Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [30]
Presently, the hysteria subsided; people began to express doubts and second thoughts; the court was dismissed, and the governor directed the Superior Court of Judicature to handle any witchcraft cases left over. Most of the remaining suspects were acquitted; a few were condemned, but the governor released them. In less than a year the Salem witch-hunt had run its course.
There have been many attempts to explain the Salem episode. A number of factors were at work. Town rivalries and factions worked as irritants beneath the surface, perhaps. There was a gender aspect, too. Not all witches were women, but most of them were, and older women at that. In some subtle and not so subtle ways, the war against witches was also a war against women: or at least against disorderly, troublesome, deviant women. In Puritan thought, order and hierarchy were “cherished values”; and those who rebelled against order “were the very embodiments of evil.” The “subordination of women” was part of the natural order; the witch symbolized, or embodied, a kind of double rebellion—of woman against man, and woman against the godly society. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, she transmitted sin to man.86
Cotton Mather wrote an account of the Salem episode; he called it Wonders of the Invisible World. The colonists (at least those who committed words to paper) firmly believed, like Mather, in the reality of this “invisible world,” the world of angels and spirits, the world in which sin and the devil were not concepts but palpable reality; Satan, the eternal adversary, dominated the evil half of the invisible world. Indeed, the “invisible world” was a crucial aspect of the colonial theory of criminality. Every period asks the question: Why is there evil in the world? Why do people do terrible crimes? Every period has its own conventional answers.
For most offenses, the colonial answer was: simple weakness and bad character. The basic punishments of colonial justice were aimed at those people who strayed. Some people were very bad, even incorrigible; some seemed to embrace evil boldly and with enormous relish. Witchcraft was one way to explain this mystery. It was a form of evil that came with a built-in account of its genesis. The witch was in league with the devil. She had sold out to the forces of darkness. She was human in form, but inhuman at heart.
In general, the world was full of signs, marks, omens, and portents; the invisible world imprinted itself on bodies living and dead. John Hughson, a white, and Caesar, a black slave, were among those who were put to death after the great conspiracy trial in New York in 1741. Their bodies were left hanging in chains for months. Then a “rumour” spread that Hughson had turned black, and Caesar white: that Hughson’s “face, hands, neck and feet, were of a deep shining black ... and the hair of Hughson’s beard and neck ... was curling like the wool of a negro’s beard and head; and the features of his face were of the symmetry of a negro beauty; the nose broad and flat, the nostrils open and extended, the mouth wide, lips full and thick, his body ... swelled to a gigantic size.” As for Caesar, “his face was at the same time somewhat bleached or turned whitish, insomuch that it occasioned a remark, that Hughson and he had changed colours.” Moreover, Hughson’s body “dripped and distilled ... from the great fermentation and abundance of matter within him”; and eventually the body “burst and discharged pail fulls of blood and corruption,” which some also “esteemed almost miraculous.”87
Was it the sun, or poison, or some other “natural” cause? Or were these, in Hughson’s case at least, “remarkable signs or tokens of his innocence” ? Some of the curious “were ready to resolve” these facts “into miracles”; others were skeptical.