Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [1]
(electronic : alk. paper)
1. Witchcraft—United States—History. I. Title.
BF1573.G36 2010
133.4'30973—dc22 2010014423
` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
O
Preface
Like many of my colleagues who teach classes in early American history, whether the U.S. history survey or courses on the colonial period, I have always made time to talk about witchcraft. For the most part, I have assigned books that explore the outbreak at Salem in 1692 or witchcraft in New England more broadly. As a result, the story of witchcraft in my classes tended to emphasize the experiences of European colonists and settlers in North America and to keep my students focused on the eastern seaboard, replicating a familiar narrative of American history that privileges the English colonies. But in 2002, I joined forces with my Georgetown colleague Amy Leonard, a specialist in early modern European history, to teach a class on witches and witchcraft in Europe and the Atlantic world. We anchored our class in Europe and then examined the collisions of witch beliefs that transpired beyond Europe, in Africa and the Americas. The class made it obvious to me that witchcraft was a unique and valuable way to understand how Europeans, Africans, and Americans made sense of each other in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. I wondered if it might be possible to develop a book on the subject that I could use in my own North American history classes. I envisioned a text that used witchcraft to explore the colonial encounters and occupations that transformed much of the continent, that moved away from the English colonies, that reached into French and Spanish territories, that integrated Native Americans and Africans, and that might be helpful to colleagues eager to find ways to incorporate the many different inhabitants of the whole continent in their own classes. Witchcraft in Early North America is the result of that investigation.
Witchcraft in Early North America covers the period from 1616, the year of an Indian revolt in a northern province of New Spain, through the first decade of the nineteenth century, the years of the Shawnee and Seneca witch hunts in the United States. The book’s geographic focus is North America, ranging from the northern provinces of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain (in other words, northern Mexico and the territory contained in the modern state of New Mexico) through the British colonies on the eastern seaboard, French (and Spanish) Louisiana, and southeastern Canada. My goal in the introduction is to help readers understand the people the book examines and the wide array of witch beliefs they held. It thus explores European, African, and Indian witch beliefs in turn, trying to understand, as much as possible, these separate belief systems before each group encountered the other. It then examines how those beliefs changed when these people met, through conquest, enslavement, colonization, and trade, in North America. I explore how witchcraft beliefs manifested themselves in three different colonial jurisdictions (New Mexico, New France, and the British colonies), in addition to looking at the witchcraft beliefs and expression of Africans and their descendants in North America. The introduction also devotes considerable space to outbreaks, setting the familiar episode at Salem in 1692 in a broader North American context. It argues that much of what historians regard as exceptional about Salem ends up looking characteristic of outbreaks across North America when we take a continental approach. The discussion of North American outbreaks includes not only a close assessment of Salem, but also separate discussions of confession, possession, and the Indian witch hunts of the early nineteenth century. The introduction concludes with an exploration of skepticism.
A second goal of the introduction is to introduce