Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [16]
Indians and Europeans sometimes interpreted epidemics differently. Europeans who benefited from these catastrophes might be inclined to attribute them to God. John Winthrop put this view succinctly in a letter in which he described the terrible toll taken by a smallpox epidemic that raged through southern New England in 1633 and 1634, eviscerating Indian communities. “God hathe hereby cleered our title to this place,” he explained to a friend in England.50 Indians, too, could appreciate the supernatural origins of disease, but they had another explanation that was just as logical and consistent with modern ideas about disease transmission: Europeans brought the diseases. Thus the exact same smallpox epidemic had dramatically opposed meanings for those who endured it: for Europeans covetous of land, it was a clear sign of God’s favor; for those who succumbed to the ravages of the terrible disease, it was just as clear an indication that European witches were at loose in the countryside.
Those launching evangelical missions in North America were optimistic that the Devil could be displaced. William Crashaw conveyed this expectation of Christian triumph in an exhortation to English clerics on their way to Jamestown. “And though Satan visibly and palpably raignes there, more then in any other knowne place of the world: yet be of courage (blessed brethren) God will treade Satan under your feet shortly, and the ages to come will eternize your names, as the Apostles of Virginia.”51 Moreover, there was strong evidence that the Devil should not hold sway in North America. Europeans believed that the Devil tempted followers with promises of riches, luxury, and goods beyond their economic or social status. Elizabeth Knapp, possessed by the Devil in the English colony of Massachusetts in 1671 (see document 17), reported that the Devil offered her “money, silkes, fine cloaths.”52 When witches testified about gatherings at their Sabbaths, they recounted witches adorned in fabulous garments that were forbidden by sumptuary laws that restricted certain fabrics and colors to people of noble birth. Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados but probably of Indian, not African, descent, attested in Salem in 1692 that she saw women wearing silk hoods at a Sabbath she attended.53 In contrast, French, English, and Dutch observers who recorded their impressions of the people of the northeastern woodlands of North America marveled at their modest economies and at their generosity. In such circumstances, where people had to carry their possessions in their semi-sedentary economies and any gathered surplus could prove a burden, what could the Devil tempt people with? Indeed, as one Jesuit reported in 1634, when people are free of want, “not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.”54
Colonization, Witchcraft, and Resistance
Europeans regarded the contest for religious dominion in North America as a competition between gods—between the strong Christian God and weaker Indian deities that served Satan and resisted God’s rule. If the Devil ruled America, then the colonization efforts that took place there could only be comprehended as an epic struggle between good and evil.55 The connection between resistance and diabolism is especially important in the colonial context. Europeans believed the Devil was characterized above all by his pride. It was that trait that led him to challenge God’s dominion, to prefer (as John Milton put it in Paradise Lost) “to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”56 Second to his pride, however, was his obstinacy, and the two were deeply intertwined. Resistance thus confirmed