Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [38]
Salem Town was, in the seventeenth century, a major commercial center, oriented toward the sea whose shores it hugged and toward the commercial opportunities afforded by trade relations with other parts of the English Atlantic world—the West Indies, Newfoundland, and Europe. The town’s hinterlands stretched for miles, and there farmers wrestled and heaved rocks out of the soil to plant grains and raise livestock. Unincorporated villages existed within the legal borders of Salem Town: one such community was Salem Village, the modern town of Danvers. In the winter months of 1692, when night fell early, bringing with it the raw chill of darkness and cheating New Englanders of precious daylight hours, the daughter and the niece of Salem Village’s minister, Samuel Parris, started behaving oddly. They spoke out of turn; they crawled about under furniture. Soon joined by other children and teenagers, the group came to comprise the coterie of possessed accusers who have made Salem a place of such fascination to contemporaries and to historians. Before the afflicted were identified as possessed, their parents consulted medical experts. With no natural cure or diagnosis, the Reverend Parris concluded that the girls had been bewitched. When pressed to name names, the girls obliged. Accusers identified 162 witches, and many of these people were interrogated and tried: some were executed, some exonerated, some died in prison, and others languished in jail until the summer of 1693. The executions commenced on June 10, 1692, and continued until the final busy day over three months later on September 22, when eight people hanged on Gallows Hill in a mass execution characteristic of outbreaks (see figure 8).
Participants were themselves among the first to try to make sense of the outbreak. Since then historians have taken their turn. In recent decades, scholars have focused on a number of important attributes of New England culture in general and Salem in particular in order to understand why Salem, of all English settlements in North America, experienced such a painful episode. These explanations center on a variety of features: religious transformations, economic and social tensions, and the challenges of frontier settlement. One of the most powerful and enduring interpretations appeared in 1974, with Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.159 Boyer and Nissenbaum sought to understand the Salem outbreak in terms of the social and economic transformations of the period. They provided a detailed study of the community of Salem—a close analysis of residential patterns, wills, land ownership, incomes, occupations, family relationships, and religious participation. Boyer and Nissenbaum wrote in the era of the community study, when historians turned to towns to uncover the fabric of human relations and the totality of human experience in intimate geographic spaces. Boyer and Nissenbaum found, for example, that those who were targets of accusations during the outbreak were people who had benefited from an expanding commercial culture. As Salem Town became ever more enmeshed in commercial networks and opportunities beyond the region, Salem Village languished, becoming a rural backwater. It was the villagers who were most likely to launch accusations of witchcraft. They saw themselves as preservers