Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [40]
After an initial rejection of the charge, Tituba explained that the Devil appeared to her in the form of a man, a hog, a dog, and two rats. The dog threatened to hurt her if she would not serve him, and he tempted her with “pretty things.” Although the Devil ordered Tituba to kill the children, she did not. At night, Tituba rode on a stick to the witches’ meeting place. She named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne as witches. She spied Good with her animal familiar, she claimed, and saw Osborne with a two-legged winged monster that turned into her. As she provided more information, Tituba drew her interrogators in with shocking details; she recognized one of the witches she saw clad in silk as someone she had seen before in Boston. In her confessions on March 1 and 2, 1692, Tituba encouraged the fears of the justices who sought witches; she assured them that there were indeed witches—many of them. She linked these witches, moreover, to luxury and to New England’s largest commercial center, Boston. The historian Elaine G. Breslaw argues that Tituba’s confession gave life to the witch hunt in its earliest days.164
Mary Beth Norton also identifies a crucial turning point, and a crucial participant, but she places the emphasis elsewhere.165 In Norton’s careful chronological analysis of what happened at Salem, April 19 emerges as an important date. On that day, Abigail Hobbs confessed. She was a teenager who lived in Topsfield, Massachusetts. Notable for her flippant attitude toward Satan, she had made herself the subject of gossip. Her reckless jokes—that, for example, she was not afraid of anything because she had made a pact with the Devil—reveal the different belief systems at work in late seventeenth-century New England. Hobbs was comfortable joking about a pact with Satan while others in her world had such concrete ideas about Satan that they accused their neighbors of heinous crimes and punished them with death. But Hobbs paid dearly for her professed attachment to the Devil, and on April 13, Ann Putnam accused Hobbs’s specter (an apparition that took human form) of tormenting her. Hobbs’s specter then turned on other possessed accusers, and within a week, Hobbs faced her accusers in court.166
After Tituba’s, Hobbs’s was the second major confession of the trials. Tituba had legitimized the hunt, but now Hobbs set it in a new direction. In her confession, Hobbs made explicit what had been thus far unexplored in the trials. She explained where she met the Devil, and what he looked like. He was a black man, and she had first encountered him in the woods four years earlier, when she lived in Falmouth on the Maine frontier. Hobbs linked the frontier wars that beset New England to the witchcraft outbreak in Salem. The region’s first major conflict between Europeans and Native Americans was King Philip’s War, also known as Metacom’s War, a conflict that was devastating to all of New England’s inhabitants. It began in 1675 and endured in northern New England until 1678, when a treaty was signed at Casco (Maine). After only ten years of an uncertain peace, war broke out again in the northeastern frontier, erupting in Maine in August 1688. French-allied raiders swooped into western Massachusetts, too, and colonists found themselves sandwiched between different fronts of the conflict known among English colonists as King William’s War (1689–1697). Settlements in Maine, New Hampshire, and northeastern Massachusetts were special targets of attack.
In the wake of Hobbs’s confession, the number of witchcraft accusations soared, and the geographic residence and demographic characteristics of the accused shifted. Previously, accused witches came from the area around Salem, but after Hobbs’s confession, the accused lived in Maine, in Boston, and beyond. Many of the newly accused were men, both wealthy and prominent, and most were never tried. Their accusers