Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [41]
Norton was hardly the first historian to make a connection to the Indian wars. Karlsen’s careful study of the group of possessed accusers at Salem had alerted historians to the centrality of these frontier wars in explaining what happened in 1692; she was joined by scholars including James E. Kences, Richard Godbeer, and Peter Charles Hoffer, all of whom focused attention on the intersections between frontier conflicts and the tumult in Salem Village.168 But Norton cast a wider net still, and by attending to the population of those accused of witchcraft whose accusations were not pursued, she was able to sketch a richer understanding of how these frontier wars shaped the outbreak at Salem.169
Thus we already find ourselves with two lines of interpretation, with two key players, one Indian slave and one English colonist, both women who occupied vulnerable positions in New England society but who might have been unlikely to appreciate this shared connection. And there are any number of key figures who emerge when we examine Salem in detail. For example, there is Samuel Parris, the village minister, vexed with the remuneration of his employment, perhaps frustrated by personal and professional failures that had prompted him to leave Barbados for Massachusetts; and then there are the Putnam family members of Salem Village, who seem to have found in witch beliefs one way to express their hostility both toward a changing world and toward the people they identified as its transformers and beneficiaries. Without any one of these personalities, would the situation have unfolded differently? That question, indeed, is just what Norton and Breslaw try to get their readers to appreciate: the single transforming moment of one person, one confession, or one accusation. The Salem outbreak provides a good example of contingency—the coincidental convergence of people and events that together produce unanticipated outcomes.
The vast literature on the witchcraft outbreak in Salem offers an ideal opportunity both to use the events there as a way to think about the historiography of witchcraft (how, that is, historians have analyzed the event) and also as a way to assess how Salem fits within a larger context of North American witchcraft. No episode of witchcraft has attracted as much attention among historians of North American witchcraft as Salem. The events there have become the benchmark by which other outbreaks are measured. Thus we have the “other” witch hunts in New England (in Hartford or Stamford), or the Abiquiu hunt, compared by its historians to Salem.170 Historians of Salem emphasize the exceptional nature of the outbreak there, but when we step back, Salem starts to look a lot like other instances of witchcraft in North America, at least in respect to those features scholars of New England have privileged: its late date, its size, the frequency of confession, and the role of possession.
Take, for example, chronology. In the context of witch beliefs in New England and the British Isles, Salem seems to have been a final sputter in a period in which “mass scares and even isolated accusations were becoming a thing of the past.”171 It is, in fact, one reason why such unusual explanations as ergot poisoning (see below) find their niche; some scholars believe ergotism can explain the late date, the “strange” timing, of the Salem outbreak, as Mary K. Matossian puts it.172 Why then, and not earlier? Why there, and not elsewhere?
But in terms of witch outbreaks on the North American continent as a whole, Salem falls quite early in the history. New Mexico experienced a major outbreak in Abiquiu in 1756–1763, some seventy years after the events at Salem. Witch hunts