Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [43]
But even the singularity of confession among Puritan women at Salem falls by the wayside in a North American context. Indeed, the very concept of “confession” loses its salience, since it suggests that someone is aware of committing a transgression. Not all practitioners saw their conduct as a source of sin or shame or wrongdoing. As the “sorcerer” Tonneraouanont reportedly announced, “I am a Demon” (see document 2).178
Confession was also affected by different legal processes. The presence of torture surely encouraged confessions. Tedapachsit, tortured with fire by the White River Delawares in 1806, admitted that “he had lied from fear” (see document 29). Another man readily confessed to flying to Kentucky with the aid of his grandmother’s medicine bundle; although not tortured himself, the recent torture and execution of his grandmother surely encouraged his quick confession.179 In jurisdictions governed by the Spanish, official understanding of a gradation of magical activity—with virtually none meriting severe punishment—opened the door for frequent confessions, since confession would not mean execution. El Cojo, the most prominent sorcerer in the Abiquiu outbreak, confessed to his witchcraft, although he had an incentive to do so since he was confined to the stocks at the time.180
Confession could be a careful strategy, not only to avoid torture, but also to achieve some other goal. Such seems to have been the case for a slave named Juan de Morga, who lived near Mexico City with a vicious owner and who wrote a letter to a church official in 1650 professing that he had made a pact with the Devil. Were the church not to act, he explained, he would renounce his faith altogether. Morga’s letter compelled the Inquisition to intervene and investigate his harsh living conditions, and ultimately to sell him to a different master.181 Not confessing could also be a prudent strategy. In Sweden, for example, executions for the crime of witchcraft were extremely rare until the 1650s, for two main reasons; maleficia had to be proved, and the guilty party was required to reject God openly. Swedish law, moreover, had one unusual feature; the condemned were taken to the place of execution and urged to confess. Those who did were immediately executed; those who refused returned to prison to live another day. This legal principle, although it was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, became general knowledge and emerged during the big Swedish witch hunts in the 1670s as a crucial survival strategy.182
While the motivations for these varied confessions (or refusals to confess) surely differed from the particular context of confessions in seventeenth-century New England, they nonetheless remind us that people were not in fact averse to admitting to witchcraft for a wide variety of reasons. The confessions at Salem were products of a particular legal and religious culture, just as was true for confessions elsewhere.
Possession
No group has attracted more attention from historians and especially from the general public than the possessed accusers at Salem, those young women whose physical gyrations and shrieks and torments and visions propelled the witch hunt.183 The Salem outbreak was remarkable in that the witch hunt’s most important accusers were women and teenage girls and even children, people without autonomous legal identities under English law. In New England as a whole there were sixty-seven possessed accusers between 1620 and 1675, and of those, fifty-nine (86 percent) were female. In this respect, possessed accusers differed markedly from nonpossessed accusers, who included both men and women. They differed in another important characteristic as well; nonpossessed accusers tended to know the people they accused, while possessed accusers generally did not (see document 20). Possessed males, moreover, did not figure during witch trials in any significant way. Possessed women were also distinctive in their age concentration: they fell for the most part between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Possessed accusers,