Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [58]
Witch beliefs themselves continued to flourish (as the Indian witch hunts attest), as did extralegal persecution by mobs. As late as 1787, for example, in the city of Philadelphia, as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered and sweltered in the summer heat, an elderly woman named Korbmacher who had previously been accused of witchcraft was attacked by a mob on July 10. She lived in Spring Garden in a German neighborhood, and it is probably no accident that her accusers were Germans, given the extensive evidence that Germans brought a range of witch beliefs with them to Pennsylvania. Her neighbors thought she was a witch, and they cut her forehead in an old practice that was supposed to counteract a witch’s spells. She appealed for help to authorities, but they could do little to dispel the beliefs of Korbmacher’s accusers. Later that month, the mob attacked again. She was carried through the streets and pelted as she went, while her attackers recited the details of her maleficia to curious onlookers. She had killed a child, one woman claimed, with a charm. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported the story with outrage and horror and urged authorities to clamp down on this public attack by the “illiterate and youthful part of society.” Without firm condemnation from authorities, the Gazette feared people would think the state condoned such actions.233 A week later, Korbmacher died of her injuries. “It is hoped,” the paper urged, “that every step will be taken to bring the offenders to punishment, in justice to the wretched victim, as well as to the violated laws of reason and society.”234 When the case against her murderers came to trial in October, the justice condemned those who attacked this “poor wretch whose sorrows and infirmities have sunk her eyes into her head, and whose features are streaked with the wrinkles of extreme old age.” In her old age she became “an object of terror,” and a witch.235
The Pennsylvania Gazette’s invocation of the laws of reason posits what seems to be, in light of the longevity of witch beliefs, a premature aspiration. The interest of courts in charging people with witchcraft may have diminished, but witch beliefs endured. Indeed, in some legal jurisdictions in North America, judicial punishment of witches continued, particularly in sovereign Indian nations within the United States. In fact, the very first case in the United States in which state criminal law intruded on a tribal murder concerned witchcraft: this was the 1821 murder of Caugh-quaw-taugh, who was a Seneca woman who lived on a reservation in New York State. Found guilty of witchcraft, she was executed by a Seneca named Soo-non-gize. New York State then pressed murder charges against the executioner. Red Jacket, a Seneca leader, spoke out in 1821 in defense of Seneca witch hunts and of Seneca sovereignty, and he rebuked white Americans in light of their own history. Why, he queried, should Americans regard the Senecas as superstitious fools because they believe in witches? So, too, had the Americans. He pointed specifically to the example of Salem. What had the Senecas done that was any different from what happened there?236 The state legislature intervened to resolve the issue, asserting state jurisdiction over Indians, but also pardoning Soo-non-gize.237
Conflicts between state law and tribal law surrounding issues of witchcraft and murder (as well as many other issues) continued into the late nineteenth century. Many Indians, like other inhabitants of North America, continued to believe in witchcraft; what distinguished them was their ability to act legally on their beliefs, and to punish—and sometimes kill—alleged witches. These actions put Indians at risk of murder charges, even if these killings