DRAFT NOT FOR QUOTATION OR CITATION
“Christ having begun a new work [the new congregation in Salem Village], it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it down.” Rev. Samuel Parris, Salem Village, January, 3, 1691.
“The Covenant People of God . . . are the special objects of SATANS Rage and Fury.” Rev. Deodat Lawson, Salem Village, March 24, 1692.
“Satans design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next upon Salem. . . .” William Barker, Sr. of Andover, confession, August 29, 1692.
It is well-known that the witchcraft accusations in Salem Village in 1692 began in the midst of an intense village-wide conflict over the Reverend Samuel Parris, the newly appointed minister to the village's only church in 1689. More than a year before any witchcraft accusations were made, strong objections to Parris began to arise. By late 1691, Parris's opponents in the village had stopped his salary and effectively blocked the growth of his newly convenanted village church. In response, Parris began to harangue his congregation with inflammatory sermons, repeatedly warning of a religious battle taking place with “the wiles of the devil” to destroy his church. In this highly charged atmosphere, it did not take long for leading members of the Parris's congregation to attribute the sudden outbreak of violent “fits” among their children to acts of witchcraft -- confirming Parris's alarms of demonic activity against his flock, especially members of covenant families. Indeed, the first to be afflicted were two children in Parris’s own household, his impressionable ten-year-old daughter Betty and his eleven-year-old niece Abigail, whose sudden and uncontrollable bodily convulsions mirrored the demonic assault on the church covenant that Parris was preaching about. After three weeks of public and private prayer, involving several local ministers, failed to cure them, a local doctor confirmed what Parris and the ministers had suspected: witchcraft was the cause. Soon the afflicted children, urged by their parents, began to name names.
The conflict over Samuel Parris has been carefully studied. But the relationship between this controversy and the outbreak of the witchcraft accusations and the unusual zealousness of the accusers, ministers, and magistrates is still not well understood. As Richard Latner has recently pointed out, in Salem Village as well as in neighboring Andover there was “an environment of divisive religious contention” which helped foment the witchcraft accusations in both communities. The strong correlation between the Salem Village accusers and the members of Parris’s newly established congregation has also been recognized. What has not been noticed, however, is the equally strong correlation between the accused villagers and the large number of village residents who did not belong to the Salem Village covenant and refused to join. Only a small number of villagers joined the covenant in Parris’s congregation, and the majority of the accusers in the village belonged to these covenant households. By contrast, the large majority of those accused of witchcraft in the village did not belong to the village covenant and had refrained from joining it, halting the congregation’s initial growth.
The deeper and darker significance of this pattern has also remained unexamined. The court testimonies reveal that all the accused villagers who were tried and executed for witchcraft were accused not only of making a covenant with the Devil -- a fairly common type of accusation in New England -- but also of afflicting members of the covenant families in the village in an attempt to make them become apostates and join the Devil’s church, thus destroying the newly established village covenant. Conversely, none of the accused villagers who were not said to have covenanted with the Devil were ever brought to trial. The most serious aspect of the village accusations, then, were the suspicions aimed at non-covenant villagers of a demonic conspiracy to attack and destroy the village church. This was the unique feature of the Salem episode: the fear of a Satanic conspiracy to destroy the Salem Village church and eventually to destroy all the churches in the Bay Colony. This theme developed within the first month, and after mid-April grew rapidly until the accusations became almost unstoppable and began to engulf much of the eastern part of the Bay Colony. A chronological and geographical analysis will reveal the emerging theme.
The households of church members and non-covenant residents of the village were spread evenly across the village landscape, and thus the village was not geographically divided against itself in terms of church membership. Yet, as the Rev. Deodat Lawson boldly told the alarmed villagers in his sermon barely three weeks after the accusations began, God had dispatched the “Fires of His Holy displeasure” to put out the village's “Fires of Contention,” an obvious reference to the village conflict over Parris, resulting in Satan's targeting God's own ”Covenant People.” Geographically, this essay focuses on accusers and accused who lived in Salem Village and its immediate environs; and it deals mainly with the early phase of the nine-month episode, from February through mid-May, when the accusations began to spread beyond the Village to twenty-two other towns in the Bay Colony.
The conflict over Samuel Parris began almost immediately after his ordination in November, 1689. Parris was the fourth minister to serve Salem Village in seventeen years, but he was the first to be ordained. The new church that Parris was to lead consisted of twenty-five villagers who were already members the church covenant in Salem Town. The size of this group had been growing in recent years. There was a also group of fourteen people who had settled in the village but were members of other neighboring churches and attended the village church for convenience due to the distances involved. At the time of Parris's ordination, the twenty-five villagers who were members of the Salem church were formally dismissed from the covenant in order to establish a new covenant in the village “that they might be a church of themselves for themselves and their children," by consent with the "Approbation of the Magistrates and neighbor churches . . . ."
As other records indicate, it was mainly this group of covenant members who succeeded in persuading the Salem Town that after seventeen years with no ordained minister to administer baptism or communion in the village, it was time to establish a full-fledged covenant congregation. The Salem church also appointed Salem's three leading magistrates, Batholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, and Jonathan Corwin to represent the Town's civil authority at Parris's ordination and to endorse the establishment of the covenant in the village. Hathorne and Gedney were also Assistants to the General Court in Boston and thus belonged to the central government of the Colony. Later, when the witchcraft accusations began, Hathorne, Gedney, and Corwin would conduct the local grand jury hearings and serve as three of the nine magistrates on the special court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 that tried and convicted the accused.
To grasp the religious situation on the ground, it is useful to observe that the households belonging to members of the newly formed village covenant were evenly distributed across the village landscape from the time of the beginning of Parris's ministry in November, 1689 to the end in 1695. Map 1 shows the households of the original twenty-five members (outline house symbols) who joined the church at the time of Parris's ordination in 1689. The same map also shows the households of thirty-four people who subsequently joined during 1690-91 (black house symbols), including five who joined later in 1693-1695. Seven of these new members were spouses of the founding members and lived in the same households but most were new to the covenant. There were also fourteen village residents whom Parris identified as “church members” who belonged to nearby churches but attended the village church and were thus, according to Parris, members of the village church. These houses are represented by triangle symbols.
In the space of a year the village covenant had more than doubled in size, and the map shows its growth across the village settlement. From the outset, however, Samuel Parris and his new congregation headed in a decidedly conservative direction. Unlike the large majority of Puritan ministers in the Bay Colony, Parris chose not to institute the more inclusive Half-Way Covenant, which opened baptism to the children of all baptized adults, including those of non-covenant residents. The more liberal Half-Way Covenant had been adopted for some years by the mother church in Salem and by the congregations in the neighboring towns of Beverly, Lynn, Marblehead, and Rowley. Only Topsfield, Salem Village’s northern neighbor, retained the old practice. By instituting the more exclusive old covenant, Parris and his followers ensured that the important sacrament of baptism -- necessary for a family's much desired continuity in the covenant -- would be restricted to children of “one of [whose] parents is in full communion,” that is, a member of the covenant, which excluded the vast majority of families in the village. Access to the sacrament of holy communion was similarly restricted to covenant members.
The records do not reveal why Parris decided to establish the old covenant, but as Larry Gragg has indicated, it is consistent with his preaching about the establishment of a “pure church” consisting solely of God's Elect under his leadership. “I have chosen you out of the World” Parris declared, emphasizing his central role, “I have separated you from the World. . . . Why it is by Preaching of the word, that a church is born & propagated.” Richard Latner has recently suggested the plausible view that in insisting on the old covenant Parris was motivated by an “evangelical piety” which led him to place emphasis upon church membership in order to renew and purify religion in Salem Village, which had never had its own covenant congregation.
It has been estimated that by 1692 well over 400 hundred villagers were neither baptized in the village church nor members of it, thus creating a fertile prospect for the spiritually enthusiastic Parris to try to attract new members. Because the previous ministers in the village had not been ordained, the village had lacked a formal congregation. Indeed, as Gragg has pointed out, one of the problems was that a whole generation had grown up in Salem Village attending a church that did not offer baptism or communion to the community. This, Parris emphasized in his ordination sermon, was a “Reproach” upon the villagers in the eyes of God; and it was something Parris emphatically proposed to change. The village church, however, had never before experienced a division within itself between members and non-members, but it was a division that Parris began to exploit in his sermons as separation between the “precious” and the “vile,” the “chosen” and the “wicked & unconverted” in order to prod and encourage the nonelect to join.
To gain full membership in the congregation, which included the right to baptize one’s children, receive communion, and vote on church policy, Parris instituted the old practice of a public confession of “faith and repentance wrought in their souls.” In Parris's formulation of the policy, men were required to make a confession of faith and repentance “before and in the presence of, the whole congregation” and “with their own tongues and mouths.” Women were permitted to write out their profession of faith and to consult privately with the minister. Parris, however, required that “persons shall not be admitted by a mere negative: that is to say, without some testimony from the Brethren.” The mother church in Salem had abandoned the custom of public testimony and substituted an easier procedure which required a month's observation of good behavior, followed by a private affirmation (or “owning”) of the covenant to the minister. While the rest of New England had moved toward embracing a wider religious community, the Salem Village church was headed in the opposite direction, and with a stern enthusiast in the pulpit.
It must have been surprising, then, when the rest of the village learned that Parris and his new congregation had established the old covenant and the practice of public testimony before the congregation. Nevertheless, between January 1690 and January 1691, twenty-seven people joined the village church. With this influx of new members, the covenant more than doubled, and Parris began to baptize their children in large numbers. In the next seven months, however, only seven villagers joined the church. After August 1691 no one joined for nearly two years, and baptisms fell off dramatically.
At this just juncture in October 1691 the village meeting voted a new five-man Village Committee into office, and this time it was made up entirely of Parris's opponents: Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Joseph Putnam, Daniel Andrew, and Francis Nurse. None of them were members of the new village covenant, unlike the previous two Committees which consisted mostly of men who were founders of the covenant in 1689. The same meeting declined to authorize the Committee to set a tax rate for the year, thus preventing the collection of taxes for Parris's salary. The meeting also raised objections to the amount of Parris's salary and questioned validity of the agreement that gave him ownership of the parsonage and land. The Committee's aim was clearly to drive out Parris from the village by using drastic economic means.
Having just established its own full-fledged congregation, some in the village might have felt that the ministry was now in the control of the covenant members alone. But nothing had changed. The villagers as a whole, whose tax money supported the ministry, had become used to determining the affairs of the church, and they were not willing to give up their power.
By November 1691, the new congregation, consisting of fifty-nine adult members and seventy-four newly baptized children, had abruptly stopped growing. Some of the villagers had organized themselves into an opposition movement and attracted others to their cause. The effect was to stymie the growth of the new church and turn public opinion against the new minister. To be sure, in this period in the Bay Colony only a minority of people within any given Puritan community joined the church covenant, but, as Gragg points out, the sudden halt in Salem Village is indicative of the rising level of opposition to Parris. Already in the summer of 1691 a frustrated Parris, still urging his evangelical mission, had strongly pressured those who failed to profess Christ and become members of the congregation: “If you are ashamed to own Christ now, to profess him before the World . . . hereafter Christ will be shamed of you.”
A complaint written by Parris's supporters dated December 26, 1692 spelled out the situation that had developed in 1691. It mentioned the growing influence of “a few” who had “drawn away others” and caused even those who were sympathetic to Parris to “absent themselves” from village meetings or refrain from casting their vote. Indeed, hardly any meetings were held in the village during 1691 to address the issue of Parris's unpaid salary. People also began to absent themselves from church services, and the meetinghouse began to fall into disrepair. Parris's record book describes growing absenteeism from church meetings, a clear sign of waning enthusiasm, which he felt as a “slight and neglect” that “did not a little trouble me.”
Looming large in the background was the majority of the villagers who, once the agitation against Parris began, refrained from joining his church and, more importantly, from paying the ministry taxes, thus empowering the opposition leaders. According to Puritan practice, only covenanted members could partake of communion. On communion Sundays, more than half those in attendance were unable to receive the sacrament, something that Parris both exploited and tried to overcome, by urging the nonelect to stay and watch the covenant members take communion. There were over seventy village households in which there were no church members, and Map 2 shows fifty-nine of them that can be located on Upham's map of the village in 1692. Nonelect villagers numbered over 150 adults and comprised about seventy percent of the adult population. As Map 2 indicates, their households were spread across the village landscape.
Unfortunately, the source documents do not give us the villagers’ reasons for the dispute with Parris. We can only surmise the causes based on the economic actions taken against him and the sudden halt in church membership. Church polity appears to have been at the center of the struggle, given the composition of the new village rate Committee, none of whom were covenant members, apparently representing the voice of the rebellious majority. Although Parris drove a hard bargain for his salary and benefits, his salary was not significantly more than previous ministers had been paid. More telling was his demand for outright possession of the minister's house and land which was unprecedented. Politically, Parris associated himself with over a dozen influential Putnam men and their wives, who were all covenant members, and their backing meant that any objections to Parris would be met with strong resistance. The Putnams had been involved in the village leadership and the affairs of the ministry for decades. Although there had been previous conflicts over village ministers in the past, none involved such intransigence on the minister's part nor the outright refusal of the Village Committee to collect the necessary taxes for his salary. It did not take long for many to get their backs up, refrain from joining the church, and try to drive Parris out. As Boyer and Nissenbaum point out in Salem Possessed, “By late 1691, then, the village had reached the point of total institutional polarization: the church speaking for one group, the village Committee for the other.”
In response to the growing opposition, Parris fought back in his sermons. Thus the whole village listened as Parris harangued them with visions of spiritual warfare and warned of evil forces at work against his congregation. It was Parris's repeated sermons about the Devil's attempt to “pull down” his new church that first raised the specter of demonic activity in the village. Although references to the work of the Devil were common in Puritan preaching (and Parris took his sermon topics from a standard preaching guide), the activity of the Devil became an increasingly significant theme in Parris's sermons, with unmistakable reference to the opposition movement in the village. As the editors of Parris's sermons point out, “the Satanic theme dominates his sermons during the four months immediately preceding the witchcraft accusations.” The evangelical Parris had translated the opposition to his ministry into a demonic attack on his new covenant, and he responded by attempting to demonize his opponents.
Only two months after his ordination, Parris's preaching began to reflect the initial strain. In January, 1690 his chosen text was: “Cursed be he who doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully.” There were, he said, “rotten-hearted” people in the village community. The following month he referred more explicitly to his church's situation. “Oh, that we would have a care of false words.” And he warned, “I am afraid there is great guiltiness upon this account in this poor little village.” He noted that whole families were becoming drawn into the conflict and that “great hatred ariseth even from nearest relations.” A year later, in January, 1691, Parris declared that “Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it down.” The references to the continued opposition and absenteeism are obvious signs of problems in his congregation. In February, when villagers were withholding payment of his salary, Parris preached a sermon with thinly veiled references to himself as Christ and his opponents as Judas. “Wicked men,” he declared, “will give thirty pieces of silver to be rid of Christ . . . . . but they would not give half so much for his gracious presence and holy sermons [and] for the maintenance of the pure religion.”
In the summer of 1691, with the anti-Parris group growing in numbers, Parris badgered his congregation with references to attack by the Devil: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” His sermons also projected a martial tone: “Christ furnisheth the believer with skill, strength. Courage. Weapons. And all military accomplishments for victory.” Thus Parris portrayed the opposition to his ministry as opposition to the church itself and warned that a great cosmic struggle between God and Satan was taking place.
By 11th of February, 1692, the situation had worsened. Parris lamented ”the present low condition of the church in the midst of its enemies,” but asserted that: “Oh, shortly the case will be far otherwise.” Given this dark and threatening atmosphere of religious conflict, filled with Parris reports of evil spirits at work, it is not surprising that the children in Parris's own household were the first to be affected. By mid-February, Dr. Griggs, a village physician, church member, and friend of Thomas and Edward Putnam, had diagnosed the children in Parris's house to be afflicted by “the evil hand.” By this time Thomas Putnam’s twelve-year-old daughter Ann and Dr. Griggs' seventeen-year-old niece Elizabeth Hubbard had also become afflicted. In his sermon of February 14th, Parris made reference to “assistants of the devil” at work in the village , just two weeks before his afflicted daughter and niece voiced their first recorded accusations.
According to the Reverend John Hale, the minister in nearby Beverly who wrote an eyewitness account, Parris initially called in both “some Worthy Gentlemen from Salem,” most likely Salem’s magistrates Hawthorne, Gedney, and Corwin who had endorsed Parris’s installation in the Village, as well as “Neighbour Ministers” to observe the two afflicted girls in his house. The magistrates and ministers, he says, “had enquired diligently into the Sufferings of the Afflicted, concluded they were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan was in them.” But first they advised Parris that “he should sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover.” Several weeks later, Doctor Griggs gave his diagnosis, and, says Hale, “the Neighbours quickly took up [Griggs’ diagnosis] and concluded they [the girls] were bewitched.”
Witchcraft having been officially established, a church member and close neighbor of Parris's, Mary Sibley, secretly arranged with John Indian, Parris's Indian slave, for a “witch cake” to be made from the children's urine. The purpose of this folk magic was to enable the children to identify the witches causing their distress. By Parris’s own admission the witch cake procedure not only confirmed that witches were at work in the village but prompted the first accusations. Nevertheless, in order to distance himself and his family from being the regarded as the instigators of the accusations, Parris rebuked Mary Sibley before the congregation for using “Diabolical means” (the witch cake) by which “the Devil hath been raised amongst us.”
Although Parris attempt to dissociate himself from the witchcraft accusations that originated in his own family, it seems clear that his sermons had already aroused villagers’ fears of demonic activity and had created the climate for the accusations. Parris also made an extraordinary public spectacle of the girls’ disturbing and by now widely performed “afflictions.” To quote Hale again, “there were two or three private Fasts at the Ministers House, one of which was kept by sundry Neighbour Ministers, and after this, another in Publick at the Village, and several days afterwards of publick Humiliation, during these molestations, not only there, but in other Congregations for them. And one General Fast by Order of the General Court, observed throughout the Colony to seek the Lord that he would rebuke Satan, and be a light unto his people in this day of darkness.” While the precise role Parris played is difficult to pin down, it was a crucial and calculated one. Sunday after Sunday, his communion day sermons referred to the escalating struggle over his ministry as a demonic attack on his church. Thus it is understandable that some in Parris’s congregation responded to what appeared to be demonic attacks on their children by seeking out the presence of the devil's agents -- witches -- in the village.
It was Parris's Indian slave Tituba, one of the first three village residents to be accused, who initially revealed the existence of organized witches' meetings in Salem Village. In contrast to the two other accused women Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, who asserted their innocence before the magistrates, Tituba responded cooperatively to the aggressive interrogation by judges John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin and to the forceful beating by Samuel Parris himself, by confessing her involvement with witchcraft and by testifying against both Good and Osborne. She said that she had spectrally seen Good and Osborne with five other witches from Boston standing inside Parris's house where “they all meet together” and that Good and Osborne had indeed “hurt” the children in Parris's house. During her second interrogation the next day (March 2nd), Tituba revealed that the leader of the witches showed her the Devil's book of covenant in which she had seen the signature marks in blood of both Good and Osborne, as well as the marks of seven other unnamed witches. In this way Tituba diverted attention from herself by testifying against Good and Osborne and, more importantly, by introducing the notion of a Satanic conspiracy in the village aimed at the minister’s household. More importantly, she introduced the sensational idea that the conspiracy was led by outsiders. Thus Tituba set the stage for a witch-hunt of potentially wide social and geographic scope, involving witches' meetings in the village led by several unknown people from outside the village.
The charge of outside leadership was certainly new to the authorities, and the effect was momentous. Goaded repeatedly by magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin during two separate interrogations, Tituba expanded the witchcraft affair well beyond the usual scale of the village contained witchcraft episode. Whether responding to Parris’s alleged beating or not, she fitted her confession into Parris’s cosmic vision of a struggle between God and Satan over his church. Hereafter, reports of “signing” the Devil's book and attempts to make others do the same would become a feature of the most serious accusations along with vivid reports of Satanic meetings in the village, held next to Parris house. As Hale later observed, “the success of Tituba’s confession encouraged those in Authority to examine others that were suspected,” which led to more confessions and thus to confirmation of a Satanic attack on the church.
On March 19th, 1692, less than three weeks after the accusations began, Samuel Parris and the Salem magistrates invited the former village minister, the Reverend Deodat Lawson, to observe the situation and preach to the congregation. Lawson wrote that he felt a deep personal involvement. Upon learning that the “the first Person Afflicted was in the minister's Family,” Lawson said that he was seriously concerned because his own wife and daughter, who had died when he was Minster in the village just three years before, were now said in court testimony to have been killed by “the Malicious Operations of the Infernal Powers.” Upon his arrival, Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams, both children of church member families, confronted Lawson with their “grievous fits” and demonstrated their afflictions. Walcott screamed in pain that she was being bitten on the wrist, and Williams almost burned herself while “flying” uncontrollably into Parris's fireplace, while calling out against Rebecca Nurse.
The next day, Lawson began the Sunday worship service with a prayer but was immediately interrupted. As if to demonstrate that the devil’s aggression was aimed at the church's ministry, the afflicted girls and a village matron stopped Lawson’s opening prayer with their “sore fits.” Two of the girls, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, Jr., became possessed and spoke sharply to the astonished Lawson, attacking his ministerial authority. Speaking in bold voices, which were understood to be inspired by the devil, the two girls reprimanded Lawson in a spectacular display of gender misconduct and Satanic assault on the clergy. “After Psalm was sung,” Lawson reported, “Abigail Williams said to me, ‘Now stand up and Name your Text’: and after it was read, she said, 'it is a long text'.” As he began to preach, the respected middle-aged Bathshua Pope, entranced by the devil, disrupted his sermon, saying outrageously “Now there is enough of that.” At the afternoon service, Abigail Williams again spoke up while possessed and attacked Lawson by questioning his authority to preach: “I know no Doctrine you had, If you did name one, I have forgot it.” Ann Putnam chimed in and accused Lawson of having a “Yellow-bird,” a witch-familiar spirit, perched on his hat, thus implying that he was an agent of the Devil. In these performances, the afflicted showed Lawson that more was at stake than just a few troubled females: ministerial authority itself was threatened. The ministry was being attacked, and godly women and children of the congregation were being transformed into agents of Satan.
The accusers, it would seem, took some risk in acting as if they were inspired by the Devil and in attacking Lawson. Denouncing his authority might have been misunderstood as an attempt to expose Lawson as a false preacher who didn't know his biblical texts or church doctrine and possessed a witch's animal spirit -- in short that he was an apostate minister who had joined the Devil. Such a claim, however, would have been seen as preposterous and thus would have undermined the girls' credibility as witch finders in the village. They took this risk, perhaps, to demonstrate that the Devil was attacking the institution of the church not just random members of the congregation. Indeed, this is how Lawson understood it, and he made it the subject of his Thursday sermon.
On March 24th, Lawson told the congregation that God had specially targeted them as the “Covenant People of God” and had loosed Satan with his “Rage and Fury” upon them. “The Lord,” he said, had sent “this Fire of his Holy displeasure” to put out the “Fires of Contention” in the village, a clear reference to the intense conflict over their minister. Lawson urged the congregation to humble themselves before God and to “PRAY, PRAY, PRAY” for deliverance from the Satan's attacks. Near the end of his sermon, Lawson also addressed “Our HONOURED MAGISTRATES, here present.” These magistrates were John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin who had just conducted the examination of Rebecca Nurse in the morning and had sent her to jail. By this time, the two magistrates had indicted and jailed a total of five village witches in a period of three weeks: Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Martha Cory, and Rebecca Nurse. From the pulpit Lawson exhorted the magistrates to continue: “Do all that in you lies to check and rebuke Satan,” and “to discover the instruments in these horrid operations.” As the civil authorities responsible for defending the church, “Being ordained of God to such a station (Rom. xiii. 1), we entreat you,” urged Lawson, “to bear not the sword in vain, as ver. 4; but approve yourselves a terror of and punishment to evil-doers . . . .” Thus Lawson sought to charge the local magistrates with their duty as protectors of the church they helped to inaugurate.
Seven days later on March 31st, Salem Village and Salem Town observed a public fast and offered prayers for the afflicted. On the same day, Lawson reported that Abigail Williams had witnessed an invisible gathering of witches near Parris's house to celebrate the Devil's sacrament with “Red Bread and Red Drink.” Thus Williams confirmed the congregation's worst fears: a demonic conspiracy was operating in the village and attacking the village church, as initially reported by Tituba on March 2nd. The next day Mercy Lewis told of witnessing the same Satanic mass near the parsonage. While in a trance-like state, she related how the Devil enticed her to take his sacrament. which she refused, saying, “I will not Eat, I will not Drink, it is Blood,” . . . ; “Christ gives the Bread of Life, I will have none of it!” Still in trance, she went on to describe her vision of a “Glorious Place” where a heavenly choir sang Psalm 110 about the Lord making his enemies his footstool. This Psalm was opening text of Parris's four communion Sunday sermons from late November 1691 through mid-February,1692. In the Christian context the psalm refers to the risen Christ conquering his enemies. Mercy's imagined temptation by the Devil and her vision of a heavenly choir celebrating Christ's victory over evil clearly reflected Parris's sermons about the village being torn between Christ and Satan.
Based on the girls' reports, Lawson estimated that there were twenty-three to twenty-four witches regularly meeting in the village where they “keep dayes of Fast and dayes of Thanksgiving, and Sacraments . . . .” Hence, Lawson not only affirmed Tituba’s and the girls’ reports of the large scope of witchcraft activity, he also pronounced it to be a full-scale assault on the Church: “Satan endeavours to Transforme himself to an Angel of Light, and to make his Kingdom and Administrations to resemble those of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In order to account for the awkward fact that by the end of March two covenanted women, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, had been accused of witchcraft, Lawson stated that Satan “makes use (at least in appearance) of some of them [members of the congregation] to Afflict others; that Christ's Kingdom may be divided against it self, and so be weakened.” After barely four weeks, there were nearly two dozen complainants and accusers in the village, both men and women, young and middle aged, and they all belonged to from covenant families. Two ministers and three local magistrates were also fully engaged in the endorsing the accusations against five village people, and the records show that they were convinced by reports of regular Satanic meetings in the village. They were also convinced that there was a growing Satanic attack on the church, involving at least two dozen yet-to-be-named suspects. A turning point had been reached: more accusations were expected, and they were sure to reach beyond the village.
Less than a month later in mid-April, Abigail Hobbs, Ann Putnam, Jr, and Mercy Lewis accused the former village minister, the Reverend George Burroughs, who was then serving as the minister in Wells, Maine. Burroughs had left Salem Village in 1683, because of discontent over his ministry, amidst rumors of wife abuse, and with his pay in arrears. The young accusers realized almost immediately that in naming George Burroughs they had identified the high priest of the Satanic church that they witnessed in the village. The discovery of a Puritan clergyman in league with Satan created a spectacular impact. “[I]t was a dreadfull thing:” said Ann Putnam, Jr, who first reported seeing Burroughs frightful apparition, “that he which was a Minister that should teach children to feare God should com to perswad poor creatures to give their souls to the divill.”. This news gave rise to the shocking notion that the Devil was not only attacking the village church but also attempting to undermine the whole Puritan religious enterprise.
The day after Ann Putnam’s spectral vision of Burroughs took place, her father Thomas Putnam wrote a personal note to the magistrates Hathorne and Corwin in Salem to draw attention to its importance. He wished “to inform your Honors of what we conceive you have not heard, which are high and dreadful: of a wheel within a wheel, at which our ears do tingle.” Using the prophet Ezekial’s well-known metaphor of a “wheel within a wheel,” he sought to validate and privilege’s Ann’s otherwise outrageous charge against the Rev. Burroughs. He called her vision a work of “divine providence,” as mysterious and prophetic as Ezekial’s visionary wheel whereby God makes himself known to his people. Things are not as they seem, Putnam appears to have been saying: God has given a twelve year-old girl the revelation that a Puritan minister is the high priest of Satan and bent on destroying the church.
Burrough's role as the leader of the witches meant that the witchcraft activity in Salem Village was a not matter of a few individuals but was an organized Satanic assault. Subsequent visions of Burroughs leading Satanic masses in Salem Village indicate that Burroughs’ goal was to recruit new witches, baptize them, sign them into a covenant, and administer the sacrament to them -- all of which was reported in the court testimonies. Deodat Lawson's diagnosis was thus confirmed. The purpose of the witchcraft activity in Salem Village and in other towns of Essex county was to establish the Devil's church, something that was both unique and formidable in New England experience. With this threat now widely known through the many grand jury hearings, which were well-attended, new witchcraft accusations proliferated as did more reports of celebrations of the Devil's sacrament in Salem Village led by Burroughs. In late July, Mary Lacey called Burroughs the “King of Hell” and Martha Carrier of Andover his Queen. She also named Cory and Nurse as Satan's two Deacons. Such reports established the view that the witchcraft attacks in Salem Village were part of an institutionalized process of demonic assault on the church. By mid-April, then, the accusation of the Rev. George Burroughs as the leader of the village witches, combined with the earlier notion of the establishment of a church of Satan in the village, propelled the village witch-hunt to an unprecedented range and duration.
From this point onward, accusers and confessors reported seeing hundreds of witches under Burroughs command coming to Salem Village and nearby Andover to hold their meetings. It may have been Burroughs' relationship with the Maine frontier and the Satan driven Indian attacks on the frontier settlements in that area that give new impetus to the accusers fears, as Mary Beth Norton has emphasized. But it was more likely Burroughs' suspect religious orthodoxy which was well-known to his accusers and also to the Salem magistrates who started their examination by questioning Burroughs' lapses in receiving communion and failure to baptize all but one of his children. After mid-April, the number of accusations increased dramatically and spread beyond the immediate environs of Salem Village to twenty-four other towns and villages, targeting people whom the village accusers did not know and had never seen before. This phase of the witch-hunt is a complex story, involving an ever widening and more diverse field of socio-political and religious factors, as Mary Beth Norton has recently shown.
By late August, 1692, the reports of large witches' meetings in Salem Village were so widely known that William Barker, Sr., one of the fifty-odd persons who confessed to witchcraft in the neighboring town of Andover, boldly told the court that he joined a meeting of a about a hundred witches, armed with swords and rapiers, “upon a green peece of ground neare the ministers house” and that there were now over three hundred witches in the country. ”Our design,” he said, ”was to destroy Salem Village and to begin at the minister's House” and ”to destroy that place [Salem Village] by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers -- Satan's design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next on Salem and soe go through the countrey. . .” Parris's dark warnings about the Devil opposing his ministry in Salem Village were well-known in Andover and had now escalated into a Satanic conspiracy against all the churches in Massachusetts Bay. As Parris put it in a sermon delivered on September 11, 1692, “The Devil, & his instruments, will be making War, as long as they can, with the Lamb & his Followers.” This was not just the usual struggle between the church and Satan over individual souls but an outright assault on the covenant community as a whole.
With Parris's strident sermons about “assistants of the Devil” at work in the village now revealed to be under the command of the former village minister Burroughs, it is not surprising that there was a strong correlation between the members of Parris's congregation and the witchcraft accusers in the village. A head count shows that a sixty-five percent of the village accusers (forty-one out of sixty-three) belonged to households of one or more covenanted church members or supporters of Parris. Map 3 shows a geographic picture of the approximate ratio of church members and Parris supporters (circled As) to village accusers (As). More telling is the fact that seventy-six percent of the village men (thirteen out of seventeen) who signed the original village covenant either initiated witchcraft complaints, the sine qua non of the legal process, or gave evidence against at least one person. Equally significant is the fact that seventy-six percent (thirteen out of seventeen) of the most active village accusers (those who accused more than three people) belonged to the church member families.
The court records show that the village accusers testified mainly to a witchcraft attacks against other covenant members, which corroborates Lawson’s initial observation that “Satan Rages Principally amongst the Visible Subjects of Christ's Kingdom,” that is, the among the elect of the Salem Village congregation. This remained true for the duration of the episode, even though the geographic range of the accusations moved far beyond the local village community. Members of village covenant families continued to feel themselves under attack, and raised their voices in accusation, no matter how distant and unfamiliar their targets were.
It is apparent, then, that the witchcraft accusations in Salem Village sprang from within the heart of the embattled village congregation. It is also apparent that the congregation’s fears were initially directed against those in the village community who were not members of the village church -- the many “outsiders” living among them -- a classic opposition between “us” and “them” within a bounded community. A large proportion of those accused in the village community, eighty-nine percent (twenty-seven out of twenty-four), were not covenant members of the village church. Map 4 illustrates the situation on the ground, including immediate, well-known neighbors to the north and south of the village. It shows the ratio of non-church residents who were accused within the village community (circled Ws) to village church members who were accused (Ws). The ratio includes Sarah Good whose residence in the village is not known. Staying strictly within the boundaries of Salem Village, Map 4 shows that eighty-four percent of those accused (thirteen out of sixteen) were not members of the village church.
Indeed, as the court records demonstrate, the most serious aspect of the village accusations was the fear of Satan's conspiracy against the village covenant. All those executed for witchcraft in the village community were said to have covenanted with the Devil by “signing” the Devil's book, and these specific charges were used at their trials. Equally important, they were also said to have tried to force other church family members to do the same, thus attempting to destroy the church by converting its members to apostasy. By contrast, the records show that none of the accused villagers who were not said to have covenanted with the Devil were ever brought to trial.The precipitating conflict that engendered witchcraft fears was a vigorous struggle within the village between Samuel Parris and the village-wide opposition movement. This is not to suggest that the accusations stemmed from a single motivation -- a desire to attack the non-covenanted residents. Not being a member of the congregation was not grounds for accusation. Nor did it mean that the leaders of the Parris opposition were specifically targeted, as only two out of the five opposition leaders were ever touched by the accusations. It did mean, however, that the village accusers, whatever their grudges were against certain neighbors, were far more likely to pick those who were not members of the congregation as suspects. Parris, whose sermons divided the village into two groups, the godly and the “wicked and unchurched,” provided a conducive framework for this process. Thus, membership in the village congregation more than any other single factor -- geographic or economic -- became the distinguishing characteristic of the accusers and accused within the village community.
After the witch trials were over in May 1693, it is evident that Parris continued to interpret the struggle against himself in terms of church membership. In October 1693, Parris preached a sermon in which he still identified his enemies with the forces of Satan: “When Sin & conscience, men & Devils accuse us, why then let the death of Christ appease our bleeding, wounded & disquieted Souls.” In May, 1695, supporters and opponents of Parris signed separate petitions for and against Parris's retention as the village minister. In copying these petitions into his record book, Parris carefully transcribed the names of the signers in two separate columns: “Church-Members” and “Householders,” that is, non-covenant residents of the village. As it turned out, the majority (105) of signers were in favor of his retention, including all but one of the original church members. But the number of his opponents (84), while somewhat smaller, was large enough to convince the authorities that reconciliation was impossible and that Parris had to depart. Of these opponents, fifty adults were not members of the village church. Another group consisted of sixteen young men, all sons of covenant members in the Village or in Salem Town who therefore had a voice but were not fully members. Seven of them were also sons of accused Villagers. It was these young men together with the non-elect adults, the majority of whom were men, tipped the scale in the eyes of the authorities.
Nonelect villagers, then, and fears of a Satanic conspiracy against the covenant were at the center of the issue, as the pattern of village accusations reveals. This, of course, is a very general pattern within what is otherwise a large “web of contingency,” to use David Hackett Fisher’s useful phrase. Nothing in this episode was inevitable and nothing can be explained by law-like social forces. Yet within the village context there was a definite pattern in the choices the accusers made: the “Devil's instruments,” to use Parris's terms, were most likely to be found among those who were not among the village's elect, and it was the families of the elect that made most of the accusations. That three members of the village church and several who belonged to other churches were also accused, far from appearing to contradict the preference for non-church members, seemed to confirm the Devil’s attack on the church. As Lawson put it in early April, after Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse had been accused and jailed, “Satan Rages Principally amongst the Visible Subjects of Christ's Kingdom and makes use (at least in appearance) of some of them to Afflict others; that Christ's Kingdom may be divided against it self, and so be weakened.”
Although no one in the village is recorded as saying that the nonelect villagers were the likely suspects, Cotton Mather believed there was a direct connection between the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village and its large number of nonelect and unbaptised residents due to the old covenant restrictions. In mid-December 1692, he wrote a letter to John Richards, a leading member of Mather’s congregation who was strongly opposed to Mather's wish to establish the Half-Way Covenant in his own church. In the letter Mather sought to persuade Richards, who had served as a magistrate on the witchcraft court of Oyer and Terminer, by formulating what he assumed would be a telling argument: “I have seen that the Divels have been Baptising so many of our miserable Neighbours, in that horrible Witchcraft. . . I cannot be well at Ease, until the Nursery of Initiated Beleevers. . . bee duely Watered, with Baptism. . . I would mark [with baptism] as many as I should, that the Destroying Angels may have less claim to them.”
Under the restrictive old covenant, Mather's parish, like Salem Village, would have excluded from membership a large number of residents, both adults and their children, who were neither members of the church nor eligible for baptism because their parents were not covenant members. Mather had read the court testimonies, and he knew that the accused were said to have done the very thing that he feared that the unbaptised might do in his own parish: they had “signed” the “Devil’s book” and thus joined the Devil's covenant. Indeed, the records show that all but two of those convicted and executed in the Salem episode were accused on the basis of spectral evidence of signing the Devil's book, a charge that characterized nearly half of all the Salem cases. Mather was therefore fearful that the same demonic activity might spread among the unchurched and unbaptised in his own parish.
In 1693, after the witch trials were over, Salem Village was deeply divided over the question of Parris's retention, and baptisms and new memberships were rare. When Samuel Parris was finally forced to leave Salem Village in 1695, Joseph Green, his carefully selected successor, immediately instituted the Half-Way Covenant (something probably arranged in advance), and in the first year of his ministry he proceeded to welcome many new members and baptize a flood children. For the first time in its history Salem Village warmly embraced its minister. A more liberal church had been established, and the ministry finally became the center of religious unity that it was intended to be.
Conclusion
Cotton Mather's justification of the witch trials in his Wonders of the Invisible World, written in October soon after the closing of the special court of Oyer and Terminer makes reference to the many testimonies about witches' meetings in Salem Village. Their purpose, he asserted, echoing both Parris's and Lawson's sermons, was the “Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country.” Given the inflammatory content of Parris's sermons and the pattern of the early witchcraft accusations in Salem Village, it seems apparent that the belief in Satan's targeting the village church members and the growing fears of a wider assault on the churches of the Colony were the main reasons for the unprecedented number of witchcraft accusations and executions. To be sure, a great many of the court testimonies tell of the usual neighborly jealousies, personal disputes, and old suspicions, typical of other New England witchcraft episodes which were small scale and well-contained. As other scholars have noted, such petty accusations were prompted by the sensational Salem affair and incorporated into it by the eager accusers in the Village, who affirmed these accusations as attacks on the village covenant, no matter how far afield. What made the difference was the overarching framework of religious apostasy and the fear of Satanic attack on the church that governed the Salem drama, drawing all witchcraft suspicions near and far into its powerful vortex.