"The Devil, & his instruments, will be making War, as long as they can,
with the Lamb & his Followers." Rev. Samuel Parris, 11 September 1692.

To gain full membership in the congregation, which included partaking of communion and voting rights 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." In the case of women, "we would not lay to much stress upon [a verbal confession] but admit of a written confession and profession, taken from the person or persons by our pastor." Moreover, "persons shall not be admitted by a mere negative: that is to say, without some testimony from the Brethren."¹¹ Even 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 of the covenant to the minister.¹² While the rest of New England had moved toward embracing a wider religious community regarding baptism and church membership, the Salem Village church was headed in the opposite direction.

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. Nevertheless, between January 1690 and January 1691, twenty-seven people joined the village church. With this influx of new members, the congregation more than doubled in size, 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 the next two years, and baptisms fell off dramatically.¹³

At this 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. 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.¹⁴ The Committee's aim was clearly to drive out Parris from the village.

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 congregation 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 the 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 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 abrupt halt in Salem Village is indicative of the rising level of opposition to Parris. Already in the summer of 1691 a frustrated Parris had threatened 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."¹⁵

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.¹⁶ People also began to absent themselves from church services, and the meeting house 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." On January 3, 1691, Parris had to cut short his sermon because it was too cold in the meeting house to continue.

Looming large in the background was the majority of the villagers who, once the agitation against Parris began, refrained from joining his congregation 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 had to take their leave in the presence of the small group of communicants -- an overt demonstration of the division within the community. There were over seventy village households in which there were no church members, and Map 2 shows fifty-nine of them that on Upham's map of the village in 1692. Non-church villagers numbered over 150 adults and comprised about seventy percent of the adult population. As Map 2 indicates, these households were spread evenly across the village landscape.¹⁷

Unfortunately, the source documents do not give us the villagers’ reasons for their dispute with Parris. We can only surmise the causes based on the actions taken against him and the sudden halt in church membership. Economically, Parris drove a hard bargain for his salary and benefits, including a year's supply of firewood in addition to his salary and outright possession of the minister's house and land, which was unprecedented.¹⁸ He also wanted to augment his salary by taking the funds contributed by non-villagers who attended the village church, of which there were quite a few. Negotations about his salary and benefits were drawn-out and abrasive. The negotiations were conducted at different times by different men from the village, and several key points had been left unresolved before Parris arrived, a portent of future trouble. Politically, Parris associated himself with the influential Putnam families in the village, and their backing meant that any objections to Parris would be met with strong resistance. Theologically, Parris instituted the restrictive old convenant and, as we shall see below, was quick to characterize opposition to himself as an attack upon his new congregation by agents of the Devil. Psychologically, Parris was a domineering and grasping personality, jealous of his position and suspicious of his opponents. Although there had been vigorous conflicts over village ministers in the past, none involved such intransigence on the minister's part nor the outright refusalof 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." (68)

In response to the growing opposition, Parris fought back in his sermons. Puritan practice required everyone to attend the worship services, whether they were communicants or not. 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 pointed 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 preceeding the witchcraft accusations."¹⁹ Parris deliberately translated his embattled situtation into a demonic attack on his church, attempting to condemn, indeed, to "demonize," his opponents.

Only a month after his ordination, Parris's preaching began to reflect the initial strain. He invoked the story of King Saul, who had become haunted with an "evil and wicked spirit" and had gone for advice "to the Devil, to a witch." 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," an explicit reference to the stopping of his salary. He also warned reluctant villagers not to be "ashamed" to profess Christ, a clear warning to those who held back from joining the congregation -- the majority of the villagers.

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, 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 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 used made refrence to "assistants of the devil" at work in the village, just two weeks before his afflicted daughter and niece voiced their first accusations.

According to the Reverend John Hale, the minister in nearby Beverly who wrote an eyewitness account, Parris initially called in local ministers to observe the two afflcited girls. The 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 advised Parris that " he should sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover." Several weeks later, Griggs gave his diagnosis, and, says Hale, “the Neighbours quickly took up [Griggs’ diagnosis] and concluded they [the girls] were bewitched.”²⁰ A church member and close neighbor of Parris's, Mary Sibley, then 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 his congregation for using “Diabolical means” (the witch cake) by which “the Devil hath been raised amongst us.”²¹

Although Parris attempted to blame his parishioner for “raising” the Devil in the village, it was Parris himself who had initially aroused villagers’ fears of demonic activity and created the climate for the accusations. Parris also made a public spectacle of the girls’ disturbing “afflictions,” calling ministers from Salem and Beverly for prayer sessions. While the precise role Parris played is difficult to pin down, it was a crucial one. Sunday after Sunday, his sermons referred to the escalating struggle over his ministry as a demonic attack on his church. Given this language and the communal understanding it created, there existed a conducive atmosphere for the witchcraft accusations. 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 revealed the existence of organized witches' meetings in Salem Village. Whereas the two other accused village women Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne proceeded to assert their innocence and deny the accusations, Tituba responded to prompting by magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin (and, perhaps, also to Parris's alleged beating) by confessing guilt and by testifying against Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. She confessed that she had spectrally seen them with five other witches from Boston standing inside Parris's house where "they all meet together." And she said that Good and Osborne has caused the afflictions of 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 where 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 sensational notion of a Satanic conspiracy against the village minister, involving local villagers, under the leadership of outsiders. Thus she set the stage for a witch-hunt of potentially wider scope involving organized witches' meetings in the village attended by apostates from well beyond the village and its immediate environs.

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 later wrote that he felt a deep personal involvement. Hearing that the "the first Person Afflicted was in the minister's Family," Lawson wrote 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.²²

The next day, Lawson began the Sunday worship service with a prayer, but he 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,²³ 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 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, presumably 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 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 to "Do all that in you lies to check and rebuke Satan," and "to discover the instruments in these horrid operations." As the civil authorities responsbile 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 . . . ." ²⁴

Seven days later on March 31st, Salem Village and Salem Town observed a public fast and offered special 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 to attack the church was operating in the village itself, as initially mentioned by Tituba in her confession of 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 described her vision of a "Glorious Place" with a heavenly choir singing Psalm 110.²⁵ This was one of the Psalms in Parris's January, 1692 sermon. In the Christian context the psalm refers to the risen and triumphant Christ conquering his enemies and making them his foot stool. 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 Satan and Christ.

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 concluded, "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 embarassing fact that by the end of March two covenent members of the village congregation 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."³⁴

In mid-April, Abigail Hobbs and Ann Putnam, Jr. 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 and with his pay in arrears. Almost immediately the young accusers realized that in naming Burroughs they had identified the high priest of the Satanic church that they witnessed in Salem Village. The discovery of a Puritan clergyman in league with Satan created a spectacular impact. It 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. 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 on the church. Burroughs was perceived to be the leader, whose goal was to recruit new members, baptize them, sign them into a covenant, and administer the sacrament to them. In short, 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 court testimonials, whose hearings 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, something previously unknown in New England. 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, set the stage for a witch-hunt of unprecedended scale and duration.

From this point onward, accusers and confessors reported seeing hundreds of witches under Burroughs command coming to Salem Village and also to nearby Andover to hold their meetings. It was partly Burroughs' relationship with the Maine frontier and the Satan driven Indian attacks in that area that may have given new impetus to the accusers fears. But it was mainly Burroughs' suspect religious orthodoxy, which was well-known to his accusers and to the Salem magistrates who started their examintion by questioning Burroughs' lapses in partaking of communion and his 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-one other towns, targeting people whom the village accusers did not know and had never even 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 large witches' meetings led by Burroughs 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, boldy 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. . . " ²⁶ Parris's dark warnings about the Devil opposing his ministry in Salem Village 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.”

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 significant proportion, fifty-nine percent (forty-four out of seventy-five) of the village accusers belonged to households headed by members of the village church or headed by members of other churches who attended the village church. Map 3 shows a geographic picture of the approximate ratio of church members to accusers.²⁶ More significant is the fact that seventy-six percent (sixteen out of twenty-one) of the most active Village accusers (those who accused more than three village people) belonged to the church member families. Equally telling is the fact that seventy-two percent of those who initiated the witchcraft complaints, the sine qua non of the legal process, were either founding members of the village congregation or were strong supporters of Parris's ministry. Early on, Lawson had concluded correctly that "Satan Rages Principally amongst the Visible Subjects of Christ's Kingdom," that is, the covenant members of the Salem Village congregation. This remained true for the duration of the episode, even though the geographhic range of the accusations moved far beong the local village community.

It is apparent, therefore, 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 directed mainly against those 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 local village community, eighty-eight percent (twenty-two out of twenty-five), were not village church members. See Map 4, which is a faily accurate illustration of the situation on the ground. ²⁷ Indeed, the most sersious aspect of the village accusations was the matter of Satan's conspiracy against the village church. All those executed for witchcraft in the village community were said to have covenanted with the Devil by "signing" the Devil's book, and, equally important, they were also said to have tried to force other church members to do the same, thus attempting to destroy the village church. By contrast, 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 not a conflict between the Village and the Town, as Boyer and Nissenbaum proposed in Salem Possessed, but a vigorous struggle within the village itself 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 unchurched 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 accuse those who were not members of the congregation. 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 him 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, Parris's supporters and opponents 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 colums: "Church-Members" and "Householders," that is, non-church residents of the village. ²⁸ 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 village opponents, fifty were not members of the village church, and it was they who tipped the scale.

Unchurched villagers, then, and fears of Satanic conspiracy against the church 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.²⁹ 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" 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.³⁰

As already mentioned, the historical sources do not reveal the grounds for the opposition to Parris nor do they say why most of the villagers did not join the new congregation. Cotton Mather, however, apparently assumed there was a direct correlation between the retention of the old covenant and the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village. 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 Halfway Covenant in his church. In the letter Mather sought to persuade Richards, who had served 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.”³¹

Under the restrictive old covenant, Mather's parish, like Salem Village, would have included a large number of residents 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 unchurched 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 in his own parish.

In 1693, after the witch trials were over, Salem Village was deeply divided over the question of Parris's retention. The following two maps show the locations of the households of those who signed petitions for and against retaining Parris in 1695. Both the pro-Parris and anti-Parris households were fairly evenly distributed across the village. These maps do not show a village geographically divided aggainst itself in the dispute over Parris. (See Maps 5 and 6) ³²

When Samuel Parris finally left Salem Village in 1695, his successor, Reverend Joseph Green, immediately instituted the Halfway Covenant and proceeded to baptize a flood children. For the first time in its history Salem Village warmly embraced its minister, and the church finally became the center of village unity it was intended to be.³³

Conclusion

Thomas Brattle in his famous Letter³⁵ opposing the trials, written in early October, mentions the belief in witches' meetings in Salem Village and attributes it to the "Salem gentlemen," a term that included both local ministers and magistrates. Cotton Mather's justification of the witch trials in his Wonders of the Invisible World, written in October soon after the closing of the witch trials court, also makes reference to the testimonies about witches' meetings in Salem Village. Their purpose, he says, echoing both Parris's and Lawson's sermons, was the "Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country."³⁶ The court documents also reveal the Salem magistrates' belief in the notion of a Satanic conspiracy from the outset, starting with their interrogation of Tituba. Given the inflamatory content of Parris's sermons and the pattern of witchcraft accusations in Salem Village, it seems apparent that the belief in Satan's targeting the villlage church and the growing fears of a wider assault on the churches of the Colony were the main reasons for the large number of witchcraft accusations and executions -- a number that was unprecendented in New England and unique to the Salem episode.