The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in Salem Village 1692

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Benjamin C. Ray
University of Virginia

 

Paul Boyer and Steve Nissenbaum’s influential study Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974) appeared a little over one hundred years after the publication of the Reverend Charles Upham’s now classic two-volume work, Salem Witchcraft (1867)¹. Like Upham's work, Salem Possessed dwelt almost exclusively on Salem Village; and like Upham, Boyer and Nissenbaum made significant use of a map of Salem Village in 1692. ² Upham's map showed the locations of virtually all the households in Salem Village (See Map 1), and Boyer and Nissenbaum used this map to plot the locations of the accusers and the accused in the Village. As a geographically based socio-economic study keyed to this map, Salem Possessed succeeded so well in explaining the witchcraft episode in Salem Village that it was not signifcantly challenged by another scholarly account, until the appearance of Mary Beth Norton's innovative and more comprehensive work, In the Devil's Snare, in 2002³.

 

The long-term success of Salem Posssessed, now in its twentieth printing, can be attributed not only to its socio-economic approach but also to its simple but compelling map of the accusations in Salem Village. Drawing upon Upham’s accurate and detailed map of Village, Boyer and Nissenbaum created a map of Salem Village (See Map 2) that used letters to mark the locations of the individual accusers (A's), accused witches (W's), and defenders (D's). The map appeared near the beginning of the book and presented a surprising picture. It showed that "the alleged witches and those who accused them resided on opposite sides of the village."⁴ Boyer and Nissenbaum followed this statement with the question,"What are we to make of this pattern?" The rest of their book gave the answer.

On the basis of their map, Boyer and Nissenbaum argued that underlying the village quarrels and the girls’ afflictions was a deep-seated economic difference between the Village and the neighboring commercial Town of Salem (of which Salem Village was a part), an economic difference that eventually divided the Village geographically into two conflicting groups. Boyer and Nissenbaum suggested that the poorer agrarian householders who lived in the western side of the Village set their hearts and fears against their more prosperous and commercially minded neighbors who lived in the eastern part of the Village, nearer the Town, and benefited from it economically. Over the years, Boyer and Nissenbaum argued, the "town oriented" easterners consistently thwarted the western farmers' efforts to gain independence from the Town and thereby improve their economic standing. One summary of Salem Possessed puts it this way: "The Salem trials can be seen as an indirect yet anguished protest of a group of villagers whose agrarian way of life was being threatened by the rising commercialism of Salem Town."⁵

Several other maps in Salem Possessed reinforce this argument. They depict the geography of the conflict in Salem Village over the new minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris, and show the locations of the land holdings of the influential Putnam and Porter families as evidence that the Village was divided into eastern and western economic factions.

But it is the striking map of the accusations in Salem Village that appears to have been the most effective device in supporting Boyer and Nissenbaum's interpretation. It reduced the whole complex episode to a single graphic image: A's on one side of the Village, W's on the other. Finally, it seemed, the mystery of the witchcraft accusations in Salem Village had been solved, by means of an objective historical method..

Most American history textbooks make reference to this map, and some repeat its socio-economic interpretation. Indeed, the map is so widely referenced in current textbooks that it is not an exaggeration to say that in American history classrooms, the Boyer and Nissenbaum map has become part of the Salem story, even in those textbooks that offer a different point of view. At the more popular level, a current Salem visitor’s guidebook recommends Salem Possessed as a “seminal work that established the socio-economic and political factors that brought about the witch hunt”.⁶ But, as Mark Monmier points out in How to Lie With Maps, when it comes to cartography, the general public seldom questions a map maker’s work and often fails to realize that “catographic license is extremely broad."⁷ Perhaps it is not surprising that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map has never been subject to thorough examination.

A review of the court documents shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map of the accusations is, in fact, considerably incomplete and contains numerous errors. In the first part of this paper, I correct the map's many inaccuracies. In the second part, I present additional maps showing relevant economic, social, and religious data in order to gain further perspective on the demographic aspects of Salem Village. At the end, I examine at the conflict over the Reverend Samuel Parris, the Village's minister during the witch trials, and present two maps that show the relationship between the Village's new congregation, headed by Parris, and the accusers and accused in the Village community.

My findings can be stated at the outset. Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed, geographic analysis of the accusations in the Village shows that there was no significant Village-wide, east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west division between households of different economic status. Equally important, eastern Village leaders were not opposed to the Village's attempts to gain independence from Salem Town. To be sure, Salem Village suffered from years of internal conflict over its ministers and replaced them at an unusually frequent rate. But these conflicts did not have an east-west geographic or economic character. The Village was in fact remarkably homogeneous in its geographic distribution of wealth at almost all economic levels during this period. The same distribution holds true of the Village’s religious and social demography.

Nevertheless, it is well-known that the witchcraft accusations began in the midst of an intense Village-wide conflict over the Reverend Samuel Parris, the newly appointed minister in 1689. Over a year before any witchcraft accusations were made, strong objections to Parris began to arise in the Village. Parris's opponents stopped his salary and effectively blocked the growth of the new church he founded. In response, Parris began to harrangue his congregation with inflamatory sermons. Well before the first witchcraft accusations were made, Parris warned his congregation repeatedly of a battle with "the wiles of the devil," and he lashed out at the opposition leaders in the Village as "Wicked and Reprobate Men, assistants of Satan to afflict the church."⁸ In this highly charged atmosphere, it did not take long for leading members of the Parris's congregation to attribute the sudden outbreak of disturbing behavior among their children to acts of witchcraft -- confirming Parris's dark warnings of demonic activity against his congregation. Indeed, the first to be afflicted were two children in Parris’s own household, his impressionable young daughter Betty and his niece Abigail, whose sudden and uncontrollable bodily "fits" mirrored the demonic assault on the church that Parris was preaching about. After three weeks of prayer failed to cure them, a local doctor confirmed that witchcraft was the cause. Soon the afflicted children, urged by their parents, began to name names.

 

The Village conflict over Samuel Parris has been carefully studied.⁹ But what has not been noticed is the strong correlation between the Village accusers and the members of Parris’s newly established congregation. In the Puritan system, there was only one church per settlement, and everyone was required to attend its services. Three-quarters of the accusers in the Village belonged to households of members of the new church. By contrast, the large majority of the accused witches in the Village did not belong to the congregation and had refrained from joining it. Pervasive as the division was between church members and non-church residents in the Village, both groups were evenly distributed across the Village landscape. The conflict that prompted the witchcraft accusations was not geographic or economic but rather, as we shall see, a struggle over the Village ministry. As the Rev. Deodat Lawson boldly told the alarmed Villagers soon after the afflictions and accusations began, God had dispatched the "Fires of His Holy displeasure" to put out the Village's "Fires of Contention" over their minister, resulting in Satan's targeting God's own "Covenant People."¹⁰

 

I

In order to explain the errors and assumptions involved in Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map of the Village accusations, it will be necessary to understand how the map was made. Boyer and Nissenbaum used Upham’s map of Salem Village in 1692, which is a detailed and fairly accurate rendering of Salem Village house locations. and geographic boundaries (see Map 3). Upham placed numbers and symbols on the map to designate the locations of 150 houses and structures in Salem Village and neighboring townships. Each number stands for the name of a householder, and correlates with Upham’s list of names of property owners in 1692. For example, number twenty-four designates the house of Thomas Putnam, which was the home of four accusers: Thomas Putnam, Ann Putnam, Sr., Ann Putnam, Jr., and Mercy Lewis. Upham’s map also plots, with less detail, the locations of several witchcraft related sites in nearby Salem Town.

In the process of digitizing and georeferencing Upham’s map, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, I have placed red dots on each of Upham's numbered house locations (See Map 3). The dots indicate geographic points with coordinates in real geographic space. To correlate Upham's map with geographic reality, I selected some of the extant 1692 houses which were still standing on their original foundations, represented by numbers on Upham’s map, and a few stable landscape features. Using a geographical positioning system device, I determined the latitude and longitude of these locations on site. These known coordinates served as control points that linked the digital version of Upham's map to real geographic space for purposes of rectifying its errors as best as can be done using GIS software. The process resulted in a very slight warping and stretching of the digital image of Upham's map. The consequent offset between Upham's paper map and geographic accuracy averages approximately 500 feet, which is sufficiently accurate for my purposes.¹¹

Placing a digital image of the Boyer and Nissenbaum accusations map, with its black letters, A's, W's, and D's, over the geo-registered Upham map provided a means for checking the accuracy of Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map and also a useful way to correlate its otherwise anonymous A's, W's, and D's with Upham's household numbers. (See Map 4.) The correlation between the letters and the house numbers turns out to be fairly close, except in the area at the center of the map where the corrrelation of letters with Upham's numbers is very inexact. Nevertheless, by using the court documents and Boyer and Nissenbaum’s census of the Salem Village households it is possible to identify the people in those households with their roles in the witch trials as accusers, accused, and defenders, and locate them accurately on the map.¹²

Boyer and Nissenbaum placed an all-important east-west demarcation line at the center of their map, yet its placement is never explained. This is curious because it is evident that positioning this line very slightly to the west would make a significant difference in the crowded center of the map, shifting several A's to the eastern side of the Village. See the close-up image, Map 5, which focuses on this area and shows the dotted demarcation line neatly dividing A's and W's. I shall take up the question of the positioning of this line later on.

 

The numerical count of A's, W's, and D's that accompanies the map in Salem Possessed refers to accusers, accused, and defenders located within the Village boundaries, even though the map itself shows a number who are located outside Village in neighboring settlements. The map indicates that there were fourteen accused witches, thirty-two accusers, and twenty-nine defenders in the Salem Village. Elsewhere, Boyer and Nissenbaum give different tallies of accusers and accused. For example, Boyer and Nissenbaum's documentary source book Salem-Village Witchcraft (1972) lists twenty-six accused witches as Village residents. Included in this list are eight people who are shown on the map in Salem Possessed as living outside the Village boundaries.¹³ A subsequent map published in Paul Boyer's co-authored volume, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (1995), shows only eleven accused witches within the Village borders.¹⁴

There is a similar problem with the number of accusers in the Village. The map in Salem Possessed shows there are twenty-nine A's in Salem Village, whereas the numerical count that accompanies the map says that there are thirty-two. This number includes three "As" located just over the Village's northern broundary in Topsfield.

For the sake of completeness, my corrections to the A's, W's, and D's on the map includes those located both inside and outside Salem Village boundaries, located within the same geographic area as Boyer and Nissenbaum's map. Even though it is evident that the social network of the Village accusers reached far beyond the Village's borders, making local geographic boundaries largely irrelevant to understanding all but the initial stage of the episode, for the purposes of this paper I will retain Boyer and Nissebaum’s focus on the Village and its immediate environs, in the exactly same area where they have placed A's, W's, and D's. The immediate environs include adjacent areas of Topsfield and Salem Farms. Widening the map's scale would introduce other issues that lead beyond Boyer and Nissenbaum's interpretion of the outbreak of the accusations in the Village, which is the focus of this paper.

Starting with the accused persons represented by W's, I have already noted that none of the letters on the Boyer and Nissenbaum map are identified by name. The identity of the W's is evident, however, from an unpublished version of the map which assigns names to each of them and locates them in the same positions as the map in Salem Possessed. See Map 6.¹⁵

 

 

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Using these names, Map 7 identifies each W on the map in Salem Possessed and indicates in red letters eight W's that need to be corrected, deleted, or added. The red W furthest to the east represents Bridget Bishop. Subsequent scholarship has shown that she did not live in the Village but in the Town, and hence the placement of this W is incorrect and should be deleted.¹⁶ The red W near the center of the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is one of a pair representing Tituba and John Indian, two Indian slaves who lived in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris. The same pair of W's appears in the same location on the unpublished map (see Map 6) and clearly represents the same two persons. John Indian, however, was never accused of witchcraft, although he himself was an active accuser in some of the grand jury hearings. Nor is John Indian identified as one of the accused witches in Boyer and Nissenbaum's list in their source book, Salem-Village Witchcraft. The W representing him on the map in Salem Possessed is therefore a mistake and should be deleted. It was possibly an uncorrected error that was carried over from the unpublished version of the map shown above. Boyer and Nissenbaum have also mistakenly placed Margaret Jacobs, daughter of George Jacobs, Jr. in her father's house in the Village, whereas according to the court records she lived in Salem Town with her grandfather, George Jacobs, Sr. Rebecca Jacobs, however, lived with her husband George in the Village, not in her father-in-law's house in Salem. All the other W's located within the Village boundaries are correct according to the court records and require no comment.¹⁷

Turning now to the W's located outside the Village, the cluster of five located to the southeast just below the Village boundary represent five members of the John Proctor family who were accused (John Proctor, his wife Elizabeth, and three of their children, William, Benjamin, and Sarah). The Proctors did not live in the Village but in the area called Salem Farms, an inland segment of Salem Town immediately to the south of the Salem Village boundary.¹⁸ Thus John Proctor was not listed on the Village tax roles. He was also a prominent member of the church in Salem Town since 1667 and remained so until his execution as a witch in 1692.

During the witchcraft episode, Proctor's great mistake was to denounce the accusing girls and scoff at their afflictions, especially those of his twenty-year-old servant, Mary Warren, whom he is said to have beaten to stop her fits. Mary Warren lived as a servant in the Proctor house and was a close friend of the young female accusers in Salem Village. She was an active accuser in her own right and was herself accused of witchcraft when she confessed in the court, saying that the other afflicted girls "did but dissemble." To rectify the map, then, an additional W needs to be placed at the location of the Proctor household to represent the accused status of Mary Warren, as well as an additional A to represent Warren's double role as an accuser.

 

The W located to the northwest just beyond the Salem Village boundary in the area of Rowley Village (now Boxford) marks the house of John Willard, as indicated on Upham's map. Property deeds show that Willard's large holdings lay within the Will's Hill area of Salem Village,¹⁹ in the northwest corner, and hence Willard's name regularly appears on the Village tax lists. Willard served as a deputy constable at the time of the witchcraft accusations and was involved in arresting several Villagers, but he is said to have quit this work out of conscience. He was subsequently accused, arrested, and eventualy executed. Curiously, Boyer and Nissenbaum do not include Willard in their numerical tally of accused Village witches in Salem Possessed, even though he is consistently identified as a resident of the Village in the court documents and tax records.

 

Also curious is the omission of four accused witches, shown here as red W's, who lived in the neighboring town of Topsfield, just to the north of Salem Village. In this area, Boyer and Nissenbaum placed three A's to represent three Topsfield accusers, but they unaccountably omitted four accused witches who lived nearby. In late April 1692, Phillip and Margaret Knight and Lydia Nichols, each represented by an A, accused their neighbors William, Deliverance, and Abigail Hobbs, who were also accused by several residents of the Village. In the same week, several Village residents, including members of the Putnam family, also accused Mary Towne Easty, the wife of Isaac Easty, whose two sisters Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce had already been accused in the Village. All four Topsfield residents were well-known to their accusers in Salem Village, and they were quickly caught up in the early phase of the Village accusations. I have therefore added four W's to repersent them in their correct locations.

Map 8, then, is the fully corrected representation of the locations of those accused of witchcraft in Salem Village and the bordering areas of Topsfield and Salem Farms, within the same area as the Boyer and Nissenbaum map..

Turning now to the large number of A's, Boyer and Nissenbaum tell us that they decided not to represent on the map two categories of accusers. The first category is an unnamed group of five accusers who "were both defenders and accusers in 1692." The second category is the most active group of accusers in the Village, "the eight 'afflicted girls'," as Boyer and Nissenbaum call them.²⁰ Thus, thirteen accusers were omitted from the map.

Omitting these thirteen accusers turns out to make an important difference because ten of them lived on the eastern side of the Village, which significantly changes the east-west ratio of accusers. The decision not to represent these thirteen well-documented accusers indicates that Boyer and Nissenbaum did not intend their map to represent information strictly as recorded in the court documents but, rather, to present an interpretation of the court documents based on their assumptions about the actors' motivations. It turns out that several more accusers were also omitted, mainly, it would seem, by oversight.²¹ Map 9 shows the names and locations of all the accusers and identifies the ommitted persons by red A's.

Looking first at the five omitted accusers who were also defenders, Boyer and Nissenbaum do not tell us who they were, only that they were not marked on the map as A's or D's. From the list of defenders presented in the source book Salem-Village Witchcraft, it is clear that by “defenders” Boyer and Nissenbaum have in mind two categories of people: “individuals testifying in defense of those accused witches who lived in Salem Village” and “everyone giving skeptical testimony designed to cast doubt on the credibility of the afflicted girls.”²² Examining the court documents, it is possible to identify five defenders who were also accusers, who do not appear as A's or D's on the accusations map. They are as follows: Nathaniel Putnam, Jonathan Putnam, Joseph Herrick, Sr., Samuel Sibley, and James Holton. The first four were defenders of Rebecca Nurse. James Holton was a defender of John Proctor. None appear on the map as A's or D's, and all were accusers of other people.

 

In addition to these five omitted accusers, it turns out that there are five more individuals who appear on the map as D's who were also accusers of other people but do not appear on the map as A's. These five are: Joseph Hutchinsin, Sr., his wife Lydia Hutchinson, John Putnam, Sr. and his wife Rebecca Putnam, and Joseph Holton, Sr. In light of Boyer and Nissenbaum's comment about the omission from the map of individuals who were "both accusers and defenders," it would appear that the reader is apparently to assume that any of the accusations made by these individuals should not be taken seriously, hence their omission as A's.

The decision to omit those who accused some people and defended others, while perhaps appealing to a modern sense of rationality, imposes an unfounded interpretation upon historical events. The fact is that some of the Villagers genuinely believed that some of the accused were guilty and that others were not, and they acted on their convictions. Their complaints and depositions appear in the records of the grand jury hearings and most were used in the trials. That they believed Rebecca Nurse or John Proctor to be innocent does not give us any grounds for supposing that they came to doubt their own accusations against other people or were skeptical about the trials in general.

Nathaniel Putnam, for example, acted as one of the complainants in the arrest warrant against John Willard and Sarah Buckley. He also initiated a complaint against Elizabeth Fosdick and Elizabeth Paine, two women who lived in Malden. In the case of his pious neighbor Rebecca Nurse, however, Putnam submitted a petition on behalf of her innocence and also signed a testimonial circulated by the Nurse family. Likewise, Jonathan Putnam accused both Mary Easty and Rebecca Nurse, but later signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse, although he did not change his testimony against Rebecca's sister, Mary Easty. Joseph Herrick, Sr., a constable in Salem Village who made a number of early arrests of witchcraft suspects, submitted testimony against Sarah Good but later signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse. Samuel Sibley testified against Sarah Good and John Proctor and later signed the petition in support of his neighbor Rebecca Nurse. Joseph and Lydia Hutchinson were among the original complainants against Tituba, Sarah Osborne, and Sarah Good but both stood by their neighbor Rebecca Nurse. Joseph Hutchinson also submitted a deposition that cast doubt upon the testimony of Abigail Williams, one of Nurse's young accusers. John Putnam, Sr. and his wife Lydia Putnam testified in court against the former Village minister the Reverend George Burroughs, but both came to the defense of Rebecca Nurse. Finally, Joseph Holton, Sr., who signed the petition for Rebecca Nurse, was one of the chief complainants against William Proctor and several Andover people. There is no indication in the documents that any of these six accusers “publicly showed their skepticism about the trials,” as Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest. I have therefore represented them on the map as "As" in accordance with the court records.

Three other accusers, however, present a more complex picture, suggesting that they may well have doubted the justification of their accusations. James Kettle initiated a deposition against Sarah Bishop, based on spectral testimony given to him by Elizabeth Hubbard. Later, it seems, Kettle spoke with Hubbard, but this time submitted a deposition accusing her of "severall untruthes." Thus Kettle may have had second thoughts and wanted to put on record his doubts about the reliability of Hubbard's testimony against Sarah Bishop, even though it concerned the death of his own two children. James Holton contributed testimony supporting the depositions of Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Hubbard against John and Elizabeth Proctor. Nevertheless, both he and his wife Ruth signed a petition on behalf of the Proctors' innocence. At John Proctor's trial, however, James Holton's testimony against Proctor was used in court, indicating that the court, at least, had no doubts about the strength of Holton's convictions. John Putnam, Sr. accused Rebecca Nurse of afflicting his son Jonathan but later signed a peitition in her defense as did his son Jonathan. Nevertheless, Putnam, Sr.'s testimony against Nurse was used in court at her trial, while the petition for Nurse was not. Even though these accusers may have had doubts about their initial accusations, their testimonies lent support to the accusations in the Village, and they became part of the evidence against the accused. I have therefore placed these three accusers on the map as A's to reflect the court records.

It is significant that all ten of these accusers lived on the eastern side of the Village. Whether Boyer and Nissenbaum deliberately discredited their accusations to keep them "off the map" and thereby reduce the number of A's on the eastern side is unknown. But if a map of the accusations is to represent the historical record, then all nine accusers must be represented in their role as accusers.

Turning now to the omission of the eight "afflicted girls," Boyer and Nissenbaum give us their names: Sarah Churchill, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Parris, Ann Putnam, Jr., Mary Warren, Mary Walcott, and Abigail Williams. The residences of these eight accusers are well-known. To this group we can add two more who were apparently overlooked: eighteen year-old Susanna Sheldon, and ten-year-old Jemima Rea. Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that they omitted all the young accusers because "we think it to be a mistake to treat the girls themselves as decisive shapers of the witchcraft outbreak as it evolved."

Subsequent scholarship, however, has made it clear that this assumption, based as it is on the view that the “afflicted girls” were merely mouthpieces for adult male villagers, is entirely unsupportable. Bernard Rosenthal's careful analysis of the court documents in Salem Story (1993)²³ illuminates the constant collaboration among the young accusers, quite independently of adult control, as well as their deliberate acts of lying and deception. Mary Beth Norton's illuminating study of these same young females in In the Devil's Snare makes it abundantly clear that they were largely initiators of the accusations in the Village and that they maintained control of the dynamics of the accusations almost on a daily basis, both inside and outside the courtroom. Although it can be said, as Norton points out, that two or three of the youngest girls were initially prompted by adults to name certain people as witches, these girls and their older female friends clearly initiated most of the accusations on their own relying on face-to-face encounters, village gossip, and frequent collaboration.

This, of course, does not minimize the role of the adults who were heavily involved in enabling and supporting the accusations. Norton emphasizes the fact that without leading village men (the most active being the village clerk Thomas Putnam) who filed official complaints and depositions on behalf of the afflicted junior females, legal proceedings would never have occurred. Samuel Parris, who was responsible for raising the subject of demonic activity in the first place, supported the accusers from the beginning and gave the afflicted girls widespread exposure through group fasts and prayer sessions. But it was the girls and young women themselves who took the initiative in naming names and, most importantly, in performing their afflictions in numerous court sessions. They were called upon repeatedly by the magistrates to give dramatic testimony during the seven months of hearings and trials, and they obliged the court with ever escalating effect, naming victims in a progressively widening social and geographic circle through the spring, summer, and fall of 1692.

Restoring all ten junior female accusers to the map as A's makes a difference in east-west pattern because seven of them lived on the eastern side of the demarcation line: Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, Jemima Rea, Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, Mary Warren, and Sarah Churchill.²⁴

I have also added six additional red A's to represent six adult accusers that Boyer and Nissenbaum apparently overlooked. Their omission is surprising because three of them, the Reverend Samuel Parris, John Indian, and Tituba were residents of the prominent Parris household, and these three accusers figure significantly in the court documents. I have placed them at the position of the Parris house, located just to the east of the Boyer and Nissenbaum demarcation line, and grouped them together with the two A's representing Abigail Williams and Betty Parris in this same house. In the Parris household there was a total of five accusers, more than any other household in the Village.Three other red A's represent the following: Joseph Whipple, who accused two women from Malden; Sarah Holton who accused Rebecca Nurse; and Mary Herrick who, together with her husband Joseph, accused Sarah Good.

To sum up, then, the corrected map of the accusations in Salem Village shows an additional twenty-six accusers, all of whom lived on the eastern side of the Village. Putting accusers and accused together on the same map (Map 10) shows that there is no pronounced east-west division. Thirty accusers appear on the eastern side of the east-west line and thirty-five on the west. Thus, the east-west ratio is nearly even. Alhough the east-west distribution of accused witches is less even, there are enough in the west so that the situation is not one sided. Clearly, accusers and accused did not live "on opposite sides of the village." Mapping the accusations in the Village and the nearby areas of Topsfield and Salem Farms does not reveal a community geographically divided against itself.

At this point it is useful to consider the location of the Boyer and Nissenbaum's east-west demarcation line whose position is not explained in Salem Possessed. If it were a strictly geographical demarcation, dividing the Village into two equal parts, the line would have to be moved further to the west in order to adjust for the large geographical appendage, called Will's Hill, in the northwestern corner. This configuration would shift several more A's to the eastern side, and it does not appear to be what Boyer and Nissenbaum had intended.

Perhaps the line was supposed to be located nearer to the meeting house, the traditional symbolic center of Puritan communities. If so, it should be moved very slightly to the east. The location of the meeting house was selected in 1673 by Joseph Hutchinson, Sr. who donated a plot of land from his own property. The site was suitable because it placed the meeting house more or less equidistant from most of the Village residents, and thus it stood at the Village's approximate demographic center. Moving the line closer to the meeting house would significantly change the east-west ratio of accusers to accused as Boyer and Nissenbaum represented it.²⁵

It is interesting to note that the unpublished version of the accusations map, mentioned above (see Map 6)shows a diagonal line instead of a vertical line, dividing the village in half from the northeast to southwest. This line appears to have been drawn so that it placed as many W's as possible on the eastern side of the Village. This strategy left eight A's on the eastern side. Comparing the diagonal version with the vertical one, which shows only two A's in the east, suggests that the purpose of the vertical arrangement was to keep as many W's as possible in the east and as many A's in the west. Placing the vertical line so that it almost-too-neatly separates the closely clustered households at the center, placing several A's to the west of it, strengthens this interpretation. I would conclude, therefore, that the placement of the vertical demarcation line on the map in Salem Possessed was intended to show as dramatically as possible that Salem Village was geographically divided against itself, placing nearly all the A's in the west, and the majority of the W's in the east.

II

Map 12shows the distribution of social, political, military, administrative, legal, and religious leadership in the village during the ten-year period 1680-1690.²⁷ The household markers on the map represent the households of church deacons, village committee men, constables, village clerks, and militia officers, as well as the village physician and the minister. Although there is a slight bias toward the east by two households, the map shows a homogeneous distribution of Village leaders over this ten-year period. These are the men who were the most committed to the Village's welfare. Although some of them also held positions in the Town Committee from time to time, it can by no means be said that the commitment to Village interests as measured by participation in its governance, was largely an affair of the householders living in the west.

Nevertheless, according to Boyer and Nissenbaum, it was the eastern Village leaders who deliberately hindered the western Villagers' long struggle for independence because the easterners' connections with the Town were economically beneficial to them. These eastern men, according to Salem Possessed, tried to undermine the Village's newly established congregation by attempting to oust the Reverend Samuel Parris, which would set back the Village’s efforts to become an independent township. An ordained minister and covenanted congregation of professed "elect" members were the necessary features in any Puritan town, and destabilizing the new church would frustrate the Salem Village's cause.

To investigate the role of the eastern Villagers in the struggle for independence involves examining the several petitions submitted to Salem Town and the General Court in Boston in the years 1670 to1692. These petitions requested release from the Town's ministry tax in order to collect a tax for a Village minister. For most Villagers, travelling the five to ten miles to Salem's meeting house, especially in the winter, was a hardship, and this was the basis for petitions for a separate ministry and meeting house in the Village.

Map13 shows the wide geographic spectrum of Villagers who supported the petition of 1670 for an independent minister in the village. From the beginning, the General Court in Boston made it clear that the support of the ministry and maintaining the meeting house would be in the hands of all the members of the Village, not just those who were already covenanted members of Salem Town's congregation. This created an unusual situation in the Village -- indeed a structural anomaly -- since the control of a town's ministry was normally in the hands of the members of a congregation alone. But Salem Village was not an independent town and, prior to the arrival of Samuel Parris, the Village had a meeting house but no separately covenanted congregation. A small number of the Villagers were members of the congregation in the Town, and a few belonged to churches in neighboring Topsfield and Beverly, but a large number were not members of any congregation. In 1679 the Salem church reiterated the policy that the Village ministry was in the control of all the inhabitants: "the liberty granted to them by the town of Salem, whereby the Court order (to have a minister amongst themselves with such bounds [of the Village]) was not granted to any of them under the notion of church members, but to the whole number of inhabitants there -- for their present ease, being so far from the meeting-house here [in Salem Town]."²⁸ This ruling set the stage for possible conflict between future church members in the Village, once an independent congregation was established there, and the rest of the Village residents if they disapproved of the minister.

After repeated conflict and a succession of three ministers in the Village in eighteen years, the last of whom was Deodat Lawson who left in 1687, the Town finally permitted the Village to recruit a new minister and establish its own covenant congregation. The search for a new minister and the recruitment of Samuel Parris was the work of a small village committe. After initial negotiations with Samuel Parris concerning salary and benefits, which were not fully resolved, the Village agreed to appoint Parris in November 1689. As the first ordained minister in the Village, Parris could establish the Village's first covenant congregation and baptize their children. This was also a major step in the Village's progress for independence from the Town.

Once Parris was selected and installed, the Village leaders lost no time in submitting petitions to the General Court in Boston for indepdenent township status. The first peitition was initiated in August 1689; another was submitted in December 1690; and still another in January 1692.²⁹ The final petition of January 28, requested that the Village be granted township status and be freed from the Town's taxes that did not benefit the Village, namely, the taxes for Salem's minister, Town roads, and the poor, while still paying a "country rate" to the Town. The petition was supported by several prominent residents, all eastern Village men: John Putnam, Nathaniel Putnam, Thomas Flint, Joseph Hutchinson, Francis Nurse, and Joseph Porter. (See Map 14) The first three were men who strongly supported Parris, and the last three were adament opponents. Despite the deepening conflict over Parris, the anti-Parris leaders steadfastly backed the independence movement in cooperation with their opponents.

As can be seen from the accompanying map which shows the location of men supporting the petition of January 1692, the Village's desire for independence was strongly supported by eastern leaders. It is difficult, then, to agree with Boyer and Nissenbaum that eastern Village leaders had little "genuine" interest in separation from the Town. Indeed, all Villagers would benefit economically because independence would free the Village from paying a sizable portion of the Town's taxes for the support of its ministry and roads. It was for this same reason, however, that the Town continued to refuse the Village's petitions.

III

To gain full membership in the congregation, which included partaking of communion and voting rights on church polity, 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."³⁶ Even the mother church in Salem had abandoned this custom 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.³⁷ 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 instituted 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 rest of the year, and baptisms fell off dramatically.³⁸

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.³⁹

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 sixty-one adult members and eighty 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. No one would join the new congregation for the next two years, and the number of baptisms declined radpidly. 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."⁴⁰

A complaint written by Parris's supporters dated December 26, 1692 spelled out the situation that had developed since 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 the year to address the issue of Parris's unpaid salary.⁴¹ 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 were the majority of the Villagers who, once the agitation against Parris began, refrained from joining his congregation, thus empowering the opposition leaders. According to Puritan practice, only covenanted members could partake of communion. On any given communion Sunday, 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. Map XX shows the large number of households of non-church members in the Village -- fifty-seven all told. Non-church members numbered approximately 135 adults and comprised about sixty percent of the adult population.⁴²

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, which was unprecedented.⁴³ 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 by 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 numerous and 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 and upon Christ himself 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 ministers in the past, none involved such intransigence on the minister's part nor the outright refusal to collect the taxes to pay 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.

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 the congregation. It was Parris's repeated sermons about the activity of demonic forces in the Village and the Devil's attempt to "pull down" his new congregation 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."⁴⁴ Parris deliberately translated his embattled situtation into a demonic attack on his church, attempting to condemn and isolate 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 reference to the continued opposition and absenteeism was obvious. In February, when some villagers were withholding payment, 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." 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 of a great cosmic struggle between the God and Satan.

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 Parris supporter 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 own daughter Ann and Dr. Griggs' niece Elizabeth Hubbard, who was his household servant, may also have become afflicted.

According to the Reverend John Hale, the minister in nearby Beverly who wrote an eyewitness account, “the Neighbours quickly took up [Griggs’ diagnosis] and concluded they [the girls] were bewitched.”⁴⁵ A local church member and close neighbor to Parris, Mary Sibley, then secretly arranged for a “witch cake” to be administered to the Parris children. 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 led to 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.”⁴⁶

Despite Parris’s efforts to blame his parishioner for “raising” the Devil in the Village, it was Parris himself who had aroused villagers’ fears of demonic activity. Parris had already made a public spectacle of the girls’ disturbing “fits," calling in ministers from Salem and Beverly for prayer sessions before finally seeking a medical opinion. While the precise role Parris played is difficult to pin down, it was a crucial one. Sunday after Sunday, Parris 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.

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 Village congregation. Lawson, hearing that the "the first Person Afflicted was in the minister's Family," wrote that he was deeply concerned because his own wife and daughter, who had died when he was minster in the Village, were now rumored to have been killed by witchcraft. Upon his arrival in the Village, 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.⁴⁷

The next day, Lawson began the Sunday worship service with a prayer, but he was immediately interrupted.⁴⁸ As if to demonstrate that the devil’s aggression was aimed at the church, 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., then 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,⁴⁹ 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 girls: the church itself was being threatened. The ministry was being attacked, as Parris had proclaimed, and godly women and children of the congregation were being transformed into agents of Satan.

In his sermon on March 24th, Lawson confirmed Parris's warning that Satan was attacking the Village congregation: "The Covenant People of God," he said, "are the special objects of SATANS Rage and Fury. He is the malicious Enemy of the Church of God." He told the congregation that God had specially targeted them. “The Lord,” he said, had sent “this Fire of his Holy displeasure” to put out their "Fires of Contention" 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 Grand Jury hearing of Rebecca Nurse in the morning and had sent her to jail. By this time, the two magistrates had indicted and jailed five accused witches: Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Martha Cory, and Rebeca Nurse. Each was accused of tormenting their accusers and of having "signed" the Devil's book, thus undermining the church. From the pulpit Lawson exhorted the magistrates 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 . . . ." ⁵⁰

Eleven days later on March 31st, the Village and Town observed a public fast with special prayers for the afflicted. On the same day, Lawson reported that Abigail Williams had witnessed a 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, something initially mentioned by Tituba, one of the first accused. The next day Mercy Lewis told of witnessing the same demonic ceremony near the parsonage. While in a trance-like state, she related how the Devil enticed her to take the Devil's 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!" Then, still in trance, she reported a vision of a "Glorious Place" where a heavenly choir was singing Psalm 110.⁵¹ This was one of the Psalms in Parris's January, 1692 sermon. In the Christian context it refers to the risen Christ making his enemies his foot stool. Mercy's two visions of the Devil and Christ clearly reflect Parris's sermons about the Village being torn between Satan and Christ.

 

A little over two weeks later, on April 19th, Abigail Hobbs and Ann Putnam, Jr. accused the former village minister, the Reverend George Burroughs, then serving as the minister in Wells, Maine. Burroughs had left Salem Village in 1683 after a bitter dispute initiated by John Putnam. Almost immediately the young accusers realized that in naming Burroughs they had at last identified the high priest of the Satanic conspiracy in the Salem Village. The discovery of a Puritan clergyman in league with Satan had immediate impact, as Mary Beth Norton has emphasized. But it was not only because of Burroughs' ties to the Indian attacks on the Maine frontier. Burrough's role as the leader of the witches meant that the witchcraft activity in Salem Village was a not just series of random personal attacks but the work of a church-like organization, with a leader whose goal was to recruit new members, baptizing them, signing them into a covenant, and administering the sacrament to them. With this threat in mind, new witchcraft accusations proliferated as did numerous 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 his Queen, and she identified two Deacons as well. Such reports established the view that the witchcraft attacks in Salem Village were part of an institutionalized process of demonic assault and provoked a witch-hunt unlike anything seen in New England before.

From this point onward, accusers and confessors reported seeing hundreds of witches under Burroughs command coming from Andover and elsewhere in the Colony to both Salem Village and Andover. It was partly Burroughs relationship with the Maine frontier and the Satan driven Indian attacks that gave new impetus to the accusers and the legal proceedings. Burroughs was said to have established a full-blown Satanic church that would destroy the village congregation. 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 had never met before. This phase of the witch-hunt is a complex story, involving an ever widening and more diverse field of socio-political elements, as Mary Beth Norton has recently shown. Even though the afflicted lived in other towns, the accusers continued to claim that the destruction of the village church was the witches' the principal goal.

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 many 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. . . " ⁵² 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 village “assistants of the Devil” at work against his church, now led by former Village minister Burroughs, it is not surprising that there was a strong correlation between the members of his congregation and the witchcraft accusers in the village. A head count shows that a significant proportion, seventy percent (forty out of fifty-eight) of the afflicted accusers belonged to households headed by members of the village church. See map xx. More significant is the fact that seventy-six percent (sixteen out of twenty-one) of the most active complainants and accusers (those who accused more than three people) belonged to the church member families. Moreover, seventy-five 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 strong supporters of Parris. By early April, Lawson had concluded correctly that "Satan Rages Principally amongst the Visible Subjects of Christ's Kingdom," that is, the members of the Salem Village congregation.

Equally significant is the fact that a large proportion of those accused in the Village community, eighty-eight percent (twenty-three out of twenty-six), were not village church members nor members of neighboring churches.⁵³ See Map xx. 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 directed mainly against the many "outsiders" living among them -- those who were not members of the Village congregation -- a classic opposition between "us" and "them” within a bounded community.

The precipitating conflict that engendered witchcraft fears was not, then, a conflict between the Village and the Town but a vigorous struggle within the Village itself between Samuel Parris and a 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 or even suspicion. 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 their neighbors, were far more likely to accuse those who were not members of their congregation. Parris, whose sermons divided the Village into two groups, the “godly” and the "vile," 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, Parris was still identifying 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 signed separate petitions, for and against Parris's retention as their minister. In copying these petitions into his record book, Parris carefully transcribed the names of the signers in two separate colums: "Church-Members" and the non-church residents or "Householders."⁵⁴ 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.

Nonchurch villagers, then, 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 employ David Hackett Fisher’s useful phrase.⁵⁵ 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 congregation, and it was the families of the congregation that made most of the accusations.

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, believed there was a direct relationship between the retention of the old covenant and the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem Village. In mid-December 1692, Mather, who wished to introduce the Halfway Covenant into his own church, wrote a letter to John Richards, a leading member of Mather’s congregation who was strongly opposed to it. 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.”⁵⁶

Mather’s attempt to associate potential witchcraft activity with the unchurched lends support to the possibility that the church members in the Salem Village also viewed their unchurched neighbors in the same manner. Indeed, almost all those accused in the Salem episode were indicted on the basis of spectral evidence that revealed that they had done the very thing Mather feared the unchurched would do -- they “signed” the “Devil’s book” in their own blood, thus becoming members of Satan’s covenant. This type of charge had been rarely made before in New England and constantly focused the accusations on Satan's attempt to over throw the church.

In 1693, after the witch trials were over, the Village was still 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 show a fairly even east-west distribution, except for those at the extreme margins of the Village. Again, these maps do not show a village geographically divided aggainst itself. (See maps XX and XX) ⁵⁷

 

 

When 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.⁵⁸

 

Conclusion

Confirmation of a Satanic conspiracy in Salem Village was first voiced by Tituba in her forced confession at the very beginning of the episode. The existence of the witches' meeting was soon corroborated by the afflicted children themselves, who "saw" them in a field near the parsonage. As time went on, no matter where witchcraft afflictions occurred in Essex County, witnesses continued to tell the court that the source the these afflictions was the Devil's work in Salem Village and later in neighboring Andover. The court records suggest that the magistrates shared this perspective. In the process of questioning the dozens of accused, they frequently elicited information about witches meetings in the Village. Thomas Brattle in his famous Letter opposing the trials, written in early October, also mentions this view 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, published soon after the closure of the witch trials court, makes repeated reference to the testimonies about witches' meetings in Salem Village aimed, he claims, at the "Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country." From early on, Satan's assault on the Village congregation and the growining fears of a wider assault on the churches of the Bay Colony appear to have fueled the continuing witchcraft accusations and convictions across the eastern Bay region. Within the Village the accusations fell mostly upon the unchurched -- the people believed most likely to undermine the new and threatened congregation.

***************

I wish to express my appreciation to the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative for supporting the digital mapping of Salem Village. I am also greatly indebted to Mike Furlough, Blair Tinker, and Scott Crocker at the Geostat Center at the University of Virginia Library for their assistance in creating the GIS maps of Salem Village. I am, of course, responsible for their content and interpretation. Thanks also to Anne K. Knowles for her assistance with an earlier version of this paper, "Teaching the Salem Witch Trials," in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles (Redlands: ESRI Press, 2002). At the time of writing that essay I had not fully investigated the number of accusers in Salem Village and their relationship to the village church, nor did I focus on the inaccuracies of the Boyer and Nissenbaum map. I am also indebted to Margo Burns, Erik Midelfort, Mary Beth Norton, Marilynne Roach, and Bernard Rosenthal for reading the present essay and giving me most useful suggestions.

 

Notes

1. Paul Boyer and Steven Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge. 1974. Salem Witchcraft, Charles W. Upham, Vols. I & II. Wiggin and Lunt, Boston 1867.

2. The map was made by Charles Upham’s brother W. P. Upham and is dated 1866. For purposes of digitization, I used an enlarged copy of this map printed by the Danvers Alarm List Company, Inc. n.d.

3. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002.

4. Salem Possessed, 35.

5. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. 3rd. edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc.: New York, 41.

6. List the tiles of the American history textbooks here. Frances Hill, Hunting for Witches: A Visitor’s Guide to the Salem Witch Trials. Commonwealth Editions. Beverly, Mass.: 2002,136. The map has appeared in prominent television productions about the Salem witch trials. It has been given a signficant role in Three Soveriengs for Sarah and in the recent History Channel program titled “Witch Hunt,” (October 31, 2004)in which Paul Boyer and Steven Nissenbaum explain the map’s significance – (insert here a quote from the TV program).

7. Mark Monmier, How To Lie With Maps. University Of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1991. p.

8. Cooper and Minkema, eds., The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris. Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Boston, 1993, 185.

9. James F. Cooper, Jr. and Kenneth P. Minkima, “Introduction,” in James F. Cooper, Jr. and Kenneth P. Minkima, The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1698-1694. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Boston. 1993; Larry D. Gragg, A Quest for Security : The Life of Samuel Parris, 1653-1720. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990; Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, Chapter 7; Upham, Salem Witchcraft.

10. Deodat Lawson, “Christ’s Fidelity the only Shield against Satan’s Malignity,” reprinted in Richard B. Trask, “The Devil hath been raised.” Danvers Historical Society: Danvers, Mass.1992, 98. It is obvious from the context that Lawson's phrase "some Fires of Contention" refers to the intensely smoldering dispute over Samuel Parris that set members of his congregation against his opponents.

11. See “The Salem Witchcraft GIS:A Visual Re-Creation of Salem Village in 1692” http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/libsites/salem/.

12. Paul Boyer and Steven Nissenbaum, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Northeastern University Press: Boston, 1993: 383-393. Here I follow Boyer and Nissenbaum's use of the term "accuser" to refer to anyone whose testimony in support of a charge of witchcraft was recorded in a court document. There are a variety of documents in which such testimonies appeared; they are commonly classified as: "complaints," "depositions," "testimonies," and "examinations." Like Boyer and Nissenbaum, I also count as accusers men who initiated complaints on behalf of others, most often girls and young women (who under Puritan law had no legal standing) who claimed to be victims of witchcraft. Several important men in Salem Village initiated numerous complaints of this kind, and most of them were members of the village church. Like Boyer and Nissenbaum, I use the term "accused" to refer to anyone named in a court document on the basis of testimony by an accuser. Other historical sources give the names of additional persons who were said to have been accused or "cried out" upon but were never formally charged or their documents are now missing from the surviving records, and these I have not counted.

 

13. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 376- 78.

14. Paul S. Boyer, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 2nd Ed. Vol. 1, Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath & Co. 1993, 49.

15. This map bears the names of Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum in the lower left corner. It was found in a folder of miscellaneous papers relating to Salem witchcraft in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. The map includes the names of two accused witches George Jacobs, Sr. and Rebecca Jacobs located in the Northfields section of Salem, to the east of the Village. These names were omitted from the published map in Salem Possessed.

16. David Greene, ”Salem Witches I: Bridget Bishop,” The American Genealogist, 57 (1981):129-138.

17. The location of the Sarah Good and her five-year-old daughter Dorothy Good is not precisely known. According to the court records, Sarah Good and her husband William Good lived in Salem Village, probably in rented rooms, but their place of residence at the time of her accusation is not known cannot be represented on the map.

18. Salem Village was originally part of Salem Town and was often referred to as "Salem Farmes" or simply “the Farmes." In 1672 several important residents of the Farms succeeded in petitioning the Town and the General Court for the authority to organize a parish called Salem Village for the purpose of hiring a minister and building a meeting house of their own. Salem Village was geographically defined at this time and given more or less precise legal borders, as represented on Upham's map. The residents within the Village established a separate tax role for themselves to support the Village ministry, and they were supposed to be freed from paying taxes to Salem Town for the preaching there. The remaining area of "the Farmes" located to the south of the Village remained part of the Town and came to be known as Salem Farms. The property owners of Salem Farms were taxed as “country” residents of the Town and were expected to attend Town meetings and belong to the Town church. The property owners living within the boundaries of Salem Village were first listed on the Village tax roles in 1681. The Village tax roles were updated every two or three years and thus constitute a record of the property owners in the Village. The inhabitants of the Village met regularly in the Village meeting house to handle their affairs, which mainly concerned the Village ministry and taxes and, later, petitions for independence from the Town.

19. Upham indicates that the location of this house is uncertain (Salem Witchcraft, Vol. 1: xix). Based on analysis of property deeds, Marilynne Roach has suggested that John and Margaret Knight Willard may have been living in the Will’s Hill area, perhaps with Margaret’s maternal relatives, the large Wilkins clan who lived in this part of the village (personal communication).

20.  Salem Possessed, 34-35.

21. Working with over 930 documents published in the three volume edition of The Salem Witchcraft Papers is not an altogether easy task. The Index to these volumes includes only one third of the names mentioned in the court records, and some documents pertaining to accused persons are only to be found in the case records of other people. Finding all the people named in the court records is both easier and more accurate when using the seach tools associated with digital text edition at <http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft>.

22. Salem-Village Witchraft. 381.

23. Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

24. Sarah Churchill is not shown on the map because the residence of George Jacobs, Sr., where she lived, was located in the Northfields area of Salem that lies outside the range of the Boyer and Nissenbaum map. There are four additional accusers in Salem Farms who lived in the Alice Schaflin house (Alice Booth, Elizabeth Booth, George Booth, & wife Elizabeth). The Schaflin house lies just outside the frame of the Boyer and Nissenbaum map.

25. The map of Salem Village in Paul Boyer's The Enduring Vision appears to locate the dividing linesomewhat to east of the meeting house.By contrast, historian George Lincoln Burr refers to Ingersoll's Taven as the "recognized centre of the 'village.' The meeting-house [property] adjoined to the east, to the west the parsonage, where lived Mr. Parris." (Burr, Narrtives, p. end note 19.) This would place the dividing line further to the west, thus shifting a number of A's to the east.

26. "Ihe Salem Village Book of Records, 1672-1697" (Transcribed in the Historical Collections of the Danvers Historical Society, Vols. ) as printed in Salem-Village Witchcraft, 353-355;Salem Possessed, 82. Boyer and Nissenbaum use the tax rate list for the year 1695 -- well after the witch trials were over. The tax rates do not vary much between the 1689-90 and 1695 lists, but it is odd that Boyer and Nissenbaum use the 1695 rates as a basis for examining the economic situation in the village that prevailed before the witchcraft accusations were made and supposedly caused it.

27. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 319-355.

28. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 246.

29. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 349-357.

30. The First Church of Salem Record Book. Essex Institute. Salem, 19?? pp. 169-71.

31. Salem-Village Witchcraft, pp.

32. Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969: 140-142, 193.

33. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 371

34. Gragg, Larry D., A Quest for Security : the Life of Samuel Parris, 1653-1720. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990: 68.

35. Ibid, p. 90. Gragg’s estimate of "well over 400" villagers who were neither baptized nor church members may be a little high. My calculation is somewhat less, about 340. Such a figure must be based on an estimate of the total population of Salem Village, which is an uncertain number given the lack of a full census of the Village. Using current sources, I estimate the total number of village residents at about 500 to 525. I derive this number from the names of householders on village tax rate list of 1689-90, from the somewhat incomplete village census complied by Boyer and Nissenbaum, and from Richard Trask’s informative estimates in “Demographics of 1692 Salem Village” in “The Devil hath been raised.” A fairly accurate number of church members and baptisms in the village can be obtained from Parris’s records in “Records of the Salem-Village Church from November 1689 to October 1696” (transcribed in Salem-Village Witchcraft) and from Marilynne Roach’s recent review of these records. See Marilynne Roach, “Records of the Rev. Samuel Parris, Salem Village, Massachusetts, 1688-1696,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. January, 2003: 6-30.

36. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 270.

37. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant,

38. See Salem-Village Witchcraft, 268-276; Marilynne Roach, "Records of the Rev. Samuel Parris."

39. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 356.

40. James F. Cooper, Jr. and Kenneth P. Minkima, The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1698-1694., 148. All subsequent quotations from Parris's sermons are from this source and, to save numerous footnotes, will be referenced in the text by the month in which they occurred.

41. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 255-56.

42. There are more non-church households than shown on this map because Upham was not able to locate all the houses in Salem Village on his map, from which this one derives.

43. According to Robert Calef, Parris’s attempt to gain ownership of the village parsonage was the key issue in the dispute (More Wonders of the Invisible World, London, 1700) abriged in Burr, Narratives, p.341.

 

44. Cooper and Minkima, Sermon Notebook, p. 20; cf. Gragg, Quest for Security, pp.98-100.

45. Rev. John Hale, "A Modest Inquiry," in Burr, Narratives, 413.

46. Salem-Village Witchcraft, 278-79.

47. Burr, Narratives, 148; 152-154.

48. Rev.Lawson, Deodat, "Christ’s Fidelity, the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity," reprinted in Richard B. Trask, “The Devil hath been raised, ” Revised Edition, Danvers, Mass., Yeoman Press, 1997, p.98.

49. Burr, Narratives, 154.

50. Devil hath been raised, pp. 103-04.

51. Burr, Narratives, 160-161. I wish to thank Marilynne Roach for calling to my attention the fact that Psalm 110 was used in Parris's sermon on Janurary 15th. See Marilynne Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Seige. Cooper Square Press: New York, 2002., pp. 64-65. Puritan congregations sang the Psalms regularly in church, and Psalm 110 was probably well-known to Mercy Lewis, in addition to her experience of singing it in the village church in January.

52. SWP II: 65-66.

53. This figure includes Sarah Good who lived somewhere in the village.See n.17 above.

54. Both petitions appear in Salem-Village Witchcraft, 260-63.

55. David Hackett Fisher, Washington’s Crossing, 2004, 364.

56. As quoted in Pope, The Half-way Covenent:197.

57. In order to support the theory of a geographically divided village, Boyer and Nissenbaum placed a carefully drawn parallelogram in the central area of the village map to show that many of the pro- and anti-Parris supporters resided at the eastern and western margins of the village. Yet, even this careful manipulation of the geographic data reveals that the central villagers played a critical role: here lived the majority of the pro-Parris supporters and here lived the large balance of the anti-Parris group. See Map xx (insert BN map here).

58. See Henry Wheatland, "Baptisms at Church in Salem Village, Now North Parish, Danvers," Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. 16, 1879:235-240, 302-311.