It’s witchcraft

Mary Beth Norton plumbs early New England

By John Freeman

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 By Mary Beth Norton, Knopf. New York. 436 pages. $30.

Mary Beth Norton reads, at the Maine Historical Society, in Portland, October 17. Call (207) 774-1822.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: Mary Beth Norton goes for accuracy over animation.

Though obscured by time and the tinny righteousness of so many high school adaptations of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the facts of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 remain scorched in the public memory. Between mid-January 1692 and May 1693, residents of Essex County, Massachusetts, brought legal action against 144 men and women for witchcraft, the accused running the gamut of rich to poor, old to young. Astonishingly, the accusers were mostly young women under 25, several of them servants — people who did not traditionally have a voice in 1692 society.

Why, then, did the people of Salem and surrounding areas listen to them? And why, of all times, did this scandal take place in 1692? These are the questions Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton hones in on throughout her meticulously researched new book, In the Devil’s Snare. Norton is something of a gender specialist, whose previous book, Founding Mothers & Fathers, atomized the slow erosion of power held by women in Colonial America. One would expect In the Devil’s Snare, then, to have a strong feminist slant, but, instead, Norton assigns more importance to the political and military context of Northern New England at the turn of the 18th century.

As Norton believes, the people of this area were deeply affected by the First and Second Indian Wars that took place on the Maine frontier. These bloody, costly clashes with the Wabanaki and their French allies had uprooted scores of settlers, many of whom had been in the colonies for two or three generations. The effect of this defeat was manifest. Not only did it call into question New Englanders’ capability to sustain profitable Northern outposts; it called into question their chosen status with God. “He had, they concluded, visited these afflictions upon them as chastisements for their many sins of omission and commission.” To fully grasp the guilt complex involved in such a belief, imagine if Americans today believed that the terrorist attacks of September 11 were God’s punishment for our sins.

It’s a provocative, if uneasy comparison, one Norton is not about to make. Since she wants to recreate the mindset of 17th-century New Englanders, Norton keeps an airtight lid on her diorama of players, whom she brings to life exclusively through diaries, letters, and court records. Unlike some of her colleagues, who have turned to novelistic devices to animate the annals of history, Norton is obsessed with authenticity. She carefully doles out her “might have”s and “could have”s, monitoring them for any trace of modernizing influence.

As a result, In the Devil’s Snare goes down like a plate of scalding, un-sweetened gruel. You know it’s good for you, but even the heartiest of souls will want for that bit of sugar. Players are introduced quickly as their accusations are plucked from the public record and plopped into the narrative, complete with odd spellings and notations. Thus we read of one “diabolicall apperition” after another, coming in the form of neighbors and friends, wearing, alternately, black hats, white hats, robes, asking the afflicted to sign a red book, and usually making that poor soul feel pricked or pinched by pins and needles.

It would be easy for Norton to distance herself from the story by commenting on how weird all this is, but she wisely stays the course, allowing the narrative to do the talking. As her account of the trials grinds forward, she splices in facts about the two Indian Wars that put the growing hysteria in perspective, and build a kind of hysteria of their own. Gradually, the reader begins to understand the political and spiritual anxiety that these defeats spread among New Englanders. This goes a long way toward explaining a fact many histories choose to gloss over, which is that a plurality of witchcraft accusations came from outside Salem.

There is something liberating about the Pilgrims’ interpretation of these events and the Indian Wars. As Norton says in her conclusion: “If God had providentially caused the wartime disasters and he had also unleashed the devil on Massachusetts, then they bore no responsibility for the current state of affairs.” This explains, too, why a very structured, patriarchal society would believe the testimonies of young girls and women.

After the community had purged itself of 14 women and five men by hanging — one “pressed to death with stones” — enough was enough, and the topsy-turvy world was again righted. In a final note, Norton allows herself a single gloss, one that says a lot about this colonial world. “[T]he strange reversal that had placed women on top was then righted, and young women were relegated once again to what contemporaries saw as their proper roles: servers, not served; followers, not leaders.” And then, with a grimness that befits Stephen King, she adds that “only one of them ever went back to Maine.”

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.