“In the Devil’s Snare” is a captivating new look at a
phenomenon that has horrified and captivated generations of Americans: the 1692
Salem witch trials. Mary Beth Norton tries to set
the record straight on much of the lore surrounding the case. The “Salem” witch
crisis actually centered in Salem Village, now Danvers. Its tentacles reached
into many Essex County towns in northeast Massachusetts: Topsfield, Haverhill,
and Andover, where more accused witches lived than in Salem itself. By quoting
extensively from extant trial records, Norton lays bare the methods used at the
trial, which relied so extensively on “spectral” evidence – the reports, from
the afflicted girls, that the unseen spirits of the accused were tormenting
them. Norton showed the Salem Villagers to be fractious lot, quarrelling with
each other over property lines and with their own ministers. And she deals a
blow to the common understanding of the start of the crisis. There is no
evidence that Tituba, slave of minister Samuel Parris, was responsible for
telling Parris’s daughter and niece stories of dark magic. And to deny her
modern readers any feeling of superiority over the Puritans, Norton tells us
that the verdicts and deaths were repudiated by many of the participants just a
few months or years after the end of the crisis.
But Norton’s main thesis, one which she trots out whenever
the opportunity presents itself, is that the Salem crisis cannot be understood,
and indeed can be explained nearly wholly, by setting in the context of the
precarious situation that New England’s 17th-century colonists held
vis-a-vis the Indians. There is a great deal to be said about this perspective.
The colonists were settled along the coast, in seaside villages up and down the
New England seacoast. The Indians were literally in the backyards of the
townspeople, whose small numbers and flimsy garrisons provided scant protection
against raids. The godly Puritans, whose mission was to bring Christianity to
the benighted savages and their demon-possessed land, could hardly be faulted
for seeing Satan’s power lurking in the dark forests, along with his
bronze-skinned minions. Add to this a world view that accepted every victory as
grace from God and every defeat as a chastisement, and you have the perfect
formula for a deep and abiding paranoia, bordering on madness. At the time of
the crisis, the colonists were in the midst of a second great war with the
Indians. Towns like Cocheco (Dover, NH) and Oyster River (Durham, NH) and the
Maine towns of Wells, York and Falmouth were attacked by Indians and the French
allies. Houses were burned, livestock stolen and residents killed, mutilated or
enslaved. The refugees, among whom were future witchcraft accusers, ended up in
places like Salem.
Norton is strongest when presenting us with information
about the trials. She quotes extensively from the trial transcripts. She even
identifies curiously missing entries in the transcripts and in the diaries of
the Salem judges, suggesting their own embarrassment at their participation or
that of their families. She traces the crisis of the English monarchy during
the period, when fallout from the Glorious Revolution (in which monarchy had
been restored after years of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan rule) rearranged the
power structure of the colony, as well as the status of its charter. And she
shows how the crisis’s days were numbered when the accusing girls started to
accuse the wealthy and the high-ranking of being in league with Satan. It was
one thing to accused some mumbling crone wandering the back roads of Salem. It
was quite another to accuse the wife of the governor.
In spite of Norton’s confidence in her thesis that the roots
of the crisis lay on the frontier, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was not
getting the whole story. It was not until far into the book that Norton
mentions, in passing, that some of the accused were browbeaten into
confessing by their captors. In fact, many of the confessed witches of Andover
soon recanted, making it clear that they had been intimidated into admitting
their guilt. Norton also withholds an important facet of 17th
century New England: that Puritan communities relied on consensus, with the
entire community working toward a particular point of view, steamrolling the
opinions of individuals. Both of these facts undermines Norton’s Indian War
thesis. This suggests that, at most, Norton could claim a “perfect storm” of
conditions, including paranoia about Indian raids, that precipitated the
crisis. Nor does Norton explain the mechanism by which so many young women
began their litany of accusations that ensnared neighbors and a former
minister. Though Norton poo-poos claims of other writers that the girls were
victims of ergot poisoning, or were involved in a land-grab, her own
claim--that the girls’ fits were induced by the trauma of seeing their families
butchered—has few legs to stand on. Certainly, some of the girls had frontier
connections. But others had none. What was their angle? Were they all caught up
in the mania of being important, in a culture where children and women had
little status? Were some of them insane? Could guilty consciences (over
adolescent dabblings in the occult) have caused psychosis? Or was this all a
sham perpetrated by the girls for their own reasons? Even, diabolically, just
for fun?
The book left me with many unanswered questions. But it did
spur my to seek out the sites of many of the scenes in the books – some of
which, like house of Samuel Parris and the location of the Salem Meeting house
– still exist far from the commercialized and folly of today’s Salem, built on
the tourist fascination with witches and hanging trees. “In the Devil’s Snare”
did not resolve the mysteries surrounding the Salem witch crisis. But Norton’s
book, in spite of its claims of finding the missing link to the puzzle, has
expanded the means by which investigators can approach the problem. The Indian
Wars of the late 17th century must now be seen as a critical link
between the God-fearing intentions of our Puritan forebears, and the devilish
madness they unleashed on themselves in 1692.
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