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.In 1691, Indian raids on the Maine bordersent a flood of refugees into the comparative safety of established coastal towns likeSalem, Massachusetts.The refugees carried with them firsthand experience of thehorrors of the war and spread rumors of Indian atrocities, inflaming the hatred ofIndians, Catholics, French Canadians, and strangers that already existed in New En-gland s northern settlements.Salem, like the other older towns nearby, had troubles enough of its own.Longsettled, there was too little land left in the town for some of its young people to startfamilies.Even the more prosperous clans felt the pinch.Long-standing quarrels overtimber and farm fields and more recent suspicions of newcomers fueled gossipabout strange and incurable illnesses and mysterious conduct of neighbors.By the end of 1691, with the war going badly, the rumors of impending catastro-phe and gossip about misfortunes began to coalesce around a single theme: the devilhad singled out New England.The refugees told stories of Indian witchcraft.Withwitchcraft accusations in the air, old suspicions of outcasts, beggars, braggarts, andmiscreants took on a new solidity.Had the political situation in the colony been moresettled, the magistrates could have quieted the people s fears, but the magistrateswere themselves unsure of their power.With only a provisional government and nocharter, they failed to act.The Shapes of the DevilFrom January 1692 to May 1693, the men and women of Salem, Massachusetts,and the neighboring towns engaged in a manic witch hunt.Hundreds were accused,many of whom languished in jail for months.Neighbor turned against neighbor,children informed on parents, and congregations expelled members.Between June2 and September 21, 1692, nineteen women and men were tried and executed for thecrime of using their spectral powers to assault a group of girls.Four other suspectsdied in jail.One man who refused to cooperate with the court was pressed to deathwith stones.Such witch hunts, ordinarily aimed at older, poor women, had torn apart Euro-pean communities since the thirteenth century, and condemned hundreds of thou-sands of defendants, most of them innocent of all wrongdoing, to death.But by the1690s, the witch-hunt craze had all but disappeared, especially in England.True, thevast majority of English people, including those in the colonies, still believed that 246 WORLDS I N MOTI ONwitches had the power to hurt people by making pacts with the devil.And althoughministers inveighed against the practice, people from all walks of life and all ranksin society engaged in countermagic and indulged their fantasies with lurid tales ofevil in the invisible world of specters and demons.But the outbreak of witchcraftfears in Salem and its environs did not grow out of the larger context of Europeanbeliefs or result from the prevalence of countermagic.Instead, the Salem crisis hadits roots in the critical-period brew of rumor, panic, local animosity, and inequality.In the midst of the war, long-smoldering quarrels in the western, Salem Villagesection of the town of Salem flashed into flame.For two years, from 1689 to 1691,people in the village had argued about whether to retain the services of ministerSamuel Parris.Quarrels over the retention of ministers were common in New En-gland towns, but this one was carried on with great venom because it overlay a strug-gle between the two most powerful families in Salem Village, the Putnams and thePorters.The Putnams were a close-knit clan of farmers, whose political fortunes andinfluence waned.The Porters, with ties to the commercial elite of the seaport, waxedmore powerful each day.The Putnams supported Parris vocally.The Porters workedsilently to oust him.To all of these local tumults were added, in the winter of 1692 (one of the coldestwinters of the age), the inexplicable illness of Parris s daughter and his niece, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams.Parris, whose own fortunes had fallen on hard times (hisfather had been a wealthy planter in Barbados), and who was reduced to pleadingwith his own vestrymen for firewood, saw his daughter s illness as an inexplicablejudgment on him.But other girls in the village soon complained of the same symp-toms.Adults were baffled until the girls accused three local women, one of them theParris s slave, Tituba, of bewitching the girls.The prodding of parents and ministers had undoubtedly played a role in chang-ing free-floating anxiety into accusations of crime.For example, when well-meaningPuritan ministers and other authority figures tried to help the girls, the ministersthemselves raised the possibility of witchcraft.Frightened by the hideous shapes oftheir own imaginings, parents and preachers may have actually fed the girls the ac-cusatory lines they spoke.Official ActionAt the end of February, the Putnams summoned the Salem magistrates to exam-ine the accusers and the suspects.Under relentless questioning, Tituba declared thata man in black had accosted her and demanded she sign his book in her blood.Help-lessly, she related, she had acceded.She also claimed there were seven other witchesin the village.Accused by the girls and Tituba, old Sarah Good, sick and deaf, could not under-stand what was happening, but conceded that others might be witches [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]