And God Created the World:
The Puritans, Nature, Chaos, and Moral BreakdownKara Mae Esquivel
2001
And God said "Let us make man in our own image, and in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground".
--Genesis 1:26
In the late months of 1691, a few curious teenaged girls from Salem Village, Massachusetts gathered round a primitive crystal ball made of an egg white suspended in a glass to find out their futures. Instead they found “a specter in the likeness of a coffin” [1] setting off an infamous time in American history of quick accusations and hysterical fear lasting over a year. The young girls began to exhibit strange behavior: “odd postures, foolish, ridiculous speeches, distempers, fits.” [2] It was finally determined that the cause of their strange behavior was the frightening and very real, at least to the Puritans, form of evil known as witchcraft. Old and young, including a four-year-old child, were accused of practicing witchcraft and thrown in prison.
The trials were relatively slow in the beginning until a trial committee known as the court of Oyer and Terminer was set up in May 1692 to try the large population of accused already imprisoned, some since early spring. After months of imprisonment the first hanging, a woman named Rebecca Nurse, occurred on 10 June. More and more people were being accused inside and outside of Salem Village. Their ability to accuse reached from politically weak to the pillars of the community. The afflicted girls even went so far as to accuse a minister in Maine. The Court of Oyer and Terminer continued at a quick pace to try and convict witch after witch. The executions went on until Increase Mather stepped in to question the reasons for conviction in October. The court was dismantled and the executions stopped. Slowly the witch trials were coming to an end. A final court was held in January 1693 to finish trying the remainder of accused, most all of whom were acquitted. The governor pardoned those who were convicted. A few months later the last of the accused witches were released by the governor, ending the Salem Village witch trials for good.
The Salem-Village witch trials of 1692 were odd to America, a leftover remnant of the trials that had clenched most of Europe at one point or another before the Puritans set out for the New World from England. Witch trials had begun to die out with the exception of a small smattering in the ever fluctuating and very fractured states of Germany. The Salem Village witch trials have been analyzed again and again by historians trying to understand what really happened within the small community. However, there has been an ignorance of the language the afflicted and the accused used when speaking about witchcraft. The testimonies of the afflicted and witnesses against the accused witches are full of references to nature, Indians, and black people. Within these references, the Puritans connected the chaotic terror they saw in the world around them with the evil they believed existed in the accused witches. In the Salem Village witch trials, the references made to an evil and chaotic nature are a reflection of the chaos and moral breakdown the Puritans saw in themselves. To understand the reason why nature was an expression of this chaos and moral breakdown it is important to understand the Puritan idea of order and chaos.
When the Puritans began to build their society it was strictly regulated by a deep-seeded belief in rigid societal order. This belief was not an invention of the New World, but a convention of the European existence. Even as the Puritans voyaged John Winthrop presented a sermon based on the ingrained ideal of a rigorous class-based system of life.
God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection. [3]
The division of people was so important God had ordained it Himself that all people were of different parts of society, with some meant to be poor and some meant to be rich. The rigid control of everything from class to the formation of towns was key to the Puritan mind. Social historian Kenneth Lockridge who studied the town of Dedham, Massachusetts south of Salem describes the Puritan society as “a holy covenanted corporation mixing mutuality with hierarchy and Christian love with exclusiveness.” [4] The Puritans sought to keep their community composed of only the elect, keeping who could and could not be included in towns to a minimum of people. Those who were among the elect were made to create a covenant with the town as well as with God. [5] As Winthrop stated:
The care of the public must oversway all private respects by which not only conscience but mere civil policy doth bind us; for it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public. [6]
This covenant was an important component of order in the Puritan society because it kept those within the community pledged to keep the whole more important than the parts, also waving some private privileges. The Puritans wanted to be in control to keep the people within the community from becoming self-interested and, perhaps not obvious from Winthrop’s sermon, to punish wayward thinking Puritans. It was also made clear that by this covenant, the people of lower standing socially and monetarily were not to think of moving up in the Puritan social hierarchy. [7] Since the social hierarchy included the preeminence of the wealthy more often than not, the wealthy were given more of the vote and, thereby, more power within the community. [8]
For many Puritans control of government and church by the few was more important than control by the many in a more democratic form of government. Much of this sentiment stemmed from a fear of sin. Lockridge says that
Their [the Puritans] conception of a whole society bound to God by a covenant made the existence of sin an immediate danger, for to allow sin was to breach the contract with God, thereby inviting his wrath down upon them all. [9]
The Puritans were afraid of sin because it could destroy the order they strove for. It was out of this fear that they built laws to punish those who strayed from the Puritan norm. [10] As Winthrop had said before, the smaller pieces had to give up some of their private privileges in order to secure the future of the whole community. It was important “that we [the Puritans] shall by all means labor to keep off from us all such as are contrary minded, and receive only such unto us as may be probably of one heart with us.” [11] Order was of the utmost importance and without it, there would not be a community. The Puritans had an immense desire for order, so much so that it bordered on obsession.
The Puritans were afraid that if sin entered the community, there would be a breakdown of order and a destruction of their community. If any Puritan exhibited signs of breaking with the order of the community, they had to be punished quickly before order began to break down. It was this feeling of haste that prompted the Puritans to eject Anne Hutchinson and her followers from the Puritan community.
Anne Hutchinson had a rather curious problem. She disagreed with the ministers on how it was possible to know when one was saved. The matter was simply that the Puritan ministers did not believe anyone could know for sure if they were saved. However Anne Hutchinson believed otherwise. [12] She felt that since the saved could know they were saved, there was no reason for a system of laws. The saved did not need laws to guide them morally if they were already meant for heaven. By her conflict with the ministers, Hutchinson was a threat to order. Winthrop later wrote a history of the named Antinomian controversy.
For here she hath manifested . . . that her opinion and practice have been the cause of all our disturbances, & that she walked by such a rule as cannot stand with peace of any state; for such bottomless revelations, as either came without any word, or without the sense of the word (which was framed to humane capacity) if they be allowed in one thing, must be admitted a rule in all things; for they being above reason and Scripture,they [the Antinomians] are not subject to control (emphasis my own). [13]
She brought the threat of sin and disorder the Puritans so feared would destroy their covenant with God because the community could not control Hutchinson and her followers. As the covenant demanded, Hutchinson was expelled to preserve order. [14]
The chaos the Puritans saw in Anne Hutchinson and outside of their own communities was expressed in the nature and the Indians they saw surrounding them. “Clothed in skins and eating wild meat, they [the Indians] took on the characteristics of the beasts on which they fed.” [15] The Indians were disorder. They did not have the same rigid order standards that the Puritans attempted to keep in place. European society had taken great pains to put into place a separation of humans and the natural, animalistic world. Keith Thomas, who wrote Man and the Natural World, believes that “human civilization indeed was virtually synonymous with the conquest of nature.” Humans had wanted to dominate the earth as a means of regaining the position they had lost in the Biblical fall even before the Enlightenment. [16] Animals were used in a variety of ways to support humankind, often times cruelly as work animals, meat, sport, etc. Humans kept trying to separate themselves from nature when animals which had once lived inside with humans were turned out, and again when the colloquial names associated with humans for plants were exchanged for more academic Latin ones. [17] However when the Puritans landed in the New World they found peoples who not only lacked a rigid God-imposed order, but who kept no barriers between themselves and the animal world. The Indians believed they were directly related to animals through animal ancestors.
Not only did they believe themselves to be related to animals, they also attempted to act like animals. Carolyn Merchant exemplifies this Indian attitude. “Through dreams, divinations, behavioral taboos, and spiritual preparations, human hunters prepared themselves to be, think, and behave like the animals.” [18] The Indians observed no boundaries when dealing with the world around them. The Puritan ideal of civilization was a structured class-ordered society, which the Indians violated on so many levels. Although not included as the elect in Puritan society, the Indians posed a threat to the tenuous order of the Puritan community. Winthrop warns against “dissembling with our God . . . the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us.” [19] Chaos, as a message from God, appeared in the form of the Indians as they were a constant source of danger attacking villages in retaliation for stolen land and encroachment. This message was most definitely apparent when Anne Hutchinson and her family were attacked and slaughtered by the Indians in 1643. It must have been a very fitting end in the eyes of the Puritans. Anne Hutchinson had received her just desserts.
By the year of the witch trials in Salem Village, an unraveling of the order the Puritans worked so hard to maintain began to appear. As the great men, such as Winthrop, who first began to plant the first Puritan colonies in America began to die and leave their progeny, a wave of self-doubt began to rise over the Puritan communities. Perry Miller surmises in his book Errand into the Wilderness that the original Puritan colonists landed in America “to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would be quickly accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them.” [20] They were there to prove the possibility of building a great, new Jerusalem that the world could point to as an example for recreating England in that image. The great Jerusalem never coalesced as they. “If an actor, playing the leading role in the greatest dramatic spectacle of the century, were to . . . stride onto the stage, only to find the theater dark and empty, no spotlight working, and himself entirely alone, he would feel as did New England around 1650 or 1660.” [21] The Puritans no longer had the attention of the world as wars broke out in Europe and, eventually, they were left alone with an experiment nobody had time for anymore. And with the disintegration of the Puritan Experiment, went the disintegration of the Puritan children.
During a formal synod in 1679, it became obvious that the children were by no means close to what their parents had been. Swearing and sleeping in church were on the rise, along with promiscuity and illegitimate children. The Puritan progeny were falling off of the Puritan path with something akin to lethargy. Others voiced an almost adolescent angst over the true purpose of the New England colonies. [22] The Puritans had battled the new ‘wilderness’ to prove the point of their experiment—that there could be a true Puritan world. But it was becoming painfully obvious to the children that they were not going back to England. Instead they were left with a harsh world and a harsh question: ‘what now?’. It was this same question that haunted a few young girls in small Salem Village as one night they took to magic to find their futures.
There was no European civilization to prop them up as the Puritans began their experiment. Indians, cold winters, and crop failures greeted the Puritans on the shores of their new home. The Puritans were left in a strange nature, late ignored by Europe in the heat of battle, alone with unfriendly neighbors and a land that did not respond to European farming practices. The great experiment they had tried so hard to make succeed was not succeeding. The founders of Plymouth and Salem were leaving their children to keep the experiment alive. However the feeling that the experiment was a colossal failure dogged them. The country was becoming rearranged as settlers moved into Indian Territory to gain land thought readily available. Some who had at first held an economically inferior position when they arrived in the New World were gaining a new foothold in wealth and finding upward mobility. [23] The ordered society was falling to pieces when the trials sprang into view. The witch trials are incredibly complex, and this small amount of possibilities do not give a full understanding of the reasons as to why they occurred. But the reasons are there, tangible theories of stress on a community in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere. Among these theories are the assertions of Paul Boyer, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Lyle Koehler.
In their book, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, Boyer and Nissenbaum construct the witch trials as a reflection of a struggle for village identity and the friction between those of the village who were merchant-based and those who were farm-based. However the struggle was not merely a reflection of jealousy or pettiness. It was more of a moral battle the Puritans felt was being waged within their community.
The moral code John Winthrop had exhorted on the voyage to America so many years before the witch trials had included sacrificing the private gain for the moral good of the community. "From infancy, a Puritan was raised to distrust his private will, to perceive it as the 'old Adam' which, above all, constituted original sin. It was this innate self-interest . . . that had to be tamed if it could not be eradicated." [24] Yet the larger Salem Town seemed to the farmers of Salem Village to be breaking this very same statute. The town had become a booming mercantile city but it still claimed authority over the village without attempting to control the private mercantile interests within the town.
It was the Town selectmen who continued to hold the power of establishing the prices at which certain grains and other farm products from the Village could be sold in the Town, of appointing men to handle such ad hoc but important tasks as determining the layout of new roads. [25]
Salem town still held onto control of such things as agricultural prices, while indulging in the un-Puritan mercantile business. “One of Satan’s most insidious guises in Salem Village during 1692 was that of thriving freeholder and prosperous merchant.” [26] The Villagers very much saw the friction with the Town as a threat to the order of their community. The Town selectmen were sinning, allowing the fear of moral breakdown to pervade the arguments. The conflict was horrid as the Salem Village farmers grew envious of the mercantile town while at the same time wanting to join in the self-seeking commercialism. As a result, the village attempted to splinter away from Salem Town in a long protracted struggle for independence. It was a moral conflict felt not just within the villagers, it was also reflected by the village itself as the village was split into two opposing viewpoints.
Sparks of friction flew as those villagers who stayed in a more agricultural form of economy interacted with those of the village who took a mercantilist route. Boyer and Nissenbaum view this fraction as very much lying across family lines. The Porter and Putnam families were at opposite ends of the argument on whether or not Salem Village should become its own separate town. While the Putnams vehemently supported the creation of an independent Salem Village, the Porters hotly protested. Animosity grew between the two families and their friends who always seemed to oppose each other in all forms of public and personal interests. Another look at the families reveals that the Porter family followed the sinful route of mercantile self-interest with ties to Salem Town, becoming very wealthy in merchant trade and by marital unions with other wealthy families. Through these ties the Porter family also gained immense political power. The Putnams did not do nearly as well with grossly inadequate farmlands, dying political power, and a huge loss in a failed iron venture. [27] “The problems the Putnams encountered in commercial interests and public politics readied them “to believe that witchcraft lay at the root of their troubles.” [28]
The divisions already created within the village were apparent when the witch trials erupted in 1692 as many of the witches were related to the Porter clan by marriage or association, or lived on the fringe of good Puritan society. As the witches defended themselves, it is not surprising to find many, including the very first, of the afflicted girls in the village belonged to the Putnam family. To Boyer and Nissenbaum this was the basis for the Salem Village witch trials when they finally erupted: hot contention wrapped in a moral context allowing the witches to be easily accused because they fit the profile of sinful and disorderly. Lyle Koehler finds some of the same problems as Boyer and Nissenbaum however he takes a decidedly different slant on the causes of the witch trials.
Lyle Koehler in his book A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England looks at the witch craft trials from a feminist perspective and how they were used as a means of power for women as well as a means for presenting social tension in human form. The Puritans were in a state of constant worry; worried about sex, their monetary futures, their salvation, and the outside forces of Indians and other religious sects. As a result, the Puritans were overly interested in the world of the occult as a means to find the answers to the questions they felt surrounded them. To Koehler
The occult provided innumerable methods whereby individuals could predict the future and define the present . . . Lovesick lasses, pregnant women, apprehensive farmers, and other superstitious individuals would not be denied their interest in magic. [29]
Even though Puritan ministers attempted to dissuade the Puritan population from dabbling in the occult, they were unable to convince their Puritan flocks that all types of magic was bad and not just the kind practiced by witches. The Puritans found the witches to be of a greater threat though than their own dealings in magic. Witches could:
bring injury and even death to their enemies . . . plunge children into fits simulating a hysterical condition, to move objects without touching them, and to transport themselves through the air on broomsticks or devil-steeds. [30]
The Puritans would find ways to ward off the evil of witches in any way they could including herbs and the help of ‘white witches’ who would work magic against the witches. But this did not keep the witches from committing acts against people. Often when something bad happened, a witch was blamed. It is no coincidence that the first for blame was a witch and that the witch was almost always a woman.
Koehler believes the reason this connection exists is imperative to understanding all of the accusations and trials of witches in New England. This connection allowed the Puritans to have access to a permanent scapegoat.
It [witchcraft] became a way to explain events which negatively affected an individual’s life. It served as a societal purgative, and as a vehicle for the expression of neighborhood resentment and repressed sexuality. [31]
The witches played the role of purging sins the Puritans, men and women, struggled with, such as the confused role of sex, the sicknesses and deaths of loved ones, and as a means to vent frustration and anger at women within the community. The accused witches were often women who did not fit the Puritan ideal. The first fact, a witch was often female, worked against women because women were assumed to be morally weaker and more lustful. Women were not as able to resist the sexual seduction of magic and the Devil. The second fact, the women often accused did not fit the Puritan ideal of a woman, allowed an accusation to be stronger. The woman was already morally weaker and if she did not behave like a Puritan woman should and resided on the fringes of Puritan society, it was not a far stretch to an accusation of witchcraft. [32] The witch was an ‘other’ within the community that would always exist, and a ready scapegoat for the blame. Witches were an easy way to express the concern the Puritans felt about themselves and the problems within, and surrounding, their community. But Koehler feels that witch accusations were also a means for women to gain power, even if only a small amount. In the Salem Village trials though, the afflicted gained a large portion of power.
To Koehler the Salem Village witch trials represented internal and external friction, like Boyer and Nissenbaum, as well as a means for the afflicted girls and women to gain an amount of power they did not have on a usual basis. The afflicted women broke out of their normal social constraints to hold power over their community with their accusations of witchcraft. At first the accused were women who lived on the fringes of Salem Village society, [33] however:
As the afflicted girls achieved more self-confidence, they actually attacked men, including at least two ministers. All of the afflicted women, most particularly the Salem Village girls, exercised fantastic power. [34]
The girls gained more and more power with every accusation, enough that they could accuse male leaders of the community, including those men who were spiritual guides. Those who questioned the accusations of the girls were immediately under suspicion. [35] The afflicted girls had gained power far exceeding any they could possibly have had in normal everyday life, allowing them to not only vent their fears, but to use power similar to power of men.
Both Koehler and Boyer and Nissenbaum agree that the witch trials were caused by external and internal strife. However, there is no mention of the natural chaos they saw around them. The Puritans were well aware of the nature they had come to inhabit mentioning not only the vastly different climate, but also the strange and frightening peoples who first encountered the Puritans when they landed.
The land of New England was not, as Carolyn Merchant asserts, “a parklike woodland” [36] or at least it had no parklike affect on the Puritans. In fact the land was difficult to farm with native European practices and the natives could be quite less than friendly. Often, because of the land’s relative lack of cultivation and civilized people, the New World was referred to as a “desert” or “wilderness”. The Puritans found themselves surrounded with unfamiliar terrain, strange animals, savage peoples and a climate harsher than that of England the Puritans attempted to create colonies in a dangerous world capable of unimaginable evils. God was assumed to be on their side, helping to tame and cultivate the emptiness the Puritans first saw as they disembarked from their ships. But the power God held over nature did not always seem to be in effect as the natives attacked villages and people froze to death during the bone-snapping winters. It was an uneasy truce between the Puritans and the new world they tried to understand. For the Puritans this instability could only be understand through a combination of faith and experience, attributing a lack of God to the nature around them and therefore giving nature, and everything included within it, an evil tone. Indian attacks, starvation, death, and sin fell under the categories of faith or Godlessness.
The Puritans were unfamiliar with the new and extreme version of the world they found in New England. Both John Winthrop and Edward Johnson, among the first to arrive in America, wrote journals commemorating the way they found the frontier of America. Winthrop wrote “this day the wind came N. W., very strong, and some snow withal, but so cold as some had their fingers frozen, and in danger to be lost . . . the rivers were frozen up.” [37] The world the Puritans came to live in was quick to change from one climate to another. But it was this world which God had destined the Puritans to conquer and create a new great civilization from. With their faith in God and their belief in the disorder of their natural surroundings, everything was a symbol of the battle to create perfection.
There was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and, after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake . . . the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom. [38]
Nature itself was struggling with good and evil, God and Satan. It was quite obvious to the Puritans that their new home was the home of evil and they were there to spread the light of truth in God. Because the Puritans were there to do God’s work, they had God on their side. God was like a great general leading his troops into battle to conquer the army of evil: nature and the savages within it. [39] It was total war.
The settlers found themselves hard pressed for food and water as they battled with the land, the Puritans attempted farming though they had a hard time due to the strange weather and hard ground. Johnson relates how God always managed to find a way of keeping His people alive in the form of food arriving in ships while the Puritans tried to coax a crop from the desert.
Although the great straites this Wildernesse people were in for want of food, was heard of among the godly people in England, yet would they not decline the worke, but men of Estates sold their possessions, and bought plenty of food for the Voyage, which some of them sent before hand, by which meanes they were provided for . . . The Lord intending to strengthen his poore Churches here . . . to trample Satan under their feet, he manifesteth fresh supplies againe and againe. [40]
God was helping the Puritan’s tame the evil, uncultivated wilderness by sending more supplies to allow the Puritans to keep farming and taming the land. Their efforts were not in vain as signs were interpreted by some to mean progress was being made.
Occurrences uncommon to England were constant reminders to the Puritans that the world they inhabited was unfamiliar and a constant threat to their goals of creating a new Eden. “[June 1,1638] Between three and four in the afternoon . . . there was a great earthquake . . . the earth was unquiet twenty days after, by times.” [41] This earthquake was a violent upheaval that “came from the Westerne and uninhabited parts of this Wildernesse.” [42] Coming from the depths of the untamed and ungodly nature, some translated it to mean the Puritans were changing the New World and God would make changes back in England as well because the earthquake trembled back along the path of the colonists. [43] The earthquake could have been interpreted differently, but the only other acceptable explanation would have to include God’s hand against a sinner or sinners such as the death of a radical Puritan or the destruction of an Indian village. Nothing of this sort is reported though, leaving only one logical Puritan explanation. God had caused the earthquake as a sign of something good. The strange phenomenon was changed into a Puritan sign from God, a combination of the experience and the Puritan mind’s explanation. This Puritan explanation was not just limited to earthquakes though.
The neighboring Indians, a part of the wilderness, were incredibly problematic. Although some of the Indians attempted civil intercourse with the settlers, the Indians were generally seen as savage and barbarous in collusion with Satan. “As for any religious observation, they were the most destitute of any people yet heard of, the Divel having them in very great subjection.” [44] They presented one of the largest threats of evil from nature. The Indians used satanic “charms” such as snakeskins to cure the sick and would converse with the Devil. Perhaps most frightening of all to the Puritans, the Devil would appear to the Indians in the form of a terrible shapeless beast or a peculiar white boy and entering their wigwams would carry some of them off. [45] Most importantly, the apparition of the devil would appear “chiefly in the most hideous woods and swamps.” This connected not only the Indians but also nature as well to the Devil because the apparition would appear in the worst places within nature itself. Not only would it appear to the Indians in the wilderness, once the Puritans had arrived the beast appeared and carried off six Indians at once. [46] God was on the side of the Puritans in the battle against the Indians as well though.
Even before they landed, God had begun making way for the Puritans by sending a “sore Consumption” that killed dozens of Indians from at least three different tribes. [47] Many of the neighboring tribes fled to escape a trail of death that left whole families dead in their tipis. “By this meanes Christ . . . not onely made roome for his people to plant; but also tamed the hard and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians . . . halfe a handfull of his [God’s] people landing not long after . . . found little resistance.” This could be the only explanation for the Puritans when those arriving were not immediately attacked by those three tribes [“the Mattachusets, Wippanaps and Tarratines”]. [48] The theory that their arrival could have been to blame for bringing the disease to Indians had to have a tinge of faith in order to coincide with the view of the Puritans. The Indians were chaotic and living in untamed nature. They would have attempted to harm the Puritans had not the hand of God destroyed them beforehand. Without this equation of faith, the disease would not have made any sense. Nature and the Indians had to be evil to begin with.
This was the nature the Puritans were sent to conquer in the name of God—land infused with the Devil himself. The Indians were not just part of the dangerous natural landscape, they also lacked the order of God the Puritans held to be so vital. This flaw only compounded the threat of danger to the Puritans and metamorphosed the Indians into evil followers of the ‘Divel’. They presented the greatest threat from nature because the Indians would rather create disorder and evil than follow God-ordered moral laws. The Puritans made attempts at converting the Indians [49] but they were hampered by the building of the colony, leaving them with a minimum of resources for conversion.
In this context it is not surprising why the Indians attacked certain people in a ferocious and bloody manner. The connection can easily be made in two cases of destructive order. One case of brutal Indian attack happened to an unnamed woman and her family. She was a follower of Anne Hutchinson and therefore a blasphemer. The woman and her family were tempting fate when they moved into a remote area surrounded with unfriendly Indians. She was warned by other Indians not to stay in the area but she ignored them, declaring “they were become all one Indian”.
On a day certaine Indians coming to her house . . . they [the Indians] cruelly murthered her, taking one of their [the family’s] daughters away with them, and another of them seeking to escape is caught . . . and they drew her back againe by the haire of the head to the stump of a tree, and there cut off her head with a hatchet . . . yet was not this the first loud speaking hand of God against [the blasphemers]. [50]
As though the beast had crawled out of the pit of nature, the Indians gruesomely slaughtered the family. It was the hand of God against the blasphemers and the Devil grasping the souls that were rightfully his. By following Anne Hutchinson’s teachings of disorder the woman connected herself and her family with natural chaos, and ultimately with evil and the Devil. She had lost faith in the Puritan religion, the true religion, and deserved her fate just as Anne had deserved hers. The same ordered punishment occurred in a Virginia colony.
A few ministers from the colony of New England were sent to Virginia to preach the Puritanical religion to the colonists there. Characterized as being “opposed by the Governour and some other malignant spirits” [51], the ministers were forced back to New England. Although Johnson asserts the attack occurred as soon as the ministers left Virginia in 1642, in reality the attack did not happen until 1644. But his emphasis to the Puritan mind is important nonetheless.
No sooner is this done, but the barbarous, inhumane, insolent, and bloody Indians are let loose upon them [the colonists of Virginia], who [the Indians] contrive the cutting them off by whole Families . . . their bloody designe taking place for the space of 200 miles up the River: the manner of the English Plantations there being very scattering, quite contrary to N. E. people, who for the most part desire society [emphasis my own]. [52]
Just as the woman declared “they were become all one Indian”, the Virginia colonists had done virtually the same thing. They had rejected God’s order. There was nothing to save the woman or the colonists because they lacked the pure Puritanical order. In essence they all lacked God. These were not the only cases of evil among the Puritans themselves.
An ugly beast, very much reminiscent of the beast that plagued the Indians, was brought forth by Anne Hutchinson, the same woman who was followed by the doomed nameless woman. Hutchinson had committed a terrible sin by diverging from Puritan laws. She, and others like her, was excommunicated. [53] The radicals traveled to Rhode Island, a place as yet untamed by the true Puritans and rife with chaotic nature. “[Mrs. Hutchinson] had been delivered of [a] child . . . and the child buried, (being stillborn,) and viewed of none but Mrs. Hutchinson and the midwife . . . the child was a monster.” [54] It was here where, not long after the unnamed woman and her family was brutally murdered, Hutchinson gave birth to a devil. The child is described as having:
a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp . . . the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales . . . behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out . . . instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl with sharp talons. [55]
Anne Hutchinson had done the unthinkable. She had gone against the church and was now punished by God with the birth of a devil. It is easy to see how this monstrous birth was perfectly rational to the Puritans. Hutchinson had questioned the order of God and when expelled, ventured to live in a society of people with the same order-less ideas. Hutchinson had become as evil and chaotic as the Indians were and the child was a manifestation of that evil chaos. It was God acting against her on behalf of the true Puritans.
The Puritans needed a way to deal with the world of nature they found themselves surrounded by on landing in the New World. God had sent them to do a mission: they were to create a new society of God. But the evil of nature was suffused into everything. The land, the people of the New World were threatening to destroy the mission before it began. They had to overcome hunger and danger. The Puritans believed they could do this only with the help of God and his order. Everything that happened had a meaning. Death and destruction often meant that the victims of these events had threatened the balanced order, or had even been bewitched. They followed a pattern of being out alone in nature, without faith, and thereby connecting themselves with the evil of nature. Their destruction was the hand of God against those who had lost faith, or as in the case of the Indians, never had faith to begin with. This rationalization allowed the Indians to attack and the earth to shake according to God’s plan. Because of their faith in God’s divine plan, they had to rationalize with God in the equation. Otherwise, they would never be the true people of God.
Nature was still beyond the walls of Puritan homes as waves of Indian attacks continued to beset them. The most infamous of these being King Philip’s War (1675-76), just a few years before the trials began in 1692. Both sides maintained huge losses but the Indians lost the hope of driving back the Puritans and keeping them out of more native land. It was not easy to forget that Indians still roamed the forests of New England, as yet not completely inhabited by Puritan civilization.
Young Ann Putnam, twelve years old, saw “the apparition of Sarah Good” one day in February 1692. Good pricked and pinched Ann, demanding that the young girl write in the book Good held out to her. Young Ann testified that she was bewitched by Sarah Good. [56] The afflicted girls were pinched, poked with sharp pins, and threatened with death if they did not write in the book the accused witch held out to them. The frightening images appeared in their bedrooms to beat them and throw them into incomprehensible fits. The witches were a representation of the anxieties and problems the Puritans were feeling in 1692, manifested in the frightening visages of the apparitions that tortured them. It was with the same nature that both Winthrop and Johnson described that the girls of Salem Village used to describe their tormentors.
Saw Good have a cat besides the bird and a thing all over hairy there . . . [William Allen] saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground so that going up to it, the said beast vanished away. And in the said place starte[d] up 2 or 3 women, and fled from me, not after the manner of other women, but swiftly vanished away out of our sight. Which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tittabe [Tituba]. [57] (emphasis my own)
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were among the first to be accused of being witches ominously portrayed early on as not only being in the company of a strange hairy monster, but transforming from “a strange and unusual beast” back into women. This representation, very much like the beast Johnson mentioned visiting the Indians, breaks down the barriers between the Puritan ordered society and the chaotic nature that was so threateningly near.
As accused witches, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were essentially accused of blurring the line between human and animal; human-made perfection and natural chaos filled with natural human urges but lacking the laws to structure a rigid moral society. Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse and other women joined them in being accused of performing witchcraft. Of the women mentioned in the documentary records of the Salem-Village witch trials, all troubled the community in some way. Bridget Bishop created an unlicensed tavern that became popular with the Puritan youth, however it was greatly disapproved of by the parents. Sarah Good, once part of a prominent family, had become a destitute, homeless beggar going from house to house in search of food and shelter. She was a rarity at church sighting her reason for not attending as being “for want of clothes.” Rather than being grateful for any help, she would barely say ‘thank you’ before creeping away grumbling. Sarah Osborne was widowed with two sons at a fairly young age. Her husband left his lands to their sons, but left the disbursement in Sarah's hands. She later committed fornication with her indentured servant only to marry him and try to dispossess her sons of the inheritance left to them in Sarah's trust. Sarah Osborne far from fulfilled her role as a good Puritan mother by going against her deceased husband's wishes and trying to keep her sons' lands. Tituba was a West Indian slave who had knowledge of voodoo and was an outsider. Rebecca Nurse however does not fit the mold of a witch. She was an old woman of a respectable family. It has been speculated that Ann Putnam resented Rebecca Nurse due to economic and political reasons, with the thinnest accusation hinging on Rebecca's own mother being accused as a witch although her mother was never tried. [58] With the exception of Rebecca Nurse, none of the women fit the Puritan ideal of the model woman. None were modest and some did not perform their motherly duties. The women were leaving behind the order of moral goodness for the natural world of sex and magic--and ultimately the Devil.
The accusations began to devolve into chaos covered in natural imagery. In one document the accuser paints a disturbing picture of animal familiarity among a group of accused.
Came Goody Olliver, and Mrs. English, and Goodman Corie [also Corey] . . . then there came a stretched snake creeping over her [Bridget Bishop] shoulder, and crept into her bosom . . . Mrs. English had a yellow bird in her bosom, and Goodman Corie had two turtles hang[ing] to his coat, and he opened his bosom and put his turtles to his breast and gave them suck . . . . then she [Bishop] pulled out her breast and the black man gave her a thing like a black pig. It had no hairs on it, and she put it to her breast and gave it suck. [59]
As with the Indians the line between human and animal is broken as the witches nurture the animals like children, perverting the normal processes of ordered human life. This testimony is an example of the hysterical anxiety the Puritans felt, giving life to the breakdown of their community by mixing chaotic animal nature with law-abiding moral Puritans.
Goodman Corie, who not only is associated with nature by the two turtles but also manages to give them suck, doubly transcends the separation of order and chaos, man and nature. Goodman Corie becomes feminized as he gains the ability to nurture with his breast. This same feminization occurred in testimony against John Willard and an unnamed old man. "I saw this Willard suckle the apparition of two black pigs on his breast . . . [the] old man . . . suckled a black snake." [60] As a result of their weakened moral senses and disregard of Puritan religious laws, Goodman Corie, John Willard, and the old man were feminized to the point of being able to perform the same procreative tasks on animals as the weaker, more easily tempted women. Women were considered morally weaker than men, and in order for three men to be witches there had to be a weakening of their moral strength to be tempted into witchcraft. Women were closer to disorder by becoming easy victims of natural human, perhaps even animalistic and often sexual [61], urges that were controlled by the strict laws the Puritans put into place. However as the men began to join the women in witchcraft it was probably incredibly frightening to the Puritans when they realized the breakdown was extensive enough to involve the morally strong men, including a Puritan minister. George Burroughs though is an exception to the feminization of the accused male witches. Instead of being feminized in the trials Burroughs was given attributes of super human strength able to hold a gun, with a seven-foot long barrel, with only a finger. [62] He was also strongly tied to, as well as presented as, another example of natural chaos—a black minister.
The black people in the testimonies are represented within the documents as not only evil, but also as the source of evil—a wizard named George Burroughs. The black people in the witch trial documents, a black woman who is mentioned once and a black man who appears as a theme in a large amount of the documents, are not a commentary on the state of slave affairs. Instead they are a depiction of evil chaos, a perverted version of the norm. These black people are represented as evil, but it is the black man who leads the assault on Puritan order.
There affirmed that they [three accusers] saw a black man whispering in her [Rebecca Nurse’s] ear . . . Goodman Corie and Goody Olliver [Bridget Bishop] kneeled down before the black man and went to prayer. . . they saw a black man whispering in his [John Willard’s] ear. [63]
Numerous times the black man is seen whispering in the ear of one of the accused, or the accused are praying to him as they would to God. However the God the witches bowed too was none other than Satan. [64] The black man is leading the accused Puritans down the path of evil and chaos in a perverted rendering of Puritan religion, and away from the rigid moral laws of God. In this sense the black man was the source of the evil which had seeped into the accused witches. Johnson maintained that the Indians were in subjection to the ‘Divel’, chaotic in their flouting of God’s ordered world. Accordingly, an Indian appears with a black woman inside a Puritan house led by the ‘little black minister’, and mastermind of the evil chaos—George Burroughs. Finally a Puritan face is given to the black man urging the witches on. After falling into fits two afflicted girls assert that the room is full of dangerous apparitions.
There was a little black minister [Burroughs] . . . Then the said Hucheson and Eli Putnam stabbed with their rapiers at a ventor. Then said Mary and Abigell, you have killed a great black woman of Stonington and an Indian that come with her, for the floor is covered with blood . . . they [the girls] saw a great company of them on a hill, and there was three of them lay dead, the black woman and the Indian, and one more that they knew not. [65]
Burroughs, a Puritan minister charged with leading the Puritans in God’s order, instead leads the chaos of the natural world inside a Puritan home to harm the girls within. The vision of an evil, perverted God becomes even stronger as George Burroughs is accused of not only being a wizard, but of actually being a little black minister who gives hellish communion. Burroughs “administered the sacrament unto them at the same time with red bread, and red wine like blood” while urging a group of witches including Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Rebecca Nurse to bewitch as many people in the village as possible. [66] Burroughs becomes a pastor of evil chaos rather than the shepard of Godly order. This view of evil as its own religion is a view of the internal struggle the Puritans felt. It is particularly expressive of the division of the community as the Villagers tried to reconcile their desire for a mercantilist future with the demands of Puritan ordered obedience. The chaos of the outside nature breaks down the fence of strict regulation to torture the Puritans in their homes.
After the documents regarding the trials of the first few witches so many people were arrested and proceedings became so confused that the Puritans stopped keeping them altogether. On the other side of the witchcraft trials, the Puritans were decidedly quieter and witchcraft was altogether silenced. But the trials were an explosion of bottled up anxiety, frustration, anger, and moral ambiguity. The Puritans attempted to find a cause for the decay of their ordered community as the sin of self-interest began to feed on the inhabitants. There are agreements that something was chasing the Puritans during 1692; a threat so horrible they found it pinching and choking them to death in their bedrooms. However, the witches were given characteristics very much like the chaos of nature around them. Indians, witches, black people were manifestations of chaos within the Puritan order. A sign of moral wrong, the line between the natural chaos and Godly order began to thin into blurring as Indians and beasts moved from the forests of New England into Puritan living rooms.
The Salem Village witch trials portrayed the witches as hostile, evil, chaotic members of nature who suckled animals at their breasts and tortured their fellow Puritans at the urging of their own black minister. It was with the use of chaotic natural images that the Puritans expressed the moral battles they felt within themselves and viewed in their community. The trials used this imagery to paint a portrait of the seething troubles beneath the seemingly well-designed order of the Salem Village community. When the Puritans looked at their finished work, they saw the horror of their inner demons staring back at them from the chaos.
Footnotes:[1] Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, (Harvard University Press: 1974) 1.
[2] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 2.
[3] John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 79.
[4] Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, (1985: W.W. Norton), 18.
[5] Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, (Harvard University Press, 1956) 5.
[6] Winthrop, Model, 82.
[7] Winthrop, Model, 79-81.
[8] Lockridge 4.
[9] Lockridge 50-51.
[10] Miller 5.
[11] Lockridge 5.
[12] Zyph, Puritanism in America, 65.
[13] Zyph 67.
[14] Lockridge 5.
[15] Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) 40.
[16] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, (Pantheon Books, 1983) 18-25.
[17] Thomas 81-85 & 94-95.
[18] Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 47.
[19] Winthrop, Model, 83.
[20] Miller 11.
[21] Miller 13.
[22] Miller 2-3 & 7-8.
[23] Miller 7-8.
[24] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 104.
[25] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 42.
[26] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 210.
[27] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 117 – 124.
[28] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 143.
[29] Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth Century New England, (University of Illinois Press, 1980) 266-267.
[30] Koehler 267-268.
[31] Koehler 294.
[32] Koehler 276-278.
[33] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 146-147.
[34] Koehler 395.
[35] Koehler 395.
[36] Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press), 31.
[37] John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal 1630 - 1649: Volume 1, ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 55.
[38] Winthrop, Journal, 83-84.
[39] Johnson 52.
[40] Johnson 190.
[41] Winthrop 271.
[42] Johnson 185.
[43] Johnson 185.
[44] Johnson 263.
[45] Johnson 263.
[46] Johnson 263.
[47] Johnson 41.
[48] Johnson 41-42.
[49] Johnson 263-264.
[50] Johnson 186 - 187.
[51] Johnson 265.
[52] Johnson 265.
[53] Johnson 176 & 185.
[54] Winthrop, Journal, 266.
[55] Winthrop, Journal, 267.
[56] Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Northeastern University Press: 1993) 3.
[57] Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Northeastern University Press: 1993) 8.
[58] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 148-150; 192-203.
[59] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 48.
[60] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 56.
[61] Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 1100 – 1700: A Documentary History, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972) 121. From the Malleus Maleficarum: “She is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations.”
[62] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 81 – 85.
[63] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 26 –59.
[64] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 37.
[65] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Village Witchcraft, 70.
[66] Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 70.
Bibliography:
Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambride: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1972.
Johnson, Edward. Johnson’s Wonder – Working Providence: 1628 1651. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910.
Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: the “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England. Chicago: University of Illinios Press, 1980.
Kors, Alan and Edward Peters. Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700: A Documentary History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
Lockridge, Kenneth. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.
Merchant, Carolyn. Ecological Revolultions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Winthrop, John. Winthrop’s Journal: 1630-1649. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.
Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity”.
Zyph. The Puritans in America.