In Escaping Salem, historian Richard Godbeer focuses on “the other witch hunt of 1692”—a series of trials that took place in Stamford, Connecticut, far from the epicenter of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. Throughout the book, Godbeer highlights how Puritan societies often sought to legislate the unknowable—like, for instance, whether or not a woman was indeed a witch and thus responsible for her neighbors’ suffering. Godbeer argues that in both Stamford and Salem, attempts to legislate things that could not been seen, measured, or definitively proven were directly connected to the uncertainties of building a new life in a new world (Puritans were English Protestants who settled in the American colonies). Because of the difficult and unpredictable nature of life on a new continent far from home, many Puritans jumped at the chance to legislate things that were unknowable or invisible as a means of exerting some measure of control over their world.
Godbeer charts how small seeds of distrust in the community grew over time, until people were regularly trying to sue and punish one another. Underpinning this behavior was the Puritans’ desire to take control of new, confusing, or distasteful social orders emerging in the New World. “Th[e] emphasis on community support [in Stamford] created intense pressure,” Godbeer writes. “When requests for help were denied and when neighbors argued, resentments and recriminations often lingered. Society was intensely communal in 1692 Stamford, and such interconnectedness created just as many problems as it did safeguards. When a neighbor didn’t help another neighbor—or when a neighbor actively tried to make another neighbor’s life harder—this lack of communal support felt practically criminal, and people would do whatever it took to make their grievance heard.
In a new and hostile place, rifts could literally make or break a fledgling community of Puritan settlers, which meant that the law often got involved. In particular, Godbeer shows how quarrels between the Newmans and the Clawsons in Stamford, and the Greys and the Disboroughs in the nearby community of Compo, led to legal measures that sought to legislate and discipline these rifts between neighbors. The law came down especially hard on Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson when the women were accused of performing acts of witchcraft against neighbors who slighted them. The attempt to make examples of these women and their families, Godbeer suggests, stemmed from the desperate desire to control neighborly relations. Puritans were willing to do anything to keep rifts under control, even if it meant trying the women for crimes of the occult—crimes that were invisible and thus unproveable in a court of law. The Newmans accused Goody Clawson of using witchcraft to kill three of their sheep after a neighborly dispute, while the Greys accused Goody Disborough of using powers of the occult to harm their cattle following an argument. However, neither Goody Clawson nor Goody Disborough’s alleged use of black magic could be proven. Even though no one actually witnessed the women using witchcraft, authorities in Stamford and Compo nevertheless sought to legislate the women’s invisible actions. Godbeer asserts that the attempt to weigh in on the invisible and legislate the unknowable was directly connected to these Puritan communities’ desire to exert control over members who were considered a threat to the tenuous relationships among different families within these settlements. So little about life in New England could be controlled, and so little about disease, famine, and affliction was known at the time. Thus, the attempt to control the uncontrollable, rooted in a fear of losing all these communities had worked so hard for, took hold.
By resorting to law and order to deal with disputes among neighbors, Puritan communities were able to feel a sense of righteousness and order in a time and place where little could be foreseen or controlled. The witch trials in Stamford—and, Godbeer suggests, those that took place in Salem and beyond—were symptomatic of Puritan communities’ desire to feel a sense of control. Though the “crimes” examined in these trials were often abstract and impossible to legislate, Godbeer suggests that Puritan societies grasped at any chance to exert control over their neighbors and their circumstances in order to feel more in charge of their uncertain destinies.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fear, Law, and Control ThemeTracker
Fear, Law, and Control Quotes in Escaping Salem
Kate, as she was known, had been in that tormented state since the end of April. Without warning and for no apparent reason she would suddenly collapse into agonized convulsions, crying out that she was pinched and pricked by invisible creatures, weeping and moaning in helpless terror. At other times she would sink into a paralyzed trance, stiff as a board and completely senseless. She told her master and mistress that during these fits she saw cats that sometimes transformed into women before her eyes and then changed back into animal form. It was these creatures that attacked her, she said.
Supernatural forces were constantly at work in the world. Sudden losses or mishaps might well be judgments from God, sent to chastise sinners and encourage moral reformation. But sometimes these misfortunes turned out to be the handiwork of someone closer to hand with much less exalted intentions, a malign neighbor using dark cunning to torment and even destroy—witchcraft might be to blame.
[Daniel Wescot] wanted the witches responsible for his household's afflictions punished and he wanted to be rid of them. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” That was, after all, God's Word.
It was on the following day that Kate first named one of the women afflicting her: Goody Clawson. This revelation came as no surprise to the Wescots. Elizabeth Clawson, a woman in her early sixties, had lived in Stamford with her husband Stephen ever since their marriage in 1655. Goody Clawson was suspected by many of having occult powers and of using them against her enemies. She was no friend of the Wescots. The Wescots had quarreled with Goody Clawson almost a decade before over the weight of some flax that she had supplied to them.
Yet how best to protect the town? Mister Selleck was well aware that allegations of witchcraft could multiply rapidly and plunge entire communities into crisis. […] Selleck also knew that trying to prove an invisible crime in court was not easy. […] Religious doctrine and the legal code invited accusations of witchcraft, yet court officials were often much less impressed by the evidence presented in such cases than were the accusers and their supporters. Ministers, magistrates, and ordinary townsfolk agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but agreeing on how to prove witchcraft in a court of law was quite another matter.
According to the clergy, witches had no occult power of their own; demons acted on their behalf, taking on the appearance of the witches for whom they acted. Most people assumed that a specter's appearance matched the identity of the witch who wanted to harm the victim. But might specters appear as innocent people so as to incriminate harmless and virtuous individuals?
Other neighbors, however, portrayed Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as argumentative and vindictive. Following the arrest of the two women, a wave of Stamford and Compo residents came forward to relate quarrels with one or the other which had been followed by mysterious illness or misfortune. […] Both women reacted to the allegations against them in ways that seemed to incriminate them further.
"About two years past," confided Goody Newman, "I also had a difference with Goody Clawson and angry words passed between us. The next day we had three sheep die suddenly. When we opened them up we couldn't find anything amiss to explain their deaths. Some of our neighbors told us then they thought the creatures were bewitched.”
As officials gathered evidence, […] there emerged a long history of suspicion and resentment surrounding the two women. Katherine Branch's allegations against Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson were clearly part of a larger story. But how would the special court react to such testimony? Would these magistrates prove any more reliable than those who presided over witchcraft cases in the past? Surely the overwhelming volume of evidence against the two women would force the court to act decisively. […] Such, at least, were the hopes of those who believed the accused to be guilty as charged.
Several women […] who had cared for Elizabeth Clawson during childbirth came forward […] to testify that she had a physical abnormality, perhaps a Devil's mark. […] The court of inquiry had appointed a group of women, "faithfully sworn, narrowly and truly to inspect and search her body.” […] These women reported "with one voice" that "they found nothing save a wart on one of her arms." They also searched Mercy Disborough's body that same day and did find "a teat or something like one in her privy parts, at least an inch long, which is not common in other women, and for which they could give no natural reason."
On 2 June both women were bound hand and foot and then thrown into the water. According to those present, Elizabeth Clawson bobbed up and down like a cork and when they tried to push her down she immediately buoyed up again. Mercy Disborough also failed to sink. If the test was trustworthy, both women were guilty. But William Jones knew from his reading that this technique, though practiced for centuries, was now extremely controversial. […] Since the Bible made no mention of any such technique having been ordained by God, ducking must be an invention of the Devil.
Even as most trials ended in acquittal, ordinary folk continued to focus on witchcraft as a practical menace, not as a spiritual betrayal. They may have been motivated partly by stubborn resistance to pressure from the courts, or they may not have understood fully why so many trials were failing to result in conviction. But whatever the reasons, when New Englanders talked about witchcraft, most of them did so in terms of the practical threat that it posed: it seemed at such times that ordinary folk cared not a whit about the Devil, only about their dead sheep.
Katherine Branch claimed that the Devil had appeared to her "in the shape of three women, Goody Clawson, Goody Miller, and Goody Disborough." [….] Many people had heard Kate relate what she saw during her fits, yet she was the sole source for all that information and the law required that there be two independent witnesses for each incriminating incident. In any case, the information Kate gave was highly suspect: a significant number of Stamford residents doubted that the young woman's fits were genuine; and even if she was seeing specters, how could anyone be sure that the Devil was not misleading her?
The sticking point was the need for clear proof of the Devil's involvement since hardly any of the depositions mentioned dealings between Elizabeth Clawson or Mercy Disborough and "the grand enemy of God." The witnesses focused on who had a motive to inflict occult harm on the victims, not how the harm was inflicted or whether the Devil was involved. That made for a perplexing situation.
The ministers did not reject the possibility that Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough were witches, but they did repudiate the evidence before the court as a sound basis for conviction. Their advice would provide an important reinforcement as Mister Jones and his fellow magistrates urged caution upon the jury.
Mercy Disborough was alive and free, but were her troubles over? A decade earlier a woman in Massachusetts had been acquitted of witchcraft. But a year or so later neighbors suspected her of striking again when an elderly man in the town fell ill. One night a group of young men visited the woman: they dragged her outside, hanged her from a tree until she seemed to be gasping her last breath, then cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her in it, leaving her for dead. Amazingly, she survived, though barely. The law was only one way of dealing with a witch...
To settle on a particular interpretation of Kate's behavior strikes me as problematic, not only because of the lack of evidence but also because people at the time were clearly uncertain and divided as to whether Kate was bewitched and if her allegations against specific women could be trusted. That uncertainty was a key component of the situation and has to be retained if we are going to understand just how perplexing Kate's ordeal was for those around her.
The supernatural realm, [The Puritans] believed, could intrude upon their lives at any time. Any extraordinary event that seemed to interrupt the natural order—comets and eclipses, dramatic fires and epidemics, deformed births and inexplicable crop failures, dreams and visions—carried supernatural significance. Some were sent by God, others by Satan. According to the world view embraced by most New Englanders, God and the Devil were constantly at work in their day-to-day lives, testing and tempting, rewarding and punishing as each son and daughter of Adam and Eve deserved.
Women known for their magical skills were much more likely than men to be accused of witchcraft. The power wielded by cunning folk was potentially dangerous whether in the hands of a man or a woman, but it seemed especially threatening if possessed by a woman because it contradicted gender norms that placed women in subordinate positions.
Personal interactions and influence were central to the experience of early New Englanders. It therefore made good sense to account for misfortune or suffering in personal terms (just as it should not surprise us that modern Americans inhabiting an often anonymous world, seemingly captive to faceless institutions, should sometimes blame impersonal forces like "the federal government" for their problems). Witchcraft explained personal problems in terms of personal interactions. A particular neighbor had quarreled with you and was now taking revenge for a perceived injury by bewitching you.
The impulse to find a scapegoat in times of trouble and to demonize those whom we dislike and fear remains very much alive. Jews and other ethnoreligious groups, communists and capitalists, feminists and homosexuals, liberals and conservatives, religious fundamentalists—each group has figured in the minds of its enemies as an evil and alien force that threatens to corrode and destroy. A periodic need for witch hunts would appear to be one of the more resilient as well as one of the least admirable human instincts.
