The title of Richard Godbeer’s book Escaping Salem suggests that the distrust, hysteria, and scapegoating that defined the Salem witch trials—and other witch hunts that took place throughout the 1600s and beyond in the landscape of early America—are firmly in the past. But as he rehashes the story of the Stamford witch trials of 1692, Godbeer ultimately suggests that the same driving forces of social uncertainty, financial or material crisis, religious extremism, and societal prejudice against women are still at work in contemporary America. In other words, Godbeer argues that American culture has never really escaped the paradigm of the “witch hunt” as a solution in times of perceived crisis.
Godbeer draws a direct link between the witch hunts of the 1600s and the contemporary fear of powerful women. He alleges that the disdain for women who eschew social norms extends to present-day societies. Women who pursue power, who shirk or age out of societally accepted physical appearances, or who act in ways that threaten patriarchy continue to face heightened scrutiny and hostility. Godbeer points to protestors who adopted the slogan “Ditch the Witch” as they rallied against controversial United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s as an example of how the rhetoric of women as “witches” persists even in contemporary society. Puritan gender ideology, Godbeer suggests, persists to this day and continues to publicly “try” women who ignore or actively seek to dismantle continuing pressures to act subserviently toward men, to focus on the home, and to seek in both appearance and behavior to operate within the still-rigid bounds of what society expects.
Cooperation was crucial to Puritan communities’ survival—but that sense of trust, cooperation, and mutual advocacy was difficult in practice. Puritan societies were small and intensely communal. Much of Puritan people’s livelihoods—social status, marriage prospects, business—depended on maintaining good relations with their neighbors. But the Salem witch trials and the witch hunts throughout Connecticut in the mid-to-late 1600s show that trusting one’s neighbor was often easier said than done. Godbeer claims that while the life of a New England settler “could not have been more different” from the life of a contemporary city-dweller, the deeply personal interactions of the past still echo through contemporary communities. While modern society is not given to such “density of interpersonal contact [within] tiny communities” of deeply interconnected people, there does still exist a social contract between members of a community—and when that contract is threatened, the worst in people emerges quickly. Puritans did not leverage accusations of witchcraft at one another out of fear rather than spite. This fear, Godbeer suggests, still exists in small communities—and when there is a sense of overlap in communal social positions, these hair-trigger tensions remain.
Puritan society’s religious extremism, Godbeer suggests, allowed for the punishment of those who were perceived to reject piety and complete devotion to God. Because Puritans saw God and the Devil as very real forces that acted on their every decision, religion was inseparable from every aspect of daily life. The “world of wonders” the Puritans inhabited was a world in which an “intensely insecure environment,” and a lack of medical knowledge made it seem like there was a supernatural explanation for everything. This world is now in the past—yet as Godbeer illustrates, the double standards that deemed some behaviors as divine and ordained by God yet others as the dark work of the Devil remain. “Godly colonists,” as Richard Godbeer calls them, could call upon magic with relative impunity. In other words, white men and women who enjoyed higher social standings could call on non-white servants to produce cures or spells without being accused of witchcraft themselves. These servants, however, were the first to be accused of witchcraft when a panic came to town. Godbeer implicitly draws a parallel between the ways in which godliness, piety, and rejection of magic and the occult were negotiable for the privileged few, and the ways in which contemporary society often prizes the appearance of faith over actual commitment to religious tenets.
The majority of Escaping Salem focuses on the lead-up to the Stamford witch trials and the legal proceedings themselves, but Godbeer’s afterword demonstrates his interest in how the cultural and spiritual panics behind the Salem and Stamford trials have continued to linger in the contemporary American consciousness. Americans, Godbeer suggests, still turn to scapegoating, blame, and the model of the witch trial when confronted with fear, distrust, or disruption of the status quo. These patterns, he implies, are just as destructive in modern-day American communities as they were in 17th-century Puritan communities.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Scapegoating and Blame ThemeTracker
Scapegoating and Blame Quotes in Escaping Salem
[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.
"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.”
That emphasis on community support created intense pressure. When requests for help were denied and when neighbors argued, resentments and recriminations often lingered. People knew that conflict threatened to undermine the values on which their community was built: discord was, as the Reverend Bishop often reminded them, an opening to the Devil, who was always looking for ways to poison the well of God's vineyard.
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.
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 whose circumstances or behavior seemed to disrupt social norms and hierarchies could easily […] become branded as the Servants of Satan. […] Women who seemed unduly aggressive and contentious or who failed to display deference toward men in positions of authority—women, in other words, like Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough—were also more likely to be accused. Both Clawson and Disborough […] fit the age profile of most accused witches: Goody Clawson was sixty-one and Goody Disborough was fifty-two. Both were also confident and determined, ready to express their opinions and to stand their ground when crossed. Such conduct seemed to many New Englanders utterly inappropriate in women.
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.
