In The Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis Of 1692 (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
"The Crucible," by Arthur Miller, is an illuminating piece of theater. But as one of America's most often produced plays, it casts a spell over our cultural imagination that complicates the historian's task. The factual inaccuracies - composite characters, age changes, the adulterous affair at the center of the play - are, in a sense, the least of it.Embroiled in the cold-war paranoia of the 1950s, Miller needed a sufficiently distant setting to critique what he called a "perverse manifestation of the panic which sets in among all classes when the balance begins to turn toward greater individual freedom." The play, with its memorable portrayal of John Proctor as a hero who refuses to betray his friends, fundamentally casts the Salem crisis as a test of individual conscience.Cornell history professor Mary Beth Norton doesn't finger him by name, but it's clear that with "In the Devil's Snare" she wants to wrest the witchcraft episode away from Arthur Miller. What happened in Salem, she argues, was not a timeless expression of the battle between conformity and individuality. Instead, her "new interpretation ... places it firmly in the context of its very specific time and place." There may be lessons here for us all, but, she insists, "The dramatic events of 1692 can be fully understood only by viewing them as intricately related to concurrent political and military affairs in northern New England."Norton builds a strong case, but her recitation of the evidence is sometimes so repetitive that to move it along I would have bargained with Satan to endure "The Crucible" one more time. Her perfectly reasonable thesis, which she characterizes as radical, is that Indian attacks on the northern frontier created a climate of panic at a time when Massachusetts had lost its charter and was being ruled by a shaky interim government.That tense atmosphere led usually skeptical men to accept the hysterical claims of young girls, which they ordinarily would have dismissed. What's more, she continues, the leaders of Massachusetts, having failed to protect their citizens from Indians - the devil's minions - "quickly became invested in believing in the reputed witches' guilt, in large part because they needed to believe that they themselves were not guilty of causing New England's current woes."Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.The air over Salem is already crowded with explanations for what happened during those paranoid months. Historians have suggested that revenge or a deadly lust for others' land motivated neighbors to hang 19 people and press one to death. (Puritans didn't burn their witches - that was considered a "Popish cruelty.") Sociologists have examined the resentment that developed between the thinly populated Salem Village and the prosperous seaport of Salem Town. Feminists have illuminated the signs of misogyny in the accusations. Psychologists have analyzed psychosomatic illnesses caused by the anxieties of young people trapped in repressive Salem households. Pathologists have noticed that smallpox often inspired panic about malevolent forces. Biologists have even speculated that moldy grain may have induced hallucinations in the bewitched girls.Many critics before Norton have noted that the Puritans were terrified of the Indians, whom they regarded as working in concert with Satan to destroy their "city on the hill." But what Norton has done here, more deliberately and carefully than anyone else, is re-create the exact battles with Wabanaki Indians that terrorized specific instigators and perpetrators of the witchcraft crisis. What's more, she's dismantled the proscenium arch over Salem and demonstrated that what happened there must be seen in the broader context of northern New England fighting for its survival.That effort involves tracing - sometimes with a degree of speculation - the history and family connections of many Salem residents back to the Maine frontier, the site of the First and Second Indian Wars (King Philip's War and King William's War). From there, Norton shows that victims of witchcraft often described their afflictions in specific phrases that echoed the grisly Indian attacks they'd seen or heard about. Norton is also particularly attentive to the flow of gossip, which enables her to reconstruct the drift of certain accusations from town to town until they took deadly root in Salem.'We must not believe all that these distracted children say.'Attorney General Thomas Newton, from Boston, was prescient when he predicted, "The tryalls will be tedious," but students of law and the history of science will be fascinated by Norton's careful analysis of the interrogations. Salem investigators made a crucial error when they departed from custom and began questioning suspects in public, thereby creating a forum in which aggrieved parties could interrupt with hysterical outbursts, fits, and curses.The Puritans lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment. They knew enough already to be skeptical, but they also believed that malevolent forces were at work in the physical world. Despite their attempts to establish scientific and medical tests for witchcraft, the judges clung to the controversial notion that testimony given by spirits and ghosts - "spectral evidence" - was admissible.To make matters worse, the magistrates began preserving the lives of confessed witches who were willing to expose other witches, a practice that quickly led to the imprisonment of hundreds of "Satan's servants." In a climate that assumed the accused were guilty, it was virtually impossible to mount an effective defense.As an academic historian, Norton tolerates none of the lurid aura that floats around the witchcraft crisis, but in the process she throws out Rosemary's baby with the bath water. There's no flesh on these characters. She names the names, but they remain just names - who went here, said that, did this. In her sober recitation of legal and historical detail, even the hysterical fits, ghastly visions, and physical manifestations of supernatural attack eventually begin to sound monotonous. Yes, this is valuable scholarship, but nonacademic readers accustomed to spellbinding characters in the work of David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin may find this approach as dry as a witch's broom.http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1031/p1...
Norton's thesis is that the Salem witch trials (which she aptly calls the "witchcraft crisis") were directly related to the two Indian wars, one occuring concurrently, and the other about ten years before. A significant portion of the accusers were in fact refugees from the Maine coast, people who had watched their families killed by Indians, who the Puritans already equated very closely with the devil and devil worship. The forest was the realm of the usually hidden, suddenly striking Indians, and also the providence of witches. (Young Goodman Brown, anyone??) I've heard the feminist take on the trials, and have to agree it, but any treatment of this subject that skipped over the fact that the players were in the middle of a war would be missing the point entirely- makes me wonder how much of "history" is similarly flawed. From my reading of this book, it seems that the Indians, from a tactical perspective, were, in 1692, definitely winning the war- as small groups of militiamen were pulled out in various key spots, the Indians were systematically eliminating settlements going down the coast of Maine. Had things gone differently, perhaps the Indians really could have pushed the European presence out of this country- remember, the West was not yet "won" and while European presence was heavy in spots (Boston, New York) it was all concentrated on the East Coast- and this is as late as 1692!My one caveat so far is that Norton uses the term "Wabanaki" liberally, and makes it sound like a tribe name, where it was actually more of a political umbrella- "Wabanaki" means "Dawnland People" and the Wabanaki Confederacy was made up of the Pasamaquoddy, the Penobscot, the Mikmaq, the Maliseet, and the Abenaki. I'm sure that Norton herself understands the difference, but she doesn't make it clear to the reader, and the average reader is not going to immediately grasp the distinction. For instance, when I'm reading about the Wabanaki sold into slavery in "Acadia" (Nova Scotia) I know that I'm reading about my own people, the Mikmaq, versus one of the other tribes, and that just blows my mind.I wrote all this, and I haven't even finished the book yet! :) This book is the second book that has substantially altered my thinking about American politics- the first one was "Crossfire," the story of the JFK assassination. One last thought- the English legal tradition=scary. Too bad we're still in it...
What do You think about In The Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis Of 1692 (2003)?
This book is a serious commitment, so for those of you that have little to no patience, skip to the conclusion, most, but not all, the good stuff is there. Norton's approach is refreshing; by examining the 17th century Puritan New England worldview in relation to the conflict of the first and second Indian Wars, the crisis in Salem no longer appears to be simply the manifestation of hysterical teenagers. Instead through exhaustive, often tedious, scholarship, Norton recreates the hostile environment in which visible setbacks on the frontier coincide with attacks from the invisible world. Every event being the providence of God, the tension between settlers and the leaders of the colony found an outlet in the invisible world with unimaginable consequences. While Norton isn't the greatest storyteller ever, her arguments are creative and intriguing, well worth the dig, if you've got the patience.
—Heather
I really liked this, but I would hesitate to recommend it to people who rarely read history, I think it might seem dense and hard to plow through. But so interesting, and anyone who is curious about the Salem Witch Trials should check this out. Norton thinks that too much attention has been paid over the years to debating the accusers in the trial (why did they do it, were they just purely faking it all, etc.), and more attention should be paid to the context of the Trials, and what was going on in the areas around northeastern Massachusetts at the time. Specifically, the settlements northeast of Salem were engaged in ongoing, bloody warfare with the French and Indians during the trials, and they had been for years. Normally, according to Norton, the middle-aged men in charge of Massachusetts didn't pay much attention to the actions and accusations of teenage girls. In fact, there were several other cases of witchcraft accusations in other parts of the colonies that died out quickly and didn't explode into trials and executions as the situation did in Salem. Why did the men in Salem take THESE accusations so seriously? Norton contends that this situation was different because the French and Indians were clearly winning the fight, burning villages and taking captives. The people of Massachusetts saw that war as one between themselves and the forces of the devil. So it was no surprise to discover that the devil was not only attacking them in the form of French and Indians, but also attacking them through witches in their midst. I do think that occasionally Norton draws a dubious parallel between people involved with the witch trials and activity on the frontier. I'm fully with her that the context must matter, to some extent, and probably has a lot to do with the willingness of the judges to convict and execute. But sometimes she goes a little far, tracing people from Salem back to towns on the Maine coast where they may or may not have lived, and people they may or may not have known very well. But really, this is one of those books where the central thesis makes so much sense, you wonder how it could have taken so long to write a book about it.
—John
One of the most detailed accounts of the Salem Witch Trials I have ever read. Norton makes an interesting case, combining the fear of Indian raids from the outside with the internal fear of Satan and witchcraft within Essex County. One could only imagine such an environment; surrounded in fear from the inside and out. I have to admit, I didn't finish reading this book. Norton includes some great evidence and primary sources from Cotton Mather and other well-known players in the trials. However, the book is very heavy with this evidence. The connections between the residents of Salem, residents of other parts of Essex County, people back in England, etc, is mind-boggling. The web weaved by who-knows-who among the accused and the afflicted is quite confusing at times. Norton is obviously a great historian, she definitely knows her stuff, but the story is presented in such a way that it can bombard the reader into a kind of "wait, what?" stupor. Norton also dispels some of the common assumptions about the witch trials and the mysterious Tituba. In terms of completeness, her work wins a gold star. In terms of entertainment value (well, as entertaining as a terrible and scary time can be made out to be) not so much.
—Milli
