Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692

By Benjamin C. Ray

The result of a perfect storm of factors that culminated in a great moral catastrophe, the Salem witch trials of 1692 took a breathtaking toll on the young English colony of Massachusetts. Over 150 people were imprisoned, and nineteen men and women, including a minister, were executed by hanging. The colonial government, which was responsible for initiating the trials, eventually repudiated the entire affair as a great "delusion of the Devil."

In Satan and Salem, Benjamin Ray looks beyond single-factor interpretations to offer a far more nuanced view of why the Salem witch-hunt spiraled out of control. Rather than assigning blame to a single perpetrator, Ray assembles portraits of several major characters, each of whom had complex motives for accusing his or her neighbors. In this way, he reveals how religious, social, political, and legal factors all played a role in the drama. Ray’s historical database of court records, documents, and maps yields a unique analysis of the geographic spread of accusations and trials, ultimately showing how the witch-hunt resulted in the execution of so many people—far more than any comparable episode on this side of the Atlantic.

In addition to the print volume, Satan and Salem will also be available as a linked e-book offering the reader the opportunity to investigate firsthand the primary sources and maps on which Ray’s groundbreaking argument rests.

Learn more at satanandsalem.org.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813937083

Book preview

RAY_COVER.jpg

University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ray, Benjamin C., 1940–

    Satan and Salem : the witch-hunt crisis of 1692 / Benjamin C. Ray.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN

978-0-8139-3707-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN

978-0-8139-3708-3 (e-book)

    1. Witch hunting—Massachusetts—Salem—History—17th century. 2. Witchcraft—Massachusetts—Salem—History. I. Title.

BF

1575.

R

28 2015

    133.4'3097445—dc23

2014036306

Frontispiece: Deposition of Ann Putnam Jr. v. George Burroughs, May 8, 1692. (From the records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, 1692, property of the Supreme Judicial Court, Division of Archives and Records Preservation; on deposit at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.)

To the memory of Joshua Rea, Sarah Rea,

Daniel Rea, and Hepzibah Rea of Salem Village,

signers of the petition for Rebecca Nurse,

May 1692

contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Stains upon Our Land

1     Samuel Parris and the New Covenant

2     Tituba’s Confession

3     The Village Girls Who Cried Witch!

4     The Magistrates

5     Reports of Witches’ Meetings

6     Thomas Putnam

7     Andover

8     Confessions

9     The Apparition and Trial of George Burroughs

10   Samuel Parris, the Beginner and Procurer

11   Blame and Shame

12   Mapping the Salem Witch Trials

13   Indians, Africans, Gender, and the Black Man

A Note on Court Records, Dates, and Names

Notes

Bibliography

Index

acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generosity of several academic colleagues and directors of archives whose assistance has made this book possible. I was fortunate to be able to collaborate with Bernard Rosenthal, who joined me in securing a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce both a digital archive of the court records, the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive (salem.lib.virginia.edu), and a new print edition, Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (RSWH), which was published in 2009. Both the new edition, with its accurate transcriptions, introductory essays, and critical notes, and the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, with its extensive primary resources, maps, and digital tools, have been foundational for the writing of the book. I have benefited, too, from two landmark books by colleagues in the field, Bernard Rosenthal’s Salem Story (1993) and Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (2002), whose collaborative work and scholarly standards are models of research in this area. Marilynne K. Roach, author of the valuable Biographical Notes section of the RSWH, has been a helpful colleague in responding to many questions about historical details, both large and small.

Also indispensible has been the assistance of the directors and librarians at several major archives. In 1999, during the early days of archival digitization, directors of archives in Boston and Salem welcomed me to digitize their well-cared-for manuscript collections. William Fowler, former President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Peter Drummey, Librarian, supported the scanning of the Society’s collection of witch trials court records, which was done with the assistance of Nancy Heywood, Digital Projects Coordinator. Roberta Zhongi, former Keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, permitted me to digitize the library’s collection of court records. Daniel Monroe, Director of the Peabody Essex Museum, and William LaMoy, former Director of the Phillips Library, authorized digitization of many of the library’s holdings of court records, with the help of Jane Axelrod and her staff. Over the years, I have returned several times to digitize court records in the Massachusetts Archives, under the helpful supervision of Michael Comeau, Martha Clark, and Elizabeth Bouvier. I also wish to thank Richard Trask, Director of the Danvers Archival Collection, for giving me constant access to the Danvers collection and for his insights into the history of Salem Village. Richard D’Abate, former Director of the Maine Historical Society, and Nicholas Noyes, Curator, have also permitted me to digitize their holdings.

The online Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, on whose sources this book depends, was the creation of the University of Virginia’s Institute of Advanced Technology, then under supervision its founding director John Unsworth. David Seaman, founding Director of the Electronic Text Center, supervised the creation of the initial website of the court records. Unsworth oversaw the building of the larger Documentary Archive by the institute’s capable staff, supervised by Worthy Martin and Daniel Pitti. The Documentary Archive’s search tools for the court records have proven to be essential. Michael Furlough, former Director of the University of Virginia Library’s Geostat Center, also supervised the creation of the digital maps of Salem Village, Andover, and Salem Town, and Chris Gist of the Scholar’s Lab created valuable maps of the Gallows Hill area. The University of Virginia’s Special Collections Library digitized its copies of the volumes by Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and Robert Calef. The Beverly Historical Society kindly permitted the digitization of its rare copy of John Hale’s Modest Enquiry. The Documentary Archive has now migrated to the Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia Library, under the directorship of Bethany Nowviskie, and Wayne Graham, Head of Research and Development, has continued to improve the Archive’s functionality.

Many graduate students have also assisted in the creation of the Archive. Kent McConnell was the Project Director, and Andrea Dickins, Mendy Gladden, Colleen Guilford, Guy Aiken, and Joseph Stuart have done many hours of XML tagging, as well as my neighbor Jane Whitehill Rotch.

I also learned a great deal while preparing historical materials for two documentaries, National Geographic Channel’s Salem Witch Trials Conspiracy and the Essex Heritage Commission’s Salem Witch-Hunt, and especially from Executive Producer and Director Tom Phillips, and the production team at Wide-Eyed Entertainment.

My two editors at the University of Virginia Press, Richard Holway and Mark Mones, have done a splendid job of shepherding the manuscript through to print publication and the e-book version. I have benefitted significantly from the initial editing suggestions by David Griffin and later by Linda Rhoades, formerly editor of the New England Quarterly, and from Susan Murray; every author should be so fortunate to have such expert guidance. I am enormously grateful to Professors David Hall and Richard Latner for their careful reading of a draft manuscript and for giving me detailed critical suggestions that have helped to strengthen the book’s factual base and its interpretations. Needless to say, I take full responsibility for any problems that remain.

Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Anthony and Christine Patton of Danvers, Massachusetts, for the many days of generous hospitality in their home during years of research visits to Danvers, Salem, and Boston; their friendship and encouragement have constantly inspired my work.

introduction

stains upon our land

I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.

—Thomas Brattle

The notorious Salem witchcraft episode of 1692 is different from any other witch-hunt in New England. More extreme in every respect, it lasted longer, jailed more suspects, condemned and executed more people, and ranged over more territory. Soon afterward it was repudiated by the government as a colossal mistake. The seven months of prosecutions and executions resulted in 152 arrests, 54 confessions, 28 convictions, 19 executions (by hanging), and 5 deaths—including that of an infant—due to poor jail conditions. A seventy-year-old man was crushed to death with stones; and a Puritan minister was convicted and hanged as a witch. In the end, twenty-five communities and hundreds of people became involved. The names of more than 1,400 people appear in the court records, ranging from accusers, accused, and the family members of each group to ministers, magistrates, constables, jury members, jail keepers, and even the blacksmiths who made the shackles for the accused. For New England, the toll of arrests and executions and community involvement was breathtaking.

After seven months of relentless witch-hunting, from March through mid-September 1692, the Boston ministers, the governor, and other leaders realized that the runaway witch trials court in Salem was threatening to undermine the stability of the whole Massachusetts Bay Province. In October 1692, after the Salem court had temporarily recessed following a series of nineteen deadly trials, Thomas Brattle, Boston’s distinguished mathematician and the treasurer of Harvard College, took up his pen and spoke his conscience. His now celebrated Letter, which Brattle circulated among his friends in the Boston legislature when there was an opportunity to take up the question of closing down the special Salem court, was bold and unrelenting. Brattle’s criticism, expressed in terms of Enlightenment rationalism, was directed not only at the court’s irregular procedures and the taking of innocent life but at the larger question of New England’s cherished civil liberties: if the Devil will be heard against us, and his testimony taken, to the seizing and apprehending of us, our liberty vanishes, and we are fools if we boast of our liberty.¹

Writing at the same time, the governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, was even more direct. He told his overseers in London that he was compelled to stop the trials because of the devastation of so many lives and because the rampant and illegal seizure of the property of those executed had threatened this Province with destruccion. No wonder that the governor, whose administration was responsible for initiating the trials, quickly repudiated the whole affair as a great delusion of the Devil. Also unprecedented in New England were the apologies and monetary restitutions that eventually followed.²

Today, it is tempting to suppose that the Salem witch-hunt was the inevitable result of a few simple factors: hysterical girls, gullible judges, and fanatic ministers. But nothing about this complex and widespread series of events was inevitable or simplistic.

Historians have repeatedly asked why Salem’s witch-hunt became so widespread, lasted so long, and spiraled so dangerously out of control. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, who wrestled with this question in their landmark book Salem Possessed, pointed out that the excesses of the Salem witch-hunt were caused by something deeper than the kind of chronic, petty squabbles between near neighbors which seem to have been at the root of earlier and far less severe witchcraft episodes in New England.³ In New England, as in Europe, inexplicable misfortunes, such as the sudden and undiagnosable death of a family member or a prized farm animal, were often attributed to demonic acts—that is, witchcraft—committed by malicious neighbors. But in New England, witchcraft proceedings were relatively rare; they usually involved accusations against only two or three people on any one occasion, and they were confined to a single community. Puritan New Englanders were no less fearful of witches than were the Catholics and Protestants in Europe, where witch-hunts flourished. But between the mid-1660s and the 1690s, New England ministers and magistrates had kept the lid on the popular willingness to blame personal misfortunes on conflicts with one’s neighbors.

The Salem episode began modestly enough. Four afflicted young girls in Salem Village accused three socially marginal women of practicing witchcraft. On their own, these numbers were not exceptional. Soon, however, four more Villagers were accused, and several adults became afflicted. In three weeks, the number of afflicted accusers increased from four to ten. Within six weeks, the accusations quadrupled, and targeted people well outside Salem Village. The Salem authorities were clearly no longer dealing with the usual conflicts that had prompted earlier, smaller witch-hunts.

For historians, the candidates for the something that caused the Salem witch-hunt range widely from political uncertainty in Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century, to increasingly secular influences upon a religiously conservative society, and, more recently, to the Indian raids along the Maine frontier. None of these key factor interpretations, however, has been taken in itself as satisfactory.

Scholars have recently pointed out that although Massachusetts had been lacking a governor and a charter and a fully operative legal system for some years before the accusations started in March 1692, it was well known by January 1692 that both a new governor and new charter were on the way from London. In the interim, the legal system was functioning well enough for the jails to become filled with witchcraft suspects before the new governor and charter arrived in May 1692.⁴ Whatever political uncertainty and lack of higher courts there may have been since 1689, governmental order was operating well enough, and it was on the verge of being fully restored when the outbreak occurred. Moreover, by contemporary standards, the witch-hunt in Salem Village was unremarkable at first, hardly the crisis it became two months later, when the new governor arrived in Boston.

Nor, as Boyer and Nissenbaum proposed in Salem Possessed, was Salem Village geographically divided between religiously conservative agrarian accusers in the western part of the Village and their secular and commercially minded victims in the east.⁵ An up-to-date map of the accusations in Salem Village (see page 189) does not bear out a geographic and economic division. Such an interpretation also reduces the episode to an easy-to-understand product of modernization—a clash between premodern and modern mentalities. This approach fails to take into account particular decisions and motives of individuals and groups at the various levels of society as well as a number of particular circumstances that contributed to the crisis.

Mary Beth Norton rightly points to the concurrence between the Second Indian War (also known as King William’s War) of 1688–97 and the witchcraft accusations in Salem in 1692, two disparate events that were both viewed as the devil’s attempt to undermine New England. Norton also indicates that the Salem leaders, magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, who were members of the Governor’s Council, ordered the withdrawal of the militia force garrisoned at Fort Royal in Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, thus leaving the northern frontier undefended and open to the supposedly devil-inspired Indian attacks of the 1690s. She proposes that the magistrates’ sense of guilt for that fateful decision induced them to zealously prosecute Satan’s witches at home, thereby compensating for their failure to resist Satan’s forces to the north.⁶

But court records barely mention the Indian war, and only a few accusers of the dozens involved had been caught up in the Second Indian War of 1688 or the earlier King Philip’s War of 1675–78. What persuaded the Salem magistrates to zealously prosecute suspected witches was not the Indian attacks on the frontier but the leaders of the local community closer to home: the minister of Salem Village, the influential parents of the afflicted girls, the Village doctor, and several ministers of neighboring communities.

Current in the popular literature is the simplistic theory that the Salem Village girls’ afflictions were caused by a biomedical illness of some kind. The court records, however, indicate that the young accusers were alert in the courtroom and did not display symptoms of any medical or mental impairment, such as ergot poisoning or meningitis.⁷ That the accusers fell into fits on cue from the magistrates and regained their composure immediately upon performing the so-called touch test by touching a defendant in the courtroom (touching a witch supposedly drew off the witch’s evil power from the afflicted person) disproves any biomedical explanation of their actions.

On the other side, a few historians have maintained that, from the outset, the accusers intentionally faked their afflictions.⁸ In the courtroom, the young accusers were made to confront their alleged tormentors, and they responded as the magistrates expected. Their behavior was conventional, akin to that described in numerous period accounts of witchcraft afflictions. Traumatized by face-to-face encounters with what they believed to be witches wielding demonic powers, the afflicted became frightened and played the role that was required of them. In time, they embellished their fits with pins stuck in their arms and hands, blood flowing from their lips, and by convulsing and falling down. Whether or not their conduct was always self-conscious and calculated or genuinely traumatized cannot be determined from the court records and contemporary accounts, which furnish evidence for both points of view.

Although no single factor fully explains the dangerous excesses of the Salem trials, a common thread runs through the whole series of events. It is the claim initiated by the four girls in Salem Village that their Christian faith was the target of Satan’s attack. This repeated charge is unique to the Salem crisis. The witches were tormenting them, the girls insisted, to make them sign the Devil’s book and join the devil’s company as witches themselves. This claim was taken up and amplified by other accusers and by confessed witches as well. Thereafter, accusers and confessors reported seeing specters (shapes and appearances) of witches gathering for worship in the pasture next to the Salem Village minister’s house. Satan was trying to subvert the ministry of the new pastor, Reverend Samuel Parris, and turn Salem Village into the first seat of Satan’s Tyranny, as the previous minister declared when he visited the Village, thus confirming Parris’s ominous preaching about the devil attacking the Village church. Fear continued to stimulate the young accusers’ imaginations. Soon, two dozen witches’ specters, then forty, were seen in the Village. In the following months, confessed witches enlarged the scope of the plot: three hundred witches were allegedly seen in Salem Village, and it was said that Satan’s aim was to abolish all the Churches in the land. It was not just the church in Salem Village but New England’s foundational institution that was under attack.

The dynamics between the church and the rest of the community of which it was a part are therefore central to understanding what initially happened in Salem Village. The Reverend Parris was a controversial and polarizing figure who became the center of conflict. Even before the first witchcraft accusation had been made, the new minister was preaching inflammatory sermons charging that the devil was trying to pull down his church. His warnings about the devil acting against his ministry seemed to explain what was happening, at least to most church members. Parris prepared many depositions against the accused, and the magistrates selected him to record a number of the court’s preliminary hearings. After the trials were over, his opponents in Salem Village called him the beginner and procurer of the crisis and eventually forced him to leave. Historians have debated the significance of Samuel Parris’s involvement, but today his role in the build-up to the witch-hunt is considered crucial.

Still, although Parris’s sermons warning of a satanic attack on the Salem Village church seem to have been influential at the outset of the witch-hunt, they did not alone cause or solely sustain the event. Many personal motives, institutional procedures, and unique circumstances were involved. One of the primary aims of the present book is to show that, far from being precipitated by a single key person or circumstance, the Salem crisis was the result of a perfect storm of factors that culminated in a grand moral catastrophe in the still-young English colony of Massachusetts. The Salem witch trials are best studied, then, not as a crime needing to be solved so that blame can be properly ascribed but—as the historical records so richly portray—as a multivalent societal tragedy involving a number of critical factors and several major characters, each with a share of responsibility. Thus, it is essential that we understand the religious and sociocultural context as well as the diverse historical contingencies and individual actions that came together in Essex County in 1692.

Close attention to the court records, for example, clarifies the role of Tituba, the Indian slave of Samuel Parris. For decades, historians have blamed her for triggering the witchcraft accusations when she supposedly performed acts of fortune-telling before the two girls in the Parris household. Neither the court records nor any other contemporary account mentions such rituals. What the records do reveal is how magistrate John Hathorne’s interrogation shaped Tituba’s confession around the standard Puritan notion of a contract with the devil and the concept of signing the devil’s book. The young afflicted accusers picked up this idea, and it became a common theme among the tormented accusers and those who confessed. Contemporary sources also reveal that Samuel Parris may have forced Tituba to confess before the magistrates. Tituba not only confessed and confirmed the presence of two witchcraft suspects in the Village; she also offered her own original claim: a wider satanic threat, emanating from Boston, was afoot in the Village, and there were more witches waiting in darkness. Thus the witch-hunt began.

In addition to Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam actively supported the Salem Village accusers. The court records show that Putnam was the most prolific writer of depositions, mainly on behalf of his daughter Ann Putnam and the five other afflicted Village girls whose courtroom torments and testimony were vital throughout the trials. Putnam also worked closely with the Salem magistrates, who were deeply committed to prosecuting the alleged witches.

The witch trials, however, were not simply a local Salem affair. After the first three months of preliminary hearings and after the establishment of the new government in Boston, the decision to move forward with indictments and trials was made at the highest level, by the governor and his Council in Boston. Nine members of the Governor’s Council served as judges on a special Court of Oyer and Terminer (To Hear and Determine) that adjudicated the witchcraft cases. For three months, witchcraft suspects had filled the local jails, and after the new governor arrived, something had to be done.

Given the scope and complexity of the Salem witch trials, we return to our original question of how they exploded seemingly beyond control. Why did the Salem magistrates, the local ministers, and the Boston government reverse thirty years of judicial restraint in resolving complaints about witchcraft and let the Salem trials get out of hand? The purpose of this book is to explore this question. Salem’s distinctiveness lies not in its initial accusations, but in their escalation throughout twenty-five different communities in Essex County until, as the governor realized, the social order was severely threatened.

Previous witch-hunts in New England had remained effectively quarantined within the boundaries of their originating communities. In Salem, the number of accusations accelerated so rapidly that it comes as no surprise that the court records reveal the absence of standard legal constraints from the beginning, and that the girls’ dramatic behavior both inside and outside the courtroom had a strong impact on their society, far beyond any previous experience of witchcraft.

A tipping point occurred in mid-April, six weeks into the legal process, with a spate of new accusations followed by new confessions that legitimated the court’s mounting prosecutions. In the midst of this acceleration of the legal process, the Reverend George Burroughs, a former minister of Salem Village, came under fire. It was claimed that Burroughs had turned to the dark side and was wreaking revenge on Salem Village, which had previously dismissed him from its pulpit. His specter was seen leading many others in satanic masses next to Samuel Parris’s house. The sensational story of a Puritan minister as Satan’s high priest attacking the Village began to spread at the same time as the escalation of the accusations by the reckless court. The convergence of these two factors propelled the Salem witch trials into the runaway debacle that they became.

Only recently have historians taken up the question of why the town of Andover, Salem Village’s western neighbor, became the locus of the witch-hunt’s extensive second phase, which accounted for a third of all the witchcraft accusations. Confessions of guilt became the norm in Andover, further legitimating the legal proceedings and driving the witch trials recklessly forward. Eventually, Andover’s absurdly high number of confessions, forty all told, raised questions about the court’s procedure, which in turn contributed to the court’s eventual closure.

The Salem trials were also exceptional because so much of the courtroom activity focused on the performances of afflictions by a group of six girls and young women from Salem Village, aged between eleven and twenty years old. The court gave extraordinary legal power to these young accusers, who became the prosecution’s star witnesses. For seven long months, they were repeatedly called upon to perform their afflictions in court as evidence, thus making the accusations by themselves and by others appear valid in the view of the judges and juries, although most of the later accusations originated from individuals outside the Village whom the girls did not know. Only the afflicted, as they were called, could see and feel the torments of witches’ specters and thus provide eyewitness evidence before the magistrates and jury that the court considered objective.

The young afflicted females from Salem Village and later the afflicted women from nearby Andover were given center stage in the Salem courtroom in a stunning reversal of the usual gender roles. Accusers in New England witchcraft cases were mostly adult men. Never before had girls and young unmarried women, who were normally socially and legally powerless—to be seen and not heard—in New England’s patriarchal society, been given such religious and legal prominence by their parents, ministers, and magistrates. Only when Boston’s critics eventually discredited the young Village accusers and their spectral evidence in court did the prosecutions stop.

One of the most significant questions about the Salem trials concerns the court’s privileging of so-called spectral evidence, which only the afflicted could see and feel. Such dubious evidence had rarely been used in previous New England witch trials. In Salem, however, almost all the indictments carried the sole charge that the young accusers were tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, and wasted by the invisible specters of the alleged witches, who were said to have tried to force their afflicted victims to sign the devil’s book. All of the defendants who were convicted were sent to the gallows on the basis of indictments specifying spectral affliction alone, despite the cautionary advice of Boston’s leading ministers about the reliability of such evidence.

A remarkable number of court records of the Salem trials survive today, nearly 950. Most are located in archives in Salem and Boston. These records document the legal proceedings in surprising detail. The bulk of the records that were used in the 1692 proceedings tell the story of the long and complicated legal process.

Thanks to the recent efforts of a team of scholars, that collection of records is now available in a newly edited and expanded edition. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Bernard Rosenthal, general editor) was published in 2009. It includes seventy newly collected documents that did not appear in the last compilation, The Salem Witchcraft Papers, published in 1977. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt also improves upon former compilations by arranging documents in chronological order. In addition, it includes scholarly notes and extensive introductory essays that explain the legal process and the unique linguistic terms that were employed.

By setting forth the chronology and detailing what happened during the legal proceedings, the new edition goes a long way toward helping us understand more about how the witch-hunt played out over time. It also identifies who was writing the hundreds of documents, most of which involve multiple hands, thus helping scholars identify the key leaders who were driving the legal process forward. Such information is invaluable. Transcriptions of nearly all of the records are online at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive (http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/). The Salem Archive’s transcriptions, based on a revised and expanded version of the Salem Witchcraft Papers, are searchable by name and date and for any word or phrase, and they are linked to digital images of most of the original manuscripts. This book’s citations refer both to the online transcriptions of the court records of the newly edited Salem Witchcraft Papers and to the same records in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt.

The court records, however, reveal only part of the story. The rest lies in other, related sources that document what happened outside the courtroom in the months and years before, during, and after the trials. These sources are also available in digital form at the online Salem Archive, and the present work will make full use of them. Two indispensable sources are The Salem Village Record Book, written by the Village clerk, and the Church Record Book Belonging to Salem Village, written by Samuel Parris and later by the Reverend Joseph Green. The two books chronicle the social, religious, and economic transactions and conflicts in Salem Village that occurred before, during, and after the arrival of the Reverend Samuel Parris. Another essential source is The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, a collection that contains Parris’s sermons. It includes the inflammatory sermons he preached leading up to the first accusations and thereafter. Parris’s sermons transformed Salem Village’s mounting opposition to him into a cosmic battle between God and Satan, creating a highly charged atmosphere in which fears of witchcraft and accusations flourished.

A few eyewitness accounts were also published. The Reverend Deodat Lawson, Salem Village’s former minister, wrote the first, soon after the initial accusations and examinations. Published in Boston under the title A Brief and True Narrative, it offers a sympathetic account