Digging into a drama that wasn’t truly ‘unpacked’
Growing up in Massachusetts made history hard to escape
One night, if the 1692 court confession is to be believed, Ann Foster and Martha Carrier flew through the Massachusetts sky on a pole. Earlier the same year, two young girls, who claimed they were bitten and pinched by “invisible agents,” were witnessed convulsing and speaking gibberish. After relentless interrogation, their family’s slave admitted to practicing witchcraft on the children, at the request of a satanic man who appeared under the guise of several animals.
As we prepare for this weekend’s invasion of adorable ghosts and goblins, it’s hard to imagine that a little more than 300 years ago the fear of witches would lead to these incredible stories and to widespread terror in the Puritan New England colony.
Within just a few months, 14 women, five men and two dogs — thought to be their accomplices — would be executed in what has become one of the most famous but misunderstood trials in American history.
The unfortunate mélange of circumstances that led up to the trials is the subject of celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning historical biographer Stacy Schiff’s fascinating new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, published by Little, Brown.
Schiff — whose last book, Cleopatra: A Life, analyzed the life of the last queen of Egypt — researched court documents, archives and personal correspondences in hopes of contextualizing the circumstances that led to the roller-coasting hysteria and accusations of the Salem witch trials.
These days, the only witches residing in the Massachusetts town are related to tourist attractions, but Schiff says that growing up in the state made its history hard to escape.
She remembers reading Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, and the work of Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne, but was really drawn to the story as a captivating historical moment.
“This is the locked-room drama that I wasn’t certain we had ever entirely unpacked, and at the same time it was a moment where women played a prominent role,” she says. “I had just come off of Cleopatra and thinking still about women’s voices, and when women are able to articulate what they think.”
Schiff believes the strain of the rigid Puritan religion, combined with widespread poverty and political uncertainty, and residual trauma from the Indian War, led to the villagers — mostly women — turning on each other. The trials also followed one of the most brutal winters on record, which Schiff speculates contributed to the atmosphere.
In many ways, the trials serve as a warning for our hyper-vigilant online culture. Schiff observed connections between the accusations and contemporary social media, where a single tweet or anonymous comment can go viral and destroy a person’s reputation.
“If there’s one thing that I hope the reader comes away with, it’s a sense of how important open-mindedness and humility about ideas, and mercy are,” she says.