Featuring an elk that decided to bugle during my recording, this episode discusses the first witch trials in American history. Forty years before the Salem Witch Trials, these happened mostly in Bermuda and Connecticut, with a few in Massachusetts. Bermuda was a disaster, Connecticut had a disaster of a legal system, and over a dozen settlers would fall victim to these facts.
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On May 26, 1647, the first American woman was executed for witchcraft. Her name was Alse Young, and we know virtually nothing about her, her trial or her execution. We know that she was pretty, and that a fair number of men were smitten with her, and that’s about it. But, it was with her death that America started down one of the more infamously dark roads in its history. And the murky, messy, early years of American witch trials is the topic of today’s episode.
Introduction
Colonial American witch scares were neither isolated to the Salem Witch Trials, nor were they a persistent issue across all of England’s colonies through the 17th Century. They only really became an area of focus in certain colonies in the 1650s, with an English world devastated by war and torn apart by religious and political differences. Today, we’re going to discuss the rise of witch superstition, and stories of the first two waves of witch trials in American history, which happened in Bermuda and New England, and saw a collective 60 women tried, and over a dozen executed.
A little over a year after Alse Young, the first woman in Massachusetts history was executed for witchcraft. Her name was Margaret Jones, she lived in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and we know more about her. Her story is so familiar at this point that it almost feels cliche. She was a midwife who practiced a variety of types of medicine. After an argument with a neighbor, that neighbor had gone to the authorities to report that she’d made their livestock sick. Others then reported that she could see the future. She was put under a constant watch in the jail, and her guards reported seeing supernatural things appear around her, like a small child who then disappeared, and she had a witchmark. She was furious and frantic when she was tried, and she was furious and frantic when she was executed. Her husband was tried alongside her, but was acquitted, after which he fled New England. His reputation followed him, though, and during a storm on his way back to England, he was put in the ship’s jail, after which the ship reportedly steadied.
But, though Jones’s story is almost prototypical for the witch trials as a whole, it wasn’t exactly the norm in these early years. For starters, Massachusetts wasn’t the New England colony with the highest rate of witch trials at this time. Instead, it was Connecticut, and the fact that it was Connecticut is outwardly very odd. Connecticut was easily one of the more moderate New England colonies, compared to Massachusetts whose severity was only exceeded by the much smaller New Haven. But unlike Massachusetts, which despite being one of the largest and most populous colonies “only” tried about 10 people, executing about five, and unlike New Haven which only tried one, being about the same size as Connecticut, Connecticut tried a total of 10 people in the Interregnum, executing four, and their activities wouldn’t even peak until after the Restoration of Charles II to the English throne in the 1660s, at which point their numbers rose to 37 trials and 11 executions. And meanwhile Bermuda tried 22 people, executing five.
More than numbers, though, these early trials are marked by the actions of people who had much less experience in witch identification and witch hunting, in colonies wracked by war, fear and uncertainty, and so there was a lot more variation in what these trials looked like, as we shall see.
Witch hysteria had started to surge in England in 1645. After the Battle of Naseby, 36 witches were tried in Essex, and 35 executed. Over that summer, a total of 100 would be. Books circulated telling people how to identify witches, and these ended up in every English colony. Independents within England were the people who led this movement, and it was Independents in America who followed their lead. This means that witch hunting was a phenomenon which was fundamentally linked to the Puritan movement, and that’s probably the first thing we need to address as we look into this whole issue.
Puritans were at the heart of all the movements which led to the widespread adoption of witch belief in the Early Modern era. It’s actually a bit of a misconception that witch persecution had always been the standard. For centuries, through the vast majority of the Medieval era, it had persisted in folk belief but been rejected and dismissed by society’s leadership, both Church and monarch, as being a silly, backward superstition. It was only as that medieval social order started to crumble in the 15th Century that this belief started to be legitimized by certain members of the Catholic clergy, specifically the Dominicans.
That transition, though, from the late medieval to early modern world was a time of fundamental change, and this change came with deep societal division and social turmoil which resulted in everything from an increase in prostitution to, well, everything we’ve discussed in this podcast so far. And in the middle of this, people on opposing political, religious and social sides actively declared each other to be agents of satan. Catholics and Protestant heretics alike were united in an attempt to bring down Christendom, and this rhetoric became deeply linked with the emerging rhetoric about witches.
Puritans were the people pushing for social change. More than anything, that’s how I’d characterize them. Yes, they were overtly religious in a different way from the norm at the time, but there were plenty of people who were just as religious in ways the puritans wouldn’t have approved of. What they were, though, was overwhelmingly members of the newly emerging middle class. Commoners, but with money, who resented the existing social divisions and who were questioning and challenging, and in this particular case, actively bringing down the very structures which had held the social order in place for hundreds of years.
And as we’ve noted in the past, Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents were factions within the Puritan movement who had very specific millenarian ideas. They believed that by purging sin, they could usher in the Second Coming of Christ and the Millennial Reign of the Saints. Of course, in the context of that belief, getting rid of agents of satan, like witches and Catholics, was even more important. This was not a common belief, but it was a belief which united the two groups who pushed the witch scares hardest. English Independents were now in charge in England, Scotland and England’s colonies, so that’s an extra thing underpinning the witch panics.
With all this combined, it had been just three days after the Battle of Naseby that 36 witches were tried in Essex, and 35 of them executed. Over the course of that summer, 100 would be executed. Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, would personally be responsible over the course of the Interregnum for convicting around 300 witches, which to put things in perspective is about as many people as “Bloody” Mary Tudor had burned as Protestant heretics. And it was his book which would travel across the Atlantic.
Copies ended up in every colony, but New England was the first to use it. From there, it traveled to Bermuda. Bermudian Independents took all their cues from New England. Massachusetts in particular helped support the colony, as well as its Bahamian offshoot, as well as giving its Independent faction a steady stream of advice on governmental and religious issues. So, it was very logical that what started in Massachusetts would soon spread to Bermuda. And it was in Bermuda, that the witch scare peaked first. And this also makes sense, because while New England had definitely affected by the English Civil War, and even more by the Pequot War which was particularly bad in Connecticut, it had largely remained a functional, if highly imperfect, society. Bermuda, on the other hand, really, really hadn’t.
If you’ve been listening, and if you remember, Bermuda was the colony that tore itself apart first when war broke out in England. The only other colony that suffered the same sort of division was Maryland, but Maryland had so many external issues that it’s not even a comparable situation. By 1651, various political and religious factions in Bermuda had spent about a decade seizing power from each other, and then rebelling, imprisoning, banishing and otherwise abusing each other. Governors had been rotated every few months by a company that was, one, completely befuddled, two almost as passionately divided in England as its colony was in America, and three, which colonists were barely listening to at this point.
There was a violent rebellion after King Charles was beheaded, and that prompted a purging of the company within England, as well as orders that the Independents who had been exiled and founded Eleutheria in the Bahamas be allowed to return. Like everywhere else in Commonwealth-era England and America, people could only vote if they signed an allegiance to the king-free government, which Bermuda’s Presbyterians refused to do for over a year. And so, after a decade of unbridled animosity, this had given one side complete control over the island. And to their limited credit, the Company realized that this might be a problem. So, in order to try to address this issue, kind of? They reinstated Governor Josias Forster, who was known for being the island’s most moderate of moderates.
At this point, too, all of their ministers had either left or died, except one who was extremely old, extremely sick and would be dead in a year. Assize Courts, whose specific role was to maintain social order by trying major civil and criminal cases by jury, hadn’t been held in a decade.
And as Forster and his government talked about the things that needed to be done, these were some of the things they decided on. What I’m about to list is not just individual court cases. It’s problems that were pervasive enough in Bermudian society that the government’s first priority was trying to figure out how to put a stop to them.
People dug for clams in other people’s crop fields, not only killing the crops but then leaving open holes which they didn’t fill in, and which both people and animals were falling into at night and getting injured. Similarly, people allowed or even sent their kids to steal whatever fruit got planted by anyone else, and allowed their animals to destroy others’ crops. They even actively foraged for livestock feed on other people’s land. The combination of these things meant that no one actually benefited from planting fruit or corn, and that meant that no one really did.
And, people were cutting down all the palmettos on the island to get liquor from them. Palmettos were crucial to the longterm survival of Bermuda as a colony, as building materials, to stabilize soil, for berries, as a vital part of the ecosystem … But they also produced a liquor called Bibby. In Bermuda’s healthy days, this was a treat, a nice little perk anytime a palmetto had to be cut down for other reasons. Now, people were cutting them down for no other reason, and therefore pushing them to the point of extinction. They were getting drunk today, even if that meant the colony might not survive tomorrow.
And how did they survive, you ask? Well, they got help from New England, in the form of money, food and Pequot slaves, but they also engaged in a practice called shipwrecking, which was pretty much a way of life in both Bermuda and the Bahamas. Both colonies were both surrounded by coral reefs, so settlers would trick incoming ships into wrecking in the reefs, and then loot them.
It was an anarchy, with people living day-to-day, showing virtually no respect for their neighbors, servants, masters, or even their own family members, and making no plans for future survival. Keeping the sabbath was almost unheard of, while drunkenness, swearing and lying were constants, and animosity came from politics, religion and good old fashioned nastiness. No taxes were collected, no courts were held. Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria.
And I’ve dwelled on this, maybe a little bit too much, but this is the context in which these witch trials started happening. It was Forster’s job to forge order from the chaos, but as usual, the English Company sent him no real instructions, guidance or support to help do this. He’d been chosen as a moderate, but surrounded by and accountable exclusively to extreme Independents who absolutely hated their now totally disenfranchised rivals. And the Independents were getting ready to use this power to push for reparations from the Presbyterian faction, and generally posing such a great threat to the Presbyterians that it prompted some Presbyterians to start signing the oath so that they could vote again and hopefully protect themselves a little, tiny bit. It also prompted some Presbyterians to stage another rebellion, and when the Independents tried searching for and seizing their guns and ammunition, respond by essentially saying “you think that’s going to stop us? We don’t need guns and ammo to fight you.”
So now, you had the very people who believed in witches in control, at a time when living conditions were easily horrible enough to make satanic influence seem feasible, when people felt all but powerless, and when levels of personal animosity among colonists had been fueled and unchecked for a decade. And, you have cutting edge people in England telling you exactly how to conduct a witch hunt, supported by people in New England, as well as a decent number of colonists who have been in England recently to witness these things first hand. The icing on the cake for Bermuda, of course, is that this was already an island steeped in superstition. It had already been known as the Devil’s Isles since long before English colonization even started.
And in the midst all of this, it’s not even surprising that witch accusations started to fly, fast. In the next four years, 12 people were accused of witchcraft, two of whom were men, and five of them, one of whom was a man, were hanged. In a 21 square mile colony of 3,000 people, these numbers were easily the per capita highest in the English speaking world.
The first case in Bermuda involved a woman named Jeane Gardiner, and another named Anne Bowen. To highlight the political dimension of this issue, Bowen was the 23 year old daughter of Richard Norwood, the passionate leader of Bermuda’s Presbyterian party who had fought hardest against Independent excesses. Norwood, himself, was accused of being a wizard at this point, and though he wasn’t convicted, rumors stayed around long enough that as late as the early 19th Century, one of his descendents burned one of his academic books with mathematical writings in it. They looked strange, the rumors were there, and the safest thing was just to destroy them.
And when an accusation of witchcraft emerged, there were a handful of prescribed ways to go about seeing whether it was true or not. That’s what Hopkins’s book had been about. Witchmarks were spots on the skin, often blue, which didn’t bleed when pricked. Confession was enough for a conviction and execution. And, trial by water, the infamous one where you threw someone in the water, and if they floated they were a witch, and if they drowned they were innocent and dead, was the final test. The problem in Bermuda, though, was that the water was very warm, very salty, and therefore very, very difficult to sink in.
And of course, there were also eyewitness and victim testimonies. Sickness of children, servants, slaves and livestock was a common accusation, as was having seen imps, or mysterious black figures of cats and things. Sometimes, though, they got downright creative. One Bermudian woman, for example, said that another woman had given her a rose, which she’d worn to bed, and that night, she had felt a hand picking her up from her bed. The use of victim testimonies, though, was extremely different in Bermuda and New England, as we’ll see.
So, in Gardiner’s case, a mixed-race woman named Tomasin, who may or may not have been a slave, accused Gardiner of making her ill after threatening to injure her. She claimed to have been struck blind and speechless for two hours. Once Gardiner was on trial, multiple people came forward with similar stories of her using witchcraft to injure them, kill their animals or damage their goods, and this was enough to do some of the tests. A group of six women examined her for witchmarks, and found a numb, blue spot in her mouth which didn’t bleed when pricked, even though the skin around it did. That’s a witchmark. Then they threw her into the ocean, and as we explained before, she floated. She tried her best to sink, tried her best to drown, but kept floating.
We don’t know what the accusations against Bowen were, but she had no witchmarks so she was set free.
The most interesting and important of all the Bermuda witch trials, though, involved a couple named John and Elizabeth Midleton. Elizabeth was the third person accused in Bermuda, after Gardiner and Bowen, and she was acquitted. She had no marks, so there wasn’t enough evidence to push forward with the trial by water.
But, a year later, her husband was accused of witchcraft and he ended up not only being executed, but being convinced that he, himself, was unknowingly a witch. John Middleton was actually a part of the radical Independent party which now controlled Bermuda. Now in his 50s, he’d come to Bermuda as a young indentured servant along with his brother, who had just returned from Eleutheria in the Bahamas. And his trial started with an accusation from a transported Scottish POW named John Makeraton, who said that Middleton had used witchcraft to injure his leg after an argument. Middleton responded that he’d healed his leg after it’d been trampled by loose calves, and in the course of this discussion it came out that Makeraton had been harvesting pig food from Middleton’s property. At this point, Makeraton backed down on his accusations, because the punishment for his own crime was “whipping without ceasing.” He said he didn’t fully remember, because he’d been falling into fits. And it really does sound like he had some sort of seizure thing going on. Makeraton was put in jail, but here, other people started to tell stories about devilish things that Middleton was doing to him. They said Makeraton would randomly fall down stiff and incoherent, and strange black creatures appeared around him, in some cases going so far as to sit on him while he was in bed. He was convinced from his prison that Middleton was attacking him, and others joined in his conviction. Yet others now emerged and said that after a trip to England, Midleton had returned showing people his witch marks. In all, 15 witnesses testified against him, and his own wife was one of them. She said that during her own trial, she had known there was a witch amongst them, and now knew it was her husband instead of herself. She lamented the fact that she’d suffered for his cause, and said that at night she would feel something in her stomach. But then she said that this was an illness she’d had since before she met him.
Her testimony was pretty harsh, but they had a rough, rough marriage. He had committed more than his fair share of adultery, as well as other things which are far, far too inappropriate for me to get into on this show. He had also taken her property from her and hidden it in the past. Not a good marriage, but she reversed her testimony at the trial, itself, and said she didn’t have any real reason to suspect him. Maybe this was for conscience sake, or maybe it’s because she risked losing the property if he was convicted, but regardless, she backed down. It was too late, though.
There was enough testimony to check for witchmarks, and he had several spots that fit the definition. And that got him a trial by water, which he of course failed, by which I mean survived. And after having grown progressively more unsure that he, himself, wasn’t a witch, Midleton confessed that they’d convinced him. He must be one. He hadn’t known it, but the evidence was too compelling, so it must be true. He went on to confess all his sins, and creating what is possibly the most startling list of confessions I’ve read in my life, which again, is far too graphic to go into here.
Then, though, they asked him if he knew any other witches, and after saying he feared there were simply too many in Bermuda, he did name a list of possible suspects. Some he was more sure of than others, and some were people that Forster asked about by name, in a way that would definitely qualify as leading the witness today. Those people were searched for marks on the day of Middleton’s execution, and two of them were hanged within the next two weeks. And after this, Bermuda’s witch craze was over for 18 months.
At that point, the last wave of interregnum witch trials in Bermuda took place, and it actually involved sailor accusations. A ship called the Mayflower, not that Mayflower, was sailing from England to the Chesapeake. They believed they had two witches on board, so they stopped in Bermuda to ask for an investigation. Sailors, who were constantly isolated and at risk, were intensely superstitious about witches, and earlier that year, an old woman had been thrown overboard from a ship making the same trip during a storm. These two, on the other hand, were simply put in Bermuda with a request for a trial. Passengers gave lots of testimony, citing supposed events from years before, but the most condemning was a story about one holding her hand over a compass and moving its needle without touching it, and trying to convince a sailor that all pregnant woman could do things like this. When asked, the woman said that she’d been carrying a steel needle, which caused this.
It all came down to the marks, though, and she had none, but the other woman had a bunch. She was convicted and executed.
Through the course of this time, there were of course a bunch of other accusations, but most followed the patterns we’ve discussed here. And they ended in large part thanks to one woman named Mrs. Millner. When she was accused of witchcraft, Mrs. Millner immediately filed a defamation suit against the man who accused her for 150 pounds. That’s about 5 years wages for the average Bermudian landowner, maybe even more. What this meant was that if Mrs. Millner wasn’t proven guilty, if she didn’t have the all-important witch marks, this man would essentially have to give her everything he owned. Now it wasn’t just a one way threat, both accuser and accused stood to lose, and the man quickly withdrew his petition. There was no recorded trial, the issue was over, only one more person would ever be executed for witchcraft in Bermuda, and that would be decades later.
Most of Bermuda’s witch trials occurred under Foster’s watch, and it’s fairly standard interpretation that he was the driving force behind them, perhaps in an attempt to give colonists a way to vent and help stabilize and heal the island. Which, it did stabilize somewhat over the course of the witch trials. And it’s worth noting in the face of this rather severe accusation against Forster, that he was extremely diligent in trying to verify each witch’s status. It took multiple testimonies to push a trial to the witchmark stage, and it took a panel of six people to verify the presence of witchmarks. If found, witchmarks would lead to the trial by water. And even in the trial by water, a person could be thrown into the sea multiple times.
The problem was that in a society as thoroughly hostile and dysfunctional as Bermuda’s, it was almost inevitable that one accusation would prompt more. Everyone with a grudge, a fear, a resentment, could gang up on a person, and this is exactly what happened. So personal diligence was outweighed by social disorder.
And this is the most stark point of contrast with New England, and especially Connecticut. Connecticut in particular required virtually nothing to condemn a person. You only needed one testimony to progress to checking witchmarks, and only one person had to say they saw a witchmark for a conviction. They didn’t even bother asking everyone involved in an event to testify, and in one case they specifically ignored when one person refuted the presence of witchmarks that another person claimed to have seen.
And this helps explain why otherwise mild and moderate Connecticut was hit so overwhelmingly hard with witch trials early on. When this rule was changed, well over a decade later, the problem of witch executions in Connecticut all but disappeared. It was easy to get one person to say something about somebody, because there were absolutely divisions and animosities among people.
Social pressures were still present in New England at the time. It wasn’t Bermuda, but there was the Pequot War, there were the conflicts over creating a religious settlement, conflicts with Presbyterians, conflicts with heretics, conflicts between deputies and magistrates, though less so in Connecticut, and discomfort over the excesses of the Independent movement in England, including the excess of killing a king. It was all that stuff that we discussed a couple months ago, about the psychological pressures mounting in New England, exacerbated by a couple of bad harvests and a pretty harsh illness going around. It wasn’t the anarchy of Bermuda, but it could be argued to be the opposite. People had an outwardly stable social structure, but a lot of internal concerns which they couldn’t voice for fear of reprisals.
There also was a significant decline in the piousness of New England society at this point. The second generation of New Englanders were now becoming adults, and they didn’t have the same level of devotion as their parents who had crossed the Atlantic. They were raised in a harsh and restrictive society in an untamed and intimidating wilderness. And, a lot of them were leaving. A huge number had gone back to fight for Parliament in the wars, but there were also a lot who were going to places like New Amsterdam or Virginia, to be away from the rigidity of New England government and society. Both Winthrop and Bradford noted this, and the damage it was doing. Both felt that the devil must be working extra hard against New England’s Churches because they were so influential.
So this was the context in which New England’s first set of witch trials happened. One similarity with Bermuda is that there are hints of political frustrations coming out in the witch accusations. The most noteworthy of these was that Richard Bellingham’s sister, Anne Hibbins, was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, in Salem in 1656. Bellingham was much like Norwood, an effective leader of the political side which opposed those in power without getting really extreme. They were respected people who knew how to do politics and did not like the way their colonies were going. So when Bellingham’s sister and Norwood’s daughter were both tried, and one executed, that just shows a lot about how these things were working.
But, like I said, the main area of focus right now is Connecticut, and the records in Connecticut are virtually nonexistent. What we do know has been meticulously pieced together from things like one-line diary entries, but it’s interesting. The first woman in Connecticut to be tried and executed was Alse Young. No records of her trial survive, but she was evidently known for being extremely beautiful and someone who a number of men were very smitten with.
The second was Mary Johnson, and her story is one of those things which is so overwhelmingly sad it reminds you of the kind of harshness of life the people of our stories were dealing with at the time. She was a servant girl who had been whipped for petty theft a couple times before, and she had a baby and was accused of killing that child by witchcraft. The sad thing is that she actually did admit to killing her child by smothering it. Then, in prison, she had another baby, something which delayed her execution for a few months, and she gave that baby to someone, along with 15 pounds to raise and educate him. She ultimately confessed to being a witch, as well as some other things, before her execution.
Next was another woman from Alse Young’s town, who was hanged for witchcraft after one man accidentally shot another.
But, the really big event of these few years happened after a couple named the Greensmiths had a party, complete with dancing. The scandal. Neighbors objected, and when a young girl became sick, in her delirium, she supposedly said that she’d been cursed by the Greensmiths. People started to be convinced that the party had actually been a witches sabbath, and every single person who had attended the party was accused of being a witch. The Greensmiths were hanged along with another party attendee named Mary Sanford, and four other people were publicly lashed. One couple escaped punishment by dropping everything and fleeing the colony as soon as the accusation was voiced.
And the stories piled up. One woman, named Mary Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, had another extremely horrible story. She, again, was considered extremely beautiful, and she was rich thanks to her first marriage, but she and her third husband, Hugh, weren’t particularly well liked in Springfield because they were extremely belligerent. One of the outlets of this combativeness, in fact, had been accusing a lot of people of being witches, including each other. Mary, though, had shown occasional bouts of undeniably odd behavior over the years, so rumors that they were witches had circulated, and both of these things were exacerbated when the couple’s two young sons had died. At this point, both were brought to the magistrates and accused of witchcraft. And Mary went along with it, saying that she and he were both witches, and that they regularly met with three other witches in the town. She was clearly out of her mind, though. Initially, the jury declared her husband to be a witch, and Mary to be innocent, likely even one of his victims, but when this happened, Mary made another confession. She said she’d murdered her kids. When this happened, the General Court refused to accept the verdict against Hugh, and refused to execute him. They convicted Mary of murder, though not witchcraft, and she died in jail awaiting execution. When he was released, Hugh left the town, and probably the colony, never to return.
Another couple of women in Connecticut were accused of killing other people’s children. The first was accused by a nurse of touching a child, who then changed color and died, and it was only after she was executed that the court bothered to ask the child’s parents what happened. The parents said that the kid had died of exposure thanks to that very nurse’s incompetence. She was in prison for adultury at the time, though, and died there. The second case was almost identical, but the father managed to testify at the trial.
The list of accused and executed goes on, but those are the most sordid of the tales. And, over the centuries, there’s been a lot of debate about why witchcraft trials happened. Some have emphasized superstition, almost treating these Early Modern people and early Americans as primitive in a way. But, in response to that, I’d emphasize the sheer number of modern ideas and ideologies that were emerging at this time, led in many cases by Puritans. Witchcraft was entering the mainstream at the same time as ideas we’d very much embrace as modern, after being rejected by leadership for hundreds of years as a silly folk belief. Obviously that played a role, but it’s not enough to explain the 40-ish years when these trials were happening, in contrast to the decades and centuries when they weren’t.
Similarly, fear, gossip, abuse, and the changing role of women have been frequently discussed and give some context, but aren’t sufficient to explain the outbreak. On this topic, though, it is quite interesting to note that the colonies most known for witch trials were the ones with the highest ratios of female colonists. New England was pretty unique among American colonies in that it didn’t have an overwhelming majority of men, and Bermuda was extraordinary in that it actually had a majority of women in the later 17th Century. We don’t know exactly when that became the case, but it would have at least been well on its way to being true in this time period.
Others have discussed the unique fear of living in the wilderness, surrounded by a huge variety of people settlers wouldn’t have met in England. It’s worth noting in response to that, though, that England very much took the lead on the witch trials. They didn’t happen in America until after they’d been going on in England for years, and after books on the issue had been published and sent to America. English people had been in America, and Puritans had had dedicated colonies for decades when the first witch trial happened.
The thing that’s common to all the witch scares, though, and which really brings all of this together, is that they happened in times of extreme unrest. This has a few interesting facets. First, of course, is the fact that even 350 years later we can see political rivals using this issue to accuse, harm and damage each other. Richard Norwood and Richard Bellingham were easily the most important political agitators in their colonies. They were people who were both high class enough and steadfast enough to be the leaders of movements which opposed the increasingly exclusionary and intolerant power structures in their colonies. They didn’t go the total radical way, which was probably inconvenient for the authorities, actually, but they also didn’t back down, and this made them incredibly important to the histories of their colonies. The fact that one’s daughter and the other’s sister were accused of witchcraft is in no way a coincidence.
Next, one of the more important, comparatively recent observations has been that the majority of the accused witches were of a significantly higher social class than their accusers. They were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly part of a landowning, politically connected family, and the same could not be said of their accusers. It was when witchcraft was part of the discussion that these people were taken seriously. In Commonwealth-era America at least, it was overwhelmingly not the case that the old woman living alone on the outskirts of society was being accused by the townspeople who just couldn’t get over her weirdness. It was the people on the fringes who were empowered against people who would have otherwise been fully above them.
This push for equality also plays into the Independent Puritan thing a bit, because that was very much their thing. Catholics and Anglicans, and even English Presbyterians to a slightly lesser degree, were unapologetically disinterested in equality. And, Anglican Virginia, formerly-Catholic Maryland, and diverse Barbados, had virtually no witch activity. Maryland did a little bit, but no one was actually hanged. All were run by Independent Puritans at this point in time, but the popular support and interest by-and-large weren’t there, so leadership had nothing to gain and everything to lose by stirring up controversy in their respective colonies.
So, it was at these extremely fragile, vulnerable, scary moments that weaker members of society were finding temporary empowerment and perhaps protection by accusing those who would have otherwise been untouchable. Add to that the superstition stuff and the women stuff and the millenarian stuff, and we have what I’d call a pretty compelling explanation of exactly how this all emerged.
But, there’s one last idea that Elaine Forman Crane discussed in her 2011 book, and that’s the possibility that some of these accused witches, especially those in Bermuda, and most especially the two who came on the Mayflower, were Quakers. And this is not something that the congregationalists of New England or Bermuda would have taken lightly. Getting rid of them, or stopping them from coming, was a massive priority among Puritan colonies. The time matches, right at the beginning of Quaker persecution. The fact that they were women traveling alone, fits. Even the Mayflower, itself, seems to have had some Quaker connections. So that is a very, very interesting little bit of food for thought.
But, that’s actually where we’re going to leave it for this week, because next episode, our topic is, in fact, the Quakers.