In the Devil's Snare

“In the Devil’s Snare, then, contends that the witchcraft crisis of 1692 can be comprehended only in the context of nearly two decades of armed conflict between English settlers and the New England Indians in both southern and northern portions of the region.”

In this quote, Norton states her main thesis that serves as an anchor for all the other ideas in the book: She argues that the Wabanaki attacks on the northeastern frontier established the conditions for the witch crisis. Many of the accusers and accused had experienced traumatic events in those attacks, like losing family members and being taken captive. Norton shows how it was only after the devil’s invisible assaults on Essex County were linked to the wars in Maine that the crisis exploded.

“Less than a month after the devastating raid on York and following more than three years of unrelenting frontier warfare, in other words, the first person identified as a witch in the Salem crisis of 1692 was someone known to all primarily as an Indian.”

Norton strengthens her claim about The Connection Between the Wabanaki Attacks and the Witch Crisis by pointing out that the first person named as a witch was an Indigenous person. According to Norton, the English settlers were traumatized by Wabanaki attacks, which is why they likened Indigenous people to the devil—and in Salem Village, the devil was assumed to have taken the form of an Indigenous person. Norton sees a strong link between the two events. The violent experiences on the frontier that the afflicted had heard about caused them to unsurprisingly name Tituba, an Indigenous person, as the source of their suffering.

“The first three accused witches, then, could be characterized thus: one (Sarah Good) who had been previously suspected of witchcraft by her neighbors; one (Sarah Osborne) who was involved in a legal battle with the family of an accuser; and one (Tituba) who was linked to the Indian war. Similar patterns would appear again and again throughout the crisis.”

Norton points out the backgrounds of the first three women who were accused to prove that the accusations were not to be taken at face value; they were loaded with context and history. The accusations were a way to mark grievances or exact vengeance. The accusation against Tituba was undoubtedly racially charged and influenced by Indigenous people’s links to the war.

“The afflicted people’s behavior on Sunday, March 20, mimicked their actions during the examinations held in the same meetinghouse almost three weeks earlier. Then their antics nominally supported authority (for the magistrates relied on them to help reveal the guilt of the accused), but on both occasions they in reality turned gender and age hierarchies upside down.”

Ordinarily, women and children had no power in Puritan society. They were expected to be silent and compliant, especially in court or church, and they were supposed to always defer to men. However, during the witch crisis, the accusers—who were usually young and female—repeatedly had fits during church sermons or court proceedings and disrupted them. They were the center of attention, which shows a change in Gender and Power Dynamics During the Witch Crisis.

“Abigail Williams’ words linked invisible and visible worlds, implying the existence of an alliance between Satan and the Wabanakis. Thus the frequent references to the ‘black man’ by confessors and the afflicted establish a crucial connection between the witchcraft crisis and the Indian wars.”

When Abigail Williams, one of the afflicted, claimed that she had a vision of a “black man” whispering in the ear of one of the accused, the public likely understood that devil to be an Indigenous person since the English settlers often referred to Indigenous peoples as “black.” As a result, the villagers increasingly considered themselves under attack in the spectral and real worlds, with Indigenous people as the cause of their torments.

“Thus the magistrates’ failure to follow Richard Bernard’s advice about conducting examinations of accused and accuser separately and in private had significant consequences that left them struggling to maintain a proper decorum.”

The magistrates, Hathorne and Corwin, who conducted the examinations of the accused, consulted treatises on witchcraft (including a book by Richard Bernard) to determine the appropriate forms of evidence and for guidelines on how to conduct the proceedings. While they heeded much of the advice, they made the crucial decision to interview the accused in public settings with the afflicted present, which was a significant departure from Bernard’s guidelines. As a result, they essentially lost control of the proceedings while the accusers manipulated the court and their audience with their claims and visions.

“New Englanders were well acquainted with death, but not this sort of death. […] Yet Ingersoll’s vivid description revealed that he and his small militia contingent had found the carnage at the Wakely farmstead truly horrifying. English settlers in northern New England had never experienced the like before.”

Lieutenant George Ingersoll described the gory scene after the Wabanakis attacked a farmstead: A pregnant woman was scalped, an adult and children were hacked to death, and other corpses were partially burned. Many in Essex County had fled such scenes of terror in Maine, while others had heard the stories and feared the Wabanakis. Scenes like these were unfamiliar to them, and their fear of the unfamiliar merged with their fear of the devil. Norton argues that the trauma and fear associated with these attacks and the ongoing war set the conditions for the witch crisis.

“Once again, the enemy had materialized, seemingly from nowhere, at a moment when the English were most vulnerable. And once more the Bay Colony’s leaders contemplated ‘an awful frown of Providence.’”

The leaders of Massachusetts were doing a poor job of defending the frontier, failing in the face of a powerful enemy. Instead of accepting the blame for this situation, the leaders attributed their failure to God’s displeasure. Norton argues that it was convenient for these leaders to equate the Wabanakis with the devil since this would absolve them of responsibility for their failures. They could claim they were under attack from the devil in the visible and invisible worlds.

“Abigail Hobbs’s confession on April 19 caused Essex County residents to connect their fears of neighbors long suspected of malefic acts with their newer concerns about the consequences of the Second Indian War, a pattern that soon manifested itself in several different towns.”

Abigail Hobbs confessed that she had been recruited by the devil in Maine and that the devil had also recruited others there. With the horrors of the Maine frontier now depicted as the work of the devil who was loose in Essex County, people started making accusations against the suspicious neighbors or those who slighted them. Thus, Hobbs directly connected the Wabanaki attacks and the witch crisis.

“That George Burroughs had indeed spectrally allied himself to Satan and the Wabanakis might well have appeared likely to anyone who contemplated his uncanny ability to survive the attacks on Falmouth in August 1676 and September 1689, followed by his remarkably prescient decision to leave the Casco Bay region sometime in the winter of 1689-90.”

Burroughs was alleged to be the leader of the witches and was accused of several crimes, including murder. The fact that he had narrowly escaped multiple attacks in Maine was attributed to his alliance with the Wabanakis and the devil. In this way, the accusations against him linked the Wabanaki attacks in Maine with the witch crisis.

“Mercy’s decisive role in creating the outcome by declaring Ann Jr.’s initial identification faulty revealed that she had effectively assumed the leadership of the primary group of accusers.”

While Mary Lewis and Ann, Jr., had made accusations together, Lewis emerged as the leader of the accusers after she refuted Ann, Jr.’s testimony, which resulted in one of the accused being freed. Lewis’s family had been killed in the attacks in Maine, and she was likely traumatized by these events, leading to her role as primary accuser during the trials. She led the charge in accusing those from Maine, such as Burroughs, whom she undoubtedly resented surviving the attacks that her family had perished in.

“Thus in the invisible world the afflicted, in effect, assumed the role of magistrates. They listened to the testimony of spectral witnesses (the murder victims) and extracted confessions that Hathorne and Corwin could not.”

Confessions were deemed the best form of evidence against witches, and the magistrates failed to obtain many of those. Instead, the accusers claimed that the accusers’ specters confessed to them and that the ghosts of their victims appeared to proclaim them guilty. In a disruption of gender dynamics, the mainly female accusers were acting the part of magistrates.

“Margaret’s recollection of what Hathorne and Corwin told her at her May 11 examination marks the earliest explicit record of what eventually became one of the magistrates’ most controversial tactics: preserving the lives of confessors so that they could testify against others, while simultaneously prosecuting people who refused to admit their guilt.”

The magistrates conducted the trial with the assumption that all the accused were guilty. So, they typically spared the lives of those who confessed to being witches, manipulating them into confessing in order to escape with their lives. The magistrates also believed that a confessed witch’s testimony against another accused witch was the second-best form of evidence—an outright confession being the best. Norton points out how this strategy was a travesty of justice.

“Essentially single-handedly, Mercy Lewis had prevented Easty from being freed, a development that underscores her leadership of the sufferers.”

Norton shows that Mercy Lewis was the most influential of the accusers. In this case, Lewis claimed to be tortured by Easty’s specter after she was released on the grounds that no confessors named her and there had been no additional torments for a month. Not only was Easty taken back into custody after Lewis’s new accusation, but others, following Lewis’s lead, also began to make complaints about her.

“At least from the vantage point of the accused and their allies, the actions of the afflicted appeared to determine a suspect’s fate. The examining magistrates were assuming the guilt of everyone brought before them, regardless of sex or status.”

The afflicted, mainly young women, were determining the outcome of examinations and later trials, with the magistrates not playing the part of neutral arbiters. In a disruption of gender dynamics, these young women were performing public functions. The accused stood no chance of a fair trial given the power the accusers had over the magistrates and judges who believed them unquestioningly.

“Yet a nagging problem loomed: many suspects did not confess directly to the magistrates. Instead, their specters had admitted guilt to the afflicted Villagers. How should such spectral confessions be assessed?”

It was on the basis of such spectral evidence that several of the accused were condemned throughout the summer. When ministers and others began to question the reliability of this evidence in the fall, positing the possibility of the devil appearing in the form of innocent people, support for the witch trials sharply declined.

“That such minor, commonplace disputes and differences of opinion could end up being interpreted as motives for murder—at least when one of the parties was a suspected witch—reveals a great deal about the mindset of people in Essex County in early June 1692.”

Norton maintains that the people of Essex County saw themselves as under attack in the visible world from the Wabanakis and the invisible world from witches. In this context of fear and mistrust, people made accusations of specters confessing to murder or threatening murders for nonsensical reasons. Those suspected of witchcraft previously were the most vulnerable to such accusations.

“These men, members of the council as well as judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, were by midsummer heavily invested in the belief that Satan lay behind the troubles then besetting their colony.”

Norton argues that the leaders of the colony would not be held responsible for their failure to defend the frontier if Satan was responsible for it; therefore, they were motivated to believe the accusers. She cites the conviction of Rebecca Nurse as demonstrative of their genuine beliefs in witchcraft. In other circumstances, authorities would rush to defend someone of Nurse’s social standing.

“The futility of that plea for help becomes evident when one realizes that the men passing judgment on it were the judges and their council colleagues.”

John Proctor and others who were imprisoned on witchcraft charges wrote petitions to Boston clergymen and to Governor Phips. They requested a change of venue and different judges. Emphasizing the governor’s responsibility for the crisis, Norton notes that he failed to take action and followed the advice of the judges of the court against whom the petitioners were bringing charges of bias.

“For their part, the magistrates no longer seemed to distinguish among the different groups of sufferers. The justices appear to have accounted all the testimony equally credible. The conflation of the afflicted and the confessors once again raised questions about the possible alliance of the accusers with the devil and his witches.”

Noting the extreme bias of the magistrates, Norton highlights their unquestioning acceptance of the allegations made by the afflicted and those confessing to witchcraft. The afflicted were susceptible to charges of witchcraft themselves, as they walked a fine line. When they had fits and experienced torment in the courtroom, they distinguished themselves from the confessors in the minds of the judges.

“Parris’s description of the witches’ assault in terms that summoned up images of attacks by the Indians and French must have sent shivers of fear through his audience—fear for their lives and for their souls. Parris warned the congregation of internal as well as external enemies.”

Emphasizing the connection between the Wabanaki attacks and the witch crisis, Norton notes how Reverend Parris’s sermon kept that linkage foremost in the minds of his congregants. The residents of Essex County accordingly felt besieged and were on the lookout for enemies within.

“Next, to be blunt, he lied. ‘I was almost the whole time of the proceeding abroad in the service of Their Majesties in the Eastern part of the Country,’ Phips falsely claimed […] he had in fact been in Boston during most of the court sessions.”

Norton explains that Governor Phips was informed fully of the proceedings in Salem during the crisis and supported them. Yet, when public opinion turned against the trials, he attempted to deny his involvement. This extract in the quote was part of his report to London.

“Accordingly, had the Second Indian War on the northeastern frontier somehow been avoided, the Essex County witchcraft crisis of 1692 would not have occurred.”

Norton is not claiming that the war caused the crisis but rather that it set the stage for it. Throughout the work, Norton argues for the importance of the connection between the Wabanaki attacks and the witch crisis, and in this quote, she makes the bold claim that the witch crisis would not have occurred if King William’s War hadn’t taken place.