The Witches

The Witches

Stacy Schiff is a popular historical writer with a story-like narrative style that prevents a factual account from becoming dry. Set in Salem and the surrounding towns, The Witches is obviously about the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s. I found the style overly erudite. Schiff often uses five words for effect where one would do, which sometimes worked and sometimes came across as repetitive in a classroom, learning historical facts by rote, sort of way.

It was interesting to have facts separated from myth and Hollywood’s suspension of truth in pursuit of entertainment. None of the accused found guilty were burned at the stake. Most were hung. Some died as a result of horrible prison conditions, and one man was pressed to death—rocks piled on top of boards placed over his body in an attempt to make him confess.

Very few who confessed were executed, which resulted in a slew of people doing so, some even before they were accused, to protect themselves. The youngest person accused was a five-year-old girl. Though done in other places at other times, none of the accused at this time were subjected to trial by water—it was believed that a witch could not be drowned, so if you drowned, you were proven not guilty. Small consolation.

Interesting side note: Bartholomew Gedney, one of those who sentenced innocent people to death or ruination—the accused often had their property or possessions confiscated, sometimes before being sentenced, which left their family, even children, destitute—was the brother of my direct antecedent who had moved to New York before the witch hunt began.

The Mindset of the Day

I found it fascinating that the people of that area were obsessed with lawsuits against one another for the slightest of offenses, and that those offenses were remembered from generation to generation. Accusations of witchcraft often rang out against troublemakers from those aggrieved by them. The Puritans had few acceptable emotional outlets, women and girls—the most prevalent accusers—even less so, and were inundated with the fearsome consequences of being sinful creatures from birth.

The devil and his minions were forces one had constantly to be on guard against, which included attacks from the devil’s servants—Indians (these were real fears as everyone had a family member or knew someone else’s who had been killed or kidnapped in attacks), bodily manifestations of the devil, and people controlled by him, mainly witches.

The courts wrestled with the question of whether an innocent person could be possessed by the devil and made to do evil things without his or her consent, a question most court officials thought unlikely, though it haunted others.

The Lesson for Today

Seeing witches was an outlet for deep, often unvoiced or unrecognized fears and, once accepted, grew and took on a life of its own that few felt safe to combat. Object to the accusations of witchcraft or the court’s judgments and you were instantly suspected of being a witch yourself—perhaps in our time similar to objecting to making Mexicans or Muslims the scapegoats for our society’s problems and thereby risk being judged to be unpatriotic or a naïve supporter of terrorists, maybe even a terrorist yourself.

It is interesting to note that few historical records of that time were saved for posterity. Those involved who kept voluminous records on every other aspect of their day, deliberately left the time of the witch trials blank or vague. No such expediency will save us from shame if we give in to fear mongering today.