IN THE DEVIL’S SNARE

The author of Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) evaluates a less edifying episode in early American history—the infamous 1692 witchcraft scare—and finds connections between the terrors of American’s Second Indian War and the colonial authorities’ endorsement of the trials.

Instead of writing another history of the oft-chronicled crisis, Norton (American History/Cornell Univ.) looks at the notoriously flawed and unfair trails from a 17th-century perspective. She quickly uncovers a number of historical threads not previously explored by scholars. Most prominently, Norton argues that massacres of colonists by the fearsome Wabanakis tribe during the Second Indian War and the colonial government’s failure to effectively counter such killings were the main precipitators of the witchcraft trials. According to the author, the contemporary Puritan worldview insisted that the military failures of such notable officials as chief judge William Stroughton and Sir William Phips indicated God’s displeasure with the New England colonies. Furthermore, Norton reveals, many of the Salem accusers had suffered personal losses at the hands of brutal Wabanakis. In her analysis of spiraling war fears and spiritual hysteria, the author contends that the state’s leaders were all too willing to believe allegations of witchcraft, which they convinced themselves was evidence of Satan’s rather than their own incompetence. Norton, a feminist scholar, blames the Massachusetts governor, councils, and judges for the executions of innocent Salem “witches.” Her fascinating new take on the crisis has particular relevance in our own era, when rumors of war and resurgent religious fervor again create a volatile cultural mix.

Blazes new trails into Salem’s well-explored history.