Stacy Schiff’s Chilling The Witches Lays Bare a Frightening Chapter in Early American History

But one of the key facts that Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff makes sure readers keep in mind throughout her absorbing and unsettling new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, is that the residents of Salem Village were not American. There was no America then; there was simply a liminal space that was not quite European and not quite anything else, carved out of a wilderness by English outcasts only a few decades before and maintained by sheer force of will against the many threats encroaching on it from all sides.
The religious extremists who founded, and fought fiercely to protect the bodies and souls of, Salem Village must have felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that were out of their control: the weather, specifically an endless, pitiless winter; the native “savages” whose raids on settlements up and down the coast were as regular as the blizzards and occasionally as destructive; and the moods of teenagers, for which no amount of Bible study could account.
One can perhaps even understand how village elders could, under those circumstances, make a desperate—if foolhardy and murderous—attempt to exercise dominion at least over the spiritual well-being of their citizens. Being able to exercise that kind of control was, after all, the Puritans’ raison d’être, the whole point of their leaving the old world for this strange and precarious new one.
Schiff provides a wealth of colorful detail about the Puritans’ lives. Did you know, for example, that glasses were still rare in the 17th century, but hard cider was plentiful, to the degree that most people were squinting all the time and, no matter how pious, also half-drunk? Or that most adolescent girls, who had no power whatsoever, lived not with their families but as servants in the households of others? By providing such background information, Schiff makes it possible to appreciate the mentality of both those crying wolf and those hunting it. She helps us understand and even, to a point, empathize with these beleaguered, stubborn immigrants who conceived of themselves as God’s chosen people. “We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs,” she points out. “We just don’t know yet which ones they are.”
Still, she lets no one off the hook. Not the corps of teenaged accusers who, overburdened though they may have been with constant chores, spiritual practice, and impossible standards of behavior, acted out not by frolicking in fields with boys but by accusing mostly older women of frolicking in fields with Satan. Not the judges who operated on an assumption that anyone named was guilty and anyone guilty deserved death. Not the local reverends, who did more than anyone to work hundreds of parishioners into a self-righteous, fatal frenzy of Us versus Them.
A whole mini-civilization collaborated in this spate of internal cleansing, of religiously motivated neighbor-on-neighbor violence; it radiated out to Boston, Maine, and beyond. No one was safe. Vagabonds and misfits were arraigned as witches, sure, but so were respectable matrons, landowners, and pillars of the community. By the end of the regional hysteria, “nearly 10 percent of Andover had been accused,” and twenty individuals, including some with unimpeachable credentials as God-fearing Christians, had gone to their deaths.
These historical anomalies are always fascinating, and especially so in the hands of a master chronicler like Schiff. Equally worth pondering is the way people react upon coming out of what must, in retrospect, seem like a fever dream. Salem’s walk of shame took the village into the next century. It involved gradually recasting the accused witches as “martyrs” and “victims.” But no one assumed fault for the debacle, perhaps because, in a sense, everyone was at fault. Fifteen years later, “the names of most victims were cleared and some families reimbursed for prison costs, still without any acknowledgement of responsibility.” The story, the embarrassment, and the fact that neither could effectively be undone became part of the early history of our republic, a coming-of-age cautionary tale about the mixing of church and state that lingers with us for good reason, and will for centuries to come.