Revelations from Salem

What Salem Teaches Us

After yesterday’s lecture on British colonial development from 1607 to 1698, one of my students asked at the end of class, “what do historians think happened at Salem? It just sounds kinda kooky.” Oh goodness, my friend. Do historians have thoughts about the Salem Witch Trials … why yes they do: everything from moldy bread causing hallucinations to younger women trying to take revenge on older women to conspiracies against women obtaining property and power to fears of violence on the frontier to losers in the expanding economy lashing out at the perceived winners. For every historian, there are probably three arguments about why there was an outbreak of accusations at Salem.

 
When I lectured on Salem, however, I didn’t try to explain what caused it. I didn’t delve into it much, in part because we’ll discuss it on Monday after reading some of the court testimony from Tituba. During lecture, I pointed out that during the trials, about 150 people were imprisoned and about 20 were executed or died in prison. I use Salem to show not that the colonies were backward, but that they were growing and succeeding. I asked my class, could the Jamestownians of 1607 have imprisoned 150 of their lot? Could they have done it in 1608? How about 1609? Could the Pilgrims have done it in 1620 and survived? How about the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay? After the requisite silence (it appears that all large classes must have 5 to 15 seconds of silence after any question is asked), one student said, “well, no, cause how would they grow their crops?” Another quickly shot in, “umm, they barely had 150 people and everybody was too busy dying.” A third kicked in, “if you have to fight against Indians, you don’t want your people in jail.” Exactly! The witch hunt at Salem could happen because the colonists were successful. They had risen in number (to about 250,000 total in 1700 with more than 50,000 in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth combined) such that they had time for mass witch hunts, mass imprisonments, and even executions.

So I never answered why Salem happened. But I think it works as another piece of evidence for colonial growth, a growth that would then go into overdrive during the eighteenth century and leave many colonists believing they can actually take on and beat one of Europe’s most powerful countries in 1776.

3 thoughts on “Revelations from Salem

  1. Come on Ed! Tell us what you think? Causation is so important to explaining other things, and you are right to emphasize the one that you do. But I’ll look forward to hearing the results on Monday, because each of the historiographies you touch on in your first paragraph is largely plausible because of the larger goings on in the British North American colonies…

    Come Monday do tell…

  2. OK, wow… I’m having one of those, “why didn’t I think of that” moments. Groupthink does seem to require prosperity. Looks like I should revise my Salem lecture. This semester, I compared Salem with “The Great New York Conspiracy” of 1741. I found that this opened doors for discussions on the expansion and contraction of religious freedom, fears of declension, and the influences of race and gender on perceptions of religious (in)authenticity. I’ll have to look in to how your insight plays out in NYC.

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