Revolutionary Myth #4: All was well before the war

Part four of our series on 5 Myths about the Revolutionary War dwells on the pre-war period.

In the shorthand version of American history, the colonial period is one of peace and prosperity right up to the 1770s. But especially in New England, the 17th and 18th centuries were strewn with political conflict and open war.

Canada and New England ended up acting out the wars between France and England over and over from 1689 through 1763. In 1689, New Englanders overthrew the Dominion imposed on them by James II. From 1689-1697, New England was a battlefield in King William’s War. Just five years later, word came to New England that they were at war with Canada once again, for in 1702, Queen Anne’s War began. This war lasted until 1711. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-42) involved New Englanders recruited to fight in the Caribbean, most notably in the attempt to take Cartagena (in what is today Colombia). 65% of the 4,183 Americans who went to fight for Cartagena died.

In 1745 and 1758, New Englanders went to Louisbourg, the major French fort guarding Canada from the sea, successfully capturing it in 1745 only to have Great Britain return it to France in their peace treaty. Harried by French-sponsored Native American attacks from 1748-58, New Englanders retook the fort at great cost in 1758 (it was destroyed in 1760).

So we see that New England was in a state of almost constant turmoil in its colonial years, turmoil almost always caused by England’s wars with France. England spared few troops for North America, focusing on the naval battles in Europe, and more than once promised to send soldiers to back up New England, then failed to do so. This caused great anger and bewilderment in New England, which felt it was being deliberately endangered by its mother country.

Of course, the last in this series of wars between France and Britain in America was the French and Indian War, 1756-63. The road to revolution was taken the next year, when the Sugar Act was passed.

No wonder New England was the hotbed of revolution against England by 1764. A sense of betrayal and separateness had been forged by all those battles against France that New Englanders fought without British help. It would not be until 1815, when the War of 1812 ended, that New England breathed several decades’ worth of peace.

Next—our final myth!

Revolutionary Myth #3: the Revolution happened quickly

We look back and tend to see a constant boil of activity in the 1770s that led to revolution. But here in part 3 of my series of 5 Myths about the Revolutionary War, we will see this is not really so.

When you study colonial town or precinct records, you see that towns, villages, and precincts met once a year (“town meeting”) to set policy, settle debates, take actions, and elect officers. Reading the record books, it seems like discussions took years–meet in April 1737 to debate the town border, meet in April 1738 to debate the town border, April 1739, etc. While discussions must have taken place between meetings, official actions, committees, and decisions took place only at town meeting. Sometimes an emergency meeting was called to expedite things, but not always.

So with the Revolution. While history books and narratives compress events, leading you to feel like the timespan between the first punitive Act (the Sugar Act) and Lexington and Concord was about 1-2 years, it all unfolded much more slowly. The Sugar Act was imposed in April 1764. The Stamp Act was imposed in March 1765. Patrick Henry gave his famous “if this be treason” speech about the Stamp Act that same year. The Townshend Act came two years later, in 1767. The Boston Massacre was three years later, in 1770.

Usually the Boston Massacre is presented as the tipping point, after which Revolution happened with lightning speed. Many people, if quizzed, think the Boston Massacre must have been in 1775. But it was a good five years before the fighting began. Between the Massacre and Lexington and Concord was the Boston Tea Party, in December 1773. The “Intolerable Acts” were put in place the next year, 1774. The first Continental Congress met in fall 1774, issuing a declaration of principles…

…but still it was not until April 1775 that the war began. Why did things move so slowly?

First, of course, was communications. It took weeks to months for the Sugar Act or Townshend Acts to take full effect throughout the colonies. Thus it took that long for indignation to build amongst Americans. South Carolina would have heard about the March 1770 Boston Massacre in the spring of 1771. And they only heard about it through the determined letter writing of men like Samuel Adams; newspapers from Boston that published the story would have had it picked up by newspapers in neighboring colonies, like Connecticut and New York, and from there it might have been picked up in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, but beyond that point the story as a newspaper story would have died. It had to be disseminated by individuals’ letters, whether private or public.

There was also the winter. Winter made travel much more slow—sometimes impossible—and this meant not only that newspapers and letters traveled far more slowly, but also that all actions were on hold until the spring. Just as armies made winter camp in December and did not fight at all until April or May, so protests and meetings were on hiatus over the snowy months.

Finally, of course, there was peoples’ reluctance to go to war. Each event—Act, riot, shooting, speech—was endured or taken in and then made sense of in a way that would allow people to avoid the terror of war. Each time something happened, Americans hoped it was the last time something dangerous would happen, and that the troubles would die down and life could go back to normal. No people want to endure a war. So there was a great deal of effort expended on diplomacy and peaceful efforts to turn things around.

So really, there was no sustained fever of revolutionary activity in the 1770s, not even in Boston. Events hit people in the spring and summer, went into hibernation through the winter, and were superseded by less inflammatory, daily events the next spring—for which people were understandably grateful. It was really not until March 1774, when the Port Act went into effect against Boston, that events hit rapidly, and even then the winter of 1774-5 was quiet, with Paul Revere’s ride coming the following April 1775.

It is only when we look back and compress events from the Sugar Act to the North Bridge that it seems like a frenzy of revolution. In reality, it took 11 years, from the 1764 Sugar Act to the 1775 shootouts in Lexington, Concord, and especially Menotomy, for the Revolution to begin.

Next: Myth 4: All was well before the war

Revolutionary War Myth #2: Americans didn’t want to pay taxes

Second in our series “Five Myths about the Revolutionary War” , concerning taxes.

Ask the average American what their colonial forebears thought about paying taxes and she will answer that they didn’t want to—wouldn’t do it, in fact, and went to war over it. But this is not so.

Americans in the Revolutionary period were not against paying taxes to Britain. Again, they were British citizens, thought of themselves as such, and had no problem with paying taxes like any other Britons to support the empire. The problem was that Americans began to suspect that they were being asked to pay for the French and Indian War (1756-63) all on their own.

In truth, Americans paid far less tax than people living in England. Taxes in England in the mid-18th century were very high. America was taxed less for a few reasons: for many beginning decades in the 1600s the colonies were not able to produce enough to be taxed very much; England was afraid to tamper with the fledgling colonial economies; it was easier and faster to collect taxes in England, where the money could be in London with days rather than weeks or months; and finally most Americans had very little actual cash, relying on bills of credit issued from London.

America also cost England very little until the French and Indian War. While England fought France and Holland in Europe, defending the home island was the main objective, and the people living on it paid the government’s expenses to do so.

But when the war with France came in full force to America in 1756, Britain had to expend a great deal of money and effort to fight and win the war there. Yes, Americans were vital to that war effort, and many volunteered to fight the hated French, but in fact most colonial governments actually charged the British army for their help. British soldiers bought food and supplies at incredibly inflated prices, paid for their board, and fought beside American militia members whose colonial governments hired them out to fight, making a pretty penny for those colonies.

Once the war was over and won for Britain, Americans assumed things would return to normal. But Britain, realizing that its citizens in England were exhausted financially, while its citizens in America had actually made money on top of their usual robust economy, turned at last to those colonies to pay for their war.

The British government might have done it, too, successfully and without any problem, if it hadn’t been impatient. Rather than introduce higher export duties on American merchants and farmers, or some other more gradual measure, it came down hard with sweeping taxes that invaded every aspect of life—taxes on stamps, sugar, and tea that made life harder for all Americans.

Even these taxes might have been accepted, if Parliament had given the Americans some say in the matter. Americans had begun to expect that they should have seats in Parliament. As British citizens, they should be able to participate in their own government. Perhaps every colony could send two representatives to Parliament, so that Americans could actually make the laws that would affect them. But the British government refused. Despite American claims to the rights of Englishmen, there was no denying that almost from the start of the colonial era there had been a clear divide between America and England, and a sense of alienation on both sides. (see Why did America Rebel against Britain? for more.)

So London did not really accept Americans as Britons, or America as just another branch of England. America was a colony, a possession, a piece of property, and its people were not British citizens but dependents on Britain. There could be no seat in Parliament for a foreign people under British rule.

When the Americans realized they would not be given a say in their own government, including what taxes were levied on them, their willingness to help pay for the French and Indian War evaporated and a rallying cry was born: “No taxation without representation.”

Americans, then, did not rebel against taxes, but against unfair government. Those Americans today who see protesting against all taxation as upholding the Revolutionary spirit and purpose are completely mistaken. Americans realized then as they do now that a government must tax its people. You pay taxes to get services. But it’s only fair to pay taxes if you have a say in them through your government representatives. If the Americans had been given their seats in Parliament, their representatives would have voted for most of the taxes and that would have been the end of it, rather than the beginning of a war.

Next time: The Revolution happened quickly

Truth v. Myth: 5 Myths about the American Revolutionary War

Our 100th post is, fittingly, a Truth v. Myth bonanza.

I was sitting through a slideshow about the Revolution designed for third-graders last week and thinking about the legends we all know by name—Washington crossing the Delaware, Valley Forge, Yorktown—but don’t really understand. Me being me, I was inevitably led to think of five quick myths about the Revolution. There are plenty more, I’m sure, and these aren’t even necessarily the most important ones, but you have to start somewhere. So today we address the first:

Myth 1: Americans were on board with the Revolution.

The majority of Americans did not see any need to separate from Great Britain. While they might not have considered it “home” anymore, they did take a good deal of their identity from being English citizens. As part of the British empire and commonwealth, Americans took pride in Britain’s power and its traditions, and saw no reason why America was not like all of the other British colonies—founded by Englishmen, fully entitled to the rights of Englishmen, quite similar in culture to England, and basically just Englishmen separated by an ocean from other Englishmen.

This is not to say that relations with England, and then Britain, had not always and almost continually been rocky. (See Why did America rebel against Britain? for details.) But picture it this way: states fight with the federal government, and many western states are continually at odds with the federal government about water rights, public park land, gun rights, illegal immigration, and endangered species. But the vast majority of citizens in those states would never get to the point where they felt they were not American, and wanted to secede. Even if they did secede, they would do so in the name of “real” Americanness, which they would feel they were protecting. When states oppose federal policies, they almost always see themselves as upholding true American values or principles.

So with the American colonies. Fight as they would with Britain, they never thought they were less English for disagreeing with London. In fact, as usual, most Americans felt they were often lone protectors of English rights and customs. They were more English than the people back in England, who were losing their way.

Thus, when war began in Massachusetts in April 1775, rebel leaders in Boston were isolated in their insistence that America break with Britain. What could the benefits possibly be? America, even if it won the fight, would be forever cut off from British wealth, prestige, power, and trade. And that wasn’t just “British” wealth, etc., but their own; they were British citizens. Revolution was civil war, and even as victors Americans would be family-killers.

Most Americans thought the answer to the real conflicts with Britain was to get American representatives into Parliament. If Americans could represent themselves as English citizens in their Parliament in London, things would even out.

And so the majority of Americans resisted and continued to resist rebellion and revolution, even as the war progressed. Many Americans who supported the war still hoped that once it was won, Britain would have learned a lesson and relations could be restored. Many Americans remained Loyalists. But the bulk of Americans were really neutral. They supported their colony’s militia, as ever more loyal to their locality than their new nation, and wanted to preserve their own colony’s rights and privileges. When battle came to a colony, the natives fought hard. When it left, they sat back to let the colony now under attack defend itself. Whatever the outcome of the war, most Americans were chiefly concerned with getting their colony the best possible deal—whether as victors dealing with a new federal govermnment, or as losers dealing with Britain.

It would not be until the 19th century that pride in creating a new nation and “overthrowing a tyrant” (rather than severing a family tie) would take over as the common feeling in America. Ironically, it was really after George Washington’s death that the new nation looked back with admiration and pride on its accomplishment. From 1775 to 1783, however, Englishmen in America were decidedly cool toward their great revolution.

Next: did America go to war over taxes?

Should Americans torture?

Time for a civics lesson.

The reaction to finding out that Americans tortured prisoners of war at the Guantanamo prison and in Iraq, and seem to still be using torture now in the Middle East has been a debate over whether torture produces valuable information. That is, do the ends justify the means? Is it worth our while to torture prisoners?

(I have to take a moment here to say torture. Not enhanced or harsh interrogation. We’re talking about the same torture techniques used by the Nazis. Torture.)

This is unfortunate and un-American. The question is not whether torture works. The question is, do the founding principles of the United States support torture? And the answer to that question is no.

Torturing people—prisoners, criminals, anyone—is unconstitutional. It is a violation of the human, civil, and natural rights this nation was founded to preserve. The U.S. has never condoned torture, including during wartime. One of the things that set us apart from the fascists we fought in World War II was our refusal to torture. We upheld the law even in very difficult circumstances. There was no torture of Nazi prisoners by American guards at Nuremberg.

Recognizing the especial temptation to torture enemies captured during war, the U.S. signed on to the 1949 Geneva Convention outlawing the torture of POWs.

One of the principles we are supposedly fighting for in the “war on terror” is the need to uphold human and civil rights. We cannot do that if we violate those rights.

So the end does not ever justify the means when it comes to torture. The “they did it first so we get to” argument often employed to support torture is hardly convincing. As Americans, we are dedicated to the principle of not sinking to the level of terrorists and war criminals. We have passed laws to prevent police officers from torturing confessions out of suspects. It is illegal to torture American prisoners in jail. We have agreed, at Geneva, to laws preventing torture of POWs.

Dressing torture up as “harsh interrogation” or “enhanced” interrogation makes it easier for Americans to condone “some” torture “sometimes.” But we cannot afford, as Americans, with our history, to use Nazi torture techniques—on anyone. Philip Zelikow, of the U.S. State Department, testified to a Congressional subcommittee on May 13, 2009, on torture by Americans and said this:

“The U.S. government, over the past seven years, adopted an unprecedented program in American history of coolly calculated, dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information. This was a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one.”

Coldly calculating torturers—is that how we think of ourselves as Americans? under any circumstances? No. We have not in our history ever officially condoned torture under any circumstances, including war. The only Confederate official put to death after our Civil War was the commandant of the Andersonville prison camp—for torture. It is not a part of our history, nor does it suddenly need to become so. Any goal that can only be achieved through torturing people is not a goal worthy of the United States.

What caused the Revolutionary War?

I’ve been thinking about this question outside the context of New England, looking at the whole of the 13 American colonies (and even the British Caribbean) to figure out what led to revolution in the 18th century.

It’s easy to see how the Puritan New England colonies almost instantly developed a sense of their own nationhood, separate from England. Their religion and civil society were radically different from the ones in place in England. But what about the royal colonies of the Chesapeake, the Middle Colonies, and the South? What spurred them on when their religion was Church of England and their politics were, for the most part, in line with English demands?

I think it must come down to the important coincidence of the English Civil War breaking out just as most of the American colonies got started. Just 35 years after the founding of Virginia, the first North American colony, the English government devolved into civil war, which had many more immediate and long-term consequences for the colonies than we realize. Royalist and Parliamentary factions each turned to the colonies for support, trying to win the loyalty—and trade—of transplanted English people. Then, as Parliament consolidated its victory, it felt it had to build up a massive navy to protect its colonies from takeover by other nations looking to take advantage of the fledgling and conflicted English government. The massive navy led to many developments: increased English governmental meddling with/control over American trade, particularly in the Caribbean; war with the Dutch, which impacted not only trade (Holland being the largest trade partner of most colonies) but the Middle Colonies settled near Dutch holdings; and the new threat that colonies which did not hew to the political and religious dictates sent out from London would be blockaded and invaded by the English navy.

New England, supposed by the Puritan Parliament to be a natural ally, was exempted from the close scrutiny and interference with trade that the other royalist colonies experienced. But New England was cruelly disappointed by the new government, which came to support a religious toleration that was anathema to the American Puritans. New England offered no support to the new government, and its sense of being separate and even at odds with England itself grew even stronger.

Inside the colonies, there was conflict between groups supporting Parliament and those supporting the king. Even worse, men who had no real loyalty to either side used the opportunity to cause trouble. In Maryland, supposed devotion to the Puritan Parliament was the cover for ruining the religiously tolerant society created there by Catholics and Protestants, as Catholics were driven out.

By the time the Stuart line was restored in 1660, the American colonies had experienced almost 20 years of conflict with England. Moreover, those who had been born in England and gone to America felt that the country they had left behind, the king to which they pledged allegiance, the religion they had grown up in, were all gone. England was no longer home as it had been before, no longer the place they felt most comfortable, the place they wanted to re-create in the New World. England became a foreign land, run by people they did not know, embracing religions they did not like, and preventing the profitable trade they had come to depend on.

By the time James II imposed the Dominion of New England in 1686, it seemed like only the last in a series of provoking actions by a mostly alien government in London. When William and Mary were enthroned in 1689, the colonies all looked forward to improving relations with England, which in itself is telling: they saw England and its government almost as a foreign nation they had to establish diplomatic relations with. While William and Mary were popular throughout the colonies, the sense of division was impossible to fully overcome. Even while the colonies felt tied to England, and demanded their rights as English people, they felt they were not really part of England. And the English government felt the same way. A tie had been broken between them during the Civil War. The Americans were really the English-descended people of another nation by the mid-18th century, and as such would never be afforded full rights as English people by England.

If England had not gone through Civil War, I think things might have been very different. There would have been no reason for all but the Puritan colonies to feel alienated from England, or to feel that England itself as they knew and accepted it had ceased to exist. It was an unfortunate coincidence for England that its internal war had to happen just as its colonies were launching, severing the ties of home almost the moment they were stretched across the sea.

Continue the story—see how the French and Indian War triggered the Revolution.

Gay marriage, thanks to our courts

Decisions in Iowa and Vermont this week legalizing marriage for gay Americans spawned the usual outraged claims that the judiciary has gone too far. “We’re not governed by the courts,” sputtered one angry man on the radio.

This basic misunderstanding of the U.S. government leads me to repost this article, written last year when California’s courts ruled on marriage for gay people. It applies to Vermont, Iowa, and any other state whose court decides in favor of allowing gay people to marry:

The California Supreme Court’s decision that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional has been met with the by-now common complaint that the Court overstepped its bounds, trampled the wishes of the voters, and got into the legislation business without a permit.

A review of the constitutionally described role of the judiciary is in order.

The famous commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, talked a great deal in his books Democracy in America about the tyranny of the majority. This is when majority rule–the basis of democracy–ends up perverting democracy by forcing injustice on the minority of the public.

For example, slavery was an example of the tyranny of the majority. Most Americans in the slave era were white and free. White and free people were the majority, and they used their majority power to keep slavery from being abolished by the minority of Americans who wanted to abolish it. The rights of black Americans were trampled by the tyranny of the majority.

Before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the majority of Americans were fine with segregated schools. They used their majority power to oppress the minority of Americans who were black, or who were white and wanted desegregation.

In each example, the majority is imposing and enforcing injustice which is incompatible with democracy. They are tyrannizing rather than governing.

The judiciary was created to break this grip of majority tyranny. The legislature–Congress–cannot usually break majority tyranny because it is made up of people popularly elected by the majority. But the appointed judiciary can break majority tyranny because its sole job is not to reflect the wishes of the people but to interpret the Constitution.

If the judiciary finds that a law made by the legislature perverts democracy and imposes the tyranny of the majority, it can and must strike that law down. This is what happened in California. The court found that although the majority of Californians (as evidenced by a previous referendum) had voted to ban gay marriage, that majority was enforcing and imposing injustice on the minority. So the court found the ban unconstitutional.

This is not beyond the scope of the judiciary, it’s exactly what it is meant to do.

I heard a commentator yesterday saying the California court should have left the issue to “the prerogative of the voters”. But if the voters’ prerogative is to oppress someone else, then the court does not simply step aside and let this happen.

The same people who rage against the partial and biased justices who lifted this ban are generally the same people who would celebrate justices who imposed a ban on abortion. People who cry out for impartiality are generally only applying it to cases they oppose. See Dispatches from the Culture Wars for an excellent post demonstrating this.

So that’s what the judiciary does: it prevents the tyranny of the majority from enforcing injustice in a democracy. Like it or not, the “will of the people” is not always sacred, and sometimes must be opposed in the name of equality.

April 7, 1630: the Puritans set sail for America

Yes, today is the 379th anniversary of the Puritans setting sail under John Winthrop for America.

These were not the Pilgrims, who had been a mixed group of about 30% religious separatists and 70% average Anglican English people who just wanted to go to the New World. The Puritans were all people who fully embraced and believed in their mission to purify the Anglican church and redeem the English kingdom from its imminent doom (God would strike England down for failing to fulfill its commission to serve and worship God properly). Their settlement in North America had huge implications. Europe was embroiled in religious war (Thirty Years’ War, 1618-48). True Christianity seemed imperiled. If it succeeded, but the Protestants in Europe lost the war, the Puritans’ settlement might well be the last fortress of true Christianity in the world. Their colony would have to maintain Christianity in the world and repopulate England and Europe with Protestants.

So it was likely with heavy hearts that these people left England. We know from the diaries of many of the men on the Arbella that they were reluctant to leave their home land. Not only would life in America be difficult, but they felt keenly the charge made by their friends and foes alike that they were abandoning the English church, running away to protect themselves from God’s coming judgment, hiding from their duty to God, the Anglican Church, and their friends and families.

The Puritans responded that they were not abandoning their country and their fellows, but trying to carve out a safe space for English people to go to in America to escape the conflagration in Europe. Everyone who wanted to serve and worship God properly would be welcomed (and this proved true during the Great Migration of 1630-40). They weren’t closing the door; rather, they were opening a big window.

When John Winthrop made his famous “city on a hill” speech, this is what he was thinking of. This quote is often taken to mean that the Puritans thought they were better than everyone else, that their settlement would be perfect, and that everyone should envy and admire them. But what Winthrop and his hearers were really thinking of was their desire to make a new refuge for true Christianity, one that would shine like a beacon to all who wished to join them. It’s almost like the Statue of Liberty–the Puritan colony would beckon to the whole world, inviting all who wished to escape the turmoil and wrong doctrines of England and Europe to come and join them, to find safe haven in New England. Yes, you had to be on board with the Puritan version of religion–freedom of worship was never a consideration–but if you were on board, you were welcomed, no matter your social rank, poverty, lack of education, or even ignorance of true religion.

So today the journey began. Think of the Puritans over the next eight weeks; that’s how long their journey took. Winthrop recorded with relish all the “handsome gales” that thrashed their ships over and over; he could not be disheartened by any setbacks. He and the rest of the Puritans would persevere in their determination to maintain their lighthouse on the eastern shores of America.

What caused the witch trials in Salem?

Part the last of our Truth v. Myth series on the 1692 witch scare in Salem. Here we try to figure out what led rational, if religious, people to fear that multiple witches were at work in their community.

As I’ve pointed out earlier, while the Puritans did believe in the Devil and evil spirits and witches, they very rarely believed they were in the presence of real witches, and most of the time that someone was accused of being a witch it was simply a way to hurry the resolution of a problem (you encroach repeatedly on my land, you won’t stop, you laugh at my complaints, so I go to the court and tell everyone you’re a witch; this sobers you up and gets you to agree to mediation). When people were seriously accused of witch craft, they were usually outsiders who made no secret of their disdain for the group. They were not pillars of respectable society, church members, and magistrates, and children were never allowed to make public accusations of witch craft, or to appear in court.

Yet these things happened at Salem. That’s what makes it such an anomaly in New England Puritan history. Deep beliefs about adults having complete power over children were overturned, the universal sign of respect that was church membership was overthrown, and the accusation was not against one person but against an ever-growing number of citizens.

We’ve looked at varying theories about why this happened. In the end, it’s one of those problems that is very hard to resolve because we lack sufficient primary resources. All we can really do is throw our two cents in. Mine is that it was a combination of factors; that, as usual, there was no single cause.

The rye crop may have been infected with ergot poisoning, giving two girls weird physical symptoms. One of those girls happened to be the daughter of the Reverend Parris, the divisive minister of Salem Village. Worried that his daughter should be manifesting signs of demonic possession–he, a minister, and one trying to keep the people of Salem Town within the sphere of the Salem Village church–Parris was panicked enough to accept a verdict of witch craft rather than sickness, which was the original verdict of the midwife.

Once word got out that the minister’s daughter might be possessed, fears of demonic attack echoed the longstanding fear of American and French attack. Salem has already been in physical danger from American war parties, and now it is in spiritual danger from Satan’s minions. Maybe God is actually punishing or “harrowing” Salem to remind them that their safety is in God’s hands alone, and that He can destroy them by Indians or by demons.

At this point, a few other women are infected by the rye, so accusations break out afresh. Because of the new symptoms, the fact that symptoms are only striking Salem Village citizens, and the need of Parris and his supporters to maintain their power base against Salem Town, some of Parris supporters, notably Putnam (whose daughter was also stricken) decide to shift the focus from “Why is Salem Village so vulnerable to the devil?” to “Why is Salem Town not affected?” Accusations by Villagers against Townies proliferate. Salem Town residents are the witches, attacking Villagers in order to undermine SV’s religious centrality (remember, the Church in Salem Village is the oldest, the original and most prestigious Congregational church in North America, and Town residents wanted to split it by forming their own church).

Now it is a political battle between Village and Town, and a bit of hysteria and panic set in amongst the average people when their leaders don’t contain and defuse the situation as was usually the case. This causes wilder accusations because it is now consequence-free to denounce someone as a witch. Problems that might have caused only consternation before now seem to be the devil’s work. People who might have been grudgingly tolerated before were now denounced. The arrival of outside officials to investigate only seems to lend credence to the idea that real witchcraft is at work.

Once people are actually executed, real fear sets in. No one wants to protest the procedings lest they be denounced themselves. Plus, the average person believes that their usually rational system of government would not wrongly sentence someone to death, so the accused must be real witches. A self-perpetuating system is set up that is only stopped when the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony calls a halt to the trials, implying that criminal proceedings will be held against those who make any further accusations.

It was this reassertion of rational government that put an end to the trials. Why? Because the Puritans were rational people who loved good government, and they were used to their governing bodies keeping a tight rein on people’s behavior. When the Salem government abandoned this responsibility, for its own reasons, and did not make it clear that the second wave of accusations were not permissable, order was destroyed and society became lawless. When the MBC government stepped in to reinforce precedent, the scare ended as quickly as it began.

So although we will never know for sure why the scare in Salem became what it became, I do think that a combination of factors, most importantly the reluctance and then refusal of the Salem governing body to follow precedent and defuse witch craft accusations (sternly warning the accuser to accept the court’s decision in their case and not to hazard a second accusation), led to the frenzy of the witch hunt. In a politically dangerous time, a time of guerrilla war and internal division, a frontier town became unmoored from the legal and religious traditions it was part of, and chaos ensued.

It is part of the fascination of Salem that it was the only witch scare in North American history. If there had been three or four witch hunts in the 1690s, I think none of them would be as famous and hypnotic to later generations as Salem. There’s something about the singular incident that grabs the imagination. If Titanic and two of its sister ships had all gone down in 1912, it would be a case for shipbuilding engineers to ponder rather than the subject of dozens of movies and hundreds of books. If two women rather than just Amelia Earhart had disappeared on a flight it would be noted briefly in the history of aviation rather than the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation.

But the fact that Salem stands alone makes it less illustrative of Puritan society, not more. The Puritans believed in devils and witch craft, but they lived by rule of law, and they did not suffer witch scares and witch hunts to become part of the fabric of life. Study Salem all you like, but do so in the context of witch mania in Reformation-era Christendom, or how a breakdown in law and order leads to chaos, or any other context than New England Puritanism per se.

Why did a witch scare break out in Salem? some theories

It’s part 4 of our Truth v. Myth series on the 1692 witch scare in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony.

We’ve so far looked at reasons for Salem to be very much on edge by spring 1692, political and religious reasons that make this incident a little more comprehensible, but we’ve also tried to establish that the witch scare was an anomaly, not a regular occurrence or a likely outcome of Puritan religious beliefs.

Now let’s go over scholarly theories about Salem. For most of the 18th century, this incident went unmentioned, probably for shame’s sake. For the 19th century, the “Puritan religion was bound to lead to this sort of awful crime” theory ruled the day. In the 20th century, particularly after WWII, when humanity was focused on how a lawful society can morph into a grotesque culture of killing, new scholarship arose. I take these examples from an excellent book called The Salem Witch Trials by David K. Goss:

First, in 1949, Marion Starkey published The Devil in Massachusetts, in which she pointed out, at last, that a belief in the spirit world was not enough to overturn the Puritans’ hyper-rational understanding of the world, the social order, and the need for a calm and productive society. Starkey posits that the fear of imminent attack by Americans (from King Phillip’s War in 1675 to King William’s War from 1689-1697) led to violent attempts to purge the community, and that the witch scare victims were scapegoats for the French and Americans.

Samuel Eliot Morrison, the famous Puritan scholar, published The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England in 1956. In it he proposes that the writings of esteemed minister Cotton Mather, particularly his Memorable Providences Related to Witchcraft and Possessions of 1689, were practically a do-it-yourself kit for would-be witches and witch-hunters, and that the girls of Salem were faking their possessions and had to keep faking them for fear of being found out. While this view is common today, think about it: could you fake demonic possesssion? Can you vomit on cue? Can you do so for 8 weeks straight? Can you scream and writhe on cue so violently that you pass out? Can you do so for weeks on end? It’s not, in the end, a convincing argument.

Chadwick Hansen’s Witchcraft at Salem comes next; Hansen suggests that colonial MBC was much like other voodoo societies which exist to this day. People really believe in the power of voodoo, and the Puritans truly believed witch craft was in their midst. To Hansen, the people of Salem were not fraudulent but pathological. This idea, again, uses the belief in the spirit world to support itself, but does not take into account a) the physical demands of maintaining the symptoms the girls displayed, or b) the Puritans’ basic sense of practicality. And again, it’s clear there were many, many skeptics in Salem at the time. Not everyone believed the voodoo in Salem. Also complicating Hansen’s theory is the fact that he claims that there were real witches practicing in Salem, including the first woman to die, Bridget Bishop.

In 1982, John Putnam Demos published Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, in which he documents not just Salem but all cases of witchcraft that reached New England courts from 1630 on, and discovered that witchcraft belonged to “the regular business of life in the seventeenth century.” Most were the result of arguments over land, bartering, trespassing animals, or mysterious accidents, and most accused witches were eccentrics, usually women, who continually started arguments. The common pattern, followed at Salem, was: “(1) witch and victim contend over some matter of mutual concern; (2) victim perceives anger in witch and fears harm; (3) victim suffers hurt of one sort or another and accuses witch.” In many cases “victims” exhibited fits and convulsions, and claimed spectral visitations, just as the girls in Salem did. To explain why the Salem cases did not get resolved peacefully, as the majority of witchcraft accusations did, Demos, like many scholars, points to the American Indian attacks and political turmoil surrounding Salem, and sees the frenzy as “a culmination of many years of chronic factionalism and discord.”

1974 saw Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. They posited that the problem was all about land and quarrels over land ownership. It was an economic battle fought with dirty tactics. Some of the anti-Parris people in Salem Village (Parris was the minister) wanted closer ties with the commercial life of Salem Town. They were pitted against people who supported the conservative minister who wanted to remain farm-based and resented ST’s success. The accusers were all SV people on the decline, lashing out at the victims who were all successful ST people on the rise. This is an interesting theory, though one that does not explain the violent physical symptoms people exhibited.

In 1976 Lisa Caporeal published an article called “Ergotism: The Satan loosed in Salem?” in which she presented the very interesting idea that ergot mold poisoning in the rye crop led to the symptoms of possession. Caporeal accepted that it was beyond the ability of the SV girls to act or to scheme so well for so long, or to maintain the physical symptoms of possession. She also discounts the idea, popular in the 19th century, that the girls and women were simply all “hysterical.” How did all the girls get the sickness at the same time? What about adult women who showed symptoms? Ergot poisoning somehow affects women more than men. If the rye crop in SV was infected in places, maybe just at and around the farm of Ann Putnam’s family (Putnam being the first girl to show signs of possession) some people would show symptoms—vomiting, convulsions, hallucinations, the shakes—while others would not. This is an interesting theory, and would explain the real physical fits experienced by the girls, but also the limited number of people accusing in Salem.

In 1984, James Kences’ “Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1687” pointed out again that the longstanding threat of American attacks created the “extreme tension of anticipating an attack that does not materialize.” Many of the girls of SV who manifested possession symptoms were refugees from Maine, where the most terrible American attacks took place; Susannah Sheldon’s brother had been killed at York, Maine. Mary Walcott and Ann Putnam both accused men they thought were involved in helping the Americans of witchcraft. Walcott accused John Alden of “selling powder and shot to the Indians and French,” and Putnam accused the Rev. George Burroughs because he had miraculously escaped two American raids in Maine. And other spectral events had taken place shortly before the witch scare, including a hallucination of “two Frenchmen” appearing in a swamp and being fired on by terrified Salemites.

Carol Karlen’s 1987 book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman basically says it was all misogyny—“perhaps the strongest link between witchcraft in England and New England was the special association of this crime with women and womanhood.” The fact that three-quarters of accused witches were women “is illustrative of a tendency on the part of New England’s male Puritan hierarchy to use the threat of witchcraft as a means of enforcing female conformity to a subservient and subordinate role in society.” But Puritan New England actually offered women more political liberty than women enjoyed in England, and while misogyny was part of life in New England in 1692, the witch hunt was limited to Salem. Witch hunts are also dramatic, expensive, tiring, risky events: witchcraft accusations in Europe usually followed an epidemic disease outbreak, war, or visit from the Inquisition, and were definitely ways to scapegoat women, but they were not commonly used. There were many other easy, simple, common ways to keep women down that were used on a daily basis. Patriarchy is primarily maintained and established in daily law, custom, and religion, not unusual and dramatic events like witch hunts. In colonial New England, there was only one witch scare in 150 years, while patriarchy was exercised on a daily basis, so persecuting women as witches was clearly not the standard way to keep men in power. (Karlsen also offers no explanation of the girls’ symptoms.)

Finally, in 1991 Enders Robinson published The Devil Discovered. Here he claimed that it was a conspiracy, that Thomas Putnam, father of Anne, and the Rev. Parris, whose daughter was also an accuser, decided to take advantage of the girls’ accusations to destroy their enemies in Salem Town. A small circle of SV men appeared in court frequently, made lots of accusations, and had their names on many depositions and complaints.

Most of these theories are sound in their own way; next time, we’ll start wrapping up which seem most likely to have caused the scare.

Next time: The heart of the problem in Salem