Richard Hite - In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692

FOR YEARS, historians studying the Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft trials have described Essex County, Massachusetts, as a powder keg in 1692, the year the trials took place. It is true that a variety of issues, at home and abroad, adversely affected the British population of the entire region at that time. The colony had labored without a real centralized government since the 1689 overthrow of Edmund Andros, royal governor of the short-lived Dominion of New Englanda revolt that followed in the wake of the deposition of Englands reigning monarch, the Catholic king James II. Though the vast majority of the colonys residents rejoiced at Andross ouster, they were still without a charter or any sort of governing entity recognized by the British Crown. This created difficulties in settling town boundary disputes, conflicts over ministers, and numerous other issues that had tended to arise in all of the New England colonies throughout the seventeenth century.

Compounding the lack of an official government was that once again, beginning in 1689, northern New England settlers had fallen victim to attacks by the some of the tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy (primarily the Abenakis). In the years prior to the witchcraft trials, the fighting in this war was confined primarily to the frontier areas of modern-day Maine and New Hampshire. Nonetheless, the Wabanaki raids terrified the residents of Essex County, most of whom remembered all too well the devastation of King Philips War that had The white residents of northern New England, primarily children and grandchildren of the so-called Great Migration British immigrants who had arrived in the Bay colony between 1620 and the early 1640s, generally associated all Native Americans with Satan, since the latter were not Christians. The French residents of Canada, primarily Catholic, were hated and feared by the Puritans for related reasonsthey were the wrong kind of Christians. It is not surprising that the threat of violence from both groups helped prompt these English colonists to fear that the devil was working to eradicate their city upon a hill established two generations earlier.

The lack of an official governing body and the threat of attack by the Wabanakis and French cast dark shadows over the lives of all of Essex Countys residents in 1692. The county consisted of eighteen separate towns,by the daughter (Betty Parris) and niece (Abigail Williams) of the communitys pastor, Samuel Parris, in January and February 1692, and the diagnosis put forth by the villages doctor, William Griggs, that the evil hand is upon them.

Once the witchcraft accusations began in Salem Village, the conflagration sent sparks flying all over Essex County. Before the end of the year 1692, fourteen of the seventeen remaining towns in the county saw at least one resident accused of witchcraft. Altogether, 156 people were formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay in 1692, all but eighteen of whom resided in Essex County. Eleven of the accused nonresidents lived in towns that bordered the county. One can look to the situation in Essex County itself and external events that affected the county to answer the question of why the accusations occurred at all and why they happened when they did.

To that end, numerous historians have thoroughly examined Salem Village (modern-day Danvers), where the accusations of witchcraft began in February 1692. In Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974) Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum examine in great detail how the village split into two separate factions prior to

Not surprisingly, the accusations that began in Salem Village eventually spread over the entire region, They initially spilled over into the town of Salem, which saw twelve of its own citizens charged with malefic witchcraft. Salem Village was not officially a separate town from the town of Salem in 1692 (even though many of its residents wished to be), a source of much of the tension within the village. Although thirteen of the other sixteen towns in Essex County had at least one accused witch in 1692, most of them did not experience the devastating effects on their entire populations that Salem Village did. All of the towns suffered from the lack of a legitimate central government and the threat of Indian raids. Salem Village was by no means the only community that labored with internal divisions over ministers and other issues. Despite all that, however, only one other town in Essex County experienced an explosion of witchcraft accusations on the level of Salem Village and the town of Salem in 1692. That town was Andoverlocated northwest of Salem Village.

The Andover witch hunt came about due to many contributing factors. Town resident Joseph Ballards wife Elizabeth was gravely ill that summer. Prompted by others, he extended an invitation to the afflicted girls of Salem Village, hoping they could determine if witchcraft lay at the root of her illness. This incident stands out in existing publications as the single initiator of the witch hunt in Andover, but it was really only one step in the process. Far more so than in Salem Village, sparks that led to the explosion of accusations in Andover stemmed back to people who were themselves accused. Samuel Wardwell, who died on the gallows, put the idea of witchcraft into the head of Joseph Ballards brother John when he expressed his concern that he was under suspiciona prophecy that turned out to be self-fulfilling. The frail Ann Foster told of 305 witches in the region conspiring to establish the kingdom of Satan, thereby giving the witch hunters evidence that they had only identified 20 percent of the devils disciples in the region by mid-July. Fosters granddaughter, young Mary Lacey, steered the accusations even more toward Andover bydeclaring its own Martha Carrier the designated Queen in Hell. The befuddled young Elizabeth Johnson displayed her own weapons of affliction, showing off some of her poppets (thought to be somewhat like voodoo dolls) in the courtroom. Sarah Hooper Wardwell horrified the magistrates and others by admitting to squeezing her own infant daughter in an effort to bring physical harm to a supposed victim, Martha Sprague. For a time, the atmosphere in Andover reached the stage where confessing ones guilt seemed a reasonable strategy for avoiding the hangmans noose. Before the accusations ended, no fewer than forty-five of Andovers residents were jailed for witchcraft. Three of those were hanged and one died in prison while under a sentence of death. Andover stood alone among the other towns of Essex County in falling victim to widespread witchcraft accusations, exceeding in number those in Salem Village and Salem Town combined.