Frances Hill - The Salem Witch Trials Reader

Persons Hanged for Witchcraft During 1692

Persons Accused of Witchcraft Who Died in Jail

The historical significance of the Salem witch trials cannot be overestimated. They were a turning point in the transition from Puritanism, with its values of community, simplicity, and piety, to the new Yankee world of individualism, urbanity, and freedom of conscience. Yet their significance transcends the purely historical. They provide an astonishingly clear and instructive model of the universal and timeless processes by which groups of human beings instigate, justify, and escalate persecution. Precisely because the numbers of people involved in the Salem witch-hunt, and the timescale of events, were on a small scale, the steps are easy to trace by which a few deranged, destructive human beings led ordinary mortals down the dark paths of fear, hatred, and envy to demonize and destroy innocent victims. When those steps are understood, the recurrent persecutions in human history, whether ethnic, religious, political, or superstitious, become less hard to comprehend.

The monster may be Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic. Or Senator Joe McCarthy. Or the mentally disturbed mother of a small child in a day care center in California in 1983. Or Samuel Parris in Salem Village in 1692. Whether operating nationwide or in a tiny community, the disturbed individuals extreme egomania and rage sow the seeds of persecution. These grow quickly in the fertile ground of anxiety and intolerance where particular groups, real or imagined, have already been scapegoated. The majority, who project their own envy, destructive-ness, and illicit desires onto those scapegoats, are now encouraged to demonize them further. Soon Nazi party workers, or Serbian politicians and soldiers, or U.S. Senators, or Californian district attorneys and child abuse experts, or seventeenth century Massachusetts ministers and magistrates, develop agendas that motivate them to push demonization to its ultimate limits. Careers are furthered and nests feathered. People with grievances, formerly powerless, are handed a weapon for settling old scores. As persecution mounts, it becomes risky to oppose it. Those with no other motive but to live quiet lives keep their doubts to themselves. Eventually the rule of law is suspended or perverted so that just means can be found to punish or destroy those perceived as the enemy.

The five persecutions I have cited differ vastly in the historical factors that allowed them to happen. The rise of Hitler would not have been possible without the legacy of Germanys defeat in the First World War. Milosevics ethnic cleansing took place in the context of the centuries old conflict in the Balkans. Joe McCarthys campaign against Communists was created by the Cold War. The accusations of Satanic child sex abuse against seven innocent people in the McMartin case in California, and against other innocents in a rash of subsequent similar cases, emerged from the superstitions of born-again Christians linked with the genuine concerns of social workers about child sex-abuse.

In Salem, the witch-hunt took place against the background of a Puritan theocracy threatened by change, in a population terrified not only of eternal damnation but of the earthly dangers of Indian massacres, recurrent smallpox epidemics, and the loss of the charter from England. It was triggered by the hysteria of a small group of girls in a village rent by bitter local conflicts.