Chapter 1
âHanged for a Witchâ
Witch-Hunting in New England before 1670
Alice Young of Windsor, Connecticut, appears to have been the first person executed for witchcraft in New England. Only fragments of information on her case remain. One reference to Youngâs trial appears on the flyleaf of a diary kept by Windsorâs townâs clerk, Matthew Grant, which reads, âMay 26, [16]47, Alice Young was hanged.â Exactly why she suffered this fate would have remained an open question if it were not for a curt entry from the same year in a journal kept by Massachusetts governor John Winthrop: âOne _____ of Windsor arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch.â Though it did not include a name, the governorâs note is doubtless an allusion to Young. There were only two people from Windsor hanged in 1647, and the other one was the John Newberry who went to the gallows after being convicted of bestiality.1 These couple of lines constitute the entire surviving record of New Englandâs first documented witch hanging. The exact nature of the charges against Young, the names of those who provided testimony, and what they said all remain a mystery.
Although the passage of time has scoured away the particulars of Alice Youngâs witch trial, some information can be gleaned about her life. She was probably the wife of John Young, a man of humble means who purchased land in Windsor in 1641 and later sold it in 1649 before relocating to Stratford, Connecticut, where he died in 1661. The timing of his relocationâshortly following Aliceâs executionâgives the appearance of a man trying to make a new start after losing his wife to the charge of witchcraft in his previous place of residence. If Goodman Young hoped that the move would erase his familyâs association with black magic, then it failed. In 1677 Thomas Beamon of Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Alice (Young) Beamon, sued a man for saying that âhis mother was a witch, and he looked like one.â Beamonâs mother was almost certainly a daughter of Alice Young. Not only did she bear her motherâs name, but she and her children continued to suffer the stigma of witchcraft.2
What is clear about Youngâs execution is that it marked the beginning of an intense period of witch-hunting in New England. Authorities there initiated legal action against fifty-seven suspected witches between 1638 and 1670. Several were repeat offenders and so there was a total of sixty-five proceedings for occult crime during this period. Out of these episodes, forty-two resulted in full-blown trials and eighteen of these ended in convictions. Except for three lucky individuals who had their verdicts overturned, all those found guilty died at the end of a rope. These numbers represent a minimum, for there might have been more prosecutions of which no trace survives. For instance, the records of the New Haven Colony between 1649 and 1653 are missing, and there is a chance that they contain evidence of additional legal actions related to occult mischief. Moreover, before the 1660s New Englandâs judicial systems lacked guidelines for the systematic recording of court proceedings, which increases the chance that some early cases may not show up in written sources. Nevertheless, the combination of surviving court documents, colonistsâ diaries, and books concerning New Englandâs early witchcraft episodes penned later in the seventeenth century makes it unlikely that many early cases have been missed.
There were other activities related to witchcraft before 1670 besides these prosecutions. This includes seven documented instances where suspicions of witchcraft did not lead to any legal action, and there were undoubtedly many more such informal accusations that have not left a paper trail. Surviving records also indicate that there were nineteen slander suits involving imputations of witchcraft, which serves as a reminder that not all litigation related to occult crime involved the prosecution of the accused and that sometimes it was accusers who found themselves on trial.3 There are no clear instances of vigilante action, such as mob assaults or lynching, against witch suspects during this period, and it is quite possible that none took place. This dearth of extralegal activity can be attributed to the premium the Puritans placed on order and respect for authority and the fact that there was no need for individuals to take the law into their own hands since the courts provided a means to punish witches. Indeed, the only documented attack on a witch suspect occurred in 1684 at a time when New Englandâs justices were very reluctant to prosecute cases of occult crime. The incident took place when Mary Webster of Hadley came under suspicion for witchcraft and âa number of brisk ladsâ from the town dragged her from her home, hung her up until she was almost dead, cut her down, and then buried her in a snowbank. The woman miraculously survived the brutal attack.4
Putting aside the witchcraft accusations related to the highly unusual Salem witch crisis of 1692, which dwarfs every other episode of witch-hunting in the Puritan colonies, the legal actions related to occult crime that took place between 1638 and 1670 represent just over two-thirds of such cases in seventeenth-century New England. Most striking, all but one of the regionâs sixteen witch executions not related to the Salem crisis took place by 1670. In addition, the witchcraft trials that took place before this year produced a 40 percent conviction rate, while the thirty non-Salem prosecutions that took place between 1671 and 1699 resulted in only three guilty verdicts (two of which the courts eventually overturned).5 In sum, New Englandâs earliest decades of witch-hunting stand out in terms of their rates of prosecution, conviction, and execution.
When analyzed as a year-by-year progression of events, it becomes clear that witch-hunting in Puritan colonies before 1670 unfolded in several phases. The first, which ran from the late 1630s, when accusations of occult crime first began to surface in the courts, until late in the following decade, was a prologue to a much more intense period of witch-hunting. The second phase, covering 1647 to 1656, saw the rapid growth and peak of witch prosecutions. During the third, spanning 1657 to 1661, witch-hunting lost some momentum. This pause was only temporary, however, and the Hartford witch panic and its aftermath marked a return to witch-hunting between 1662 and 1665. The final phase, which saw a sharp decline in cases of occult crime, ran from the mid-1660s to decadeâs end.
While conditions in New England certainly shaped this course of events, the regionâs history of witch-hunting also intersected with developments beyond its borders, and so accounting for its changing contours requires an analysis that extends across the Atlantic. Historian John Demos developed a model for understanding ups and downs in witch-hunting that can be put to good use here. He argues that various factors served to generate or inhibit fears of the occult. In particular, Demos contends that âwitchcraft proceedings and episodes of conflict did not appear together, in the same time and place; instead they waxed and waned, in alternative sequence.â In its most basic terms, disputes ranging from wars to religious controversies distracted folk from the threat of witchcraft and consumed energies that could have otherwise gone toward prosecuting occult crime. Demos notes, however, that in the aftermath of conflictâespecially ones that fractured communitiesâaccusations of witchcraft often returned with a vengeance. He also observes that âharmsââepidemics, crop failures, and other large-scale misfortunesâand âsignsââearthquakes, comets, or other unusual phenomena interpreted as Godâs efforts to communicate his divine displeasureâcould trigger witch fears.6 These factors played out on a local, regional, and transatlantic level.
Figure 1.1 Witch-hunting in New England up to 1670
Foundations, 1638â47
New Englandâs colonists came from a land with a long history of witchcraft belief and decades of state-sponsored efforts to stamp out occult crime. England passed witchcraft statutes in 1542, 1563, and 1604 that made the practice of black magic a civil crime. The final law was the most aggressive in terms of the punishments it mandated, which is not surprising since it was enacted during the reign of James I who published Daemonologi in 1597, a treatise that decried witches as servants of Satan and urged their prosecution. The book joined a growing body of English works concerning occult crime, including Henry Hollandâs A Treatise against Witchcraft (1580), William Perkinsâs Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), Alexander Robertâs A Treatise of Witchcraft (1616), and Thomas Cooperâs The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617). These publications were part of a broader exploration of witchcraft that gained momentum among intellectuals in mainland Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and like their continental counterparts, their authors addressed the threat posed by witches and the proper means to bring them to justice. England put these laws and learned texts to good use and produced its fair share of witch prosecutions.7
In light of this heritage, it is surprising that New England saw no legal proceedings for witchcraft in the opening decades of settlement, especially considering that its Puritan immigrants saw themselves as Godâs chosen people doing battle against sin and Satan. Indeed, many of the ingredients needed for witch prosecutions were present in the region from the time the first colonists came ashore. English witch beliefs made their way across the Atlantic with the Puritan pioneers; they quickly established the judicial institutions needed to prosecute occult crime, and drew up legal codes that made it a capital offense.8
New Englandâs laws against witchcraft, however, went unused for a decade. It is often difficult to determine why something did not happen, and such is the case when trying to figure out why so much time passed before a witch was brought to book. One likely reason is that the Puritan colonists were simply distracted by the demands of settlement, and hunting witches took a back seat to clearing land, building communities, and securing them from possible attack by Natives or competing European powers. In addition, stamping out religious dissent among the settler population occupied the attention of authorities.9 Events back in the mother country also served to consume the energies of any would-be witch hunters. The 1630s witnessed a downward spiral in relations between King Charles I and Parliament, and this smoldering political crisis erupted into civil war in 1642. Anxious about loved ones back home and fearing that Parliamentarian forces (with whom the Puritans were aligned) might succumb to the kingâs army, New Englanders also worried about being drawn into the war if it spread across the empire. The conflict triggered other problems for the Puritan colonies, including economic dislocation and a surge in return migration to England that sapped their population.10
There are additional factors that may have inhibited witch-hunting during New Englandâs first decades of settlement. The main migration to New England took place in the 1630s, a decade characterized by a lull in witch-hunting back home, meaning that hauling suspected black magicians into court may not have been a vital part of many colonistsâ Old World experience. Timing may also be relevant in another way. It is possible that the opening years of colonization were free of prosecutions for occult crime because such events commonly grew out of tensions that were years in the making. In other words, during the 1620s and 1630s, New Englandâs fledgling settlements were not mature enough to have developed the layers of personal conflict and suspicion that generated witchcraft accusations.11 Then again, perhaps it was the Puritan settlersâ religious faith that inoculated them from witch scares in the early years of colonization. They may have believed that their status as Godâs chosen people gave them a level of protection against the Devil and his minions. More likely, the fact that the initial wave of migrants to New England was a largely self-selected group with a common background and set of values may have worked to mitigate the sorts of frictions that often sparked witchcraft episodes.12
Just because the courts were free of witch trials does not mean that Puritan colonists put aside their fears that people in their midst might have been guilty of black magic. More often than not such feelings went undocumented; however, witchcraft suspicions related to Massachusettsâs Antinomian Controversy of 1636â38 have left a paper trail. To quickly sum up this complicated episode, it pitted the authorities against religious dissidents they labeled âAntinomians,â meaning âopposed to the law.â Reverends John Cotton and John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson, and Henry Vane (who served as the colonyâs governor in 1637) led the challenge to Massachusettsâs civil and ecclesiastical leadership. Those in charge of the colony accused the dissenters of making the blasphemous claim that those who had received Godâs grace were free from civil law and able to supplant the Bible with revelations received directly from God. Anne Hutchinson was doubly offensive to those in charge: not only did she hold heterodox views but upended gender hierarchies by leading prayer meetings attended by both men and women. The upshot of all this was that the government vigorously suppressed the Antinomians. Their leaders faced banishment (Reverends Wheelwright and Hutchinson), left the colony of their own free will (Vane), or returned to the orthodox fold (Reverend Cotton).13
Rumors of witchcraft emerged in the aftermath of the Antinomian Controversy when accusations of occult misdeeds began to swirl around one of Anne Hutchinsonâs followers, Jane Hawkins. As it had done with her mentor, Massachusetts banished Hawkins in 1638 and warned her not âto question matters of religion.â14 By this time, a strong connection existed between witchcraft and heresy in Europeansâ minds, and Hawkinsâs ties to the Antinomians probably helped stoke fears that she was a witch. Her close association with the groupâs outspoken Jezebel, Anne Hutchinson, fit another facet of the witch stereotype, for many early modern Europeans saw witchcraft as primarily a female crime and believed that women commonly shared knowledge of the black arts with others of their sex.15
Reinforcing suspicion against Hawkins was her work as a medical practitioner. In a time and place where trained physicians were few and far between, local folk, most often women, filled the breach. Any housewife had at least a cursory knowledge of folk cures, while some women pursued medicine as a vocation. Others, such as Jane Hawkins, combined general medical services ...
