Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton discusses how the conflict on New England’s frontier shaped the Salem witch trials, revealing a story of trauma, refugees, and accusations in 17th-century Massachusetts.
“How long have you been in the snare of the devil?” That was the lose‑lose question asked of those—mostly women—accused of witchcraft in Essex County, where Salem Village was located, in 1692. According to the Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton, PhD ’69, however, it was the accusers, rather than their targets, who were in the thrall of something powerful. In her 2002 Ambassador Award–winning book In the Devil’s Snare, Norton says that the Salem witchcraft crisis was driven not by a demonic force, but rather by the trauma of the nearby wars with New England’s Indigenous populations—conflicts that had been raging for many years and had left an indelible mark on many refugees who fled to towns on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and correctness.
I think you counted 144 formal accusations of witchcraft across Essex County—not just Salem Village—over the 17 months from January 1692 to May of 1693. Can you walk us through, if it’s at all possible, briefly, a chronology of how the crisis unfolded?
Basically, everything started pretty quietly with two little girls in the home of the Reverend Samuel Parris—his daughter and his niece—having [fits] that nobody could explain. The local doctor could not explain what was happening to the little girls, and so he basically said they had been bewitched. So then—this was in January of 1692—and so then local grandees, including other ministers, were called in, and they then questioned the girls. At the end of February, they filed accusations against three local women for being witches.
And so the girls had started to name people; basically, adults, we could say, were badgering these girls to say who was bewitching them. And so the names that were produced were Tituba, who was the Indian slave of the minister, and two local women, both of whom had, er, reputations, shall we say. So there were these three accusations. Tituba confessed, and she said—she said she was a witch. I mean, she was an experienced enslaved person. She knew when her master said, “Confess to doing something,” you’d better do it, or else you’d get beaten. And so she did confess. And she said, in addition to these other two women—the local women—there were other witches that she knew about, but she didn’t give their names.
And so then there was this interest locally in who were the other witches and where did they come from. And so time passed, and some other women were mentioned—and one man—and basically it was all then … it wasn’t dying down exactly, but not much happened for some weeks. And then in the middle of April, a young woman named Abigail Hobbs, who was from a nearby town, Topsfield, confessed to being a witch. And she said she had been recruited as a witch by the devil in the woods near her house, which was not that in Topsfield, but was outside Falmouth, Maine, which is now Portland, Maine. And that’s what started everything off, in my opinion.
Before that, it was kind of—we would say it was a kind of a normal witchcraft situation. There were all kinds of other times in New England when a few people were accused, and then things are done with them—or not done with them—and then that’s it; it’s over. But in this case, there was an explosion of other accusations in a row. And that’s one of the things that led me into the importance of the Indian War on the Maine frontier.
Because she was saying, “This happened—the devil recruited me in the woods on the Maine frontier as a witch.” And so then, from the end of April, there were all these other accusations. The governor was away—or the governor was just being … he was a new governor; he arrived in the middle of May to find a lot of people, almost a hundred or more people, in jail because they had all this explosion of accusations. He then set up a special court to try the witches—to try the people who were accused of being witches.
And then, for the rest of the summer and into the fall, we have a period in which there are sort of trading accusations alternating with court sessions, because the court sessions are held sporadically. There’s one in early June; there’s one in late June; there’s one in July; there’s one in August; and then there’s a final one in September. And so the court sessions come and go, and as the court sessions come and go, new people are named because other people confess to being witches, and they name people who, they say, are their associates. And so more names get thrown into the … more. And everything finally dies down after the governor decides to dissolve the special court in the middle of October. There are a few final accusations from Gloucester in November, but then trials continue because you’ve got all these people still in jail, and you have to do something with them—you can’t just let them go.
So there are new trials under the regular courts of the province in January and May 1693, and then that’s the end of it. So it’s complicated.
You say, actually, that one of your kind of bedrock moments in doing this research was the realization that the crisis was really driven by the accusers rather than the accused. I’d love it if you could talk about that a little bit. Who and what was driving the crisis? Who sustained it? And what are some common misconceptions about it?
Well, let me just start by saying the way that people have traditionally looked at the Salem witch trials is to study the accused people. Most books about Salem are about the accused people—who have studied, in great detail sometimes, what did these people do, and so why are they—why have they been accused by their neighbors or other people of being witches?
But I realized that, in fact, it’s not the accused who are driving things; it’s the accusers. They are the ones who are deciding who gets accused, and then people respond to them. I’ll just go back one second and say that the reason everyone’s focused on the accused is that we all know they were innocent—that is, all modern people know these people were not witches, because there weren’t such things as real witches in the seventeenth century (let’s leave aside the people who hang out in Salem today). But anyway, so historians have always identified with the accused people, and that’s why they focus on the accused people.
But I realized that, in fact, what we had to do was focus on the accusers and the judges, because they’re the ones who are responsible for the decisions. And it’s not just the accusers; it’s also the judges. And so there was a moment—you’re absolutely right—there was a moment when I said to myself, “This is a work about accusers and judges. This is not a book about the accused.” And so that sort of switched the way I was thinking about things, because I realized that the accusers were driving things.
And so then the question becomes, Why did the accusers accuse the people they did? And then you have to decide who the accusers are. And there are different groups of accusers. There are people who accuse their neighbors—these are people with whom they have had longstanding complaints. There are people who will come in and say, “I had an argument with Baa, and she crossed me out, and the next day my cow [died?] and I now see myself with the cow.” And that’s the kind of standard witchcraft accusation you get, and it’s very standard in England as well—and Europe. That’s a well‑known pattern of accusation.
But what I ended up being interested in is the accused by the accusers who accuse people whom they don’t know personally, or whom they knew personally, as it turns out, on the Maine frontier, but don’t know them particularly in Salem Village today. So, basically, I became very interested in, in particular, the young accusers. And there was a group of them who were refugees from the Maine frontier. A lot of them were servants—they weren’t exclusively servants, but a lot of them were servants living in Salem Village, whose families had been wiped out by the Indian wars. And so I realized I had to find out about their background in Maine.
And that’s what took me to the stacks of the Cornell Library, where I pulled off the shelf something called the Documentary History of the State of Maine, because there was no history of that Indian War, which is known as King William’s War. There has been some modern work on the earlier Indian War, which is called King Philip’s War, which is better known, but which has never been studied in any detail for its Maine aspect of it. They’ve only studied it for the southern New England aspect. But when Jill Lepore—of course, she was a faculty member at Harvard—is well known for her work on King Philip’s War in southern New England. But, in fact, I discovered that there was a major part of King Philip’s War in northern New England. And these young women from Salem Village, who were the accusers, were refugees from Maine—partly from that Indian War and partly from William’s War.
Anyway, back to the Documentary History of the State of Maine. I pulled it off the shelf, and I started looking at the documents, and my jaw dropped. It was one of—you spoke about an “ah‑ha” moment—this was one of the greatest moments of my historical career. Everybody—I knew the names: all these people from Maine in the late 1680s and early 1690s. I was familiar with the names. There were accusers; there were accused; there were militia members; there were leaders of the colony; there were justices of the peace. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like they were all over this Maine—this … the documents from Maine. And so that’s what led me to focus on Maine and to focus on what was going on in Maine.
And it became the key to the … became the key to the book. And, as a friend of mine once said, what you’ve really done is written an Indian captivity narrative, because my narrative about Salem witchcraft—which I did not intend that way; I intended it to be a reinterpretation of the documents of the trials from a feminist perspective—that’s what I intended to write—instead, I wrote a joint history of witchcraft and the Maine Indian War.
I don’t think people understand—and maybe you can set the table for us here—just how close the violence was to the people in Essex County in the 1600s.
After the Pequot War of the 1630s, there were pretty compatible—I would say—relationships with Native peoples between them and the English settlers between the 1630s and the 1670s. But by the 1670s, the English population was spreading around—was, in fact, encroaching on Native peoples’ lands in both Rhode Island and Connecticut and southern Massachusetts, and then in the north, in Maine.
Maine was the big … was the frontier of Massachusetts at the time. And it was notable for its wood. Everybody wanted the timber from Maine, and they wanted especially the tall pine trees for shipbuilding and for masts and spars and basically the structure of ships. And so it was basically a kind of… There was kind of a gold [rush], we can say, to Maine in the 1670s as people moved up to Maine to draw on the timber that was there.
And so, in addition to the problems in the South, which had to do more with, well, all kinds of things: encroaching and expanding settlements in Rhode Island; expanding settlements in Connecticut; the use of land for livestock grazing, that sort of thing—it was very different in Maine. But in basically both north and south of the Boston area—north and south of Essex County—problems developed in the 1670s between Native people and the English settlers. And so warfare broke out first in 1675 in the South, and that war pretty much … that’s known as King Philip’s War. It’s been quite well studied, and it ends pretty much in 1678, although it ends in the South before it ends in the North. There are about six months more of fighting in the North than after the southern war is over.
And, basically, a lot of people flee Maine in the war of the 1670s, and they flee to the Boston area; they flee into Essex County, which is the far north of Massachusetts. Then, after the peace in 1678, they start moving back to Maine again because—hey, as I said—everybody wants the timber, the [fetch], and so forth. And so they start to clash with the Native people again, and that’s what leads to what we know as King William’s War. And it’s because it starts after the Glorious Revolution in England, where William and Mary are now on the throne. I call it in the book what the people at the time called it, which was the Second Indian War, whereas King Philip’s War was the First Indian War.
Everything in Maine lasted—I mean, there were many, many problems in Maine that lasted until the 1730s. Until the 1720s and ’30s, people did not fully resettle Maine. One of the things that made me realize how important the Indian War was was how often images of Indians crop up in the testimonies in 1692—not just in the testimony of the accusers, not just in the testimony of the accused; not just in other things. But people talk about seeing apparitions of Indians; it’s a palpable presence in their minds. And if you read the history of the Indian wars at that time, you see why—because, indeed, there was a major attack on Billerica, which is twenty miles from Salem, during—actually during—one of the trials. So, I mean, it’s right there.
And so one can see it has a grip on people’s minds. And I think—let me go back to my comment about the original thing—that historians tend to focus on the accused. If you focus on the accused and what they did to anger their neighbors (which is basically a word that comes down to you don’t know about, or you don’t think about, the fact that people are saying, “Oh, I had a nightmare last night, and an Indian appeared to me, and he had a hatchet in his hand, and he was threatening [me],” that sort of thing). So there was—by taking a … by focusing on the accusers, by focusing on the context, and by focusing on all kinds of evidence, not just the trial records themselves—that I figured this out. I went looking for all the material I could find from the time.
And so I went to the Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, and I called for basically every letter they had from the period of the late 1680s and 1690s. And one of the things I was actually very disappointed by in the beginning was that there were a lot of people who didn’t talk about Salem witchcraft in 1692. I thought, Why aren’t people mentioning it? What they were mentioning was the war. And this is true also of letters that went to England. I found that the material that I read—I read it, too, in the British and the National Archives—[was] very compelling, because people talk about the Indian War; they talk about their cousin’s experience here or there or whatever, and they don’t talk about Salem Village; they don’t talk about witchcraft.
And at first I was really disappointed: Why aren’t they talking about what I want them to talk about—what I thought they’d be talking about? But, in fact, they were talking about what was most important to them, which was the Indian War, which is the background for everything. Because they believe in the importance and the reality of the—obviously—of the invisible world. Remember, this was before the Enlightenment, before modern science. Nobody has a narrative to tell them, “There’s one thing coming in five days.” They don’t know that. So they … a hurricane blows up; a mysterious illness kills your cows; a mysterious illness kills your kid, who one day seems fine, and the next day is very sick, and then two days later is dead.
And so, witchcraft becomes the default explanation for all of this. And therefore, when you have what seems to be a mass attack on society by Indians in the visible world—and then everybody knows that the Indians are allied with the devil in the invisible world—this is a thing that everybody who’s studied Puritans knows about. It was something that the Puritans thought: that before they arrived, New England was under the control of the devil through the Indian shamans. And so when you see that the devil and the Indians are allied, you know … that explains why you keep witnessing this war. Because, in fact, that’s what’s happening: the New Englanders were losing the war.
Let’s talk about the way that this merging of the visible and invisible worlds plays out. Specifically, I’d love it if you could talk a little bit about the story of Mercy Lewis and her relationship with Ann Putnam.
Yes. Mercy Lewis was a servant in the household of the Putnams, and she was, in fact, a refugee from the Maine Indian War. And I discovered—from looking at her genealogy, or such as it exists (alas, a lot of the Maine records are destroyed, so it’s very fragmentary)—that a lot of her family was killed, first starting in King Philip’s War and then again in William’s War. She herself was a refugee from King William’s War who arrived in Salem Village with basically all of her family destroyed, except for one sister who had married a man in Salem Village. And I think that’s why she was in Salem Village.
She was a servant in the household of the Putnams, and Ann Putnam Jr., the young girl, was one of the first people to make a direct connection to Maine after the confession—born of Abigail Hobbs—who said she’d been recruited by the devil near her house in Falmouth, Maine. Ann Putnam Jr. seemed to know a great deal about what went on in Falmouth, Maine, but she’d never been in Falmouth, Maine. So how would she know what went on in Falmouth to put the stock in her accusations? And the way she knew, I argue, is because of Mercy Lewis. Mercy Lewis was the servant in her household; the two girls would probably have slept in what would be called the upper chamber, above the [room], and they might even have shared a bed.
I had this vision—I had various spectral sections of my own while I was working on this book—and one of them was of Mercy Lewis, in effect, telling witch stories to Ann Putnam Jr. in the night as they lay together in bed in the upstairs chamber of the Putnam household. And that—that’s how, I think, Ann Putnam Jr. becomes sort of the mouthpiece, initially, for a number of the accusations of George Burroughs, who is a really crucial person in my story—and who is not, by the way, a crucial person in anybody else’s, or hardly anybody else’s, story. But he was a man who had been the minister in Salem Village. And then—guess what?—he went to Maine, and he became a minister in Maine. So he was in both places; he made a logical connection between the two places. And he was regarded by a number of the people in 1692 as the leader of the witches. He was—the confessors said—he was basically the leader of the witches.
This is stunning to me, just because of our identification of the crisis with women: the idea that it was a man—and not just a man, but a minister—who was identified by the people at the time as kind of the leader of the cabal.
Right. And I originally … I knew from the beginning of my research that Burroughs was going to be important, but I had no idea of the details of the connection to Maine—again, when I started, I didn’t know that. And—I … he was … is really a crucial person in my book. But nobody else had ever really worked on him. Well, he was worked on by one other person, who regarded him as important because he was a minister with unusual beliefs—and that was true. But it was more than that. I mean, he became the real … [scene‑]setter, I think. And he was, in fact, convicted and hanged. Again, it’s not widely known that this minister … you can read books about Salem Village or about Salem witchcraft that do not mention George Burroughs—or that he’s only there in footnotes. And, again, it’s because historians identify with the accused. Who are the accused? They are women, for the most part. And so people haven’t focused on the accusers. And when you focus on the accusers, you find that they’re really obsessed with this guy, George Burroughs.
Is it a total of 19 people executed as a result of the witch crisis?
[People have] said that it’s 19 women, but it’s not. It’s 14 women and five men.
So 19 people total. And how many were convicted?
Well, a few more were convicted, but they were not executed for one reason or another. And one of the people who was convicted but not executed was Mary Bradbury. And she was not executed because she—she was prominent, as I said, and she had a prominent husband. He was actually on the council of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he talked the governor into reprieving her. And so she was in fact not reprieved, but the execution was postponed. And finally she was one of the people who was tried in 1693—or not tried, but she was released in 1693—because she’d been tried before; her execution was postponed because she was a prominent person, and her husband pulled some strings to get that.
And so she was not executed. And there were other women who were not executed. There was at least one who was pregnant when she was found guilty, and they would not execute a pregnant woman; she would only be executed after she gave birth. And, fortunately, she didn’t give birth until after everything had sort of fallen apart, so they did not execute her.
What kind of life do you live if you’ve been convicted of witchcraft in a Christian theocracy?
That was really tough on some of these people. And, in fact, years later—years even now—witchcraft … even though the witchcraft trials pretty much stopped after this, those accusations remained, and there were people who still continued to think of them as witches. Now, I did not do this, but a friend of mine, Chadwick Hansen—Emerson W. Baker III, officially—did a book, excellent book, about Salem in which he followed up on some of these people. It’s called The Storm of Witchcraft. And he followed them down—he followed their descendants—and he discovered other things … you know, things about what happened to them. A number of them left; they moved elsewhere. And they … it took—and I learned, I knew this from other material that I knew from talking to local people in the Salem area—it took more than two generations for people who were from accused families and accusers’ families to remarry, even though it was a small community, because there was so much fallout and continuing bad blood, shall we say, among the families.
Now, the Massachusetts government did apologize officially to the victims five years after the crisis, and in the early eighteenth century, they compensated victims’ families—that is, families that had had property confiscated and so forth could come in and make … make complaints and so forth. But, in fact, the Burroughs family was still submitting compensation petitions up until the 1750s.
You mentioned that a friend or a colleague said that what you had really done was write a history of Indian captivity. I wonder if, from listening to you, this is really a story about what violence does to people and to communities?
I think it is. It is about pervasive violence and pervasive fear. I think if you pay really close attention to what you’re reading in the trial records—and sort of the day‑to‑day‑ness of things—the overall sense one gets is of fear, of overwhelming fear.
People are falling asleep and having horrible nightmares—some of which directly involve Native people; sometimes they don’t. But, in any event, it is an atmosphere of fear. And so the violence was a part of that, but it’s not as though the violence was constant. I mean, the raids on the frontier villages were violent enough, to be sure, but they were sporadic. They were—you know, the Native people (it was the Wabanaki people on the Maine frontier) were, in fact, relatively few in number, and raids themselves were relatively few in number. But the constant fear of the violence was what lay behind everything.