Reading the Salem Witch Child by Kristina West

Author:Kristina West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030493042
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

‘The Strength of Margaret Jacobs’

At the age of 16, Salem’s Margaret Jacobs is one of the accused who sits problematically within a claim to childhood in narratives of the trials due to varying assumptions on the relative ages of children and adults between narratives and within legal designations. Like many others, her accusation was a direct or indirect result of her family relations: she was arrested on May 10 along with her grandfather, George Jacobs Sr. on the accusation of Abigail Williams who claimed that Jacobs Sr. ‘had made Margaret set her hand to the book’ and ‘also that the said Margaret had hurt her pretty much to day & at other times & brought her the book several times to night but not before’.47 Margaret’s father had already fled in fear of such an accusation, and her mother, Rebecca—despite a mental illness of some years’ duration—would be arrested not long afterwards, eventually spending 11 months in jail to Margaret’s nine. Yet Margaret’s tale, even among such a litany of tragedy as this, is often related with a peculiar poignancy, one which results in her being called ‘hero’, ‘brave’, and similar appellations in some historical accounts.

At the time of Margaret’s arrest at this still-early stage of the trial section of the panic, the accused were being offered a stark choice: confess and live or deny the charges and be hanged for witchcraft. Although we know that this was frequently the case when looking at the trials in retrospect, Margaret’s evidence shows how blatant the technique of intimidation was and how early in the process it began; far earlier than the majority of accusations against Andover’s children in the subsequent months. As Norton comments:Margaret’s recollection of what Hathorne and Corwin told her at her May 11 examination marks the earliest explicit record of what eventually became of the magistrates’ most controversial tactics: preserving the lives of confessors so they could testify against others, while simultaneously prosecuting people who refused to admit their guilt.48

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