Schiff, Stacy - The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Schiff Stacy

Author:Schiff, Stacy [Schiff, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

WHEN YOU DESIGNATE yourselves “a flock in the wilderness,” you are very nearly advertising for predators. A host of them had preyed—or been expected to prey—on New England since its founding. In the words of Mary Rowlandson (who may have had ministerial help with them), the Indians were “ravenous wolves,” “roaring lions and savage bears.” In Mather’s pages Native Americans regularly turned up as tigers, the devil as a tiger or a roaring lion. The Quakers comported themselves as “grievous wolves.” They joined the French and Indians to complete New England’s diabolical menagerie, its lions, tigers, and bears. Bewitched at her May hearing, Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank. Only outside the meetinghouse did she find relief from the “paws of those roaring lions and jaws of those tearing bears”—words she borrowed from Lawson’s March 25 sermon. As physical and moral boundaries blurred, so did the rampaging, ravaging predators. (Parris was far from alone in his thinking when, in a May sermon, he lumped together Louis XIV, his Catholic confederates, and a witch-and-wizard-instigating devil, at least two of whom were nowhere in the neighborhood.)* In most statements you could substitute the word “Indian” for “Catholic” without altering the meaning of the phrase. Inevitably it entailed subversion.†

The Indians were of course also “horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers.” That made sense; the wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den.” Since the time of Moses, the Prince of Darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans, in “a corner of the world where he had reigned without any control for many ages.” In fact he was livid about it, asserted Mather, who regularly muddied the zoological waters. Indians, wolves, and devils constituted the “dragons of the wilderness.” To join the Church of England was, in Mather’s estimation, to be bewitched. Quakers were a leprous people in the devil’s snare. He deemed their religion every bit as wholesome as “juice of toads.” Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable climate, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil.

The muddled fears produced a snarl of blame. When fire broke out in Boston, it was said to be the work of Baptists. Who slit the throats of the sheep grazing late on Cambridge Common? It had been wolves, but it made sense, late in 1691, to ban Frenchmen anyway. In 1689, agitating against Andros, Mather referred to the (fictitious) decade-old Popish Plot, still vivid in the New England mind. The new Indian war seemed “a branch of the plot to bring us low.” Mather ascribed Phips’s disastrous Quebec campaign to the Anglican presence in Boston; it made the Lord angry. It helped that conspiracies came as naturally as did covenants to a New Englander, with his sense of sanctified mission and his insistence on purity. As an Indian informant put it, the colonists were as “apt to believe as children.”* They felt themselves stalked on all sides.

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