“The horrid calamity which, plague-like, spread”:
Understanding the Salem witch trials as a Social Epidemic
Benjamin C. Ray
University of Virginia
[Abstract: The geographic and demographic scope of the Salem witch trials of 1692 was
unprecedented in New England. Robert Calef, the Salem witch trials’ most trenchant
contemporary critic, used the metaphor “plague-like” to characterize the rapid geographic
spread and large social impact of the tragedy. A recent digital map confirms the same
epidemic-like nature of the episode. The present essay draws upon Malcolm Gladwell’s
illuminating study of social epidemics, The Tipping Point, to shed new light on the Salem
debacle and suggest that the conditions for Salem’s plague-like spread were determined
from the very beginning.]
The Salem witchcraft episode of 1692 is different from any other witchcraft
outbreak in New England. It spread quickly outside Salem village where it started, lasted
longer, jailed more suspects, condemned and executed more people, and ranged over
vastly more territory. Once it was over, the government repudiated the trials as a colossal
mistake—a great delusion caused by Satan. In 1710, the government gave monetary
restitution to those who had been condemned and to the families of the executed,
recognizing that the trials had been wrong from the beginning. How did this happen?
Robert Calef, Salem’s most trenchant contemporary critic, published his detailed
exposé of the Salem trials in More Wonders of the Invisible World in 1700. He likened
the unprecedented geographic range, the large number of accused suspects, and the
sufferings they endured, to a plague: “All which Tragedies [of the accused suspects],
though begun in one Town, or rather by one Parish, has Plague-like spread more than
through that Country.”
Six years earlier in 1694 the Rev. Samuel Parris, the notorious minister of Salem
village, used the same epidemiological metaphor and pronounced the Salem tragedy to be
“plague-like.” For Parris, the metaphor supported his view that the witchcraft affair was
so devastating as to be an act of God. In Parris’s words, “the Lord ordered the late
horrid calamity (which afterwards, plague-like, spread in many other places) to break out
first in my own family . . . .” Although Calef and Parris saw the Salem episode from
different perspectives, one secular, the other theological, both men used the plague
metaphor to characterize the episode’s frightening and unparalleled geographic and
demographic extent as well as its tragic effect. Nothing like this had ever occurred in
New England before, and it had happened rapidly.
I
Several years ago, as part of a research web site on the Salem witch trials, I
created a dynamic digital map that showed the geographic spread and chronological
sequence of witchcraft accusations starting in Salem village and moving through eastern
Essex County and beyond <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/salem/maps> (click on the
“Regional Accusations Map”). The map is a day-by-day display of the widening
geographic spread and increasing numbers of accused suspects across twenty-five towns
and villages along the eastern portion of the Bay Colony. An interesting feature of the
map is that it confirms Calef’s and Parris’s plague-like characterization of the Salem
episode. The map shows the accusations beginning on a small scale and staying within
the Salem village community, consistent with the size and scope of previous witchcraft
outbreaks in New England. As Parris indicated, the outbreak started with the two girls in
his own household. Yet within the space of a little more than a month the map shows the
doubling of the accusations and arrests. The numbers shown on the map continue to
escalate geometrically in the months that follow from the initial group of three suspects in
the village to a total of over 160 in twenty-five different towns.
In the end, the fifteen month affair resulted in 162 arrests, fifty-four confessions,
twenty-eight convictions, twenty executions, and five deaths in jail due to poor
conditions. Some 1,600 people are named in some 950 extant court records. These
people were involved in various roles: as complainants, accusers, accused suspects,
family members of the accusers and accused, ministers, magistrates, constables, jurymen,
petitioners, jail keepers, and blacksmiths (who made the shackles). Unlike other
witchcraft outbreaks, the accused came from all walks of life. No one was immune, even
the governor’s wife. How, one might ask, did this extraordinary geographic and
demographic escalation occur? Are there any parallels that epidemiological studies might
show?
II
Malcolm Gladwell’s recent analysis of social epidemics, The Tipping Point: How
Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, shows how seemingly irrational social
phenomena, such as fads in fashion and crime waves, can be made understandable by
noting their parallels to epidemics of disease. His explanation is that they share a basic
pattern. Like disease epidemics, social epidemics start small, involve contagious
behavior, spread rapidly, and cover a geographic area many times larger than their point
of origins. The most important phase, Gladwell emphasizes, is the dramatic moment
when everything can change all at once. He calls this phase the “Tipping Point.” It is
“the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point when sudden change brings
about unexpected results.” All epidemics, social and epidemiological, have tipping
points—the AIDs virus, the adoption of cell phones, the drop in New York City’s crime
rate in the 1990s, the change from white inner city neighborhoods to African American
neighborhoods in the 1970s.
Gladwell’s concept of the tipping point does not explain fully why social
epidemics occur nor does it not give much attention to the motives of the actors involved.
The concept focuses instead on social patterns and processes in order to explain how
social epidemics occur—their timing and sequence. As such, the tipping point concept
gives historians a way to identify the chain of causation as well as the most critical
actions (and actors) involved in the otherwise puzzling and seemingly incomprehensible
development of social epidemics—a crucial step in historical analysis.
The world of the tipping point, Gladwell points out, is not the kind of world we
think we live in, and we don’t believe other people live in it either, hence social
epidemics appear irrational and mysterious—something essentially biological and
mindless. In this kind of world very small beginnings produce effects that seem all out of
proportion to their initial causes. In the case of Salem it was just three ordinary
witchcraft accusations by two very young girls in the village minister’s house that set
things off, engulfing a large area of Essex County. “To appreciate the power of
epidemics,” Gladwell writes, “we have to abandon this expectation of proportionality.”
We need to grasp how “big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these
changes can happen very quickly.” This is what happened in Salem village in 1692.
III
In Salem village, Parris’s nine-year-old Betty Parris and his niece, eleven year-old
Abigail Williams, were the first to behave strangely. Their violent contortions, initially
mute, convinced the local authorities, the physicians, the ministers, and the magistrates
who came to observe them, that their “fits” were genuine. The Rev. John Hale, the
minister of nearby Beverly, described what he saw: “These Children were bitten and
pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way,
and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and
beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect.” Further,
“sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their
limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with
them, with bowels of compassion for them.”
There is no question that the authorities were convinced that witchcraft was afoot.
The girls’ disturbing physical contortions possessed what Gladwell calls the “Stickiness
Factor,” the psychological impact of which is evident in Hale’s description. Almost
immediately Parris summoned three sets of local authorities to witness the girls’ behavior
and render their advice: physicians, magistrates and clergymen. The social importance of
this group of people was crucial to the episode, and without them there would have been
no witch trials. Gladwell calls such people social “Connectors.” Connectors belong to
important social networks and are able to utilize them. According to Hale, “at length one
Physitian [Dr. William Griggs] gave his opinion, that they were under an Evil Hand.”
Hale continues, “This [diagnosis] the Neighbors quickly took up, and concluded they
were bewitched.” Thus began the critical word-of-mouth feature of the epidemic.
After Griggs’ diagnosis, Hale reports that “Mr. Paris seeing the distressed
condition of his family, desired the presence of some Worthy Gentlemen [the
magistrates] of Salem, and some Neighbour Ministers to consult together at his House;
who. . . concluded they [the afflictions] were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan
was in them.” A neighbor secretly directed Parris’s slave John Indian to make a “witch
cake” to feed to a dog in order to discover the identity of the witch (or witches) afflicting
the girls. The girls’ then accused Tituba, Parris’s Indian slave who was John Indian’s
wife, and the magistrates questioned her informally. She admitted to helping make the
witch cake, but no formal charges were made against Tituba at this time.
The news of Griggs’ diagnosis, the witch cake incident, the accusation of Tituba,
and the repeated performances of the girls’ “fits” in Parris’s house spread quickly through
the village and to neighboring towns by means of the ministers, church members, and
community gossip. People in these towns would later become involved as they dredged
up old suspicions and accused their own neighbors and linked their animosities and fears
to the larger Salem bandwagon.
Nothing like this kind of notoriety and geographic spread accompanied previous
witchcraft cases in Massachusetts. The two Salem magistrates, John Hathorne and
Jonathan Corwin, who were convinced that witchcraft was afoot, were not only justices
of the peace, they were influential political leaders who would soon be appointed
members of the Governor’s Council, and Corwin, later both would serve as two of the
nine judges presiding over the trials.
Disturbing as the Betty’s and Abigail’s behavior was, nothing legal could take
place until people old enough to formally testify (more than fourteen-years-old) became
involved. What made the diagnosis of witchcraft in Parris’s house sensational was that it
was attack on the minister’s children which was also perceived as an attack against the
minister himself. Two years after his ordination as the village minister, Parris became the
focus of intense opposition. In 1691 a newly elected village tax rate committee tried to
oust him by cutting off his salary, stopping his supply firewood, and taking away his
claim to the village parsonage. In mid-January 1692, at the time when Betty Parris began
to “fall ill,” as the records put it, Parris attempted to demonize his village opponents and
warned his congregation that “Christ having begun a new work [the new congregation in
Salem village], it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.” In mid- February,
when Griggs pronounced his witchcraft diagnosis, Parris spoke ominously of God
“sending forth destroyers” because of the village’s “slighting of Christ,” and he warned
his congregation that “Christ governs his church, not only by his word & spirit, but by
his Rod, and &afflictions.” That a minister’s family was under attack was amazing news
and added “stickiness” to the witchcraft diagnosis, lifting it above ordinary bewitchment
claims between neighbors.
But so far, no formal charges were made. Hale’s account continues: “In a short
time after [the witch cake incident] other persons who were of age to be witnesses, were
molested by Satan, and in their fits cryed out upon Tituba and Goody Osburn and Sarah
Good that they or Specters in their Shapes did grievously torment them.” The contagion
had begun. “Hereupon,” Hale reports, “some of their Village Neighbours complained to
the Magistrates at Salem, desiring they would come and examine the afflicted and
accused together; the which they did.” Formal charges were filed on February 29th on
behalf of four young females: Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, the first afflicted girls,
and Ann Putnam, Jr., who was twelve-years-old, and Elizabeth Hubbard, who was
seventeen-years-old.
Elizabeth Hubbard, grand niece and maid servant in the house of the respected Dr.
Griggs, was most likely the one whose age and family connection added weight to the
charges. As a member of Grigg’s household, she would have been amply informed of the
two girls’ behavior and her uncle’s diagnosis of its demonic cause.
It is also significant that Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam belonged to
households headed by prominent church members who were staunch supporters of the
embattled Samuel Parris. Indeed, the Putnam family and other church members were
among the “Neighbours” who initiated the first complaints. From the beginning, it was
evident that the people under witchcraft attack were mainly members of the village
church. And the majority of those claiming to be afflicted in Salem village and the
majority of villagers who initiated the complaints and accusations of the first two months
would continue to be church members. Ann Putnam’s father Thomas Putnam and
Samuel Parris, supported by other church members, began the long process of writing the
dozens of depositions and many of the complaints on behalf of the young female
accusers.
The fact that the most of the devil’s alleged victims constituted a specific group,
namely, church members, and were not just a random group of village residents meant
that the accusers were fighting against a common enemy. As time went on, the number of
village accusers increased. This was unusual compared to previous witchcraft episodes in
which a few accusers belonging to a two or three different families accused at most two
or three their neighbors. In Salem village Parris told his congregation that as the body of
Christ they were the target. This sense of collective threat resulted in a far larger number
of accusers making repeated accusations against a wide range of village suspects. As
sociological studies show, people are far more emboldened to take up sides if they feel
the are members of a grouphence the power of social networks. Such a situation
occurred in Salem village where fearful church members were led by a domineering
minister who had become the object of intense village-wide dispute
Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, and Elizabeth Hubbard were joined by three other
accusers, all young village girls two of whom belonged to church member families:
nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, a maidservant servant in Ann Putnam’s house, Mary
Walcott, Ann’s seventeen-year-old cousin and daughter of prominent church member,
Jonathan Walcott, and Mary Warren, a servant in house of convicted witch John Procter.
These five young females would comprise the core group of village accusers throughout
the episode. They would became the court’s star witnesses whom the Salem magistrates
regularly summoned to confirm every accusation from near and far. Through the Spring,
Summer, and Fall of 1692, these young females performed their dramatic “fits” and
“afflictions” as visible “evidence” of witchcraft before the magistrates and juries.
Hale’s statement that the village complainants urged the magistrates to “examine
the afflicted and accused together” reveals a powerful contextual influence. By agreeing
to bring the afflicted and the accused together in court so that the accusers could exhibit
their afflictions before the accused as evidence, the Salem magistrates disregarded
established legal principle about collusion among plaintiffs and flouted the traditional
clerical caution about the validity of spectral evidence. The Salem justices thereby
transformed the court into a theatrical stage worthy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Here
the “afflicted” girls engaged in repeated performances, screaming and contorting
themselves before the defendants and displaying bite marks and pins in their flesh to
judges, jurors, and hundreds of local citizens. In the course of more than one hundred
examinations, thirty-seven grand jury hearings, and twenty-four trials from March
through mid-September, the legal juggernaut moved onward involving fresh
performances at each hearing and trial session, confirming accusations originating well
beyond the local Salem community.
Epidemics are strongly influenced by their social situation, hence Gladwell’s
emphasis upon the “Power of Context.” In previous witchcraft cases, the Essex county
court records show that the Salem magistrates examined witchcraft accusers separately
and did not put them together in the courtroom with the accused. The records also show
the justices in these cases often refused to act on witchcraft charges or dismissed them as
libelous.
The reason for the Salem magistrates’ unusual compliance with the wishes of the
village church leaders lies in the fact that the justices were the village congregation’s civil
sponsors at the time of Parris’s ordination. When Parris and several of his “Neighbours”
requested the Salem Gentlemen to “examine the afflicted and accused together,” the
magistrates had a vested interest in doing so. They were the church’s legal protectors, and
Parris and his congregation wanted them to get to the bottom of the matter by means of a
face-to-face confrontation in court.
During the first examinations of the three suspects, it became clear that the one
defendant whose testimony was the most effective was Parris’s Indian slave Tituba.
Instead of denying involvement in witchcraft, like Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn who
were examined just before her, Tituba confessed and offered as much detail as she could
think of guided by the magistrates questions. Whether coerced by Parris who allegedly
beat her or not, she framed her confession around the idea of a compact with the devil, a
notion that was central to the Puritan doctrine about Satan and immediately convincing to
the ministers and the magistrates. Tituba’s story was not, therefore, the usual tale of petty
jealousies and suspicion by neighbors. It was a shocking account of the Devil’s attempt to
recruit a group of followers within Salem village to attack the minister’s family and thus
mount a major threat to the church. Tituba told of a Satanic conspiracy led by five
unnamed witches from Boston who flew in the air on poles and recruited conspirators by
making them covenant with the Devil by “signing the Devil’s book.” Tituba gave the
magistrates and ministers the kind of information they valued most—allegedly
eyewitness reports of village suspects in spectral form making compacts with the Devil—
in addition to a vivid account of her conversation with the Devil himself. Vulnerable and
possibly beaten by Parris and made to confess, Tituba’s strategy saved her life, and she
was never brought to trial by the special witchcraft court.
The theme of the devil’s compact was not part of the girls’ initial accusations.
But after Tituba’s confession they immediately picked it up and incorporated it into
subsequent accusations against new suspects, together with vivid reports of Satanic
masses in the field next to the Parris’s house, carrying forward Tituba’s initial testimony.
In this way notion of a Satanic conspiracy against the village church became quickly
established. Later, new suspects would see the wisdom of confessing to escape trial and
would tell of dozens, then hundreds of witches regularly meeting in Salem village and
confirm Satan’s plan to destroy all the churches in the Colony. According to one,
“Satans desire was to Sett up his own worship, abolish all the Churches in the land.”
Tituba’s confession thus became a model for over four dozen other people who
would confess to save themselves from trial. The confessors described increasingly
larger witches’ meetings and more compacts with the Devil, and provided the names of
more suspects from across a wide geographic area, thus confirming endorsing the court’s
activity.
Three weeks after the accusations began, another important Connector arrived in
the village. Samuel Parris and the Salem magistrates invited the Reverend Deodat
Lawson, Parris’s predecessor in Salem village, to observe the “afflicted” girls and preach
a sermon. Lawson was sympathetic to Parris and was deeply interested in the witchcraft
accusations. In a preface to his published account of his visit to the village, he explained
that his wife and daughter who had died while he was the minister of Salem village were
now rumored to have been killed by witchcraft. After his visit in March, Lawson
confirmed that among other causes, the devil was making use of the village dispute over
their minister. Lawson quickly wrote a sensational pamphlet describing the girls’
“afflictions” and the scenes of courtroom procedures in great detail. The pamphlet was
published in Boston in April 1692, thereby adding to Salem village’s growing notoriety.
At the end of March a fast was held in the village, and a separate fast was held in
Salem town. In early May the General Court in Boston ordered a General Fast throughout
the Colony in order “to Seek the Lord that he would rebuke Satan.” Within the space of
just two months, what had started in Salem village was perceived to be a threat to the
Colony as a whole.
One of the ways biological epidemics succeed in human communities is by
circumventing the body’s protective immune system. The same thing happened in Salem,
as the authorities ignored basic safe guards against an unchecked legal system. From the
beginning, the Salem magistrates failed to require the village complainants to post the
usual monetary bond for prosecution of their witchcraft complaints, a procedure that
protected the court against frivolous charges, especially in capital cases. Early on, the
Salem magistrates also stifled public dissent by arresting on charges of witchcraft village
critics Martha Cory and John Procter who openly challenged the young accusers and the
judgment of the court. On March 27th Samuel Parris reinforced the magistrates’ actions
by preaching a blistering sermon prematurely condemning the five village suspects that
had been arrested thus far and warning that there were more to be discovered, possibility
within the congregation itself. Parris thus created a terrifying vision of an uncontrollable
Satanic onslaught. Later, in early June after the first trial and execution, the government
silenced with a heavy fine the lone voice of the Rev. William Milbourne of Boston who
dared petition the General Court about the validity of spectral evidence.
At the same time, the government requested advice from Boston’s leading
ministers. Unfortunately, the ministers’ advice was ambiguous, and it was easily ignored
by the court. Most crucially, the ministers also failed to question the validity of spectral
evidence, which eventually became the central issue that stopped the trials. The
defendants’ pleas of innocence were also ignored, and petitions by others on their behalf
failed to sway the court. From the outset, then, the path for vigorous prosecution was
cleared and enabled the accusations to spread out of control.
Conclusion
By the first week of April the runaway accusations and the aggressive procedures
of the Salem magistrates sealed the fate of the witchcraft outbreak that would last six
more months until the special court of Oyer and Terminer finally was closed by the
Governor in late October, 1692. By April 11th, the authorities had arrested, examined,
and jailed ten people, more than any previous witchcraft episode in New England; and
new accusers were initiating accusations outside Salem village in neighboring Topsfield,
Salem Farms, Salem town and Ipswich. The usefulness of focusing on Salem’s tipping
point and tracking the chain of causation, instead of the personalities and motivations
involved, is that it shows that the critical threshold in the legal process occurred in early
March at the time of the initial hearings, much sooner than historians have generally
recognized. In hearing the first cases, Salem magistrates, gripped by the urge to defend
the embattled village minister and his church, effectively nullified the key restraints on
the legal process and stifled dissent in the village with the eager support from the local
ministers and their congregations. The Boston ministers remained ineffective through the
summer and fall, and the government in Boston firmly silenced any dissent as soon as the
trials began. This situation remained unchanged until the Boston ministers and the
governor finally came to their senses in late September-early October, and public reaction
also began to set in—“a strange ferment of dissatisfaction,” in the words of Governor
Phips. A second tipping point occurred this time strongly against the trials, which were
seen to have become plague-like and out of control. Thus ended one of America’s earliest
and most notorious social epidemics.
Further reading:
Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (New York, 2002) is the best recent work on the
Salem witch trials. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make
a Big Difference (Boston, 2000). Bernard Rosenthal, General Editor, Records of the
Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge, 2009) is the most complete edition of the nearly one
thousand court records discovered to date, including many previously unpublished
manuscripts. And it presents a chronological arrangement of the court records.