To understand why Salem Village responded as it did, we clearly need to know more about the Village.
The evidence uncovered over the centuries points to a malevolent presence in Salem that has little to do with witchcraft: self-interest. Two Salems existed: Salem Town and Salem Village. The crux of the issue can be traced to an economic disagreement between the two and, more precisely, between the Putnam family and the Porters, both of the Village but the latter more affiliated with the Town. The historians do not bring in gender, conflict with the Native Americans, or even a discussion of the common occult practices; their analysis centers on a factional conflict with its roots in the changing economy of the day.
[Samuel Parris] had a keen mind and a way with words, and Sunday after Sunday, in the little Village meetinghouse, by the alchemy of typology and allegory, he took the nagging fears and conflicting impulses of his hearers and wove them into a pattern overwhelming in its scope, a universal drama in which Christ and Satan, Heaven and Hell, struggled for supremacy.
As history has not stopped reminding us, words from the right (wrong) person at the right time to the right (wrong) people can have a powerful impact. Rev. Samuel Parris may not have been Jonathan Edwards, but when the message one delivers is entertaining or prurient or piquant enough, one doesn’t need to be a powerful speaker. Salem didn’t wake up one day to hysteria; it had to build slowly, Sunday after Sunday.
Outsiders in these years were always more ready to deplore the symptoms of the Village's malaise than they were to examine its causes.
Salem is certainly a spectacle, and outsiders engage in plenty of tongue-wagging about its inability to keep a minister (and, soon enough, its devolution into witchcraft hysteria). But as the historians note here, outsiders were not well-equipped to actually do anything to help. They were quick to censure and slow to counsel; as the Village's ordination situation became a debacle, they watched from the sidelines and only haphazardly offered help. This may have contributed to the rancor that grew as the situation with Parris and ordination proceeded.
Whatever else they might have been, the Salem witch trials cannot be written off as a communal effort to purge the poor, the deviant, or the outcast.
One of the common misconceptions about the Salem Witch Trials is that the accusers were all young girls of poor or modest backgrounds, and the women they targeted all strange and unlikable, and also of poor backgrounds. While this describes some of the accused, there were actually many notable personages accused from the higher ranks of society; thus, this is an important corrective to a ubiquitous theory.
After nearly three centuries of retelling in history books, poems, stories, and plays, the whole affair has taken on a foreordained quality. It is hard to conceive that the events of 1692 could have gone in any other direction or led to any other outcome.
This compelling quote most likely resonates with readers, especially if they've given even the smallest bit of attention to the Trials. The whole thing does seem to be inevitable—the hysterical girls, the poor accused women, the histrionics of the trials, the flimsiness of the evidence, the eventual executions. Yet Salem could have gone in other directions, as the historians set out to explain, asserting that there isn't such a thing as historical inevitability.
The specific concern of Cases of Conscience, as of the ministers' June letter, was a legal one: what constitutes admissible evidence in witchcraft cases?
One of the most meretricious aspects of the Trials is the type of evidence that was allowed into the courtroom and used to convict the suspected witches. Painfully spurious accounts of how the accused were pricking the girls while on the stand, or how they'd appeared as spectres to Villagers, or how after they were aggrieved they targeted a neighbor's cow or pig, were used to levy a guilty verdict and a death sentence on nearly 20 people. The ministers were concerned with all of this, as they were representative of not just the church but also the state; there was no way this sort of due process (or lack thereof) could continue without making the Village—and by extension, the colony of Massachusetts Bay—a laughingstock.
For even though the Village's relationship to the Town was the crucial factor in the early history of the Village, that relationship was never simply a matter of Town versus Village. Within each, significant divisions were to be found.
The historians first establish the tensions between the Village and Town and then turn to explaining that this story isn't exactly about one of those two settlements, but of tensions within the Village. Some Villagers were pulled by the Town, engaging in commerce, serving as Town selectmen, marrying Town residents. Others were more ambivalent, and still others were openly antagonistic. This is an important distinction to make, as the Trials were a Village phenomenon.
...what was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself.
This is the text's main thesis: that what was really happening was a larger battle over the future of Salem Village. Was it going to continue to be an agricultural hub, a traditional Puritan stronghold? Or was it going to move past its pre-capitalist stage into a more modern, mercantile one? Was the focus on community to be supplanted by the will and whim of the individual? These are big, important questions, and Salem Possessed suggests that the tensions and anxieties over them exacerbated the witchcraft crisis.
Ultimately, the evidence for these relationships fades off into shadowy associations which are frustratingly difficult to document with precision...
The historians acknowledge the gravity of their task—to excavate people's thoughts, feelings, and motivations from centuries ago. Of course, that is not possible unless such people put paper to pen, and so all they can do is make educated hypotheses based on the records that do exist. They explain their methodology and its shortcomings in order to demonstrate their meticulous research and historical writing standards.
"Salem Town" had emerged victorious in the shadowy struggle with "Salem Village."
This is one of the historians' final points—that the Town and everything it represented supplanted the Village and everything it represented. It did not happen overnight, but Puritanical piety was waning; commerce was making an inexorable move to supplant agriculture; and modern capitalist values like individualism, competition, and ambition were becoming more manifest.
