The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. It ended less than a year later after nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter started to scream and convulse.
The agonies of Salem were bound in place and time, in ways that demand a knowingness about ideas as well as a feeling for faces and weather. How could such a thing happen then, and there, among them? How do good people, reasonable people, do great evil? This was a society in which there was certainly about the presence of evil and the devil in society and when tensions is society seemed insolvable and attitudes irreconcilable, finding scapegoats on whom to transfer the community’s paranoia and angst found ready expression in the charge of witchcraft.
The essential paradox of Salem - the thing that makes it worth returning to - is that it took place so late, in the twilight of the long age of European witch-hunting and among sophisticated and ambitious people, who were in most ways radical and in some respects out-and-out avant-garde. This changing political situation reinforced already existing tensions within communities between those whose mission lay, much as the early ‘pilgrims’, who emigrated to the English colonies in New England to escape religious persecution, in establishing and maintaining ‘plantations of religion’ and those who simply wanted to establish plantations. The charter affirmed the Crown’s authority to appoint the governor and naval officers to supervise ports, while guaranteeing that delegates to the colonial assembly were to be popularly elected by property-owning males. In 1691, he granted Massachusetts a new charter that established it as a royal colony. After fifty years of being largely left to themselves, from the early 1680s Charles II and then, after the ‘Glorious Revolution in 1688-89, William III asserted royal control over the colonies. The early 1690s were years of considerable anxiety in the New England colonies that were faced with spectral threats and actual threats from Native Americans and from without by a resurgent English state for whom colonies were not merely political adjuncts but economic opportunities.
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