Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

Reflections on history while writing my book, American Hero
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered       

Good Times, 1692

How could a 13 year-old girl bring down an entire village of proper and prosperous Puritans? Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around 13 year-old girls would even ask that question. I would rather face an army of Orcs than one Abigail Williams. But what really destroyed Salem in 1692 and put a full grind stop on the Puritan Movement was not the hysterical rantings of one confused and bi-polar adolescent who convinced herself, her friends, and almost everyone else that harmless and lonely widows danced the sky-clad tango with the goat-footed devil under the pale moonlight—which for those who know witches already smacks of ridiculousness because Wiccan is a pagan (wo)manifestation of primal feminine forces that does not recognize the Judeo-Christian God or the Manichean Devil due to their masculine-based subordination of the Eternal Mother, duh—but something much more piercing than the sharpest pitchfork of any hell-spawn demon. In a word, what destroyed the Puritans was guilt.

    Of what would such God-fearing Pilgrims have to be guilty about? First, don’t believe that people didn’t know any better back in the 17^th century and so we can understand, if not excuse, their racism, sexism, intolerance, and the “is that a crowbar inserted into your lower intestines or are you just unhappy to see me?” attitude about anything not seared with the Puritan Seal of Approval. We already downed a few pints with jolly old Thomas Merton at Merrymount. He was unmatched for his drinking skills, but wasn’t alone in his open-mindedness. Roger Williams founded the Providence Plantation in what would become Rhode Island based on the idea of separation between church and state. William Penn actually worked with Indians and refused to treat non-Christian natives, Catholics, or Jews any differently than the Christian immigrants. Of course, the Dutch in New Amsterdam were aggressively heterogeneous. You could walk down Wall Street and hear as many languages then as you might now. Thanks to Adriaen van der Donck, with a last minute assist by the ornery Peter Stuyvesant, human rights survived the change in ownership from Dutch New Amsterdam to English New York.

    Despite these bastions of common sense, most white colonists in the late 17^th century condoned the extermination of Indians, the enslavement of Africans, and the war on women. At the same time, some still small voice within them warned against the Dark Side.

    When Anne Hutchinson, who advocated for women to lead spiritual services, was banished from New England, and later killed, the guilt grew like a canker among the Puritans. They already had the ghosts of murdered Indians on their conscience. Perhaps worse, the prosperity of New England, and Salem in particular, came from the slave trade. The slave ships during the Middle Passage, just beginning now, were built in New England. The ships’ captains and crews were from New England. The main income of the families in Salem in the 1690s came from slavery, both in British North America and in their interests in slave auction houses in Barbados.      

   To minds twisted into justifying the inhumanity of slavery with Christian compassion for the downtrodden, believing in witches and talking cats must have come as a relief. How easy it must have been to hang a few mentally imbalanced people rather than deal with the imbalance of your own morality.

    In the hysteria of the witch-hunts, over twenty people were executed, many more lives were ruined, including the accusatory girls who took on the guilt of their society. As for Abigail Williams, she disappeared into history, last seen walking the streets of Barbados, a scorned and bitter woman.

    The Salem Witch Trials soon made the Puritans ridiculous in their own eyes. It was a self-destructive act, subconsciously motivated to erase the guilt they felt for their involvement in slavery and other forms of oppression. After that, it took a long time for religious fundamentalists to be taken seriously again, enough time to give Ben Franklin and other freethinkers some space to develop the ideas that would change the world in the 18^th century.