Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (11 page)

It was not a war fought by the chivalrous standards of European engagement. The Puritans sacked and burned Indian villages by night. Aided by loyal Narragansett and Mohican forces, the colonial equivalent of a search-and-destroy team entered a stockaded Pequot town near the Mystic River, slaughtered its 600 inhabitants, and burned the village. In the only other confrontation of the war, a group of Pequot was trapped. The men were killed, the boys sold to slavers, and the women and girls kept by the Puritans as slaves. As a tribe, the Pequot were practically exterminated.

The English maintained peace for nearly forty years thanks to their old allies, Massasoit’s Wampanoag—saviors of the Pilgrims—and the Narragansett led by Canonicus (who had sheltered Roger Williams after he was banished from Boston). When these two chiefs died, the English were ready to complete the subjugation of the New England Indians. But Massasoit’s son Metacom, called King Philip by the English for his adoption of European dress and customs, struck back.

The fighting took place in the summer of 1676, and for the colonists it wasn’t as easy as the Pequot battles had been. The combat was the fiercest in New England history, and far bloodier than much of the fighting during the Revolution. Metacom’s Indians were equipped with guns and armor acquired through trade, and he was an aggressive leader. The outcome of this war was not assured, particularly in the early going. But the colonists had too much on their side: superior numbers—including 500 Mohican gunmen, blood rivals of the Wampanoag—and devastating battle tactics, including a return to the wholesale massacre of noncombatants.

King Philip was ultimately killed, his head displayed on a pole. His wife and son, the grandson of the chief who had saved the Pilgrims, were sold into slavery in the West Indies, an act of mercy according to the leading Puritan clerics.

What was Nat Bacon’s Rebellion?

As the New England colonists learned at great cost from Metacom, the “Indian problem” was not a simple matter. Massed confrontations were risky, so new tactics emerged. The colonists found an effective measure in the “scalp bounty,” a Dutch innovation in which a fee was paid for Indian scalps. The common conception is of Indians as scalp takers, but it was the colonists who adopted the tactic as a means of Indian control, and it even became a profitable enterprise. In the Bay Colony in 1703, a scalp brought 12 pounds sterling, a price inflated to 100 pounds by 1722. The most famous American scalp taker of the colonial period was a woman named Hannah Dustin, who was taken captive in 1695 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She and two other captives killed ten of the twelve Indians holding them. Dustin left but then returned to take their scalps, believing that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would still pay a bounty for the scalps. In her hometown, Dustin was later memorialized with a statue showing her holding a hatchet in one hand and the scalps in the other. It was the first permanent statue built to honor a woman in American history. (The story of Hannah Dustin and relations between colonial settlers and Indians, especially in New England, is recounted in more detail in my recent book
America’s Hidden History.
)

In 1676, while New England struggled against King Philip, the Indian issue boiled over into something different in Virginia. This overlooked episode, known as Nat Bacon’s Rebellion, can be seen as another in a series of wrongs committed against the Indians. But it was also a demonstration of a new anti-authority sentiment in America, a foreshadowing of the Revolutionary spirit.

A cousin to the scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, Nathaniel Bacon was a young planter and an up-and-coming member of Virginia’s ruling elite. At the time, Virginians were fighting sporadic battles with the Susquehannock, the result of treaties broken by the English. When his plantation overseer was killed, Bacon grew angry at what he thought was the docile Indian policy of Virginia’s Governor Berkeley. Without the governor’s permission, Bacon raised a militia force of 500 men and vented his rage on the Indians. When his little army attacked the peaceful Occaneechee (instead of the more warlike Susquehannock), Bacon became an immediate local hero, especially among the Indian-hating frontier colonists who favored pushing farther west. In his
Declaration of the People
, written exactly 100 years before another Virginian wrote another declaration, Bacon criticized the Berkeley administration for levying unfair taxes, placing favorites in high positions, and not protecting the western farmers from Indians. Governor Berkeley branded Bacon a traitor, but granted some of the reforms he demanded, and Bacon was later pardoned, having apologized.

When Bacon felt that the governor had reneged on his pledge to pursue the Indians, the fiery rebel focused his anger toward the colonial government. In the first popular rebellion in colonial America, Bacon led troops of lower-class planters, servants, and some free and slave blacks to Jamestown and burned it. Faced with a true rebellion, Governor Berkeley fled. An English naval squadron was sent to capture Bacon, who died of dysentery before they reached him, and the remnants of his backwoods army were rounded up, with two dozen of them ending up on the gallows.

Nat Bacon’s Rebellion was the first of almost twenty minor uprisings against colonial governments, including the Paxton uprising in Pennsylvania in 1763, Leisler’s Rebellion in New York in 1689, and the Regulator Rebellion in South Carolina in 1771. All of these were revolts against the colonial “haves,” those wealthy colonists who owned the bulk of America’s land and controlled its prosperity, and the “have-nots,” often backwoodsmen or lower-class farmers struggling for survival. By adding these bloody outbreaks of popular resentment against the colonial “establishment” to the numerous riots and slave revolts of the pre-Revolutionary period, the picture of colonial gentility is destroyed. Instead we get a clouded image of unsettled grievances waiting to boil over.

Who were the witches of Salem?

Modern-day Salem does a good business in lightheartedly promoting its Halloween capital image. The town may have more psychics and tarot readers per capita than anywhere else in America. But for the twenty people who died there in 1692, there was little humor in the affair. The hysteria developed, as many New England disputes had, out of religious infighting. New England was a theocracy, a Puritan church state in which church and government were closely connected. And since Puritanism then controlled the politics and economy of most of New England, such a controversy among churchmen was no small matter.

Salem Village was created in 1672 by a group of rural families who wanted their own church instead of going to church in the larger town of nearby Salem, a prosperous trading town. Several years of haggling over ministers followed until Samuel Parris, a former merchant and Harvard dropout, was called and arrived in Salem Village in 1689. No peacemaker, Parris failed to calm his troubled parish, and in two years’ time things went haywire. In January 1692, the minister’s daughter Betty and his niece Abigail, aged nine and eleven, and twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, daughter of one of the town’s most powerful men, began to act strangely. So did five other young girls. A doctor diagnosed them as bewitched and under the influence of an “Evil Hand.” Suspicion immediately fell on Tituba, the Parris family’s West Indian slave, who had been teaching the girls fortune-telling games.

At first, the slave Tituba and two elderly townswomen, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, were arrested on February 29, 1692, accused of witchery, and a general court jailed them on suspicion of witchcraft. But their trial triggered an astonishing wave of accusations, and three of the young girls, basking in their sudden notoriety, ignited a storm of satanic fear throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Governor William Phips convened a special court that formally charged more than 150 people.

The three Salem Village girls were the chief witnesses, and even though they said they had concocted the whole affair for “sport,” the trials continued. The charge of witchery soon became a means to settle village feuds. Reason was turned upside-down and the court was right out of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. To escape the hangman’s noose, the panic-stricken accused often “confessed” to anything, including broomstick rides and sex with the Devil. Professions of innocence or criticism of the proceedings were tantamount to guilt. Refusal to implicate a neighbor meant a death sentence.

There was nothing peculiarly American about these witch trials. In fact, America was relatively free of the far more murderous rampage of witch hunts that had swept Europe for centuries. Between 1300 and 1700, thousands of people, mostly women, had been executed in Europe. Eventually twenty-eight suspected witches, most of them women, were convicted in Salem. Five of them “confessed” and were spared, two escaped, and a pregnant woman was pardoned. But in the end, nineteen “witches” were hanged, and the husband of one convicted witch was “pressed” to death, or suffocated under a pile of stones for refusing to plead. Three of the executed said they had actually participated in “malefic practices” or black magic. At the belated urging of Increase Mather (1639–1723), the president of Harvard, and other Puritan ministers, Governor Phips called off the trials that were literally ripping the colony apart. He may have been influenced by the fact that his own wife had been accused.

So what caused this extraordinary outbreak? Start with the idea that the girls were actually possessed. The Christian belief in the existence of the Devil is widely accepted in modern America. There have been reports that the pope himself has performed exorcisms. So, for some people, the concept of satanic possession is entirely plausible, if not scientifically verifiable.

Were the girls simply playacting? There is little doubt that they were young girls whose wild stories were used to attract attention, but then got out of hand. It is a plausible explanation, especially when set against the tenor of the times when people were more than willing to accept that the Devil walked in New England, a refrain that they heard every day of their lives, and certainly from the pulpits on the Sabbath.

But that still does not completely explain the strange behavior that was documented and seemed to go beyond playacting. Perhaps the girls had inadvertently discovered what we might call “magic mushrooms”? An intriguing scientific answer to the behavior of the Salem girls was put forth by behavioral psychologist Linda Caporeal, who likened their actions to those of LSD users. While there was no LSD in colonial Massachusetts, there was ergot, a fungus that affects rye grain and the natural substance from which LSD is derived. Toxicologists know that ergot-contaminated foods can lead to convulsions, delusions, hallucinations, and many other symptoms that are present in the records of the Salem trials. At the time, rye was a staple grain in Salem, and the “witches” lived in a region of swampy meadows that would have bred the fungus. Caporeal’s theory is based on circumstantial evidence and is unprovable, but is quite intriguing nonetheless.

Natural highs aside, there is another medical explanation. Were the girls mentally ill? Did they suffer from a neurotic condition that doctors like Freud later called
hysteria? As Frances Hill writes, “There can be no doubt that what beset the Goodwin children, Elizabeth Knapp, and all the others . . . was clinical hysteria. The extraordinary body postures, inexplicable pains, deafness, dumbness, and blindness, meaningless babbling, refusal to eat, destructive and self-destructive behavior . . . are just the same in all three accounts. So are the exhibitionism, the self-control even in apparent abandonment and the complete power over parents. . .
” According to Hill, clinical hysteria is understood differently today, and one of its most frequent forms of expression is anorexia, the eating disorder that primarily affects adolescent girls. She also notes that hysteria often occurs among ill-educated, rural populations.

Whatever the real cause, the incident at Salem had no real lasting impact on the course of American history. However, it certainly demonstrated a strain of intolerance and stiff-necked sanctimoniousness of the New England Puritan spirit. The incident also demonstrates the danger of a church state, an institution vigorously avoided by the Framers of the Constitution. The failure of an entire community to prevent the madness was a sad tribute to moral cowardice, a trait not limited in American history to either New England or the colonial period. (Another “witch hunt” with eerie parallels to the Salem affair but far more damaging was carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy against alleged Communists in government in the 1950s, and is covered in Chapter 7. Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible
, written in 1953 in response to the McCarthy Red Scare, and filmed in 1997 with Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis, is a compelling dramatic treatment of the Salem incident.)

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the Salem incident underscores the importance of the protections for the accused that the Framers would solidify in the Constitution and, to a greater extent, in the Bill of Rights about one hundred years after the Salem trials. The rule of law—presumption of innocence, jury trials, right to counsel, and other protections that were codified as the birthright of Americans and the foundation of the American legal system—were all lacking in 1691. They might well have saved innocent lives. That is an important lesson to keep in mind whenever panic threatens to overcome the restraints that governments and people are often too willing to abandon in the name of security.

Must Read:
A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials
by Frances Hill.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

Puritan leader C
OTTON
M
ATHER,
writing in 1705 to Rev. John Williams, held captive by the French, after a French-Indian raid on the settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704: