Salem, Massachusetts History

This excerpt from Chapter 2 of "The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience" by Alan E. Johnson discusses the events leading up to and surrounding the trial and banishment of Roger Williams from the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1635-36.  After spending that winter in the New England wilderness, succored only by his Native American friends, Williams went on to establish the new settlement of Providence (later in Rhode Island) based on liberty of conscience and separation of church and state.

In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over time, the only organized witch trials in American history have not only become a strong metaphor for mass hysteria and scapegoating, as ‘the Halloween capital of the world’, the town today feeds on its contested past. Moreover, the Salem witch trials have generated innumerable cultural works – films, tv series, and, most prominently, books. To this day, more than 70 works of fiction tell and retell the ‘Salem story’. This talk explores not only what happened in 1692 as well as its touristic exploitation, but why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory, from classics such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

This essay discusses the historical origins of the witchcraft trial phenomenon, its roots, and the causes for its occurrence in New England from a historical, social, anthropological, and gender perspective. Salem witchcraft had its roots in Europe and in order to understand it one should comprehend the worldview of late-seventeenth-century Puritan New Englanders, who lived in a pre-Enlightenment world. As many historians and researchers have pointed out the people of Salem experienced a number of hardships at the time of the witch trials, such as economic struggles, disease epidemics, war, political dissension, and factionalism and thus the Salem witchcraft trials cannot be described apart from its social, cultural, theological, economic, and political contexts. Moreover, understanding the geographical and chronological phases of the trials and investigations is important. Finally, it is interesting to see how growing awareness of feminist perspectives on history, have generated a new feminist interpretation of the witchcraft trials.

In the early twentieth century, French-Canadians and Franco-Americans represented a large ethnic enclave within the city of Salem, Massachusetts. From 1840 to the early twentieth century, they came to the city seeking industrial jobs and opportunities. By 1930, they represented close to 34% of Salem’s population. They worked in factories, built neighborhoods, opened small businesses, created ethnic institutions and began to shape the commercial life of the city. Despite their size and influence, the details of their legacy seem to have been forgotten. The Point neighborhood that they so long inhabited is now home to only a handful of Franco-Americans, others spreading out throughout Salem with no trace of their former roots. There is no single answer as to why this shift occurred. The third, fourth, and fifth generations have made their lives away from any appellation that once crowned their ancestors. To be a French-Canadian or Franco-American is no longer a defining characteristic for those who still reside in Salem. Tracing the Franco-American experience through oral history accounts collected in 2011, this paper follows French Canadians’ and Franco- Americans’ of work and commerce within Salem. By looking at French-Canadian experience in relation to other major immigrant groups in Salem, namely Irish and Polish ethnic groups, we can see how French Canadians, in particular, helped the city’s economy to flourish. This, in turn, led to their assimilation into the larger Anglophone community and helps explains how their particular stories and imprint have for the most part disappeared.

Daniel Webster’s famous prosecution speech in the Salem Murder Trial (1830) has been both praised and condemned. Celebrated as a masterpiece of forensic eloquence it is also criticized as contributing to a miscarriage of justice. This essay examines that address to the Salem jury in the context of Webster’s own classical training in rhetoric. Specifically, the paper discusses the elements and details of Webster’s persuasive strategy as they are drawn from his Ciceronian rhetorical sensibility. Ethical condemnations of Webster’s address cannot be sustained when that trial speech is reviewed from the vantage of classical forensic rhetoric. In fact, Webster’s performance may be one of the last great expressions of the classical forensic paradigm in American courtroom oratory.

Nations like narratives, lose their origins in the myth of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation-or narration-might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. Homi K. Bhabha / Nation and Narration Abstract In the quadricentennial of the founding of Plymouth Plantation, recent challenges in the United States politics and society raise critical questions on American identity and American democracy. Thus, calling for a revisit on the seventeenth century northeastern American experience of English colonizers, contemporary academia is engaged in new approaches and perspectives on American history and historicism, whereby a peculiar sense of past and act of remembrance count for present day cultural and political dilemmas across the United States. The legacy of early founders and pioneers of New England colonies provides a host of historicism on Anglo-American identity, which was elaborately imprinted in colonial accounts on material culture, legal, military, political and religious practices in the nexus of intra-and extra-imperial encounters of metropole and the colony itself.

The Salem witch trials have traditionally been framed as a case of religious zealotry and superstition. For centuries blame has been placed on the accusers and this narrative has gone largely unquestioned. However, it ignores the role that the magistrates and Governor Phips played in the crisis and how their actions directly contributed to the spread of witchcraft accusations through Essex county. The judges presiding over the Court of Oyer and Terminer were the best legal minds of their generation and their actions were heavily criticized by their contemporaries. Phips was a poorly educated man with no political experience that chose to ignore the crisis instead of confronting it, and people died because of his inaction. Recent disasters including military losses, economic hardship, and the lack of a legal charter threatened the power structures of Massachusetts and the Salem witch trials were used by some of these men as a way to hold on to that power and increase their wealth.

The legacy of Daniel Webster’s participation in the prosecution of John Francis Knapp is complex.  As Howard Bradley and James Winans pointed out in their treatment of the famous trial, “Webster has been much praised, but also much condemned for his conduct of the case.”  This essay reexamines that famous legal oration in order to bring to light a dimension of Webster’s address heretofore unnoticed by historians and critics.  What commentators on the trial speech have not recognized is the close link between the form and substance of Webster’s address to the jury and the accumulated content of the extensive newspaper coverage of the case.  This analysis will show that the material for Webster’s address was drawn from widely circulated New England press reports and was crafted to conform to a pre-established narrative framework familiar to the Salem jury.  The trial, then, is an early case study in pre-trial publicity.

Almost two centuries after the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt, an impressive memorial was constructed near the purported grave of Rebecca Nurse, one of the nineteen innocents executed for witchcraft. However, across town the well-known (but unmarked) grave of George Jacobs Sr., another executed ‘witch,’ was left bare, with no memorial or even a headstone erected to mark the spot. Adding insult to the lack of memorialization, after Jacobs’ body was accidentally exhumed in the 1950s it spent decades travelling around Danvers – including being kept under a dining room table, in a resident’s bedroom, and as the center piece of a display in a high school cafeteria. Finally, Jacobs received a proper burial in 1992 near the monument to Rebecca Nurse, constructed over a century prior. This paper examines why one witch-hunt victim was grandly memorialized while another in the same town was left in an unmarked grave, what can be learned about how the local community confronted its legacy of the witch-hunt in the centuries after 1692, and why the remains of a man executed in 1692 did so much travelling.

There have been many theories regarding the cause of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692. Religious, social, and political reasons abound, as well as the possibility that behaviour was indicative of ergot poisoning. A definitive explanation may never be found. What made the Salem witch trials so distinctive was the lack of a stereotypical 'formula' usually seen in witchcraft cases. No class, gender, occupation or age was immune from accusation. By exploring the background and circumstances of those involved, a picture begins to emerge of a settlement suffocated by Puritan ideals, political contradictions and superstitious paranoia.

Like so many late nineteenth-century New Englanders, the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts were fascinated by Italy. Many of the women artists who went to Italy before, during, and after the American Civil War came from Salem, including the sisters Abigail Osgood (1823-1913) and Mary Elizabeth (1825-1902) Williams, known collectively as the Misses Williams.  The sisters were middle class and unmarried, and needed their art to be self-supporting; Italian travel allowed them to create complex paintings and projects that culminated in the establishment of a successful studio selling Italian art and objects from their Salem home in 1886.  They created their own paintings, sought out buyers, entered exhibitions, accumulated objects, and even researched art history, much of it with a focus on supplying middle-class women like themselves with fashionable objects to fill their homes.  Their success as women who made and marketed art for and to other women distinguishes them both at home and abroad and demonstrates a new and gendered market that promoted an understanding of Italy and its cultural history in the greater Boston area.

To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

Salem Willows Park has also been the site of a centuries-long tradition: the yearly Black Picnic (since renamed "Negro Election Day") that has historically provided a day of relaxation for African-Americans to gather and network. The gathering has historical roots in 18th-century Northern festivals organized by enslaved and free people of color as a general holiday.

UPDATE: On March 14, 2022,  the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places office accepted additional documentation that was prepared by Betsy Friedberg and Ben Haley of the Massachusetts Historical Commission. The 2022 documentation recognized "Negro Election Day" as the presently preferred name for the yearly Black Picnic celebration at Salem Willows Park. While I had no role in the writing and editing of the 2022 additional documentation, it includes parts that I had researched, written, and edited in 2016, and so the 2022 version has been appended to the 2016 version.

The attached PDF contains the title page, copyright page, epigraphs, and table of contents for "The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience" by Alan E. Johnson (available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon websites throughout the world).  For additional information, see http://www.amazon.com/First-American-Founder-Williams-Conscience/dp/1511823712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436397728&sr=1-1.

The Salem witch trials have fascinated historians since the eighteenth century, but as Mary Beth Norton aptly states there is still “much of the complicated Salem story [that] remains untold.” Previous scholarship has
failed tell fully the story of the trials’ aftermath. In this paper, I follow the story of a group of witch trial victims and their families to illuminate the religious and political tensions after the trials ended in 1693. I argue that
reconciliation came only after the resignation of the Reverend Samuel Parris and the out-migration of the disaffected families to a new community. I discuss the emigration of the Nurse, Cloyse, and Bridges families to Framingham in light of conflict over the extension of church membership through the Halfway Covenant during the Reverend Thomas Green’s tenure in Salem Village. Green’s efforts to heal the parish were met with limited success because of the persistent factionalism in the community. After 1692, the religious and political conflicts in Salem Village provided the impetus for community formation and expansion in the new town of Framingham.

This book is about Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83), who was banished from the colony of Massachusetts Bay for advocating freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, Native American rights, and related matters.  He founded the town of Providence in what became Rhode Island on the basis of full liberty of conscience and complete separation of religion and government.  For additional information, see the uploaded PDF and links.

The book is available in paperback and Kindle e-book editions at Amazon websites throughout the world.  The paperback is also available at some other websites and bookstores.

See also my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlUZaehYk7WmwW8v9oBMzQ) about Roger Williams, including an interview (https://youtu.be/mGRl5lIbdYY) with me about this book.

For Errata and Supplemental Comments, see the separate document uploaded at https://www.academia.edu/13798228/Errata_and_Supplemental_Comments_to_The_First_American_Founder_Roger_Williams_and_Freedom_of_Conscience.

Alan E. Johnson

Este texto pretende revisar los modos en que se emplea la figura de la Bruja en la confluencia entre el arte contemporáneo y la moda. Asumiendo la vigencia de lo brujesco femenino en todos los ámbitos culturales, realizamos un estudio interdisciplinar que aborda el concepto desde perspectivas diversas: literaria, antropológica, social y feminista. Comprobamos si, como con frecuencia ocurre en las artes visuales, en el diseño de moda se tiende a recuperar a la Bruja para transmitir mensajes político-feministas. Para ello, analizamos el trabajo de las creadoras Laura Murillo y María Cores, a la vez que trazamos un breve recorrido por las McQueen colecciones brujeriles de Saint Laurent, Alexander y Gareth Pugh, entre otros.

The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut, thrived, the African ivory trade left in its wake massive human exploitation and ecological devastation. At the same time, dynamic East African engagement with capitalism and imperialism took place within these trade histories.

Drawing from extensive archival and field research in New England, Great Britain, and Tanzania, Alexandra Kelly investigates the complex global legacies of the historical ivory trade. She not only explains the complexities of this trade but also analyzes Anglo-American narratives about Africa, questioning why elephants and ivory feature so centrally in those representations. From elephant conservation efforts to the cultural heritage industries in New England and East Africa, her study reveals the ongoing global repercussions of the ivory craze and will be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and conservationists.

Although possessions and demons and the like have been known and spoken about for centuries, never before have they been so popularized and in the public spotlight. Books and to a greater extent, movies, have shaped our understanding, familiarity, and imaginations regarding the subject of the occult. There was, however, a time before demons and possessions were simply fodder for horror flicks and teenaged terror. In the late 17 th century, during the time of the Puritans, witchcraft and possessions ran rampant, or at least were thought to. I, as I am sure many others were as well, was introduced both to the Puritans and the witch-trials during high school through the book The Crucible. Arthur Miller weaves a tale that focuses on teenaged girls

To this day, Salem, Massachusetts is inseparable from its religious history – the Puritan theocracy of the Colonial era has made the town infamous for the witch trials in 1692. But while the witch used to be the town’s biggest threat, in contemporary Salem, the town’s marketing of its contested history and particularly the figure of the witch have made Salem the United States’ number one Halloween destination. Moreover, Salem has become a center of modern pagans (e.g. Wicca) and self-proclaimed witches who pride themselves on Salem new-found religious tolerance and host groups such as the Witches Education League. Erica Feldman, one of their leaders, explains that despite, or just because of its history, “[t]here are a lot of us [witches] here [in Salem] because it’s the one place in the world that really embraces the figure of the witch.” This re-appropriation of the figure of the witch is traceable widely in popular culture (e.g. Harry Potter, Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and even in online activism (e.g. #BindTrump, #MagicResistence), and is also reflected in contemporary ‘Salem literature’ which has experienced a new boom in recent years with a decidedly female authorship and strong female protagonists whose psychic powers and supernatural healing abilities make them all the more fitting into modern-day Salem. Among these are Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) as well as Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader (2009) and The Fifth Petal (2017). This paper aims to explore the depiction of religion in real and fictional Salem in general and the re-appropriation of the witch in particular.

There is a host of scholarship in both the literary and historical disciplines regarding the witchcraft trial episodes in colonial New England. The general orientation of this work emphasizes either a psychoanalytic framework, seeking to diagnose the symptoms that informed the panic, or a cultural studies lens, trying to contextualize notions and accusations of and about witchcraft within the ideological coordinates of a respective municipality in the 17 th century. I believe these approaches, while capable, both ultimately fail to acknowledge some basic moral truths about the government of Boston and Salem which should therefore impact scholarly conclusions.

The Story upon a Hill: The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction analyzes the work of several of the most important contemporary writers in the United States as reinterpreting commonplace narratives of the country’s origins with a keen eye on the effects of inclusion and exclusion that Puritan myths promote. In 1989, Ronald Reagan recalled the words of Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, who imagined the colony as a “city upon a hill” for future nations to emulate. In Reagan’s speech, Winthrop’s signature rhetoric became an emblem of American idealism, and for many Americans, the Puritans’ New England was the place where the United States forged its original identity.

Few places in the United States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, location of the only organized witch trials in American history in 1692. Salem has thus become a prominent lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), a site of memory, and its haunting legacy has made it one of the most frequently used settings in American literature: to this day, over 50 works of fiction discuss Salem’s history and spatiality. Thus, what I term ‘Salem literature’ has itself become a lieu de mémoire. 
Building upon Aleida Assmann’s finding that places of memory can initiate and support processes of memory only in connection with other media of memory (cp. 1999), I want to trace how Salem’s memory culture is reflected in literature from the 19th century to the present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835) is set on Gallows Hill, long believed to have been the site of the executions. The narrator bemoans the lack of historical awareness among Salemites and the absence of a memorial: “we could not but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the heart.” This description stands in contrast to contemporary Salem: Not only has the city become a tourist magnet for all things witch-related, but two memorials can now be visited: the Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial in the city center was established in 1992, and in 2017 a new memorial was erected in the spot recently established as the true location of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge. This investigation is strikingly reflected in two modern novels, Adriana Mather’s young adult novel How to Hang a Witch (2016) and Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). Though not critically acclaimed as it lacks rhetorical and narratological depth and shows many clichés of the genre, Mather’s novel serves as an interesting example for making Colonial history appeal to young readers: teenage protagonist Samantha is here credited with finding the real location of the executions, though the depiction is far from historically correct. In Barry’s novel, historian Rose Whelan’s search for the true hanging location, on the other hand, parallels the real investigations of historian Emerson W. Baker and his colleagues of the Gallows Hill Project at Salem State University. In fact, as “honoring this true place was long overdue,” Barry’s novel ends with the installation of the memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, almost foreshadowing the real commemoration on July 19th, 2017 and mayor Kim Driscoll’s words that “Proctor's Ledge is a place - an object - but it is also an idea. And it is also a memory." In this paper, I thus want to discuss how literature mirrors and fosters the cultural memory and memory culture at work in one of the most contested places of the United States.

Often inspired by religious sermons, female benevolence in the nineteenth century is usually dismissed as the result of a passive woman’s “impulses from the heart.” This portrayal fails to capture the dedicated and systematic approach to business that these women upheld. Female-run societies became their own respectable economic entities, collecting and distributing large sums of money. Although benevolent in their mission, these societies, like those of men, were also remarkably self-serving.