Scholars have sought to explain Salem in terms of gender, class, even encephalitis or ergotism–or downright fakery. But Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton’s new study, “In the Devil’s Snare” (436 pages. Knopf. $30), claims Salem “can be comprehended only in the context of… armed conflict between English settlers and… Indians.” Native Americans (already regarded as devilish) had driven colonists out of frontier settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, and traumatized refugees had settled in Essex County. Norton finds many accusers and accused had “links” to the frontier. Language used to describe “spectral” torments sometimes resembled actual Indian tortures; at least two accusers said they saw Indian sachems at witch meetings. And the authorities may have believed the accusations because they wanted to “shift the responsibility for their inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world”; they also truly believed the Devil had mounted simultaneous physical and spiritual assaults.
No one could refute Norton’s daintily nuanced–though ploddingly advanced–thesis. If nothing else, such participants as refugee Mercy Lewis (who’d survived an Indian attack in Maine at the age of 3 and who later made 53 legal accusations) wouldn’t have been in Salem in the first place. But neither could anyone prove that the Indian war–or anything else–is the one key to what Norton calls the “mentalite” of Essex County 300 years ago. And she can’t resist sweetening up her scrupulous research with iffy speculation. The day after one Bridget Bishop was hanged in Salem, Indians attacked Wells, Maine. “Did anyone view the attack as revenge for Goody Bishop’s execution?” Norton writes. “It would have been easy for New Englanders to reach such a conclusion, but no such reasoning is recorded in surviving documents.” Dainty nuancers will rightly call this book an important contribution. But is it the last word? Devil a bit of
