Witchcraft in Early North America

American Controversies Series

Series Editor: Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College

Students love debate. They love contention, which they see all about them in modern society. Yet too many monographs or biographies erase the controversies that existed in earlier decades. Slavery and institutionalized sexism, for example, strike modern readers as being so clearly wrong that they cannot understand why rational Americans endorsed slavery or thought it foolish to enfranchise women. How could a politician as brilliant as Thomas Jefferson believe that forced assimilation was the best policy for Native Americans? Why did Americans allow Hitler to become so powerful before confronting him? Why were many of the so-called Greatest Generation indifferent to social justice at home? How did the Vietnam War become such a political and cultural powder keg? Hindsight is often the enemy of understanding, and what strikes us as obvious was often anything but simple to earlier generations.

This series deals with major controversies in American history. The events depicted in this series were either controversial at the time (such as militant abolitionism) or have sparked modern historiographical controversies. (Did slave conspiracies actually exist, for example? Why did witch trials in Salem spiral out of control in 1692?) Each volume in the series begins with an extensive essay that explains the topic, discusses the relevant historiography, and summarizes the various points of view (contemporaneous as well as modern). The second half of the volume is devoted to documents, but each is annotated and preceded by a brief introduction. By contextualizing each document, this series pulls back the curtain, so to speak, on the process of writing history, even as the essays, letters, laws, and newspaper accounts that follow allow important American actors to speak in their own voices. Most of all, by examining both sides in these debates, and by providing documents that see each issue from different angles, the American Controversies Series will bring history alive—and enliven history classrooms.

Volumes Published

Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821

Gary J. Kornblith

Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan

Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson

Witchcraft in Early North America

Alison Games

Witchcraft in Early North America

Alison Games

Cover illustrations: Witch riding the Devil, from Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster (London, 1684); English witch, from The Wonderful discoverie of the witchcraft of Margaret and Phillip Flower, daughters of Joan Flower neere Bever Castle: executed at Lincolne, March 11, 1618 (London, 1619), both items reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; The Conjurer, from Thomas Hariot, A Brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfort-
am-Main, 1590), plate XI, reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library; Isaac Jogues, from François Ducreux, Historiae Canadensis (Paris, 1664), The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-49877.

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Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Games, Alison, 1963-

Witchcraft in Early North America / Alison Games.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-0357-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0359-4
(electronic : alk. paper)

1. Witchcraft—United States—History. I. Title.

BF1573.G36 2010

133.4'30973—dc22 2010014423

` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

O

Preface

Like many of my colleagues who teach classes in early American history, whether the U.S. history survey or courses on the colonial period, I have always made time to talk about witchcraft. For the most part, I have assigned books that explore the outbreak at Salem in 1692 or witchcraft in New England more broadly. As a result, the story of witchcraft in my classes tended to emphasize the experiences of European colonists and settlers in North America and to keep my students focused on the eastern seaboard, replicating a familiar narrative of American history that privileges the English colonies. But in 2002, I joined forces with my Georgetown colleague Amy Leonard, a specialist in early modern European history, to teach a class on witches and witchcraft in Europe and the Atlantic world. We anchored our class in Europe and then examined the collisions of witch beliefs that transpired beyond Europe, in Africa and the Americas. The class made it obvious to me that witchcraft was a unique and valuable way to understand how Europeans, Africans, and Americans made sense of each other in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. I wondered if it might be possible to develop a book on the subject that I could use in my own North American history classes. I envisioned a text that used witchcraft to explore the colonial encounters and occupations that transformed much of the continent, that moved away from the English colonies, that reached into French and Spanish territories, that integrated Native Americans and Africans, and that might be helpful to colleagues eager to find ways to incorporate the many different inhabitants of the whole continent in their own classes. Witchcraft in Early North America is the result of that investigation.

Witchcraft in Early North America covers the period from 1616, the year of an Indian revolt in a northern province of New Spain, through the first decade of the nineteenth century, the years of the Shawnee and Seneca witch hunts in the United States. The book’s geographic focus is North America, ranging from the northern provinces of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain (in other words, northern Mexico and the territory contained in the modern state of New Mexico) through the British colonies on the eastern seaboard, French (and Spanish) Louisiana, and southeastern Canada. My goal in the introduction is to help readers understand the people the book examines and the wide array of witch beliefs they held. It thus explores European, African, and Indian witch beliefs in turn, trying to understand, as much as possible, these separate belief systems before each group encountered the other. It then examines how those beliefs changed when these people met, through conquest, enslavement, colonization, and trade, in North America. I explore how witchcraft beliefs manifested themselves in three different colonial jurisdictions (New Mexico, New France, and the British colonies), in addition to looking at the witchcraft beliefs and expression of Africans and their descendants in North America. The introduction also devotes considerable space to outbreaks, setting the familiar episode at Salem in 1692 in a broader North American context. It argues that much of what historians regard as exceptional about Salem ends up looking characteristic of outbreaks across North America when we take a continental approach. The discussion of North American outbreaks includes not only a close assessment of Salem, but also separate discussions of confession, possession, and the Indian witch hunts of the early nineteenth century. The introduction concludes with an exploration of skepticism.

A second goal of the introduction is to introduce students to the historiography of witchcraft—that is, the different ways in which historians have interpreted the subject over time. Scholars who examine witchcraft analyze it through the history of law, medicine, disease, religion, family, community, sexuality, economy, race, psychology, gender, politics, and popular culture. It is a subject characterized by methodological diversity, and thus witchcraft offers an ideal entry into how historians work to understand the past. The primary documents in Section II will encourage students to weigh historians’ interpretations and to develop their own.

Readers are likely to understand the primary sources more easily if they read the introduction first, and indeed the two sections of this volume have been designed to be interdependent. The documents represent an array of source material, including missionary reports, trial transcripts, laws, newspapers, letters, church records, and travel accounts. The documents focus on six core topics: First Impressions, Resistance and the Devil, English Witch Beliefs Cross the Atlantic, New Worlds, Possession, and Outbreaks. The documents delineate a wide variety of perspectives and experiences, although rarely are Indians and Africans and enslaved people able to speak for themselves. Students will have to read closely to get beyond European perceptions and viewpoints, and they will also have to wrestle with some archaic language, especially in some legal documents. While I have made some silent editorial changes, for the most part I have left English spelling unchanged from its original seventeenth-century form. Readers might find it helpful to read documents out loud if the spelling confuses them, and if they do so, they might enjoy imagining how the language sounded to those who heard it centuries ago.

I made extensive use of all facets of the Georgetown University libraries in the course of this project. I am especially grateful to the efficient sleuths in the interlibrary loan office, the invisible people who circulate books so expeditiously around the Washington Research Library Consortium, the solicitous staff at the circulation desk who knew when a book arrived from remote storage or another library on the subject of witchcraft that it was for me, and John Buchtel in Special Collections. David Hagen photographed material from Georgetown’s Special Collections and worked some digital magic on an image from the Library of Congress. I also thank Steven Tabor at the Huntington Library, Anne-Marie Walsh at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Susan Danforth at the John Carter Brown Library, and Mary Haegert and John Overholt at Harvard University for their help with images. Robert D. Martínez gave me permission to use his translation of Fray Toledo’s letter about the possessions at Abiquiu, and I thank him for his generosity. I was fortunate that this project found a home in Rowman and Littlefield’s American Controversies series, and I am grateful to Niels Aaboe, Karen Ackermann, Michelle Cassidy, and especially Elisa Weeks for their assistance. Bill Nelson made the map.

I have picked the brains of many friends and colleagues in the past two years as I worked on this book. I thank Rose Beiler, Judy Bieber, Elaine Crane, Steve Hackel, Cindy Nickerson, Carla Pestana, and Jim Williams for their assistance. In the History Department at Georgetown, one never lacks for patient, helpful, and generous readers. I sometimes wonder how historians in less collegial departments manage to write books. I am grateful to the many colleagues who read the introduction for me. I thank Tommaso Astarita, Katie Benton-Cohen, David Collins, Chandra Manning, Adam Rothman, and John Tutino. I have learned more about witchcraft (and all sorts of other interesting and important things) from Amy Leonard than she can imagine. Special thanks to Karin Wulf (who has been reading my work for twenty years) for her extensive editorial advice. My animal familiars have provided constant companionship. Doug Egerton read drafts of this book with care and enthusiasm and offered many helpful suggestions as I planned and worked on the project. I may have failed to follow all of the suggestions these kind friends and readers made, but this book is vastly better for their careful and helpful intervention.