Williamsburg and Jamestown, Virginia

THE WOODS ARE DENSE AND VERDANT around Jamestown. Deer leap between dark clusters of trees where the ground isn't thick with swamp or marsh. Osprey hover above the James River, stalking fish. Save for a single parkway cutting through, the land is mostly untouched, offering a glimpse of what the English saw when they first settled on the isthmus in 1607.

During the first few years of the seventeenth century, James I had become the ruler of a vastly expanded kingdom, but his country's economy was in decline. In a bid to spread Anglican doctrine, tap into the natural resources of Virginia, and compete with the Spanish who were gaining a foothold in the “New World,” the king approved a charter to start the Virginia colony in 1606. It would be the first of thirteen that would later coalesce into the United States.

I drove from Richmond to Jamestown late at night, no lights on the highway but high beams and the glowing eyes of animals in the trees. My destination was the Historic Powhatan Resort, named after the indigenous tribe that inhabited the region for centuries before the English brought guns, disease, and witchcraft. Jamestown colonizer Captain John Smith had nothing but noxious words when meeting Chief Powhatan, describing him as “more like a devil than a man.”

I came to Virginia in search of the early modern American Devil and his faithful servant, the witch. Little did I know that turning the TV on in my room at the resort, I would be treated to Protestant preaching straight out of the colonial past. Settling in for bed, I alighted on The 700 Club, evangelical minister Pat Robertson's long-running show on air since 1966. I watched Robertson tell a man his gay son was in the Devil's clutches. He then spoke of the subservient role God wants women to take in their relationships with men. I listened to Robertson try to heal the sick with impassioned prayer. One viewer appeared on camera to say her chronic migraines had been cured by the nonagenarian. “The Devil didn't win this time,” she announced, joyously. “I did.”

This is the same Pat Robertson who once spoke out in vehement opposition against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1992, writing an open letter to the Christian Coalition expressing his distaste for gender equality. The “feminist agenda,” he wrote, “is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” (In a way, he wasn't all wrong . . .)

Many of the early Protestant beliefs foundational to Robertson's evangelism—and the modern evangelical movement—came directly from England to the colonies when witch hunts still raged. In fact, some scholars have deemed Puritan minister Cotton Mather—famed for his role in the Salem trials—“the first American evangelical.”

When I could stomach The 700 Club no more, I turned the TV off. Gazing out at the bucolic grounds outside my room, I fell asleep pondering just how much and how little the American religious landscape has changed since the days of King James.

The next morning, I set out early to visit the Jamestown Settlement. Inside the visitor center, a temporary exhibition called “Tenacity” was on view, exploring the lives of real women who once lived in Jamestown: Powhatan, English, and West African. A variety of artifacts populated the displays, from an embroidered Elizabethan bodice to a ducking stool used to punish women deemed gossips or scolds. These items revealed a partial picture of life in the seventeenth century, but the accompanying panels offered more insight into women's responsibilities, relationships, and struggles.

Even for the wealthy and white, Jamestown was relatively inhospitable. The early colony was riddled with disease: typhoid, dysentery, scurvy, and salt poisoning ran rampant. Swampland was pervasive, so clean drinking water was hard to come by, and food shortages even led the fledgling colony to cannibalism within the first few years of its founding. Amid such life-threatening hardships, the colonists first and foremost looked to indigenous people as a source of evil. The foreign Powhatan religion was viewed as unsettling and bizarre—and reeked of witchcraft to English eyes. “Their priests,” wrote Reverend Alexander Whitaker in 1612, “are no other but such as our English witches are. They live naked in bodie, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no covering.”

Alison Games explains in Witchcraft in Early North America that those “launching evangelical missions in North America were optimistic that the Devil could be displaced.” In 1613, William Crashaw affirmed the duty to continue to colonize—and Christianize—the land, concurring with Whitaker's view of Virginia. “Satan visibly and palpably raignes there,” he wrote, “more than any other known place of the world: yet be of courage . . . God will treade Satan under your feet shortly.”

There are no records of the English trying any Indians in court for the crime of witchcraft. It would take another decade until the colonists began to look within their ranks for unholy crimes.

“Beginning in the mid-1620s, as the Virginia colony grew with new arrivals, the English settlers began to find disciples of the devil in their own communities,” writes Carson O. Hudson in Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia. “From then until the early eighteenth century, the colony's surviving records indicate several witchcraft investigations, petitions, slander suits and countersuits.”

Joan Wright is the first known woman accused of witchcraft in America. She arrived at Jamestown in 1609 from Hull, a port town in the northeast of England. Within a year, she had married her husband Robert, who himself would run in and out of trouble with the law as a notorious debtor. Earlier in life, Wright was whipped for not sewing a shirt correctly. Years later, she was a midwife a bit too good at knowing when those in her community weren't well—and when husbands or hens were about to die. She was also left-handed, a feature that marked her as odd, if not nefarious. Colonial Virginians eventually had enough of her ill-omened speech, and she was branded a witch.

A short drive from the Jamestown Settlement is Historic Jamestowne, the heart of the first colony. There, on a gently sloping stretch of land dotted with oak trees, sunlight dapples the James River as it laps at the shore. Some of what used to stand in the old fort has been partially reconstructed based on the work of archaeologists. Visitors walking through the site—which remains in various states of excavation—can see where the well, the storehouse, the barracks, and the first church once stood, where Powhatan Pocahontas (given name Matoaka) married Englishman and tobacco farmer John Rolfe. The most fascinating items dug up at Jamestown are housed on-site at the Voorhees Archaearium archaeology museum. Under glass portals in its floors, you can view the original foundations of the Jamestown General Court where Joan Wright stood trial in September of 1626.

Over a dozen people spoke out against Goodwife Wright. According to one testimony, Wright was supposed to deliver a child, but the mother changed her mind after learning Wright was left-handed and requested another midwife. Wright took her leave of the family's house “very much discontented,” and shortly thereafter, the mother, father, and child fell ill in succession. The child eventually died. In a similar case, Wright was passed over yet again to assist with a birth, and the newborn delivered by another midwife passed away. More testimony swore that Wright had been a witch back in England and retained knowledge of how to combat witchcraft—as any good cunning woman would. All you had to do was heat a horseshoe in the fires of an oven until it was “red hott,” and then fling it into urine to make a witch “sick at the harte.” (Throughout colonial Virginia, an upside-down horseshoe nailed over a door or hearth was used to ward off witches, but witch bottles were common, too.) Wright's trial records indicate that she wasn't all that bothered about being called a witch by her neighbors, though. She reportedly “made light of it,” saying, “God forgive them.”

“The accusations against Wright and her response before the Virginia Council illustrate one of the important features of English beliefs,” Alison Games notes, “the relative insignificance of the Devil and the Devil's pact. Both elements would emerge as characteristics in outbreaks, but for the most part witchcraft accusations in English colonies centered not on diabolism but rather on maleficia.”

We know that Wright was tried in the Jamestown court, but the verdict and what happened to her afterward were destroyed during the Civil War. It is quite unlikely Wright was killed, however. The only known woman executed for witchcraft near the colony was Kathryn Grady, the victim of vigilante “justice” aboard a ship destined for Virginia that ran into rough waters in 1654, for which she was blamed.

Recently, the Jamestown Settlement mounted a play, Season of the Witch, based on Joan Wright's trial transcripts. Every October, both the Settlement and Historic Jamestowne feature some sort of witchcraft-related event for the Halloween season, shining a light once more on the colony's women once deemed witches.

Time stands still in Colonial Williamsburg. The world's largest living history museum has been built to thrive as the city once did before the Revolutionary War. Gallivant down the mile-long Duke of Gloucester Street, and you can tip the wrist at historic taverns, watch horse-drawn carriages careen by, and explore the Blacksmith's, the Joiner's, the Printer's, the Milliner's, and the Wig Maker's. Inside these quaint buildings are people—not actors—trained in their trades, busy crafting goods just as they would have in the eighteenth century.

At the Silversmith's, I was privy to delicate tablewares in the midst of fabrication. A single silver bowl can take days to produce in the traditional way, the master silversmith said. At the Printer's, I watched a tradesman gathering single metal pieces each stamped with a different letter to create a holiday greeting. This painstaking work was how early modern witchcraft pamphlets were made. At the Apothecary's, the shelves are stacked with jars and bottles filled with herbs and powders that colonial people would have wandered inside to buy. A woman working in a cap and dress was answering questions from guests, so I inquired about the historical difference between midwives and doctors. She explained that pregnancy was not viewed as an ailment back then, and thus not the province of doctors—unless there were complications, of course.

Colonial Williamsburg isn't entirely accessible by car, so a bus cycles through various stops around the perimeter to take you from one area to the next. Each time I climbed aboard, a recorded greeting reminded me to curb my speech. “Please abstain from inappropriate or disrespectful language,” a woman's voice announced through the bus speakers, invoking a bygone time when women's words were frequently criminalized.

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law about disorderly female speech that stated “brabling” women would be punished by ducking—the same punishment King James suggests for witches in Daemonologie.

As Terri L. Snyder notes in Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia, “brabbling signified a wrangling, quibbling, quarrelsome, or riotous disposition. It was not an expressly gendered term, but Virginia's lawmakers chose to inflect it as such in the text of the law and the punishment it described.” Joan Wright was clearly a “brabling” woman, and in New England witchcraft cases, disorderly speech was often used as evidence that a woman was a witch.

Down the main thoroughfare past the trade shops, I came upon a garden growing traditional colonial plants like Scotch kale, leeks, poppies, sorrel, scurvy grass, purple turnip, and prickly pear. Turnip and mint were commonly used to battle coughs and stomachaches, the women tending to the neat rows of flowers and greens told me.

Across the street, the fife-and-drum corps played the sun below the horizon. Marching in formation with red coats and cream-colored breeches, the corps executed Scottish and English traditional songs with precision. Nearby, I spied a working couple in colonial garb: her skirts billowing, his tricorn pointed due north as they walked arm in arm down the cobblestone street past tourists pretending to be stuck in the stocks. A nearby sign encouraged us to tag such pictures with the hashtag #colonialmugshots.

Cannons fired at dusk, and students from the College of William and Mary next door ran down Duke of Gloucester Street or walked their dogs among the tourists. I wandered into an off-site coffee shop and sipped tea next to a woman in colonial costume. She gripped her cup of coffee in one hand as she hid the unruly wisps of hair that escaped her white cap with the other. Once it was fully dark, I ventured back inside Colonial Williamsburg to a candlelit courtroom for a witch trial.

Joan Wright may have been the first witch of Virginia, but the colony's last would be far more famous. Grace Sherwood, known today as the “Witch of Pungo” or, more simply, the “Virginia Witch,” was in and out of courtrooms for years because of her malevolent reputation.

In 1697, Grace and her husband James sued a man for defamation after he called her a witch. They requested the sum of fifty pounds sterling, but the case was settled out of court. Sherwood would sue for defamation again in 1698, when a different man and his wife said Grace had “bewitched their pigs to death and bewitched their cotton.” Concurrently, another woman professed that Grace came to her at night and “rid her and went out the key hole or crack of the door like a black catt.” In turn, Grace and her husband sued both parties for slander, asking one hundred pounds sterling, each. The jury denied the Sherwoods’ claim, and Grace was left with her bad name intact.

In 1705, four years after her husband left her widowed, Grace got into a physical altercation with a neighbor who had called her a witch, and she brought the complaint to court. The jury found in Grace's favor, awarding her one pound in damages. Angered by their loss, the neighbor and her husband brought a formal charge of witchcraft against Grace in 1706. Following witch protocol set in England, a jury of women was brought in to search Grace Sherwood's body for any suspicious marks. (Unfortunately for Grace, a woman she had previously sued for slander served as forewoman of said group.) Upon examining Sherwood, the women announced that they had found “two things like titts with severall other spotts.” Grace was taken into custody and eventually put to a water test. She was bound by rope around her hands and feet and thrown in the water. Those present observed Grace carefully to see if she would float or sink to determine if she was a witch. Unfortunately, Grace floated, “contrary to custom.”

Sherwood's story is so memorable that a statue of her stands today in Virginia Beach, and she is the star of a weekly play performed at Colonial Williamsburg. Some even suggest that Grace Sherwood herself haunts the productions.

Cry Witch, written and directed by historian Carson O. Hudson, is drawn from the records of Grace Sherwood's 1706 trial for witchcraft. The line queued up outside the historic Capitol building for the play—the same grounds where the original trial took place—was packed with chattering teenage students on a field trip. Once we had filed in and were seated, the gentleman jurors entered and took their places in the jury box. “Abandon your twenty-first century mindsets” declared the bewigged man introducing the play, and Cry Witch began with the accusations against Sherwood read aloud, followed by live witness testimonies.

Cry Witch is designed to incorporate audience interaction, and so the students obliged, addressing their queries about the evidence presented to the governor who presided over the trial. Some witnesses were more measured than others. One woman was in a deeply agitated state as she attested that Grace came into her home at night to afflict her with witchcraft. The audience was then asked to vote on Sherwood's guilt or innocence, and based on so many negative accusations, the group overwhelmingly leaned toward guilty. Sherwood would soon dissolve into her own agitated state, falling into a fit of hopeless screaming when the verdict was announced.

My foray into the American witch trials felt like a continuation of the English trials in certain respects. However, in Virginia, accusations were all small-scale, at the individual level. But what makes studying the Virginia witch hunts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries particularly disturbing is the historical backdrop against which they took place. Walking the streets of Colonial Williamsburg, I saw actors playing Indians and Africans living in various states of subjugation as they would have among the European colonists, an important reminder that white women accused of witchcraft were hardly experiencing persecution on the scale that indigenous and enslaved people living around them were.

America was built on stolen indigenous territory and flourished because of slave labor. Because of that fact, it can feel foolish to dwell on witch persecutions—on gender-based oppression—alone. And yet, examining the witch trials in colonial America is crucial to understanding American history and to grasping how Europeans settlers and their descendants would eventually come to define themselves as “white” in opposition to a racialized “other.” This process was, in fact, tied to aspects of witch hunting.

In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Kathleen M. Brown describes how gender became increasingly “scrutinized by the court and church alike” in late sixteenth-century England, becoming “an important technology of state power—both at home and abroad.” This is her explanation for the rise in witchcraft cases at the time. “Parliament's decision to criminalize witchcraft,” Brown explains, “tightened the connections between gender ideologies and state power by reiterating categories of deviance and encouraging community efforts to enforce conformity.”

Accusations of witchcraft were one way to police women who strayed from behaving in accordance with patriarchal standards. Or, as Christina Larner puts it in Enemies of God: “The women who were accused were those who challenged the patriarchal view of the ideal woman.” However, the move to legislate the hierarchy of gender would also go on to impact conceptions of racial hierarchies as well. “Discourses of gender, the division of labor by sex, and the regulation of white women's sexuality were integral to the process of defining race and contributed significantly to the establishment of slavery in Virginia during the seventeenth century,” Brown argues.

Even when examining the persecution of white women by the church, state, and their own communities, the specter of racism and colonialism hovers nearby, adding a new dimension to witch accusations that did not exist in Europe. The interplay between race, sex, and gender-based oppression has birthed a thorny, complex legacy that endures in contemporary US politics and culture. When delving into the American witch trials, it cannot be ignored.

The morning after I saw Cry Witch, I visited Grace Sherwood in a hospital parking lot. A beautiful bronze memorial to Virginia's famed, final sorceress is accompanied by a plaque with the words of then-governor Tim Kaine, who exonerated Grace posthumously in 2006. What happened to Grace after she was declared a witch at her ducking is unknown, but there is evidence that she received a grant for land in 1714, so she was likely jailed and then released. Her last will and testament were probated in 1740 by her sons, making Grace around eighty when she died.

The Grace Sherwood statue is near a highway, a hospital, and a Walgreens. It is a very forgettable place for a memorial, and no one was parked anywhere near me when I arrived. However, there were traces of recent visitors. In Grace's hand is a bronze basket of herbs, but someone had placed a bouquet of live roses there that had barely begun to wilt. At her feet, a raccoon stands on its hind legs, a paw tugging on Grace's skirts. Local lore embellished Sherwood's legacy to include the skills of midwifery and the ability to communicate with animals and to heal with herbs. How much of that is true, we'll never know. What we do know is that she was ducked where Witchduck Road now dead-ends at the water. Old Donation Church down the street features a gravestone-shaped memorial to Grace in a small garden. And every year at the Pungo Strawberry Festival, an honorary “Witch of Pungo” is named.

The surrounding area of Virginia Beach has a surprisingly large concentration of metaphysical, New Age, and witch shops. I visited a few, cognizant of how much has changed for witchcraft to be normalized—as it has in London, Paris, Florence, and beyond. But it is not as if witchcraft has been completely accepted, either. Today, the contemporary evangelical community retains great political power in this country, and many of its members do indeed still believe in the Devil—and Satanic witches, too. Though Protestantism and the belief in witchcraft may have come from Europe, it manifested in America in uniquely American ways.