Reply to Carla Pestana’s “Origins of Witchcraft Crisis”
This 1000-word reply appeared as a Letter to the Editor to the American Historical Review 130.2 (June 2025): 1007-1008, in response to a featured retrospective review of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974), entitled, “The Origins of Witchcraft Crisis 50 Years Later,” by Carla Gardina Pestana (American Historical Review 129.4 [December 2024]: 1751-1754). I have linked here my reply and Pestana’s review to pdf copies of the original journal articles. The AHR’s paywall prevents nonsubscribers from accessing these web articles directly.
In printing my letter to the editor, the AHR misprinted the word “capitalism” as “capitalist” in the second-to-last paragraph, 6th line from the bottom (I had taken the word from a direct quotation from Salem Possessed.) I have corrected the pdf copy in pen.
TO THE EDITOR:
In her featured review of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s 1974 book, Salem Possessed (“The Origins of Witchcraft Crisis 50 Years Later,” AHR, December 2024, 1751-1754), Carla Gardina Pestana laments that a work whose “assumptions underlying the interpretation have crumbled” should “still resonate” and remain “a seductive story” (p. 1754). Her conclusion would have been more persuasive had she summarized the scholarship undermining those assumptions and better captured why the book has nevertheless proved so popular.
In order to explain the pattern of witchcraft accusations in Salem village in 1692, Boyer and Nissenbaum posited a twenty-year-long factional face-off between the economically declining farmers residing on the Puritan village’s western side (they predominated among the accusers) and the economically advancing farmers and tradesfolk residing on the village’s eastern side, next to Salem town (they predominated among the accused and their defenders). The authors contended that this factional strife accounted for the selections and departures of the village’s four ministers during these years, culminating in the witch hunting ministry of Samuel Parris. They argued that the prosecution of presumed witches provided an outlet for the economically struggling Puritans to get back at their more prosperous neighbors.
This depiction of the Salem witch hunt was accepted by nearly all academic reviewers until 2008. In that year Richard Latner demonstrated that Boyer and Nissenbaum’s reliance on tax-assessment lists from the single year 1695 had yielded a misleading portrait of the two sides. Adding tax data from 1681, 1690, 1694, and 1700 to those from 1695, Latner showed that the supporters of Parris and the witch hunt were not a declining group prior to 1692 (or later, for that matter), having gained back an earlier deficit by 1690. “The tax rolls do not support the claim that the pro-Parris group lashed out in resentment in 1692 against those [the presumed witches] who represented the superior forces of modernization,” Latner concluded. “If any group had reason to complain, it is the minister’s opponents” (“Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem’s Witch-Hunters Modernization’s Failures?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 [July 2008]: 423-448; quotation pp. 446-447).
In the same year Benjamin Ray revisited Boyer and Nissenbaum’s most famous graphic (appearing on p. 34 of Salem Possessed), a map displaying a large selection of the residences of the leading witchcraft accusers, accused witches, and witches’ defenders in 1692 (90 data points in all). The geographic distribution of these residences dramatically lined up on opposite sides of the authors’ posited east-west divide, with accusers greatly overrepresented (94%) on the village’s western side and accused (77%) and their defenders (81%) overrepresented on its eastern side. Through a careful (though not flawless) reexamination of all the village’s participants in the witch hunt, Ray was able persuasively to correct mistakes and omissions in the original map to produce a less lopsided pattern between accusers (now 59% on the western side) and accused (now 68% on the eastern side); Ray omitted defenders from his corrections (“The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 [July 2008]: 449-478). Yet Ray could not account for what remained of this geographic variance.
Ten years later my own chapter-length critique of Salem Possessed solved the problem of the geographic divide left over from Ray’s amended map by reminding readers of the larger contexts of family ties and religious beliefs within which witchcraft accusations proceeded, typically owing to personal grievances and fears. A number of extended families – with the Putnams and Wilkinses in the lead – produced the lion’s share of witchcraft accusations at Salem, and because generations of family members held contiguous lands through subdivisions, accusers tended to live near each other and at some distance from those they accused. The Wilkins clan alone, which owned most of the land in the northwest corner of Salem village, accounted for eleven accusers on the western side of Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map, while they lived near to just one accused witch and a single defender. The accused also tended to be grouped in extended families, not, as Boyer and Nissenbaum thought, because they held commercial ties to Salem town, but rather because it was believed that witchcraft ran in families. Boyer and Nissenbaum’s “factions” were chiefly an illusion fostered by reading later events and alliances backward into the pre-1692 period. (See Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018], chap. 2.)
Omitting all this scholarship from her review, Pestana is left criticizing Salem Possessed simply for its alignment with historians’ town studies of the 1960s-80s, which depicted (mostly positively) colonial towns as traditional and insular when we now know them to have been bound up with capitalist values and trans-Atlantic commerce right from the start. In truth, these settlements shared in both these characteristics, as most historians of that era acknowledged. What made Salem Possessed so seductive to readers and scholars from the 1970s all the way up through today was not its denial of the commercial element but rather its ideological hostility to it. The Salem story was one where, as the authors put it, “a subsistence, peasant-based economy was being subverted by mercantile capitalism….[T]he social order was being profoundly shaken by a superhuman force which had lured all too many into active complicity with it. We have chosen to construe this force as emergent mercantile capitalism. [Cotton] Mather, and Salem Village, called it witchcraft” (pp. 178, 209).
As for witch hunting, it will not do to banish “village infighting, spite, and envy” from our understanding, as Pestana advocates (p. 1754). That’s the part of the phenomenon that joins early modern European witch hunting (including in its colonial outposts) to witch hunting in all times and places. The other essential part of this phenomenon comes from the religious ideas and fervor of the era that turned small-scale scapegoating into mass panics.
Tony Fels
Professor Emeritus of History
University of San Francisco