Katie: We all appreciate your asking people to correspond with you privately. Yours is, though, the most sophisticated request for information from a high school student for a term paper on the Salem Witch trials that I have seen. Usually such requests are about "The Crucible", which has so little historical validity it's sickening, the students making the requests have never done enough very basic reading to realize it, and they typically ask idiotic questions wildly at variance with reality, that they would have discovered that quickly if they had gone to the library and picked up a book. Practically any book. Your subject is more complicated, though, than you realize it is. It is easy to think that the Salem witch trials must had some impact on the public consciousness. Actually, they directly grew out of contradictions and problems within the Puritan faith and of social change that was already changing the way the Puritans thought. The people who brought the charges were actively resisting the changes. Salem Village was populated mostly by small farmers whose livlihood was threatened by the development of a capitalist economy and of world trade in Salem Town, next door. They also thought in extremely traditional ways, and some people, such as John Willard, but he was simply the most obvious example, were charged with witchcraft because they handled land or came upon money in ways other than the traditional ways of the feudal society that very much still existed to that point. John Willard was a land speculator; others had sold land, inherited land or money by other than the accepted way, etc. The villagers of Salem did not understand any part of the developing Capitalist economy or the new ways of thinking and thought it was Satanic. Puritanism held that anything different from the right way of thinking was Satanic. Salem Village was born of the differences in economic status and interests between the farmers on the outskirts and the merchants of Salem Town. The conflict focused on the church partly because the church was born of a long dispute with Salem Town over whether the people of the village had to support and attend the distant church in Salem Town! Moreover, there was considerable uncertainty and anxiety on all fronts; the government of the colony had had some problems with structure and stability and English willingness to invest in and support the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Salem Village always seemed to be fighting for its survival with surrounding towns such as Topsfield. The small farmers of the village appeared to think they were fighting the entire world for their survival. The village church itself suffered from not only the town's factionalism, which made life for a short succession of ministers very hard, but the Puritan intellectual climate, ie, its inherent liberalism fostered differences in ideas and debate but such was not tolerated; Rev. George Burroughs was driven from town partly for the "heresy" of not believing in infant baptism, which was one of the main controversies within the Puritan movement at the time. On a political level, both the right to vote and the right to hold public office were once restricted to the Puritan church, but as a prosperous merchant class developed the merchants took care of this situation. Understand, they didn't simply have to join the Puritans' church, everyone was required to belong to it and they pretty much did. To be full-fledged members, people had to convince the church's inner circle that they were among a very small and select number of people who God had elected at the beginning of time to save; ie, that they were in a state of grace. Into all of this came Rev. Parris, and a member of the once powerful but economically and politically disenfranchised Putnam family. The Putnams' fate really was an example of the changing economic structure and its impact; their fortunes and their political power had both fallen to the new economic order and the rise to power of the merchants of the town. A sister of the deceased wife of a former minister who had fallen victim to the town's factionalism married into the Putnam family. Puritan theology really played havoc with the mental health with anyone who was at all serious, scrupulous or high-strung of temperament; one problem that Puritanism was starting to deal with at that time is that all over New England, the most devout and moral adults of the community, often members of the minister's family, were refusing to come to church or to take communion because they could not convince themselves, let alone feel capaple of convincing the church's inner circle, that they were in a state of grace! Younger Puritans were very prone to the sort of fits of anxiety and demonic possession that the Salem girls experienced. I myself went through something like this as a teenager. From exposure to Fundamentalist thinking, of course. And I have manic depression, which it took a very long time to have correctly diagnosed. But something similar ran in the family of this woman who married into the Putnam family. Both Anne Putnam Sr and her daughter were obsessed, high-strung, and unstable, and Anne Sr's sister had also been very high-strung and chronically in poor physical and mental health. Putnam genealogists write that such a tendency ran in the Carr family. The tendency to mood and anxiety disorders is very strongly genetic. In fact, I became interested in my Salem ancestors because I wanted to know if the witch trials were an account of ancestors of mine with problems similar to my own. The Putnams themselves were probably not entirely mentally stable; they never forgot any slight or any fight they had lost. Many people charged in the witch trials were people who had won battles with the Putnams over this and that over the years. Both husband of Anne Putnam and Rev. Parris, I believe, had a history of violence toward spouses and children, as well as far too severe a personality to have been mentally healthy, and both as I recall are known to have employed violence to keep servants and children testifying against their enemies at the witch trials. Parris was previously an unsuccessful merchant before turning to the ministry, he came from a family of somewhat successful merchants and traders. He was a very self-serving man, and he tried to get the Salem Village congregation to give him permanent title to the rectory where he lived with his family while serving as minister of Salem Village. No way he was entitled to it, but the Putnams sensed an ally, and they supported him. I don't remember the outcome, but of course some of the people charged in the witch trials had done little except oppose Parris's bid to get permanent title to that property! There was a third level to the "witch conspiracy"; Dr. Griggs. His servant, actually a niece, was one of the afflicted girls. He targeted people who were threats to his exclusive status and power, particularly women in the village who served as folk healers and midwives, something women had done since time beyond memory, and such women were targets of witchcraft accusations right through the medieval period. The grounds, they did things that were legitmately the role of an assortment of men! There is valid and legitimate disagreement about what was going on with the girls, but I think they were atleast initially driven crazy by their elders' shenagans. I think they tended to target people their parents disliked out of the same anxiety that drove them to think they were possessed by the devil. Remember that to these people, one way of thinking and acting was right and any other was Satanic. As an adolescent, I quite well knew better than all of this on an intellectual level, but on an emotional one I was simply scared and depressed right out of my mind. I have seen the effect that severe anxiety can have on the mind of an adolescent. The change from a Puritan society to a liberal one was a long time happening. It can best be seen in my own ancestry in the Tuttles of Connecticut rather than the people of Salem Village. The Tuttles were a family of substantial means who produced several generations of seriously insane family members, and an entire clan of Puritan clergy. These clergy were on the forefront of the movement to keep Puritanism as it originally was. One in particular, REverend Jonathan Edwards, led a revivalist movement during the 19th century. Rev. Edwards taught Puritanism as it originally was, a feudal religion marked by a capricious, moody, arbitrary, angry and vengeful God. Puritanism was simply a Calvinist sect; they taught that God selected a handful of people who would be saved at the beginning of time, not because of anything at all about those people, what they deserved, what the all-knowing God knew at the beginning of time they would come to deserve, etc., but simply because it pleased God to do so. This was a theology, born in the late middle ages, far more ferociously feudal than Roman Catholicism which kind of benignly taught people to accept their lot and do their best. Calvinism depicted God as a feudal warlord with the manic depressive temperament most successful feudal warlords have always had, and people's place in the cosmos, not to mention on earth, was foreordained for all time, people had to accept their lot, and they could do nothing to change it. People who DID change their lot, in Salem Village, incurred charges of witchcraft! Puritanism like all Calvinist sects had a variety of half-put-together answers to the critical questions of what did one do to be one of the saved and how did one know one was saved, and it came down to a mixture of "know in one's HEART that one was saved", and their degree of success in life, which was taken for a sign of God's favor, while poverty and disease obviously were signs of God's disfavor. You can learn something about it by researching Jonathan Edwards, both on the web and in the library. The best sources on Calvinism are biographies of Calvin himself (the man fully realized that a serious anxiety disorder affected his faith), and under German and Dutch Reformed on the web, also Old School and Primitive Baptists. This entire way of thinking literally succumbed to the development of a Capitalist society. In prosperous 18th century New England, people felt as if they made their own fates both in Heaven and on earth, and they changed to thinking that people brought about their salvation by choices that they made. That of course was Roman Catholic thinking, but the Congregationalists and Baptists, both outgrowths of Calvinistic religion, had forgotten that, and therefore they developed new, liberal churches, such as the Unitarian/ Universalist church (which began by teaching simply that God originally intended to save everyone). The witch trials were actually part of the death throes of Puritanism, but not in the sense that the death throes of Puritanism happened in a few years or a couple of decades. I think it did kind of bring to people a sense of having gone too far. It was not the first witchhunt of its kind, and it pretty much was the last. Also, not long after the trials there was a large-scale exodus from the Salem environs by people who decided they had simply had enough of having their lives dictated by the Puritan authorities. My ancestors were among them. Of course, the struggle for power against Puritan authorities was going on on more than one front and the witch trials had been to a good degree about it. On the politics and the social context of the witch trials, several people have recently posted bibliographies of very good sources available at most public libraries to this list. We've also recently done alot of discussion on it. Noone has done the equivalent with sources on the psychological aspects of the situation, but I now have my sources well organized and will post this information tomorrow. Yours, Dora ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com