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Josh Hutchinson:
On the night of May 20th, 1692, between about 8 and 11, Mercy Lewis was reportedly bewitched so badly that six eyewitnesses described it as if death would’ve quickly followed and said that she could not continue long in this world without a mitigation of those torments.
Sarah Jack: Mercy
There were men attending to Mercy, but she couldn’t speak, so they sent for Elizabeth Hubbard so they could find out who was afflicting Mercy.
Josh Hutchinson: But once Elizabeth Hubbard arrived on the scene, she and Mercy began having alternating fits, that one was afflicted while the other was well, and so one could speak while the other was in a fit. And so eventually they revealed that Mary Esty was the one that they saw coming to afflict them in her spectral form, and Mary Esty had only recently been released [00:01:00] from jail because the afflicted girls didn’t agree on whether Mary’s specter was the one that was hurting them.
So Esty’s specter supposedly brought the devil’s book to Mercy Lewis and threatened to kill her by showing her a winding sheet and a coffin. This, the men took to be a grave threat, meaning that her death was imminent. In fear, they rode to Salem Town to get a warrant for her arrest in the middle of the night to wake up the magistrates and say, Hey, we need to arrest this woman and get her back in chains so that her specter is not roaming any longer. So they rode to Salem, got the warrant, rode back with the constable, arrested Mary Esty, and took her back to the jail, and got all that done sometime between the [00:02:00] start at eight and 11 and midnight, this imposing deadline that seemed to be in place on Mercy Lewis’s life.
Sarah Jack: She lived, but she still had afflictions.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and poor Mary Esty went to jail and stayed there for four months before her trial in September. Welcome to The Thing About Salem. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I am Sarah Jack. We are descendants of Mary Esty. Did that sound like hysteria to you?
Josh Hutchinson: Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines hysteria as behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess.
Sarah Jack: Hysteria is not the most accurate way to explain the Salem Witch Trials. Though the Salem Witch Trials are considered a witch [00:03:00] panic and there was certainly widespread fear, we cannot diagnose clinical hysteria from a distance of 330 years, and accusers definitely were not all hysterical all the time.
Josh Hutchinson: The Salem Witch Trials proceeded through orderly legal channels, and months went by before the first trial. And during all this time, there’s no reports of any extrajudicial actions, any vigilante style justice, or people just taking the law into their own hands. And also the non-afflicted witnesses and accusers were quite composed in court hearings, as were the jury members, and of course, the judges seemed to be of sound mind the entire time.
Sarah Jack: Hysteria has turned into a buzzword when it comes to witch hunts. It’s just an adjective. It’s a description we just throw [00:04:00] on there. But when we label any witch-hunt the result of hysteria, it is a way of not accepting what causes a witch-hunt and not accepting that we’re capable of the same injustices today.
Josh Hutchinson: We still have the same emotions. There’s the same kind of quick spread of fear that happens when scary situations arise in our society. The quick spread of the panic in 1692, it was a function of several things happening in the colony at that point in time. There was economic uncertainty, there was war, political uncertainty, religious strife and uncertainty, and the list goes on, so many stresses on people’s minds at that time that when they found an enemy they could pin all of this uncertainty and disarray, basically, [00:05:00] on, they went with that enemy.
Sarah Jack: So you know, all of these conditions, the economics and war, and politics and religious and social, and every other factor that went into the Salem Witch Trials, those are things that just regularly happen during human history. You could look at any period of time and you’d see similar things going on in societies, and it’s just when there’s a big enough combination of all of those factors that panics happen and witch-trial-like behaviors occur. So today we call those things witch hunts when we recognize them, but so often we don’t.Since 1692, there have been several moral panics. We’ve had them recently in our world. I don’t have to say what they are. You’re thinking of them [00:06:00] right now and we need to recognize it. Reactions to injustice can be extreme, because injustice is an extreme negative experience. It doesn’t mean the reaction’s hysteria, and we need to recognize that it’s ordinary human behaviors that responsible for those panics.
Now the affliction stories are colorful. They were modeled over and over, over decades and through other hunts for witches, colorful and imaginative, but not hysterical. You know, sometimes we feel hysterical or we see someone we love have a really extreme response to a trauma and we might say it was so bad we were in hysterics. But that’s a generalized description. [00:07:00] Shock, anger, sadness, fear, those are the things that we need to pull the threads out on and look at to honestly reflect on the Salem Witch Trials.
Salem wasn’t the only witch panic that happened in New England, so these things happened periodically. Salem of course, dwarfs the others in its absolute scale, but fears like this came up many times in New England, and it’s crucial to understand that they weren’t all merely an irrational outburst of hysteria. They were actually profound panic born from deeply held beliefs and very real societal pressures. The colonists genuinely believed in the existence of witches and their diabolical powers, as did pretty much any Christian at the time. They viewed these powers as an existential threat to their community and their faith.[00:08:00]
Extreme fear is fear. It can cause panic, but the hysteria isn’t what would propel the judicial conviction of an accused witch.
Josh Hutchinson:
Salem
began in mid-January when Betty and Abigail began displaying the first symptoms. Late February, they were diagnosed as being under an evil hand, a witch cake was baked to test who was the first witch, and the first accusations were made on February 26th. So March 1st, you get the first arrest, legal examinations, and incarcerations, but it’s not until June 2nd that there’s the first trial. So this is five months between January and June that the children are ill. The illness is spreading through the village and then surrounding communities. Somehow they allow five months to go by while they’re supposedly [00:09:00] hysterical this entire five months before they have the first trial of a defendant.
Sarah Jack: It is obvious that the events are just too complex to simply write off to hysteria and move on. Moving on afterafter labeling it hysteria is one of the reasons that we’re, generation after generation, still trying to figure out what’s going on. If we stop labeling it as hysteria, that’s one point. Now I’m not gonna go hunt who’s using the label still and criticize you, but just think about, if we take that word out of there, it leaves more space for talking about the story of our ancestors. More nuanced and sophisticated explanations help us to learn lessons from these witch trials, and the way people reacted then is just how we react to fears now. Fears about immigration, terrorism, nonconformity to gender [00:10:00] norms today, those reactions. It’s us. They’re humans. We’re humans. Same reactions.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and we started this episode with the story of Mercy Lewis accusing Mary Esty of imminently planning to murder her. Even this midnight horse ride illustrates that people went through legal channels, even when they were at their most frantic.
Sarah Jack: The Salem Witch Trials were a human reaction to great fear during a time of stress and uncertainty. And when we consider that, we can have more empathy for both sides, for accusers and the accused, I even think this hysteria label kind of takes the humanity out of the accusers, and we really need to recognize what they were experiencing also.
Josh Hutchinson: And it’s so important just to recognize how ordinary the people and the emotions [00:11:00] involved in the witch trials were. They’re us, we’re them, people haven’t changed that much in 333 years, so we need to know and acknowledge that they had the same feelings and fretted about the same things that we do, and so reacted in ways that we react to things still today. So we’re much closer to thinking like the people did then than we choose to believe.
Sarah Jack: It is so true. You know, the United States is celebrating the, 250 years of independence and we act like that was, just yesterday. Well, 1692 was just a few generations before that. So if we can identify and recognize ourselves in the founding fathers of the United States, then we can do the same with those who were [00:12:00] founding the colonies and hunting witches.
Josh Hutchinson: And it’s true that the afflicted people were energetic and noisy and just got wild in the court sessions, but in between attending the hearings against the accused, they were reported to have behaved normally. Thomas Brattle, in a letter to an unnamed clergyman, wrote that, “many of these afflicted persons who have scores of strange fits in a day, yet in the intervals of time are hail and hardy, robust and lusty, as though nothing had afflicted them.”
And so he tells about here about the chief justice giving the jury their instructions. “He told them that they were not to mind whether the bodies of the said afflicted were really pined and consumed, as was expressed in the indictment, but whether the said afflicted did not suffer from the accused such afflictions as naturally [00:13:00] tended to their being pined and consumed, wasted, et cetera. This, said he, is a pining and consuming in the sense of the law.”
Hysteria, while possibly affecting individual witch trial accusers at specific times, is not a satisfying explanation of why witch hunts occurred in the past or why they’re occurring today.
The hysteria explanation leaves open the possibility that witch hunts happen randomly whenever a person or group is hysterical. They understate the factors that contribute to witch hunts, the social, economic, political, religious and cultural factors, the emotional stresses and fears, the familial and neighborhood strife, the sudden disaster that serves as the impetus for the hunt.
To address witch hunting and in the future, we have to understand the ordinary human emotions and behaviors involved in the hunts. We are who [00:14:00] we always were. We’re as capable of witch hunts as any people at any time in history.
America has seen numerous moral panics, including the Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, over the years. But rather than citing hysteria as the cause of these more recent panics, historians and other researchers reason that societal pressures caused these panics. So why do we insist that the witch trials 300 some years ago were the products of hysteria, when we know that people today are involved in the same kind of panics? Let’s be realistic and address the human factors that lead to widespread human rights violations during periods of panic.
Sarah Jack: We’d love to chat with you about this in our Patreon community. Come say hi and tell us what you think of hysteria. I.
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