Connecticut and its fascinating history of witch hunts

FALLS VILLAGE — The Salem witch trials of 1692-93 are justly famous and — thanks to the literary works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller — firmly ingrained in the American imagination.Less familiar is the Hartford witch hunt that took place 30 years earlier.Walt Woodward, the Connecticut state historian and an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, covered witch hunting in New England and more at the first of the First Tuesday series of lectures sponsored by the Falls Village-Canaan Historical Society and held at the South Canaan Meetinghouse. The talk was held on Tuesday, June 3.Woodward said that, to modern sensibilities, witch hunting and the belief in witchcraft are difficult to comprehend.Placed in historical context, however, the fear of witches was logical, even rational.The Renaissance ushered in an era of “great flowering in the humanities,” he said. It also included a “most horrendous” amount of witch hunting cases — between 1500 and 1700, 100,000 people were executed for being witches in Europe. Woodward said there are several reasons for this phenomenon:• Effects of the Protestant Reformation. “It’s hard for us to really understand the force of the Catholic Church in Europe for the first 1,500 years after Christ,” said Woodward. “So when Martin Luther challenged the church, society itself fractured. The 17th century was a nightmare for everyone.”• Churches of any stripe wanted to regain control. One way to accomplish this was to create a bogeyman — witchcraft — and give it a scientific basis in the form of books such as the “Malleus Maleficarum,” which gave detailed instructions on how to discover and prosecute witches. “They rationalized a folk fear.”• Witchcraft was closely linked with the devil and devil worship. And making a pact with the devil — literally, “signing the Devil’s book” — was a thoroughly modern concept in an age when illiteracy was the norm and Gutenberg had just invented moveable type. “It was the equivalent of friending the devil on Facebook.”Prosecution invariably involved torture — water torture, various clamps and presses, a chair with nails on the arms.And it was effective, if the goal was a confession. If the subject finally broke down and confessed, then the witch hunters knew they were right all along. “It’s a terrible circular argument that feeds on itself.”After the confession, the next question was, “Who else?”“By the time the witch broke, she had already heard the names” of the other suspects during the interrogation, and readily repeated them. “This is how you get 100,000 executions.”Heresy and treasonTo answer the question, “What was the matter with these people,” Woodward said that in a world where religion, science and magic were intertwined, attributing misfortune to witches or other occult phenomena made perfect sense.“There is a logic to it. Don’t be deluded into thinking that’s a helpless woman, because the devil is by her side. You can’t allow it or your own soul is in peril.”He noted that, in Europe, convicted witches were burned at the stake — as heretics.A witch could be responsible for almost any ill: sick livestock, bad weather, poor crops, disease, death.Weather was particularly important in an agrarian society, and when it changed for the worse, “They didn’t ask why — they asked who.”Belief in magic was universal, Woodward said.Alchemy, which he called a “proto-science,” is most famous for the effort to turn base metals, such as lead, into gold.But not to create wealth, he continued. That would have been greedy, and therefore sinful.The urge to change lead into gold, rather, was an attempt to please God by purifying the element. “It mirrors what happens when the soul is saved.”Woodward said that England “came late to the party” when it came to witch hunting, and the English did not use torture.And they added an interesting wrinkle: In England, convicted witches were hanged for treason, not heresy.The reason for that was that, starting with Henry VIII and the break with the Roman Catholic Church, the king was also the head of the church. So signing the devil’s book was an act of treason.The English also introduced the concepts of the familiar (an intermediary that relayed messages between the devil and the witch) and the witch’s teat, a third nipple at which both the familiar and the devil himself could receive sustenance.Across the oceanWhile the Puritans of England, in the county of Essex in particular, were busy executing witches between 1645 and 1647, their counterparts in the New World were also getting busy.Enter Gov. John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut — scholar, politician and alchemist.Between 1647 and 1692, 57 people, mostly women, were tried for witchcraft in 24 Connecticut towns, with 16 convictions, four confessions and 16 executions. (In Salem, in 1962-63, 24 were charged, 30 were convicted, 44 confessed and 19 executed.)But there was about a 25-year gap between executions in Connecticut, which in its early history was “the fiercest” in prosecuting witches. Until Winthrop became governor, serving between 1657 and 1676.Winthrop was “the New World’s leading scientist,” who founded New London, intending it to be an “alchemical colony.”He was deeply skeptical of witchcraft prosecutions, although he had to be circumspect in how he expressed his skepticism.The reluctant prosecutorIn 1661, Winthrop went to London to petition for a royal charter for the colony. In his absence, the Hartford witch hunt resulted in four executions.In 1663, Winthrop returned with his charter, and a great deal of additional political clout. He was back in time for the trial of Goody Seager, who was initially charged with witchcraft but convicted instead of adultery. (The former was a capital offense; the latter was punished by flogging and ostracization.)Two years later she was back in court, charged with witchcraft, and sentenced to hang.Winthrop, backed by the authority of the charter, simply refused to enforce the verdict.“It’s odd that the New Englander best known for the practice of magic was also the most reluctant prosecutor of witches,” Woodward said. His conclusion is that Winthrop “knew how complex and difficult magic was.“He thought they were troublemakers or misfits. They could conform or leave.”But not face execution.Winthrop’s other move was legalistic. In English common law, a capital charge had to be backed up with two witnesses to the same act at the same time.In New England, this was interpreted rather loosely. It was sufficient to have two witnesses who each claimed to have witnessed an act of witchcraft at different times.Winthrop changed this, with the help of cooperative clergymen, so that the two witnesses, same act, same time rule applied.This cut down on the witchcraft claims — “because witchcraft always began in the imagination.”And it explains why Connectcut had a period of relative calm in the prosecution of witches.