The Hartford Witch hysteria: that’s right, our Hartford, Conn.

Every year, on the weekend before Labor Day, the Norfolk Library holds its book sale. On Sunday, after 12,000 books have been picked over, oddities appear. Early Connecticut Probate Court Records, Vol. I Hartford District, 1635-1700, a record printed in the 1890’s was one such book. It might engage economic historians, but it would not be riveting, we thought.  It did look suitably old, “a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” to quote Edgar Allen Poe, so, always looking for a local story and on the principle that you never know what’s in a book, we bought it. For $3.

The cases were about distribution of estates: in cash, houses, farmland, or livestock. Two matters struck us. The first,  that wills specified how the share of a deceased child should be divided.  Life was precarious; diphtheria, whooping cough, and smallpox were rampant, and many children did not reach adulthood. The other surprise was the case of Nathaniel and Rebecca Greensmith whose estate, including the fate of their two daughters, was settled in 1662.

The Greensmiths were hanged for witchcraft in West Hartford, thirty years before the executions in Salem, Massachusetts. We knew nothing of Connecticut witchcraft cases, until Jen found a master’s thesis from Colorado State University, written in 2022 by Alaina R. Franklin: Dangerous Expectations: Uncovering What Triggered the Hunt for Witches in 17th Century New England, which has an excellent history of witchcraft in Connecticut.

Witchcraft was defined as: an act by which individuals used secret or occult means, emanating from the devil, to inflict suffering upon people or their property. The Probate Court charge in the book we bought read: Nathaniel Greensmith, thou art here indicted by the name of Nathaniel Greensmith for not having the feare of God before thine eyes; thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan the grand enemy of God and mankind, and by his help has acted things in a preter naturall way beyond human abilities in a naturall course, for which according to the law of God and ye established laws of this Commonwealth thou deserveth to die.

The condemnation, containing neither reasonable doubt nor presumption of innocence, was the same for other accused people, the Greensmiths being the last of 17 in Connecticut. When they were executed on January 25, 1662, their Estate was £137-14s-01p, before the Commonwealth deducted £40 for prison expenses.

The six Magistrates and twelve men on the jury were listed by name, proud to hang two of Satan’s minions on the testimony of teenaged girls. There was no appointed defense attorney, nor were there rules of admissible evidence that we found. Surviving torture (in this case drowning while bound) helped a person’s case. In Colonial New England the preferred evil doers were women, easily swayed by Satan whom the Puritans took seriously as the primary source of evil.

The Puritans had fine writers. In England, John Milton (1608–1674) wrote Paradise Lost (1667); the descriptions of Satan and his minions falling from heaven after challenging God, are incomparable. Satan had a palace waiting for him called Pandemonium — a palace for a variety of demons. Satan has been a gift to literature, a stand-in for evil and temptation; he was the core of the Faust legend.

We have a New England version, Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936), which we read in high school. (Do students still read it?)  Webster defends Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer who had sold his soul to the Devil for money. The Devil stored Stone’s soul in a matchbox, where it fluttered, like a pale butterfly, with many other souls. The good senator was a silver-tongued defense attorney and he got Stone’s soul back, though the Devil had packed the jury with torturers and judicial monsters. The Greensmiths could have used him.

The 17th century was a calamity of religious wars and other tragedies; the Puritan and Pilgrim emigrations to New England was one result. It was the time of the little ice age, a long period of freezing temperatures and crop failures. Inflation, previously unknown, reduced living standards. In 1660, plague followed, and the population declined. Witch-burnings peaked about 1660, according to a recent essay in The Economist. The Economist’s writers pointed out that hysterical responses to religious conflict, climate change, inflation, and fearsome plagues are not unique to the 17th century.

Why does this subject appear in a column titled The Body Scientific?  The 17th century was a time of political terror and anxiety; but it also saw the uneasy beginnings of rationalism and the stirrings of science, emerging in what was still a medieval and authoritarian society. René Descartes was driven out of Paris and ended in Stockholm for his thoughts on reason and proof. “I think, therefor I am.” was not calculated to please the Church.  Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam for demanding evidence for belief and thinking more broadly than was allowed.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and published the first drawings of life under a microscope. Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica. Other thinkers contributed, including the Baron Montesquieu, who created the idea of the separation of government powers. The movement for free thought gained force, usually a conflict with religious and authoritarian leaders, who remained. More than a century after the Hartford hysteria, the American founders, who had read these writers, knew to separate church and state in courtrooms and to divide government powers into independent branches.

Jen Pfaltz is a graduate of The University of New Hampshire’s writing program.  She is Program and Office Manager of the Norfolk Hub. Rich Kessin is Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University Medical Center. We will return to the Puritan period.