The Specter of Salem' by Gretchen A. Adams: Study of the Salem Witch Craft Trials
In The Specter of Salem, Gretchen A. Adams studies the ways nineteenth-century Americans deployed the history of the Salem witchcraft trials to influence debates over national identity, the sectional crisis, and new religious movements. Adams situates her work within a wide range of historical and sociological literature, including studies of collective memory, nationalism, and language. Her research is based on the legal records and histories written immediately after the trials, as well as nineteenth-century schoolbooks, newspapers, magazines, and printed records of regional associations. Adams argues that those who evoked the history of the Salem witchcraft trials used it to represent “persecution, intolerance, and bigotry” (p. 3). Thus, she suggests, the trials acted as a “negative symbol” to influence others to act with more disinterest, virtue, and reason (p. 5). Adams makes little mention of the persecution of women in her study, even though she believes that the best histories written about Salem focus on factors of age, economics, gender, and sexuality. After reading Adams’s work, historians who center their research on the history of women and gender will be left wondering whether nineteenth-century U.S. women’s rights advocates ever rhetorically connected their own situation with Salem’s “witches.”
Adams begins her history by reminding readers about the events in Salem in 1692, and shows that the history of the trials was immediately contested by the generations who lived through the events. Adams explores petitions of accused persons asking for pardons and restitution, as well as pamphlets published by ministers and eyewitnesses after the episode, to glimpse the way the public narrative about the witchcraft trials was crafted. Adams finds that before 1710, Massachusetts’s “settled opinion” was that the judicial system had failed in 1692 and that many accused witches were actually “good people” (p. 24). For most of the eighteenth century,
Adams begins her history by reminding readers about the events in Salem in 1692, and shows that the history of the trials was immediately contested by the generations who lived through the events. Adams explores petitions of accused persons asking for pardons and restitution, as well as pamphlets published by ministers and eyewitnesses after the episode, to glimpse the way the public narrative about the witchcraft trials was crafted. Adams finds that before 1710, Massachusetts’s “settled opinion” was that the judicial system had failed in 1692 and that many accused witches were actually “good people” (p. 24). For most of the eighteenth century,