Today in Salem: Mercy Lewis, 18, is swinging a stick wherever 12-year-old Ann Putnam points. There! Ann screams. No, there! Mercy swings wildly, but the specter of Martha Corey just swings backs with a phantom red hot iron rod.
Ann’s father, the powerful Thomas Putnam, has invited the real gospel woman Martha Corey to visit, just to be sure that Ann’s visions are correct. It’s no small thing to accuse a church member of witchcraft. It’s a mistake, though. The minute Martha Corey entered the door Ann had contorted herself in torment.
Now Ann claims to see a man skewered on a spit, roasting right there in her parents’ hearth, with Martha Corey turning the spit. Suddenly Mercy loses control, swinging sticks and screaming at the specter, even though Ann is the only one who can see her.
Now it’s late at night. In a chair at the hearth, smoke is curling from her skirts as the refugee and servant Mercy Lewis inches closer and closer to the fire. She remembers her entire village burning, every structure blazing with heat and fire, even the cattle destroyed, and her parents dying brutally. How had she escaped? Why was she still alive? She can’t answer those questions. Now the fire pulls her toward it. It doesn’t matter that she’s sitting in a chair, that the hearth is laid with rough bricks, that two grown men are sweating and grunting as they try to pull her away. The chair just keeps moving forward, dragging all of them with it. Finally Ann Putnam’s uncle throws himself between Mercy and the fire then lifts, tilting her backward into the other men’s arms. They carry her to the corner of the room, where she’s safe, for now.
LEARN MORE: Why did Native Americans attack and destroy settlements in Maine?
22 years before the Salem witchcraft trials, English officials banned selling ammunition to Native Americans, hoping to quell rising tensions. Instead, they were inflamed. So when war broke out in southern Massachusetts, Commissioners were sent to northern Massachusetts – today’s Maine – to proactively enforce the ban on ammunition sales.
The war spread to Maine, though, when the French (longtime foes of the English) gave ammunition to the Native Americans anyway, and British sailors killed a Native American baby. After five weeks of aggressive fighting on both sides, 60 miles of Maine coastland was wiped clean of English settlements. Native American villages were just as devastated. Families were forced to flee their homes and leave fields unharvested. With no access to fishing grounds or guns for hunting, many Native Americans starved.
A peace treaty was eventually negotiated, but the English settlers ignored it, flagrantly. Over the course of the next 20 years they intentionally blocked fishing streams, let their cattle destroy Native American crops, and inflicted other major abuses. (In one overture for “peace,” the English invited 400 Native Americans to attend a conference, and promptly captured and enslaved 200 of them.)
War broke out again, with the major event being the burning destruction of Falmouth (now Portland), Maine. Many of its traumatized residents – including at least one accuser and four who were in turn accused – fled to Salem, just two years before the witchcraft hysteria began.
WHO was Thomas Putnam?
A third-generation resident of Salem Village. Some of the most prolific accusers were his daughter Ann, his niece Mary Walcott, and his servant Mercy Lewis. He gave their accusations legal weight by seeking arrest warrants, transcribing depositions, swearing out complaints, and writing letters to the judges.
Thomas was aggressive in his support in part because he was a resentful and bitter man, for several reasons.
On a general level was an ongoing family feud between Thomas’s family, the Putnams, and the Porters. The Putnams lived in the rural Village, while the Porters lived in the Town. The Putnams were farmers, and the Porters were merchants. The Putnams were prosperous enough, but all of their worth and income were tied up in a farm. The Porters, with their ability to start and fund new businesses, eventually became one of the wealthiest families in the region. It was a classic conflict of rural vs. urban, farmer vs. merchant, and Thomas was squarely on the rural farmer side.
On a more personal level, Thomas’s father had recently died and left most of his estate to Thomas’s stepmother and half-brother, whom he disliked. Thomas felt cheated, even disinherited, and contested the will, but he failed. Adding insult to injury, his half-brother then married into the enemy side: Porter family. The feud just intensified.
To sum it up: Thomas had a lot of axes to grind. Case files: Thomas Putnam Jr.