[On March 1st,
1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and
the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in
what would become the
Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem
Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]
On the danger of
looking too closely at our historical heroes, and a potential middle ground.
One of the first
Salem Witch Trials figures about whom I learned was Giles
Corey, an elderly man and the only one of the 20 executed “witches” who died by “pressing”
rather than hanging. As both those hyperlinked articles note, the 80 year-old Corey
refused to enter a plea of either guilty or innocent before the court,
maintaining his silence throughout the fatal pressing (which was apparently employed
in an attempt to draw such a plea out of him one way or the other); indeed, the story went
that the only words he spoke as more and more rocks were piled upon him were “More
weight.” To a young AmericanStudier (and I learned about Corey for the first
time at some point in high school, so it was indeed quite early in my
AmericanStudies career and perspective), that was one of the most badass and
inspiring historical moments I had ever encountered (also a horrific one, to be
sure, but nonetheless a badass and inspiring response to such horrors), and
Corey became one of my historical heroes as a result.
And then I
learned more. Most relevantly, I learned that before Corey was accused of
witchcraft, his third wife
Martha was—and that, as that hyperlinked article traces at length, Giles
not only refused to corroborate Martha’s story in a way that might help her
avoid conviction, but in fact testified against her at her trial, more or less
assuring that she would be found guilty. I understand full well that marriages
can be unhappy and far from the romantic ideal, and I also understand
motivations of self-preservation and survival, especially in times like the witch
trials era—but at best (and I do mean at best), Giles’s actions toward Martha
utterly destroy any image of him as courageous or heroic. Moreover, further
investigation into Giles revealed that he had beaten to death one of his farmhands,
Jacob
Goodale, some fifteen years earlier, in
1675; he was found guilty of the murder but punished with only a fine. Clearly
this was a man with a history of violence and ugliness, and one whose
mistreatment of his third wife (and while he did not himself accuse her of
witchcraft, I can think of no kinder word than mistreatment for his behavior
once she was accused) was simply a final brutal act in an undignified life.
But it wasn’t
his final act overall, of course. That was refusing to play by the witch trials’
court’s rigged rules, refusing to give in to their barbaric torture, dying on
his own stubborn terms rather than their nonsensical and awful ones. Those
actions could be linked to his violence toward others, I suppose, but they’re
also certainly a form of personal bravery in the face of violence. Is it
possible to highlight and even celebrate that final act, while also remembering
that Giles Corey participated actively in systems of communal violence and
patriarchal oppression at their most extreme? That’s not unlike the questions I
asked about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s end-of-life transformations in a
footnote to this post, and there I called those shifts “far too little and
too late.” Corey didn’t reach the depths of bigotry, brutality, and pure
badness that Forrest did, but in a more personal and small way he seems to have
been much the same type of man. But he was also a victim of the Witch Trials,
and a victim whose final acts of stubborn bravery do help illuminate the true
depravity of that period. So I believe it is worth remembering and even celebrating
those final acts, but only in a much more accurate context than those with
which I initially remembered and celebrated Giles Corey.
Next Witch
Trials context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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