In 1650, nearly 50,000 English settlers lived in what is now the United States. Most clung to the Atlantic coast, within easy reach of ships that could bring essential supplies, protection, and means of escape. Indians outnumbered them by about ten to one; African slaves were rare. French and Spanish colonization in what is now the United States was numerically even more inconsequential, with only about 1,000 Hispanics and even fewer Frenchmen. From the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific, most Indians had probably never seen a European.
By 1750 the demographic situation had been transformed. Nearly a million Europeans, the great majority of English background, and perhaps a quarter of a million African slaves occupied the Atlantic seaboard. The Indians had not been entirely removed: Scores of Indian villages had been enveloped by English settlement. Tens of thousands more Indians had retreated into coastal swamplands or the foothills of the Appalachians. But Englishspeaking peoples had become masters of the land east of the Appalachians.
New Spain and New France had also grown from 1650 to 1750; but by the latter date, fewer than
20,000 Hispanic and French-speaking people lived in those colonies. In most places west of the Appalachian Mountains, Indians feared other tribes far more than European interlopers.
After 1750, the immense sea of risk-taking English-speaking peoples and African slaves that had flooded into the eastern portion of the continent would spill beyond the Appalachians. By sheer force of their numbers, the English would decisively influence American identity, if only by making English the dominant language. Most of the immigrants, too, were farmers, united by a seemingly inexhaustible craving for land. But these enterprising immigrants also differed in fundamental ways. The cultures the immigrants brought with them varied according to the nationality, social status, and taste of the individual. The newcomers never lost their foreign heritage entirely, but they—and certainly their descendants— became something quite different from their relatives who remained in the Old World. They became what we call Americans.
But not right away.
Few portraits of single puritan women exist; their invisibility may help explain why some sought attention, perhaps by making witchcraft accusations. The young woman in this portrait became "visible” by becoming a mother.
Winona Ryder stars in the 1996 movie based on Arthur Miller's 1953 play, The Crucible, an interpretation of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Ryder plays Abigail Williams, consumed with desire for John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis),a married man. Proctor has broken off their affair and reconciled with his wife, Elizabeth (Joan Allen). As the movie begins, Abigail and some other girls have sneaked into the woods with Tituba, a slave who practices black magic. They ask about their future husbands, and some beg her to cast a spell on their favorites. Abigail whispers something to Tituba, who recoils in horror. Abigail's dark eyes, glowing with fury, inform the movie audience of her message: She wants Elizabeth Proctor dead. Tituba slips into a trance and begins conjuring. Exhilarated by this illicit flouting of convention, and quivering with sexual energy, the girls throw off their clothes and dance wildly around a fire.
Then the minister happens onto the scene. The girls flee in terror. Some become hysterical. Later, when confronted by church elders, Abigail blurts out that Tituba was a witch who was trying to steal their souls. Tituba initially denies the charges, but after being whipped she confesses.
Pressed further, she names two other women as accomplices. At the mention of their names, Abigail's face contorts with pain and she moans; taking the cue, the other girls scream and writhe upon the floor. They supply the names of more witches. Alarmed by the enormity of Satan's plot, Massachusetts authorities initiate an investigation.
After one court session, Abigail saunters over to John, standing by the side of the church. When he asks what "mischief" she has been up to, Abigail averts her eyes demurely and then gives him a wicked grin. John smiles at this prodigy in the seductive arts. She responds with a kiss, her hand groping for his groin. He hesitates, but then roughly pushes her away. He has reconciled with Elizabeth; he wants nothing more of Abigail. Her eyes blaze with hatred.
The girls'hysterics intensify. Eventually over 100 suspected witches, most of them women, are arrested. The Proctors themselves come under suspicion. Asked to recite the Ten Commandments, John omits the injunction against adul-tery;the magistrate looks at him searchingly. When Abigail accuses Elizabeth of being a witch, John lashes out at the girl.
"She is a whore," he declares in court."I have known her, sir."
"He is lying," Abigail hisses. Suddenly her eyes widen, horror-stricken, and she screams that he, too, is in league with Satan. Her flawless histrionics again prevail: He is arrested.
During the trials, the magistrates look for physical evidence of satanic possession: unnatural flaps of skin or unusual warts—witch's teats—with which Satan's minions sap human souls. Family and neighbors, too, furnish evidence. Some cite occasions when the accused lost their tempers or stole livestock. But the main evidence is the behavior of the girls themselves, who squirm and howl, claiming that the spirits of the accused torment them. This "spectral"evi-dence unsettles the magistrates. Seeking stronger proof, they urge prisoners to confess. Those who do will be spared, for the act of confession signifies their break with Satan. Those who refuse must be hanged.
The Proctors are among those convicted and sentenced to death. (Because Elizabeth is pregnant, her execution is postponed.) When given the opportunity to save himself, John signs a confession. But inspired by his wife's quiet courage, he repudiates it, choosing to die with honor rather than live in shame. His noble death at the scaffold, and the deaths of others like him, cause the people of Massachusetts to end the witch hunt.
The Crucible warrants consideration apart from Ryder's remarkable performance. For one, the movie vividly recreates a puritan world inhabited by palpable spirits. Contemporary viewers may snicker at scenes of adults scanning the night sky for flying witches and evil birds, but the puritans believed in such things. They regarded comets, meteors, and lightning as signals from God. For example, when Cotton Mather lost the pages of a lecture, he concluded that "Spectres, or Agents in the invisible World, were the Robbers."
Episodes and language taken directly from trial records, though sometimes altered, give the movie a historical feel. For example, the Proctors were in fact interrogated on their biblical knowledge. Whereas in the movie John falters by omitting the commandment against adultery, in history, the fatal mistake was Elizabeth's. Asked to recite the Lord's Prayer, she substituted "hollowed be thy name"for "hallowed be thy name."The magistrates declared this to be a "deprav-ing"act, for she had transformed the prayer into a curse— proof of satanic possession.
The movie's rendering of the girls'hysteria mostly corresponds with what we know from the historical record. A bewildered John Hale, a minister from Beverly, recorded that Abigail and her cousin were
Bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves....Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone.
Historians still puzzle over the girls'behavior. Probably they were seeking attention, or venting anxiety over their fate as women in a patriarchal society. Certainly their choice of victims suggests that they were expressing their parents' enmity toward their neighbors. The movie alludes to such issues, but mostly attributes the girls' hysteria to sexual frustration, a consequence of puritan repression.
Ryder's Abigail symbolizes adolescent sexuality: Her lust for John (and hatred of Elizabeth) precipitates the witch hunt. In fact, the real Abigail did accuse Elizabeth of witch-craft. The trial record reports that when Elizabeth denied the charge, Abigail raised her hand as if to strike her, but instead touched Elizabeth's hood "very lightly"and cried out,"My fingers! My fingers—burned!"Then Abigail swooned to the floor. But if these few historical details provide some basis for Abigail's conjectured affair with Elizabeth's husband, others call it into question, the most telling being the gap in their ages:The real Abigail was eleven and Proctor, sixty.
Whatever the merits of playwright Arthur Miller's speculation about Abigail and John, his larger questions have long intrigued historians:Were the puritans sexually repressive? If so, did young people assent to puritan strictures or rebel against them?
Such questions cannot be answered with certainty. Few puritans left written accounts of their illicit thoughts and sexual behavior. Social historians have approached the matter from a different angle. Nearly all marriages and births in colonial New England (and most other places) were recorded. Scholars have scoured such records to determine how many brides gave birth to babies within six months of marriage; such women almost certainly had engaged in premarital intercourse.
This data for about a dozen communities in puritan New England indicate an extraordinarily low rate of premarital intercourse, far below England's at the same time or New England's a century later. This suggests that young puritan couples were watched closely. Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, commenting on the relative absence of premarital pregnancy, concluded that sinners there were
This image shows actress Winona Ryder as a young puritan who accuses others of witchcraft.
"more discovered and seen and made public by due search, inquisition and due punishment; for the churches look narrowly to their members, and the magistrates over all, more strictly than in other places."On the other hand, the low rate of premarital pregnancy might not signify puritan repression so much as young people's acceptance of puritan values.
When critics confronted Arthur Miller on his deviations from the historical record, and especially when they expressed skepticism over whether young Abigail Williams and the elderly John Proctor had an affair, Miller was unre-pentant."What's real?"he retorted."We don't know what these people were like." Perhaps so, but one suspects that Winona Ryder's Abigail would have had a hard time of it in Salem in 1692. Could a bloom of such poisonous precocity have emerged through the stony soil of New England puri-tanism, and if so, could it have survived the attentive weeding of the puritans themselves?
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