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Salem’s terrible history

August 5th, 2009 Lisa - Central

I’ve had a fascination with the Salem witch trials since I first read The Crucible in high school.  I followed up many years later with a research paper on the connection between midwifery and the trials.  It’s such a sad passage in our colonial history.  Martha Carrier was one of the women hanged in Salem, after refusing to admit to being a witch.  Her descendant, Kathleen Kent, after hearing her family’s stories about Carrier, spent several years researching historical records to create a heart wrenching account in The Heretic’s Daughter.

The Heretic’s Daughter details early New England Puritan life.  Martha married a Welshman, Thomas, who was rumored to have been the executioner of King Charles I in England.  An immense but quiet man, he and his independent and obstinate wife scratch out a minimal living in Billerica, Massachusetts.  When smallpox threatens their family, they sneak under the cover of night (violating the quarantine) to Andover, where they stay with Martha’s mother.  But Andrew, one of Sarah’s 3 brothers, was already infected and through him, 13 people in the town get the pox and die, including Martha’s mother.  The family stays on the farm, precipitating a dispute with her brother, who believes he should inherit the place.

In a environment where Indians were still raiding, killing and kidnapping colonists, and where smallpox threatened to kill off entire families, several young women begin to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft.  When Martha’s brother, an alcoholic, is accused, he points the finger at his sister, Martha.  Martha refuses to confess to the charges of witchcraft; as a matter of fact, she calls the accusers insane.  Soon, all of her children but the youngest daughter are accused as well.  The older boys, Richard and Andrew are tortured by a rope tied from their throat to their legs behind their backs - causing them to cut off their own air supply - until they confess.  Told by Martha to do anything to save themselves, all of the children eventually accuse their mother of raising them as witches.  Martha is easily convicted and is sentenced to hanging.

Told from Sarah’s perspective, the horrible events take on an even more evil character.  Kent does a wonderful job of building the suspicion around Martha through her own daughter who, though very young, chafes against her mother’s stoic and outwardly cold personality.  It takes the threat to her life for Sarah to see the iron-like strength and courage of her mother in the face of death.  Kent especially brings the colonial world to life.  For example, she demonstrates how the Carrier family completely falls apart when Martha is imprisoned.  The loss of an important contributor to the family’s upkeep cripples their ability to keep up with the extraordinary amount of work it took to farm and raise a family.  Though not a unique history of the witch trials, Kent’s version is nevertheless an affecting read.

For further reading, here’s a transcript of the trial of Martha Carrier.

Entry Filed under: Historical Fiction