A Manifest Incongruity
Because my family has lived in America for a very long time, I am eligible to join many of the lineage societies that limit their membership to the descendants of early settlers or men who served in various wars. I can’t say I’ve ever had the desire to actually join any of these societies, however, with one exception. I am intrigued by the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, a lineage society dedicated to “preserving and honoring our ancestors who were accused of witchcraft in Colonial America prior to 31 December 1699.” A lineage society based on recognizing the consequences of the misogyny and scapegoating so prevalent in our history? Sign me up! As it happens, though, I’m not actually descended from anyone accused of witchcraft in Colonial America. Instead, I’ve learned that I’m related to one of the people responsible for conducting the infamous Salem witch trials.
Mather, Cotton. 1693. Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-England. Boston, MA: John Dunton. Image from the Library of Congress.
The Reverend Nicholas Noyes, my eight times great-granduncle, was born in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1647. He was part of a family of ministers. His grandfather, the Reverend William Noyes, graduated from Oxford University and served as the rector of a congregation in Wiltshire, England. His father, my nine times great-grandfather, also named Nicholas Noyes, had no chance to get an education because he immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634 at the age of 18 with his brother the Reverend James Noyes and his cousin the Reverend Thomas Parker, the founders of Newbury. The elder Nicholas nonetheless went on to play an active role in the civic and religious life of Newbury, serving as a church deacon and as a representative to the colony’s General Court in Boston (Anderson 2007).
The younger Nicholas was educated at Harvard College, which had been founded in 1636 for the purpose of training ministers, and after spending some time in Connecticut, moved in 1683 to the bustling port of Salem Town, Massachusetts, where he became one of the ministers of the town church (Noyes 1897). The initial accusations of witchcraft in 1692 originated in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts), a rural outlying area of the county. Salem Village had its own church and minister, but these were subordinate to the church in Salem Town. So when the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village, began to display strange physical symptoms and make allegations of witchcraft, he consulted the ministers of Salem Town, including Noyes (Hill 1995).
Noyes became actively involved in the witch hunts that rapidly spread from Salem Village to other parts of the county. He attended many of the trials and was involved in efforts to get suspected witches to confess, an action that would allow them to escape execution. Sarah Churchill, one of the many people accused of witchcraft, eventually confessed to Noyes but then recanted, saying:
If she told Mr. Noyes but once she had set her hand to the [devil’s] book, he would believe her; but, if she told the truth, and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times, he would not believe her (Hill 1995).
Noyes also officiated at a number of executions of alleged witches, offering prayers for the condemned souls and extorting them to confess their actions. Sarah Good, one of the first people executed, cursed him when he pressed her for a confession at the gallows, saying, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink” (Hill 1995). Her words had little effect on Noyes, who remained a leading proponent of the witch hunts even after they ended. In 1703, he was one of only a few ministers in the county who did not sign a letter to the General Assembly, asking that the names of those accused be cleared (Hill 1995).
The Salem witch trials dominated life in northeastern Massachusetts throughout 1692. More than 200 people, nearly 80% of them women, were accused of witchcraft; 54 confessed; 30 were convicted; 19 were executed; five died from the miserable conditions in which they were jailed; and one was pressed to death with stones in an effort to elicit a plea. More people might have died had not the colonial governor Sir William Phips in October 1692 forbade further imprisonment for those accused and provided reprieves to some of those convicted, actions possibly motivated by the fact that his wife was among those recently accused.
Widow Penny et al. 1692. Petition to the Governor and General Assembly of Massachusetts from accused witches asking for bail. Image from the Library of Congress.
The final Salem witch trials were held in early 1693, but there were no more executions. In 1711, the Massachusetts Bay General Assembly annulled many of the convictions, but families had already been financially ruined by their attempts to help loved ones who had been accused and imprisoned (Hill 1995).
This incident in American colonial history has been the subject of considerable historical research, but no real consensus has been reached about why the situation became so intense. Certainly, Puritan religious doctrine contributed strongly to a sense that evil was at work in the world, and fanatical ministers like Parris and Noyes drove the ensuing witch hunts. Historians also point to the unstable political situation in the Massachusetts Bay colony, which had lost its charter in 1684 and was under constant threat of attacks by hostile Native Americans. Other historians have proposed an economic explanation, contrasting the situation in the agrarian Salem Village with the economic prosperity of Salem Town, while still others have pointed to vicious feuding between several of the leading families in Salem Village, with some suggesting that at least the initial accusations of witchcraft were actually a deliberate conspiracy. It seems likely that this messy stew of religious fanaticism, political and economic instability, and interpersonal malice all contributed to the tragedy (Ray 2010).
In an odd postscript to these events, Nicholas Noyes’s other claim to fame was his intense opposition to the wearing of wigs, particularly by men, and most particularly, when these wigs were made of women’s hair. In the latter part of the 17th century, the wigs worn by the wealthy and elite in Europe were highly ostentatious, and that fashion had begun to spread to the American colonies. For many Puritan residents of New England, wearing a wig seemed like a worldly vanity. For Noyes and others of his time, wigs were even more problematic (Godbeer 1997).
de Largillière, Nicolas. c 1700. Portrait of a Man in a Purple Robe. Image from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, Germany.
In a treatise written in 1702, Noyes rails against the wearing of wigs, calling them “a manifest incongruity” that runs counter to a natural order in which a person’s hair signals their identity, gender, age, and social status (Noyes 1702). Upending these natural hierarchies seems to be a rejection of the natural world as created by God, a horrifying thought indeed to a staunch Puritan (Godbeer 1997).
From a modern perspective, Noyes’s horror of wigs seems quaint and rather silly, much like the wigs themselves, but his treatise also illuminates the kind of thinking that led to the deaths of 25 people and the ruin of many others during the Salem witch trials. Moral panics—cultural moments when some behavior or group is seen as an existential threat to society—have continued in American culture well past the 17th century. The 20th century saw moral panics over communism in the 1940s and 50s and satanism in the 1980s that led to people losing their jobs and even being jailed for imagined crimes (Critcher 2008). Now we live in a nation where immigrants from Central and South America are assumed to be violent gang members, transgender and nonbinary people are seen as subverting natural hierarchies of biological sex, and drag queen story hours are believed to somehow be causing the destruction of civilization. I would have hoped we had learned something in the 300+ years since the Reverend Nicholas Noyes participated in the Salem witch trials, but I very much fear we have not.
Helminski, Francis. 2019. Part of the memorial for the victims of the 1692-3 witchcraft trials, Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Works Cited
Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration, Immigrants to New England, 1634-35. Vol V M-P. Boston, MA: New England Historical and Genealogical Society.
Critcher, Chas. 2008. “Moral Panic Analysis: Past, Present and Future.” Sociology Compass 2(4): 1127–44.
Godbeer, Richard. 1997. “Perversions of Anatomy, Anatomies of Perversion: The Periwig Controversy in Colonial Massachusetts.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, 109: 1-23.
Hill, Frances. 1995. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York: Doubleday.
Noyes, James Atkins. 1897. “Nicholas Noyes and his Son Rev. Nicholas Noyes.” In Genealogical Record of Some of the Noyes Descendants of James, Nicholas and Peter Noyes. Henry E. and Harriette E. Noyes, Eds. Boston, MA: unknown.
Noyes, Nicholas. 1702. “Reasons Against Wearing of Periwiggs; Especially, Against Men’s Wearing of Periwiggs Made of Women’s Hair, As the Custom Now Is, Deduced from Scripture and Reason.” In The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800. Ed. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Ray, Benjamin C. 2010. "’The Salem Witch Mania’: Recent Scholarship and American History Textbooks.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (1): 40-64.