I usually write about genealogy on Thursdays – and this essay is about my family history. But Tuesday’s horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered, has made me think about government power and personal freedom. In Uvalde, personal freedom meant that an 18-year-old man purchased a weapon of war and wantonly killed people. In Uvalde, the unwillingness of government authorities to use their power to restrict access to these weapons abetted the killer. In Uvalde, government power meant that the police department, equipped with military-grade armaments (as many police departments are these days), for more than 40 minutes was unable to enter a classroom where the gunmen was systematically killing people. Since Tuesday, public outrage over mass shootings in America (213 so far in 2022) has raised, once again, the struggle between personal freedom and government power.
The image at the top of this post is an illustration of events during the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. These trials are an example of how public hysteria can have deadly consequences, and how a society can recover and move on from these episodes of hysteria. I have at least two family connections to this history. (NOTE: Salem was not the only town where witches were hanged, and it didn’t begin in the 1690s. Salem is most famous because of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible.)
My 8th great-grandmother Margaret Stevenson Scott (1616-1692) was hanged as a witch in Salem on September 22, 1692. Margaret was born in England and came to Massachusetts with her parents. I don’t know when Margaret came to Massachusetts, but she married Benjamin Scott in Cambridge, MA, in 1642. They had at least seven children, including my 8x great-grandmother Mary Scott. They had several children in Cambridge before they moved to Rowley, where they had more children. They lost four of their children in childhood – at least two in infancy and two more within just a few years. This already tragic set of circumstances was to turn against Margaret later in her life.
Margaret’s husband Benjamin died in 1671, and that’s when Margaret’s troubles began. Benjamin had owned property, but when he died he left her a fairly small estate – 67 pounds – on which she had to live for the rest of her life. By 1691, after 20 years of widowhood, Margaret was poor and isolated. Only one of her children, her son Benjamin, still lived in Rowley, and he was married with six children, so he couldn’t contribute much to her well-being.
All of this resulted in a crisis for Margaret in 1692. The Salem Witch hysteria was in full bloom at this time, and a woman like Margaret – old, widowed, poor, alone, and vulnerable – was a likely target for accusations of witchcraft. The deaths of so many of her children, along with her low social and economic standing in the community, made people suspicious of her. She was formally accused of witchcraft by members of two of the most distinguished families of Rowley.
Margaret was found guilty on September 22, 1692 and was hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem. She has the distinction of being the only person from Rowley hanged during this series of events in Salem. By the time of her execution, the witchcraft hysteria had begun to abate, and her execution (along with seven other unfortunate individuals executed that day) was the last conducted during the witchcraft trials.
It took 20 executions to sow the seeds of doubt among the Massachusetts colonial authorities and make them realize that they had been behaving like crazy people. Among these authorities was another ancestor of mine – William Stoughton (1631-1701). He was the second cousin of my 11th great-grandmother Elizabeth Stoughton (1615-1642). They had both come to Massachusetts since 1630. Here’s what Find-A-Grave says about William:
During the Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692, despite any formal legal training, he was named by Governor William Phips as chief justice of the court of oyer and terminer, specifically appointed to hear evidence against those accused of witchcraft. Stoughton ignored or deliberately disregarded established legal protections for the accused, including depriving them of counsel, allowing closed conversations between accusers and judges, and allowing spectators to interrupt the proceedings with personal remarks and hearsay against the accused. He is most notorious, however, for allowing so-called spectral evidence, and for turning judges into interrogators and de facto prosecutors, so that guilty findings were largely a forgone conclusion. This gave those accused no options but to admit to crimes they hadn't committed in order to save their lives, or go to the gallows pleading their innocence. After the hysteria was officially repudiated, Stoughton refused to apologize for his role in the tragedy, unlike his colleague Samuel Sewall. Nor did his role in the notorious affair hurt him civically. In 1694, he became acting governor of the colony and died a prosperous landholder in Dorchester.
In the spring in 1693, the governor of Massachusetts pardoned the individuals who were still imprisoned, and within a few years the state government had repented of its wrongdoing and declared the 1692 trials and executions unlawful. In 1957, the state of Massachusetts formally apologized for the trials, and by 2001 all of the convicted were fully exonerated. All of this was a bit late for Margaret.
So why am I writing about this today? There are a couple of reasons:
Mass hysteria can make people do things that are, quite literally, crazy. Their fear disrupts their thinking. They abandon logic and rely on things like hopes and prayers.
After a mass hysteria has waned, people wonder what in the world they had been doing. Some of the perpetrators of the injustices recognize their wrongdoing and try to make amends – like Samuel Sewall and the governmental officials in Massachusetts. Others – like my ancestor William Stoughton – go to their graves thinking that they had been right.
I am writing this today out of a sense of hope verging on optimism. In the midst of the Salem trials, it was impossible to believe that people would come to their senses and stop the madness. But they did. It helped that it gets cold in Massachusetts in the winter, and that any prisoners still locked up after September 22 were allowed to go home for the winter. Not because the jailors had suddenly experienced an attack of humanitarianism – because of the cold, none of the jailers were willing to serve as guards over the winter. By the spring – after a self-imposed pause – the hangers of witches realized that they had been batshit crazy. So they stopped hanging witches. Later on, government officials recognized the literal insanity of what they had been doing, and they pardoned the witches and moved on. As I said, a bit late for Margaret.
I’m going to spell out the connection, even though you all probably understand where I’m going. The gun obsession of a large swath of Americans is akin to the witchcraft hysteria. The illogic of this obsession doesn’t matter. These people have abandoned logic and are relying on hopes and prayers – and suggestions that the solution is more guns. Have the people who want to arm teachers ever been in a faculty meeting?
Here's where hope and logic come in. If we can somehow hit the PAUSE button – by passing some minimal laws like red flag protections, extended background checks, and other proposals that are out there – it could act like the coming of winter in Salem. Given a chance to think about all of this, perhaps we can come to our senses. Let’s be clear – the GOP is the culprit. Not all minds have to change – my ancestor William Stoughton never repented – but if only a couple of Republican Senators heed Senator Chris Murphy’s call for a willingness to address this hysteria, the turnaround can begin.
According to one estimate (https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/ ), 2,500 people have been killed or wounded in mass shootings in the United States since 2009. The death toll in Salem was 19 people. The death toll in Uvalde is 21 – and it may rise. If it was enough to bring Salem to its senses, isn’t enough for us?
Terrible, but the vision of armed teachers in a faculty meeting was a good bit of humor.