Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft

Salem Village had proven incapable of retaining three religious ministers. By June of 1689, Samuel Parris was brought into the community as a replacement. His arrival sparked a division between inhabitants who wanted their own ordained minister and those who didn’t, but Parris was eventually ordained. He was also given the Village parsonage and a tract of land outright, even though previous rulings had prevented this property to be deeded to an individual and his heirs. Parris’s early triumphs caused alarm among the faction resisting autonomy. “The one firm result of the year’s maneuverings was the emergence of a church which, if it went unchallenged, could become the single most powerful force for political autonomy in the Village,” write the authors (64-65).

During the years that followed, the Village Committee that supported Parris was voted out, and the anti-Parris faction came to power. They actively attempted to oust Parris by refusing to pay his salary. Members of the community who opposed this move refused to pay their taxes. This was the prevailing political climate at the time of the witch trials:

The witchcraft episode did not generate the divisions within the Village, nor did it shift them in any fundamental way, but it laid bare the intensity with which they were experienced and heightened the vindictiveness with which they were expressed (page number?)