Harry F. Faulkner
Recently I attended a legal seminar at which the events of some of the greatest trials in history were used as a tool to teach lessons of rhetoric and advocacy for trial lawyers. During a discussion of the Salem Witch Trials, the speaker noted that the trials had been prosecuted by the Pilgrims. I pointed out to him that, while this is a common misunderstanding, it was the Puritans, not the Pilgrims, who were to blame. While witchcraft was a capital crime at Plymouth, there were during the history of the colony only two incidents involving such accusations. In both cases, the women accused of witchcraft were exonerated. However, there is an interesting and little known connection between the Pilgrims and the Salem Witch Trials, which is the subject of this article.

Undoubtedly, the witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 constituted the most infamous event in New England history. In all, 24 innocent people lost their lives to the hangman or while imprisoned awaiting trial. In most witch hunts, charges of witchcraft occurred mainly against females past their child-bearing years or against poor unfortunates considered a nuisance in their community. Neighbors often accused other neighbors because of some old quarrel. But, at Salem, this pattern began to change as more prominent people faced charges of practicing witchcraft.

This trend at Salem continued when in May, 1692, Captain John Alden, Jr., -one of the best known men in New England, and the first son born to now legendary Mayflower Pilgrims, John and Priscilla Alden, faced accusation. His arrest warrant alleged that he used witchcraft to cruelly torture and afflict sever-al of the.young girls of Salem Village. At first glance these charges made no sense. Alden, a wealthy Bostonian, had never lived at Salem or even met any of the "afflicted" girls.

But, the charges, although completely false, become more understandable when one examines the forms of factional conflict, described by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum in their book Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, that existed between Salem Town (located on the Atlantic coast) and Salem Village (next to Salem Town on the west and governed by the same town council of selectmen) in the last decade of the 1600s.

Boyer and Nissenbaum identify several important forms of conflict which separated most of the accusers from the accused at Salem. One of these was whether one was affiliated with the Salem Village church. The minister of the Salem Village church, the Reverend Samuel Parris, was a principal leader of the accusers, and his most ardent supporters claimed affiliation with that church. Of course, Alden did not worship at the Salem Village church, being a charter member of the Puritan Third Church of Boston, now known as the Old South Church of Boston (Williams, 1999:28).

A second important form of conflict was wealth. The poorest men in Salem Village supported Reverend Parris by a two to one margin, while the richest men opposed him by the same margin. Alden was a wealthy man with substantial real estate holdings and success as a merchant sea captain.

Another critical form of conflict was geography. Those living in the north-western half of Salem Village made up Reverend Parris's strongest supporters, while those living nearest Salem Town opposed him by a six to one ratio. At first, Alden's case may not seem applicable to the analysis of geography as a form of conflict because he was a resident of Boston. But, he would have been considered an outsider and therefore viewed with distrust by the more provincial people of Salem Village. Probably known to many of them by his reputation as a sea captain, he had many associations with Salem Town because it was the second largest seaport in New England at the time.

Other important forms of conflict were the social and economic conflicts that existed between the commercial Salem Town and the agricultural Salem Village. The new merchant class at Salem Town had little in common with the farmers of Salem Village. The prosperity of Salem Town had given it an urban pattern of life, while Salem Village remained distinctly rural. The merchants of Salem Town were importing and exporting goods all over the world, and as a consequence the Town's relative wealth increased dramatically. Alden served as a naval commander, but made his main living as a merchant sea captain trading with the English, French and Indians for furs and supplies along the northeastern Atlantic coast as far north as Port Royal, Acadia (now known as Nova Scotia, Canada).

The new internationally oriented merchant class at Salem Town prospered by engaging in pre-industrial capitalism, a practice foreign to agrarian life at Salem Village. To make matters worse, the average size of Salem Village land holdings continued to shrink during the late 1600s. Because Alden owned a substantial amount of land it would be surprising if some farmers in Salem Village did not look on him with envy. Capitalism also constituted a threat to the Puritan ideal of placing a higher value on the best interests of the community as a whole as opposed to one's self interest. Therefore, some residents of Salem Village may have seen the new class of merchant capitalists as a threat to the basic moral principals on which Puritanism was founded. Certainly Alden's associations in trading with Indians must have been considered immoral by many Puritans.

Another form of conflict was that the new wealth of the merchant class at Salem Town brought them economic and political power. A power that "only those few farmers [referring to Salem Village] with close merchant ties and affinities" could exercise (Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974:87). Certainly Alden possessed economic and political power, but because the Salem Witch Hunt was out of control and all those tried were being convicted, he felt compelled to use his influence to escape from his Boston prison cell while awaiting trial. Although the power and influence of Alden did not protect him from accusation at Salem. his escape until the witchcraft hysteria had subsided probably saved him from conviction and execution.

This anxiety of the people of Salem Village over their vulnerability to Indian attack (particularly of those residing nearest the frontier on the northwestern side of the Village) was another form of conflict and likely a principal factor leading to the accusations against Alden. The authors describe a petition by Salem Village residents in which these residents compared the compact Salem Town to their own scattered settlement which was "always vulnerable to Indian attack because its houses were so widely separated (Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974:92). Alden had close associations with the French and Indians while trading. fighting. and engaging in prisoner exchanges. He, along with the Reverend John Burroughs, executed for witchcraft at Salem, had taken part in, but survived the French and Indian wars in Maine that had orphaned several of the afflicted Salem Village girls.

A factor not considered in Boyer and Nissenbaum's analysis of factional conflict which also likely contributed to the accusations against Alden was his role as a naval commander in New England's failed military expedition against Canada in 1690. The Canadian expedition was not universally popular. "When [Captain] John Alden visited Marblehead to requisition heavy guns. he was met by what the General Court described on 15 July as an `Insurrection of the people.' This had partly been prompted by the action of local militia captains, who had ordered the beating of drums to summon the crowd... Towns vulnerable to land or sea attack were reluctant to give up their military personnel or supplies for the general good" (Baker and Reid, 1998:95-96). The citizens of Marblehead were understandably alarmed about leaving their coastal town defenseless against enemy attack. Surely the citizens of nearby Salem felt the same way, and Alden would therefore have been unpopular there as well. It is also worth noting that the majority of the Justices on the Court of Oyer and Terminer (meaning "to hear and determine"), which tried most of the witchcraft cases, were military officers and may have been looking for a scapegoat for recent New England military failures.

Proclaimed innocent of all charges after the witchcraft hysteria subsided in 1693, Alden later gave a third-person account of his examination at Salem. Former Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson provides a good summary of Alden's account:

... and the justices allowed had always had the character of an honest man, though one of them, Gidney, told him at his examination he then saw cause to think otherwise. Alden, in the account he gives, says that the accuser pointed first to another man and said nothing, but when the man who held her stooped down to her car. she cried out `Alden, Alden.' All were ordered into the street and a ring was made, and then she cried out, `There stands Alden. a bold fellow with his hat on, sells powder and shot to the Indians, lies with the squaws and has papooses.' He was immediately taken into custody of the marshal and required to deliver his sword. A further examination was had in the meeting house. his hands held open by the officer that he might not pinch the afflicted, and upon their being struck down at the sight of him and making their usual cries he was committed to jail in Boston (Hutchinson. 1870:404).

Several points may be taken from Alden's examination. First. the Gidney he mentions (referring to Major Bartholomew Gedney) served as a militia officer in the military expedition against Canada prior to being named a Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminor. Second. it is evident that his young accuser relied on coaching by an adult and did not personally know Alden. Third, although there is no evidence that Alden engaged in any inappropriate conduct with the Indians, his accuser associated Alden with Indians. an association that many Puritans likened to consorting with the devil. Fourth, Alden. a proud man, would not remove his hat. The Puritans associated not removing one's hat with the Quakers, of whom they disapproved.

Captain John Alden, Jr., suffered as a victim of the hysteria of his young female accusers, fueled by the ulterior motives of his adult enemies, operating together without a central authority in the Massachusetts Bay Colony powerful enough to address the issues of factional conflict before they spun out of control. Dr. Gary Jensen, Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, described these conditions as constituting "the perfect storm." Fortunately, the discredit brought to the witch trials by the wide-spread accusations against prominent citizens, like Alden, ultimately led to their end in 1693.

Captain John Alden, Jr., and The Salem Witch Trials