America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem by Owen Davies (review)

In one sense, American historians have always known that witchcraft continued after Salem; there was the swimming of Grace Sherwood in 1706, Tenskwatawa’s witch trials among the Delaware in 1806, and the phenomenal success of Starhawk’s Spiral Dance in 1979. More generally, however, Americanists have no patience with modern witchcraft, having determined that the bits and pieces of continued witch beliefs (such as the above episodes, but also including African-American conjure, himmelsbriefs, Lovecraftian magic, dozens of Hollywood films, and other artifacts) cannot be cobbled together into a continuation of magic. 1692 is therefore the stamp and the seal of American witchcraft; it passes its warning to humanity and reassures historians working after 1700 that they need not bother about witchcraft.

Unfortunately, “we now know of more people killed as witches in America after 1692 than before it,” according to Owen Davies in America Bewitched, his nigh-comprehensive look at post-Salem witchcraft (3). It is not merely that people continued to believe in witches, Davies argues, but that they continued to kill witches. Davies carefully documents three centuries of witch prosecutions and persecutions—primarily as recorded in American newspapers—in an effort to reorient historiography of both America and its witches.

The data provided is the strength and the substance of the work. Working through an enormous array of newspaper materials—in a manner virtually impossible for predigital historians—Davies conclusively demonstrates that for centuries after Salem, Americans still believed in witches and executed them. These witch killings continued through private channels, rather than through the state. Davies’s newspaper research has unearthed over 150 witch incidents after 1692, mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Americans also tended to shoot their witches, with recipes for blessing bullets to kill witches dating back to the 1820s (40–41). Davies’s exhaustive research includes detailed and repeated reports from newspapers across the expanding republic—from Massachusetts to Arizona to Alaska. For those inclined to criticize the accuracy of newspaper reports, Davies points out that such reports are often more reliable than folkloric sources (the usual source for nineteenth-century witchcraft studies). Newspapers were free of the moralizing tendency of nineteenth-century folklore collectors, and newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were often the only repositories of trial transcripts (10–14).

If witchcraft belief and prosecution continued after 1692, and if it was not limited to any particular racial or religious group, then it is probably time to rethink the theory and narrative of American witchcraft. Bewitched sketches some remarkable insights to get the ball rolling. For example, witchcraft became more associated with women after the Puritan era; 85 percent of the accused were women in the “142 cases of assault, slander, murder, and abuse” against European American witches from the 1780s to the 1950s. The figure for colonial New England was 78 percent (68). The problem of witchcraft also had profound effects for the history of American psychology; the determination between “normal and abnormal witchcraft belief” often served as the crux of legal acceptance of psychological analysis (162–66). Davies also argues that American historians have failed to see witchcraft after Salem because so much folkloric and anthropological work of the intervening years was intended to show witchcraft and magic as the province of African-American and Native American cultures. Setting 1692 as the end of American witchcraft was part of the argument for the superiority of European and Euro-American civilization. Yet witchcraft was pervasive: “The preoccupation with Salem has served as a smokescreen for some uncomfortable truths regarding the people who built the United States. Thousands of Americans, Native, European, and African, were persecuted, abused, and murdered as witches after 1692” (226). Finally, Davies suggests that the eventual decline of witch persecution—now pushed back to the 1960s—should not be seen as a moment when communists replaced witches as the enemy within, but rather...