Salem Village in 1692 was not one community but two, overlapping uneasily on the same ground. To the east lay Salem Town — a prosperous port, commercially oriented, Anglican-leaning, connected to the wider Atlantic world. To the west lay the farming village, Puritan to its core, economically marginal, and deeply suspicious of the town's growing wealth and influence.
The village had been petitioning for formal separation from the town since the 1670s. The dispute was partly theological — the villagers wanted their own church, their own minister, their own covenant community — and partly economic. The town taxed the village for roads and bridges that served the port trade, not the farms. The village resented paying for a prosperity it did not share.
The afflicted were almost entirely from the village's western, farming faction. The accused were disproportionately from the eastern, town-connected faction.
The Putnam family sat at the center of the accusation network. Thomas Putnam Jr. signed more complaints than any other individual. His daughter Ann was among the most prolific accusers. The Putnams had been losing ground — literally and figuratively — for a generation: land disputes with neighbors, a contested inheritance, a sense that the world they had built was slipping away.
The accused, by contrast, were disproportionately connected to Salem Town, to merchant networks, to the new commercial economy. Rebecca Nurse's family had prospered. John Proctor ran a tavern on the road to the town. Bridget Bishop kept an unlicensed establishment that drew customers from both communities. They were, in the eyes of the accusers, the beneficiaries of a world that was leaving the village behind.
