Ehninger, John W, "Giles Corey of Salem Farms," The Poetical Works of Longfellow, 1880, p. 723.

Although we can’t know what Tituba truly looked like, she was often described in fiction as an outsider, someone who white people avoided “because she embodied their racialized religious fear.”² The Puritans of Salem saw Tituba as a representative of Satan –  more diabolical a presence than the accused white witches of the community.³ This racial fear underpins the way she is represented in the actual trial records from 1692. In court documents, Tituba is racialized both as Native American and Black. Accusers who testified against Tituba first refer to her as African, and later as Indian—these same witnesses describe the Devil in a similar way, first as Black and later as “tawny,” or Indian.⁴ 18th and 19th century European Americans consistently associated the Devil with a figure racalized as non-white, speaking to their belief that African Americans were uniquely gifted or suited to the practice of witchcraft.⁵ Witchcraft practices via certain African spiritual and religious traditions did persist throughout New England among African Americans.⁶ The perception that Black Americans were particularly knowledgeable about witchcraft continued through the 19th century, shown through different representations of witches in fiction. 

Fredericks, A. “Tituba and the Children,” 1878, Popular History of the United States, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 457.

Many fictional witches were depicted as white and were often described as “ancient,” and “sharp-tongued,” like John Greenleaf Whittier’s Alice Knight of The Haunted House.⁷Others were “old crones,” and “ugly,” “old grannies.”⁸ But in Hope Leslie, one of the more commercially successful and significant works of 19th century witchcraft fiction, C.M. Sedgewick describes “an old Indian Hag” who was sentenced to death for “hellish incantations.”⁹ Sedgewick’s construction of an “Indian” witch seems to point towards those lasting popular conceptions of Tituba, the original witch of Massachusetts.

“John Greenleaf Whittier” NPS.

Cranstone, Lefevre James. "Giles Corey of Salem Farms," 1880, The Poetical Works of Longfellow, Houghton Mifflin Boston, 752.

Scholars look to the early 1800s as a time of great change in American culture and society. America was a new nation, still striving to assert itself as independent. Just a few decades after winning the revolution, America and Britain clashed again in the War of 1812. Though the results of this war were somewhat ambiguous, the United States emerged with a few major victories and gained a newfound sense of national pride. What was certain was that America had proven itself as a major player on the global stage. This post-war period was marked by renewed optimism and patriotism. The early 1800s began a renaissance of literature—writers were beginning to articulate what exactly an American Literature could look like. Some writers found inspiration in periods of what they now embraced as distinctly American history, periods that were “ready for the novelist’s purpose.”¹⁰ This embracing of history through fiction was a strong way to articulate post-war national pride. As historian G. Harrison Orians writes, the colonial period was of a particular interest to writers:

“Fertilest of these were the colonial days of New England, and so optimistic [were] the romantic possibilities of this period that in the decade following...many phases of Puritan life were poured into fiction. Witchcraft, as one of the colorful though minor incidents of that life, was soon appropriated.”¹¹

Hawkins, Mical, and William Clifton. “Back side Albany, a Comic Ballad,” 1837, Thomas Birch, New York, monographic. Notated Music.

David Waldstreicher writes about minstrelsy’s war-time origins, noting the war’s context of “black sailors and emerging black political and literary culture in the North.”¹⁶ Waldstreicher situated minstrelsy as part of the patriotism and “reinvention of American nationhood,” sparked by the war.¹⁷ The first blackface minstrel song, “Back-side Albany,” debuted a few weeks after the American victory at the Battle of Plattsburgh, as part of a play about that campaign.  According to 19th century writer Benson J. Lossing, it was one of the most popular songs written during the war. While writers of witchcraft fiction romanticized the colonial period, white minstrel performers in blackface asserted their own national identity through the “ventriloquizing” of African Americans.¹⁸ Minstrel performers’ derisive racialization constructed an American identity defined by exclusion, and by the maintenance of a racial hierarchy many white Americans already felt slipping away. 

Ledger Job Printing Office, “Morris Brothers minstrels from Boston, organized Dec. 14th, --The model troupe / Ledger Job Print,” ca. 1869, Phila. Boston Massachusetts, Photograph.