As far as scholars have been able to determine, he was neither reporting on nor responding to an actual event, certainly not a witch trial. The article, presented as local news, is a literary hoax, similar to two others Franklin published in the Gazette. The tale is told by the sort of narrator who often appears in satire, an urbane, witty figure who coolly observes the action with an amused, tolerant attitude.
The inclusion of the accused in the tests makes the proceedings less a trial and more an absurd experiment in which scales and water are used to detect virtue and vice. If they sink, they are innocent if they float, they are guilty. In the second test they will be cast into water. If it outweighs them, they are witches if they outweigh it, they are not. In the first the men and women will be weighed individually against a “huge great” Bible. In a normal proceeding only the accused would be tried, but in this one the accused cut a deal to put their accusers, also a man and a woman, on trial as well. Untitled when it appeared, a nineteenth-century editor dubbed it “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly.” The brief narrative describes the determined efforts of a mob in a small New Jersey town to find a man and a woman guilty of witchcraft after they had been accused of making sheep dance and hogs sing. Franklin frequently contributed articles, as he did for the October 22, 1730, edition when he published, anonymously, a satire datelined “Burlington, Oct.
They circulated widely, and with high literacy levels in Philadelphia, we can assume that the Gazette had a substantial general readership. In eighteenth-century America people hung on to newspapers, especially in inns, because paper was precious. A year later Benjamin Franklin and a business partner bought it and in the following decades turned it into one of the most popular publications in the American colonies, printing reports from other papers as well as local news. The Pennsylvania Gazette was founded in Philadelphia in 1728.
The student pdf also includes links to the interactive exercises. The second interactive asks students to draw a conclusion from the piece. This exercise lends itself well to whole-class discussion with projection on a screen or smart board. You may want to make these tasks, or at least the first two, a pencil-and-paper assignment. The first interactive activity asks students to do three things: identify words and phrases that make the piece a satire, explain why the language they chose is satirical, and compare their choices and rationales with ours. For close reading we have analyzed the article through fine-grained, text-dependent questions. We have numbered the sentences to make it easier to teach. In 1730, as a twenty-four-year-old, his firm embrace of the rationalistic philosophy of Deism could easily have moved him to take aim at the irrationality of enthusiasm as it might manifest itself in a witch hunt. Although Franklin later befriended the preacher George Whitefield, a major figure in the First Great Awakening, he remained suspicious of the revival’s enthusiasm throughout his life. Thus the satire could be seen as foreshadowing the attitude many among the elite took toward the religious emotionalism, which they called “enthusiasm,” of those caught up in the Awakening’s fervor. The publication date of 1730 places the piece on the earliest fringe of the First Great Awakening, which had its initial manifestations around New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In addition to illustrating how satire works, this piece could be used to highlight cultural differences between the educated elite of the eighteenth century who were influenced by Enlightenment thought and the common folks who were not.