ABSTRACT
In 1692, Salem village, now Danvers, had a population of about 600. Salem town allowed villagers to use their church tax to construct a meetinghouse of their own and to hire a minister. Deodat Lawson, English-born and Cambridge-educated, had served as minister to Martha's Vineyard before being called to Salem village. Upon his arrival in 1684, a period of calm descended on Salem village, but in 1686, controversy arose once again. It began with a renewed effort on the part of some residents to establish a fully covenanted church in their midst and to ordain Lawson as their first fully empowered minister. Kinship was a primary determinant of social action in the seventeenth-century Puritan New England community, so it is not surprising that the contending Salem village factions were led by two dominant families, the Porters and the Putnams. By 1692, Salem village had reached the point of institutional, demographic, and economic polarization.
