This squabble between the Putnams and the Nurses has deep
roots. You can find great quotes about this issue because there are several of them in
Act I when Rebecca Nurse is introduced. Miller takes the opportunity to diverge from
dialogue and gives some background in prose:
Francis Nurse... was called upon to arbitrate
disputes as though he were an unofficial judge. By the time of the delusion, they had
three hundred acres.
No one
seems to account for how he got this land. Although generally, he was a well-respected
man people would trust.
Another suggestion to explain the systematic
sampaign against Rebecca, and inferentially against Francis, is the land war he fought
with his neighbors, one of whom was a
Putnam.
Yet another
suggestion from Miller's text explains the sides that Salemites took in the positioning
of a new minister:
The Nurse clan had been in the faction that
prevented Bayley's taking office. In addition, certain families allied to the Nurses by
blood or friendship, and whose farms were contiguous with the Nurse farm or close to it,
combined to break away from Salem town authority and set up Topfield, a new and
independent entity whose existence was resented by old
Salemites.
The text goes on
to assert that Putnam was likely one of those and Putnams signed the first complaints
against Rebecca Nurse regarding witchcraft...
coincidentally.
This grudge lead to corruption because
these claims and complaints of the Putnams encouraged the young girls who further
claimed others with the Nurses had been seen with the Devil. These people eventually
hung after false accusations.
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