The year 1696 was not a good one for Samuel Sewall of Boston. In May his wife delivered a stillborn son, and in July he heard of the deaths of a pair of favorite uncles. Furthermore, two of his older children were struggling with their religious faith. Late in the year things got even worse: His wife fell gravely ill, and their two-year-old daughter, Sarah, died suddenly. To top it all off, the Massachusetts legislature declared a day of fasting and repentance to atone for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Sewall had served as a judge in those proceedings, which condemned twenty people and two dogs to death. Later, when the witchcraft hysteria had subsided, its instigators began having second thoughts. As often happens in the aftermath of mass delusions, a miasma of shame and guilt hung over Massachusetts. Neighbor criticized neighbor with veiled charges and allusions, and everyone involved tried to shift the blame or made futile attempts to forget the whole affair.

In the years after Salem, Sewall experienced a series of calamities out of a Stephen King novel. A friend saw balls of fire in the air; a “strange plague of flyes” spoiled the colony’s pea crop; Sewall had a nightmare in which almost all his children were dead; a late-April hailstorm shattered the windows of his new home. Upon this last event, a worried Sewall wrote in his diary that “more Ministers Houses than others proportionably had been smitten with Lightening” and wondered “what the meaning of God should be in it.” One of Sewall’s daughters gashed her head in a terrible fall, while another was afflicted with fits. News of the death of England’s young Queen Mary, a Protestant heroine, arrived in 1695, and the following year brought its fresh batch of troubles.

On the morning of December 25—no holiday for the Puritans—Sewall buried his little daughter Sarah. That afternoon he sat in the family tomb and contemplated the coffins of his mother, father, cousin, and six dead children. In these gloomy surroundings he must have meditated on the Bible verses his son had read the previous day, especially Matthew 12:7 (“And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless”), which “did awfully bring to mind the Salem Tragedie.” Over the next three weeks Sewall prayed fervently for help, and by the time of the appointed fast day, he knew what he had to do.

On January 14 Sewall stood in Old South Church while the minister read his agonized confession of error: “Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted upon the opening of the late Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem … he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and shame of it. …” At the end of his statement, Sewall bowed to the congregation. Others who had been involved at Salem made their own halfhearted apologies and confessions, mostly of the mistakes-were-made variety, but Sewall’s was by far the boldest and most unequivocal.

After his confession Sewall became more liberal. He went on to publish The Selling of Joseph, a landmark antislavery tract; to modify a strict law against miscegenation; and to oppose capital punishment for counterfeiting. Twenty years after the trials Massachusetts tried to close the book on Salem by annulling the witchcraft convictions and paying the victims’ heirs, but the stain would not wash out. As late as 1720, while reading a historian’s account of the Salem delusion, an aging Sewall was moved to cry, “The good and gracious God be pleased to save New England and me, and my family!”

On December 28 the evil specter of drug abuse reared its polychromatic head in the pages of the New York Herald. Under the headline WHOLE TOWN MAD FOR COCAINE appeared the sorry tale of South Manchester, Connecticut, where addiction was so widespread that “hundreds of persons have become slaves to the stuff.” The problem had begun when a local druggist compounded a cure for catarrh, a respiratory illness, out of cocaine (then a common nonprescription drug), menthol, lactose, and magnesia. The prescription worked so well that catarrh cases skyrocketed.

Soon devotees were congregating in dark corners to share a pinch of the precious remedy. Strangers stopped one another on the street to beg for a fix. Some “hard working and usually frugal mechanics” put five dollars’ worth—about half the typical wage—up their noses every week. One druggist complained that “well known men and women went to his house at all hours of the night and made him go to the store and get the stuff for them, threatening if he did not that they would break into the place.” A reporter said it was common to see a trolley conductor or motorman “take out a bottle, shake a white powder in his palm and then sniff it with intense satisfaction and a long drawn sigh of relief.” Some residents found in the newspaper’s report an explanation of the strange behavior they had been noticing. A schoolteacher “had known that some of her charges had a white powder, which they appeared to be playing with, but the nature of it was unknown to her until she read the HERALD.”

A few days later S. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia, a sixty-seven-year-old doctor and novelist whom one critic has called “conservative to the point of reaction,” gave the Herald his account of a recent medical experiment. Mitchell, a distinguished physiological researcher, had gotten some New Mexican mescal beans from a colleague, and one day he took the extract from six and a half of them and recorded his reactions.

The earliest effects were “great gastric discomfort,” dilated pupils, “a slight sense of exhilaration,” and “a tendency to talk.” Dr. Mitchell continued his medical rounds, visiting and treating patients as he noted these symptoms. Later, while sitting at his desk at home, the doctor became aware of “a transparent, violet haze” about his pen point and felt “a certain sense of the things about me as having a more positive existence than usual.” Reading and writing became more labored, and he noticed “tiny points of light, like stars or fireflies,” as well as “fragments of stained glass windows.”

At this point the dogged researcher went upstairs and lay in a dark room, “hoping for still better things in the way of color.” He got them: floating chromatic films, another shower of white points, brightly colored zigzag lines, puffy clouds in vivid hues, and a spear that turned into an elaborate Gothic tower surrounded by statues and hung with jewels that dripped color. Next came a surrealistic landscape dominated by a gigantic bird claw, followed by a hundred-foot brown worm with flailing green and red tentacles that rotated “like a Catherine wheel” while two leather-clad dwarfs smoked long green pipes. Mitchell’s final vision, which for some reason he found the strangest of all, was “a beach, which I knew to be that of Newport,” washed by colored waves.

Mitchell predicted “a perilous reign for the mescal habit” if the drug became widely available. Commenting on the report, Harper’s Weekly admitted mescal’s “curious and interesting peculiarities” but doubted that it would ever “supersede the familiar exhilaration produced by John Barleycorn.”

On December 21 Eugene Talmadge, a virulent white supremacist who had just been elected governor of Georgia, died at the age of sixty-two. Since Talmadge had not yet been inaugurated, no one was sure what to do next. The reform-minded incumbent, Ellis Arnall, vowed to remain in office until a successor was legally qualified. The lieutenant governor-elect, Melvin Thompson, claimed the post for himself. And there was a third aspirant—Talmadge’s son Herman, who shared his father’s racist views. An obscure clause in Georgia’s constitution said that if no candidate for governor received a majority, the legislature could choose from the top two vote-getters. When the senior Talmadge’s health started to fail before the election (in which he was unopposed), his supporters quietly arranged for some voters to write in Herman’s name. That way, if Eugene died, the legislature could pick his son to replace him—maybe.

On January 14 thousands of Talmadge supporters mobbed the capitol in Atlanta, where Georgia’s legislature was meeting in joint session to count the votes. As Fiddlin’ John Carson, a long-time stump entertainer at Talmadge rallies, strolled the halls playing “Sugar in the Gourd,” the official tally was announced: 143,279 for Eugene Talmadge, 699 for James Carmichael (whom Talmadge had defeated in the Democratic primary), 637 for D. T. Bowers (a nonentity who made a hobby of running for office), and 617 for Herman Talmadge. Then, in the sort of accident that used to occur often in Southern politics, an extra 58 Talmadge write-ins suddenly materialized from his native Telfair County. (The ballots had been put in the wrong envelope, it was explained.) A later investigation showed that Telfair had done some fiddlin’ of its own: Many of the voters were dead, and a large block of them had voted in alphabetical order. With the postmortem write-ins added to his total, Herman Talmadge nosed out Bowers (who in real life, appropriately enough, was a tombstone salesman) for second place.

Amid arm-twisting, intimidation, bribery, and even attempted kidnapping, the legislature elected Herman Talmadge governor, with the key procedural measure squeaking by on a vote of 128 to 126. After being sworn in at 1:55 A.M. on the fifteenth, Talmadge tried to occupy the governor’s office. Arnall refused to yield, as fistfights broke out between the opposing camps. During the night Talmadge’s men snuck in and changed the locks. Arnall retaliated by setting up shop in the capitol’s lobby.

On January 18, with Thompson installed as lieutenant governor, Arnall resigned, and Thompson proclaimed himself governor. The state treasurer announced that he would release no funds until he could be sure who was in charge. Banks refused to cash state checks, and the secretary of state impounded the Great Seal of Georgia, even taking it home and sleeping on it until the situation cleared up. With the government paralyzed and Georgia a national laughingstock, Talmadge proposed to resolve the dispute with a special election—for white voters only. Confident of victory in the courts, Thompson declined the offer.

The standoff continued until March 19, when Georgia’s supreme court ruled in favor of Thompson. The clause Talmadge was relying on, it decided, applied only when no candidate received a majority. In this case Eugene Talmadge had received a whopping majority, and since he was not able to serve, Thompson had legally succeeded him. Some Talmadge supporters, exhibiting newfound respect for the distinction between living and dead, grumbled about the illogicality of certifying the election of a corpse. Others questioned the court’s power to override the legislature. Talmadge accepted the decision, however, and vacated the governor’s office. He got the last laugh in 1948, when he defeated Thompson handily.