Witch trials encyclopedia

The hysteria only increased when noted Boston minister Cotton Mather joined in the fray. During the trials held in Salem town in Essex County, the accused were slandered with little recourse and denied rights that should have been granted under English common law.

Technically, those accused of practicing witchcraft, or their next of kin, could respond to accusations by filing charges of defamation against their accusers. However, defendants won only four of fifteen such cases filed. Those convicted of defamation or slander were forced to pay fines and apologize publicly, but the more typical scenario was for courts to charge the accused with lying and add fines or additional punishment.

Bearing false witness and committing perjury were considered felonies in Salem; under normal conditions, those convicted of such charges were prosecuted in public forums. During the witch trials, however, individuals convicted of perjury could save themselves from public humiliation by accusing their neighbors. Most defendants lacked benefit of counsel and were assumed guilty. Those who publicly questioned the guilt of a defendant were likely to be accused of witchcraft themselves.

Mostly populated by Puritans, Salem Village was experiencing economic hardship in , and residents were only too willing to blame someone else for their troubles. The accusers were generally young females between the ages of 11 and The mischief began when a group of girls accused Tituba, a slave from South America who had told their fortunes, of witchcraft after they became mysteriously ill.

Responding to increased attention, the girls expanded their credibility by producing a plethora of new evidence against accused witches and spreading the hysteria to neighboring towns. Encouraged by their elders and joined by some peers, the girls began accusing anyone they disliked or feared of being witches.

In court, the girls submitted anecdotal evidence and exhibited strange behavior, including weeping, joking, jerking, barking, writhing, and screeching, to suggest that their accusers were using magic to attack them. Told that they would be shown mercy if they confessed, 54 of the accused witches admitted guilt.

Families and friends often urged their loved ones to confess to save their lives. Families sometimes turned on one another. When Margaret Jacobs confessed to witchcraft, she implicated several others, including her grandfather, Reverend George Burroughs. From February to May, events escalated until residents had been accused of witchcraft. He presided over black masses and bloody sacraments. He killed wives. He bewitched neighbors. He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England.

When the court took up his case, more than thirty witnesses volunteered to damn him. Until June, the examinations of the accused witches had not been able to proceed to actual trials because the colony lacked an official charter and an ability to try capital offenses. Stocked with high-ranking officials from Boston, this court could move from the initial depositions, testimonials, and examinations to grand jury indictments and finally jury trials.

The court first tried Bridget Bishop on June 2. Bishop denied her guilt, which would prove a good way to die in Salem. The trial proceeded quickly, and on June 10, she was hanged.

At that point, Salem paused. Accusations and examinations had swept up a series of accused witches, mostly from Salem Village and its immediate vicinity. But now it had executed its first witch, a woman who disconcertingly refused to confess even on the scaffold. Before proceeding, the magistrates wanted some approval from Puritan ministers.

Asked for their thoughts on the matter, several prominent ministers took two days to respond. The judges at Salem approached spectral evidence in direct violation of precedent and principle. Ignoring all other ambiguities and cautions, the court pressed on, turning its attention in a second phase of trials from Salem Village to the nearby town of Andover, where a great number of accused persons quickly confessed—many doing so explicitly to save their lives.

The suffering of the accused did not begin with that first hanging of Bridget Bishop. It began rather with the accusation itself, the taint of dark magic and ungodly ways, the loss of reputation.

For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. And suffering extended elsewhere as well, to the forfeiture of property and constrained conditions for surviving children, and to the prisons, which were wretched, unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous. The first to die at Salem was not Bridget Bishop but Sarah Osborne, the bedridden widow, who perished in jail a month before her case could even be heard.

In total, nineteen would be executed, one man would be pressed to death between boards, and at least five would die in jail before Governor Phips, under growing opposition, would finally close down the Court of Oyer and Terminer—much to the dismay and indignation of its presiding judge, William Stoughton.

Phips created another court to hear the remaining cases, and this second court cleared the jails, refused to accept former confessions, and acquitted all but three. Governor Phips immediately reprieved the convicted three. No one else would die for witchcraft in New England. Most scholars agree on the basic narrative of the Salem witch trials. Disagreements abound, with alternative explanations for the afflicted, the accused, the judges, the ministers, the magistrates, and the proceedings as a whole.

Much about Salem begs for explanation. Not only was the witch hunt larger and more extensive than anything New England had ever seen, but those in authority acted quite differently than had their colleagues in prior cases.

Young girls and others had fallen into fits and afflictions before; in fact, almost simultaneously with Salem, the same kinds of fits with the same sorts of accusations were beginning among a small group of girls in Hartford, Connecticut.

Yet neither in neighboring Hartford in nor in the previous six decades did such afflictions lead to stuffed jails and mass executions. At Salem, something beyond the regular business of life broke out. What made Salem go so wrong? Three prominent and overlapping explanations have come to the fore, each emphasizing a particular aspect.

One early and influential account laid all the blame on economic development and communal division. In Salem Possessed , Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum saw Salem Village at war with forces of modernization that threatened a close-knit, traditional agricultural society.

Mapping the houses of the afflicted against the houses of the accused, they found that most of the afflicted came from the western, more agricultural areas of Salem Village, while the accused tended to come from the eastern, more merchant-oriented society of Salem Town. From this map and other evidence, Boyer and Nissenbaum claimed that the coming of modern capitalism caused irreparable harm to the self-understanding and social fabric of the community, leading to a witch hunt.

The cause of the Salem witch hunt was finally the economy, along with all the social factors that economic division and development entails. A second major interpretation puts the primary emphasis on political instability. From through , the colony had no charter and thus no official government.

During this interim, it returned to the administration of the first charter, waiting for the outcome of negotiations between Increase Mather and the new king and queen.

The new charter, which arrived in the midst of the Salem panic, mixed features of the first and second governments. Returning many rights to the Massachusetts citizens, it nonetheless retained a royally appointed governor and still required religious tolerance. Many opposed the charter, and some began to wonder if Puritan New England had run its course. This political instability, some have argued, caused the witch hunt.

Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters. Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. Almost every attempt to mount a counteroffensive failed miserably.

Towns were razed, casualties mounted, and captives were taken north and forced into Catholicism. No one would be safe without a thoroughgoing reformation. Closer to Salem, these northern wars touched the lives of several participants in the witch hunt: some of the afflicted were war refugees, orphaned and traumatized; some of the accused, especially George Burroughs, had close ties to Maine; and some of the judges were responsible for terrible defeats and financial losses during the wars.

Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflicted—several of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—Salem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause.

Each of these explanations has been used to make sense of Salem, and all have been found wanting. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft.

They came to see the devil anywhere, and they sought to defeat him everywhere. Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. These groups often have defining characteristics, though they also divide into their own subgroups local magistrates vs.

Boston magistrates, for example, or the ministers in support of the trials vs. These personalities and groups have all received their own attention as important factors at Salem.

Salem begins with the afflicted: there are no trials without the seizures, screams, and fits. These afflictions began with young girls who would remain the core group of the afflicted, but they spread to a host of others, including males and adults such as John Indian and Ann Putnam, Sr. What explains the bewitched? A variety of notions have been advanced, and the only one consistently refuted has been the one that dominates popular imagination: ergot poisoning.

According to this idea, the afflicted consumed a fungus that grows on moldy rye bread, causing symptoms similar to those of LSD. All scholars rule out this possibility. Much more likely is that the girls simply faked it.

The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoning—the intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on command—suggests the possibility of fraud. All scholars agree that at least some fraud was involved, and certain members of the afflicted group, such as Mary Warren, seem particularly suspect. Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud.

At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear. If friends, family members, respected ministers, and magistrates all believe that you are tormented by specters, at what point do you begin to believe them? So, too, hysteria can be contagious. Is it fraud to fall when others fall, or fear when others fear?

Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem. As for the accused, how did their names come to the afflicted? The first three names make sense: they fit the usual description of witches. But once witchcraft expanded to church members and Puritan ministers, does any rationale explain how one person came to be accused while another person escaped?

Theories abound, beginning primarily with the economic disparities proposed in Salem Possessed , but most recent scholarship settles on the idea of religious division within the community. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him.

As the witch hunt passed on from Salem Village to surrounding communities, accusers seemed to seek out those who were religiously corrupt in some way—those who failed to attend church regularly, who did not participate in sacraments, who failed to become full members of a church, or who had some kind of connection to Quakers, Baptists, or other religious dissidents.

This religious rationale does not explain all accusations, but it seems to make the most sense of identifying the accused. When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. Recently, attention has turned from the local antagonisms of the afflicted and the accused to the role of the judges and magistrates who seemed to push the trials forward.

At Salem, magistrates disregarded both precedent and advice. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of The elite defined the deed as a covenant with the devil; most of the non-elite saw it as a harmful use of magic. Common citizens brought their testimony of harm to magistrates, but harm in itself proved nothing. Successful prosecutions required either a confession or two witnesses to confirm that someone had made a pact with the devil.

For sixty years, confessions were hard to come by and pacts with the devil were hard to prove. More important, in the previous several decades of Puritan New England, ministers and magistrates were decidedly uneasy about spectral evidence; it could identify a potential suspect , but it could never be used to convict. At Salem, spectral evidence convicted. It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. The changed use of spectral evidence would be one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of Salem, one that informs the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and an element that scholars continue trying to explain.

New England law had previously limited accusations of witchcraft and other crimes by requiring the posting of a bond; in order to curtail frivolous cases, people had to pay money in order to lodge a case with the court. At Salem, that requirement was dropped. As a result of the conditions surrounding witchcraft before Salem, not only were there fewer complaints made in previous decades, but those complaints were far less successfully prosecuted. For sixty years, commoners and lay people had pressed for the conviction of witches, and for just as many years their political and religious superiors had pressed back even harder.

At Salem, all of these precedents would be ignored or reversed. Bonds were not required for many months, swelling the number of complaints.

Confessions, some of which were produced by illegal torture, saved the lives of those who confessed. Those doomed by their denials of guilt, meanwhile, were often convicted almost exclusively on the basis of spectral evidence. As the accused protested their innocence, the afflicted girls would fall, twist, scream and writhe, pointing to an invisible tormenter.

Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not required—assuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. The court ignored the tomes on witchcraft that previous courts so carefully studied. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be percent. Why did the judges want convictions? Perhaps these judges needed a way to prove they were on the side of godly Puritans, while also finding a conspiracy of witches to be a handy excuse for their failures.

In addition, as Baker reveals, these judges were mostly related to each other through marriage. The only unrelated judge was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and Saltonstall was the only judge to resign from the court in protest. Why they suddenly sought convictions is difficult to determine, but if the judges had not so desperately wanted the prosecution to succeed, the witch hunt could never have taken off.

For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in The records of the Salem witch trials are an endless testimony of suffering. Loss, despair, anxiety, and sorrow pour out of the testimonies. Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Witches, in other words, changed the dynamics and experience of loss. That may not have been the explicit rationale for many witnesses, but it certainly seems to have guided the thinking of Samuel Parris.

Parris, the embattled minister whose children started throwing themselves at open flames, was the fourth pastor of Salem Village.

The first three had short tenures, invited by one faction but opposed by another. Few had their salaries paid; all would leave Salem for less than stellar careers; and one, George Burroughs, would be hanged as a witch.

Salem Village offered one of the lowest ministerial salaries in the entire colony, and its reputation of bitter factional divisions preceded it. In , no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. He tried his hand as a merchant in Boston and failed there, too. Finally, Salem Village asked him to preach. For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage.

In his first sermon, he demanded that congregants love, serve, and obey him. Then he removed the Halfway Covenant that allowed God-fearing congregants who were not full members to baptize their children.

It was clear from the start that Samuel Parris would not heal this divided church. The trouble with Parris seems especially evident from his preaching. As scholars have shown, Parris posed no neutral ground: all people were either of God or the devil, and his goal was to parse and separate. From the moment he first began preaching, Parris spoke of cosmic battles. Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again.

Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within The Salem Witch Trials. Emerson W. Baker Emerson W. Keywords Salem witch trials witchcraft Massachusetts crisis specter spectral.

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