Salem Witch Trials

B

The Trials Begin

The first person accused, a slave named Tituba, confessed that she had seen a “black man” who wanted her to sign his book, which was understood to mean that the Devil wanted her allegiance. She admitted that she had signed and said that there were as many as seven other witches in the neighborhood. Two elderly local farmwives, who were also accused, denied that they were witches but conceded that witches might live nearby. The public examinations of suspects, most of whom the young accusers immediately denounced as witches, went on until the end of the summer.

The girls not only made accusations about Salem women and men, they also accused women and men from the neighboring towns. They named people they did not know and had never seen before. The suspects most often denied their guilt and expressed bewilderment, but this did not help their cause. The number of accused soon mounted into the dozens, then the hundreds.

There appeared to be some physical confirmation of the accusers’ accounts. The girls rolled about in agony, screamed in pain, and claimed to see one another afflicted by specters invisible to the examiners. Pinch marks and bruises on their bodies seemed to confirm their stories. Many of those who came to see the examinations were persuaded. The agony of the victims seemed real enough, but was it hysterical or feigned? Some historians believe that the girls were acting out their anger against parents or mistresses. Other historians find that the girls were ill in some way or subject to hallucinations. Another group of scholars believes the girls came to love the attention and power that the accusations gave them.

C

Testimony About Spectral Forms

The magistrates were told by the respected Boston minister Cotton Mather that witches could assume spectral shape. Mather warned that the Devil and his witches were carrying out an all-out assault on the colony. Although Mather admitted that the Devil might be trying to sow confusion by causing the pious and righteous to appear to be witches, he nevertheless urged the magistrates to scour the countryside for witches.

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In May 1692, with nearly 150 accused witches crowding the jails, including a child of four, the danger of an outbreak of disease in the jails added urgency to the crisis. Newly appointed governor William Phips arrived from England with a new charter and called a special court of “oyer and terminer” (to hear and determine the cases) consisting of nine judges. Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, a veteran politician, was named chief judge. Stoughton strongly believed that there was a Devil who contracted secretly with men and women to do his evil work in the colony. He also coveted Phips’s post and intended to use the trials to embarrass the governor. Several of the judges had already presided over earlier witchcraft trials. Only one judge, Nathaniel Saltonstall, found the entire process so unfair that he resigned from the court.

From June 2 to September 21, 1692, the first round of trials took place. Defendants were brought in groups to court, and the juries rarely took more than a few hours to reach their verdicts. Although the suspects included women and men who were full members of the local churches and had led lives of respectability and piety, this did not save them. Soon, realizing that confession saved them from immediate conviction and sentence of death, some men and women began to confess that they were witches and began to accuse their neighbors of taking part in secret meetings with the Devil.

D

Doubts Set In

But by the end of September, after the first set of trials had ended and all those tried had been convicted of witchcraft, many people who had been silent began to condemn the haste of the convictions and the uncertainty of spectral evidence. Leading ministers protested the proceedings. They convinced Increase Mather, Cotton Mather’s father and the most respected minister in the colony, to prepare a tract on the dangers of accepting spectral evidence at trials. Increase Mather argued that spectral visitations might be the Devil’s instrument to fool people and cast blame on the innocent, an argument that some of the defendants had made at their trials.

Phips was convinced by the tract and ordered the trials suspended. He reconvened the trials in the winter, but this time spectral evidence was not allowed. All but three women were acquitted at this new round of trials, and Phips pardoned them, as well as everyone else, by the spring of 1693. Stoughton, who had been the most committed to the trials, resigned his commission, furious that he could not finish his work of ridding New England of witches.

The colony’s legislature later admitted that the trials had been a mistake and provided compensation for the families of those convicted. Cotton Mather and other ministers, along with one of the judges, Samuel Sewall, asked public pardon for their roles. Stoughton alone refused to admit any error in his conduct. In later years, more accusations of witchcraft arose in the colony, but the ministers and the judges refused to credit them. Common people still believed in witchcraft, and folklore of witches was still popular, but the rulers of the colony had learned from the Salem episode to be wary of such stories. There were no more witchcraft trials in Massachusetts, and there were no more executions for witchcraft in North America.

IV

The Legacy of the Salem Witch Trials

The Salem witch trials left a lasting impression on American history. In the 20th century the United States playwright Arthur Miller revived attention to the trials with his prize-winning play The Crucible (1953). Miller used the trials as an allegory for the anti-Communist investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s. The Salem witch trials continue to remind Americans of the dangers of hysterical fears and panic-driven trials. Some Americans still believe in witchcraft, Satanism, and black magic. A handful of criminal cases every year involves such accusations. Sometimes young people, pressed by the authorities, accuse parents or caretakers of witchcraft and describe magical events remarkably similar to those heard in Salem more than 300 years ago.

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