I.

Introduction

Salem Witch Trials, trials that occurred during the years 1692 and 1693 in the eastern counties of colonial Massachusetts in which people were accused of being witches. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1692, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, another suspect was pressed to death under heavy stones when he refused to take part in his trial, 4 people died in jail awaiting their trials, and nearly 200 other people were arrested.

A second round of trials in the winter of 1693 ended in only three convictions out of nearly 150 cases. All of these defendants were ultimately pardoned by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The crisis brought normal life in the colony to a near standstill. Today the trials are so widely regarded as notorious miscarriages of justice that they have become synonymous with mass hysteria, panic, and superstition. When Americans want to criticize a hasty indictment or panic-stricken accusation, they call it a “Salem witch trial.”

II.

Origins of Witchcraft Trials

The Massachusetts colony, although distant from Europe and the British Isles, shared many of Europe’s cultural beliefs, which included a belief in witchcraft. Christian religious courts and secular authorities alike believed that the Devil could give certain people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their allegiance to him. Trials of women and men for witchcraft were common in Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Most of these trials were of women, and most of these women were poor.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent women and men were executed during this 300-year period in what historians have called a “witchcraft craze.” English courts heard hundreds of these cases, and many ended in the execution of the suspects. By the end of the 1600s, however, most English judges no longer believed accusations of witchcraft, and they began dismissing the cases.

Protestant reformers (also called Puritans) who governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony were no more superstitious than other Christians at the time. However, they believed that the Devil had long sought to destroy their pious sanctuary in the New World. There were dozens of witchcraft trials in New England during the 1600s. Although most ended with the defendants being warned to mend their ways and not bother their neighbors, some resulted in the execution of the defendant. See also Colonial America; Massachusetts Bay Company.

III.

Uniqueness of the Salem Witchcraft Trials

In the Salem cases, as in previous witchcraft trials, the suspects were all indicted by grand juries and found guilty by juries of their neighbors, according to the rules of criminal procedure then in force. The judges allowed the supposed victims to testify about being attacked by the suspects in their spectral, or ghostly, forms—that is, forms that no one other than the victims could see. This allowance was unique but not unheard of. English courts had previously permitted this kind of testimony in some cases.

A.

Context of the Salem Witch Trials

Nevertheless, historians have noted that the Salem cases came as the witchcraft craze was winding down elsewhere in the Western world. As a result historians have sought to understand the trials in the context of the peculiar circumstances in the colony. These local circumstances were certainly dire. First, because of a long-standing quarrel with the English crown, the Massachusetts colony in 1684 had lost its charter (fundamental laws). By 1692 its politics were in chaos, its laws and its future uncertain.

In addition, England’s rulers, William and Mary, had begun a war with France in the American settlements. The war—known as King William’s War in America—brought terror along Massachusetts’s northern border with French Canada. From Canada and western Maine, French troops and their much-feared Native American allies swept down on colonial settlements, killing, burning, and taking captives. Because King William’s War pitted Protestant England and its colonies against Catholic France and her Indian allies, the combat raised the specter, in the New Englanders’ minds, of the Devil turning his attention to them, for they assumed that the Devil was in league with the Catholic Church. New Englanders also believed that Native American enemies were the tools of the Devil and that they practiced witchcraft. These wartime attacks resulted in widespread anxiety throughout the colony.

The port town of Salem in the county of Essex lay at the edge of the war zone. Salem was a wealthy community, and its merchants sent ships all over the Atlantic Ocean. With the war on, however, profits had fallen and anxieties had grown. Into the county came hundreds of frightened refugees from villages to the north and west that had been raided by the French and Indians. These displaced people spread all over Salem township, including the farming community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) to the west.

Salem village had troubles of its own during these years. Old animosities between rival families grew hotter as the shortage of firewood and farmland for a new generation of young married people pitted young against old, debtor against creditor, and farmer against merchant. In particular, those families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem had become estranged from those whose occupations still centered on agriculture.

Just before the infamous witchcraft allegations were made, the villagers were arguing about whether to retain the services of minister Samuel Parris. Two powerful clans, the Putnams and the Porters, divided over the issue. The Putnams were a close-knit clan of farmers whose political fortunes and influence had waned. The Porters, with ties to the commercial elite of the seaport, waxed more powerful each day. The Putnams openly supported Parris. The Porters worked silently to oust him.

Some observers saw the hand of the Devil in the quarreling of the villagers. Thus when Reverend Parris’s 9-year-old daughter, Betty, and 11-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, followed by other girls in the neighborhood, started having fits, falling down suddenly, crying out in pain, and becoming mute, a local doctor suggested that the cause might be supernatural. Panic struck Salem when this was suggested. After the daughter of one of the Putnams, 11-year-old Ann, also became afflicted, the Putnams asked the local magistrates John Corwin and John Hathorne to examine the girls. On February 29, 1692, pressed by parents, magistrates, and ministers to explain their conduct, the girls suddenly blamed three local women for afflicting them. The three women supposedly came to them in their spectral form. The examiners immediately assumed that the accused must be witches.

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.

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.