It was really a decision which shore excursion to take when we reached Boston. We eventually decided on a trip to Salem to visit the witch museum as I had heard a lot about Salem and the witch trials. We travelled around forty five minutes from Boston Harbour enjoying the New England countryside and the beautiful architecture of many of the old homes. I was not expecting to see so many beautifully maintained and restored houses. We again noted this architecture as we were taken on a town tour of Salem.
we eventually reached the witch museum and spent an entertaining afternoon in the Museum looking at exhibits and enjoying the show that has been produced to educate about the events that happened so long ago.
The City of Salem is
a coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. Located on
the North Shore, Massachusetts, Salem is
a New
England bedrock of history and is considered one of the most significant
seaports in Puritan American history.
The City of Salem's reported
population was 41,340 at the 2010 census. Salem and Lawrence were the county seats of
Essex County prior to the abolishment of county government in 1999.
The city is home to the House of Seven Gables, Salem State University, the Salem Willows Park,
Forrest River Park, and the Peabody Essex Museum. Salem is a
residential and tourist area which includes the neighborhoods of Salem Neck,
The Point, South Salem and North Salem, Witchcraft Heights, Pickering Wharf,
and the McIntire Historic District (named after
Salem's famous architect and carver, Samuel McIntire). Salem was
one of the most significant seaports in early America.
Featured notably in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, much of
the city's cultural identity is reflective of its role as the location of
the Salem witch trials of
1692: Police cars are adorned with witch logos, a local public school is known
as the Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, the Salem High School athletic
teams are named the Witches; and Gallows Hill, a site of numerous public
hangings, is currently used as a playing field for various sports. Tourists
know Salem as a mix of important historical sites and a vibrant downtown that
has more than 60 restaurants, cafes and coffee shops. In 2012, the Retailers
Association of Massachusetts chose Salem as the recipient of their inaugural
"Best Shopping District" award.
President Barack Obama on
January 10, 2013 signed executive order HR1339 designating Salem as the
birthplace of the U.S. National Guard.
History
Salem, located at the mouth of the Naumkeag river
at the site of an ancient Native American village and trading centre, was first
settled by Europeans in 1626, when a company of fishermen from Cape Ann led by Roger Conant arrived. Conant's
leadership had provided the stability to survive the first two years, but he
was immediately replaced by John Endecott, one of the new arrivals, by order of the Massachusetts
Bay Company. Conant
graciously stepped aside and was granted 200 acres (0.81 km2) of land in compensation. These
"New Planters" and the "Old Planters agreed to cooperate,
in large part due to the diplomacy of Conant and Endicott. In recognition of
this peaceful transition to the new government, the name of the settlement was
changed to Salem, a hellenized form of the word for
"peace" in Hebrew שלום (shalom), and the name mentioned several times in the
Bible and traditionally associated with Jerusalem.
In 1628, Endecott ordered that the Great ("Governor's") House be moved from Cape
Ann, reassembling on what is now Washington Street north of Church
Street. When Higginson arrived in Salem, he wrote that "we found a
faire house newly built for the Governor" which was remarkable for being
two stories high. A year later, the Massachusetts Bay Charter was issued
creating the Massachusetts Bay Colony with Matthew Craddock as its governor in London and Endecott as its
governor in the colony. John Winthrop was elected Governor in late 1629, and
arrived with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, beginning the Great
Migration.
In 1639, Endecott's was one of the signatures on
the building contract for enlarging the meeting house in Town House Square for
the First Church in Salem. This document remains part of the town records at
City Hall. He was active in the affairs of the town throughout his life. Samuel Skelton was the first pastor of the First Church of
Salem, which is the original Puritan church in North America. Endecott
already had a close relationship with Skelton, having been converted by him,
and Endecott considered him as his spiritual father.
Roger Conant died in 1679, at the age of 87; a
large statue commemorating him stands overlooking Salem Common. Salem
originally included much of the North
Shore,
including Marblehead. Most of the accused in
the Salem witch trials lived in nearby "Salem
Village", now known as Danvers, although a few lived on the
outskirts of Salem. Salem Village also included Peabody and parts of
present-day Beverly. Middleton, Topsfield, Wenham and Manchester-by-the-Sea were once parts of Salem.
William Hathorne was a prosperous businessman in early Salem
and became one of its leading citizens of the early colonial period. He led
troops to victory in King Philip's War, served as a magistrate on the
highest court, and was chosen as the first speaker of the House of Deputies. He
was a zealous advocate of the personal rights of freemen against royal
emissaries and agents.
Puritans had come to Massachusetts to obtain religious
freedom for themselves, but had no particular interest in establishing a haven
for other faiths. The laws were harsh, with punishments that included fines,
deprivation of property, banishment or imprisonment.
One of the most widely known aspects of Salem is
its history of witchcraft allegations, which in many popular accounts started
with Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, and their friends playing with a Venus glass and
egg. Salem is also significant in legal history as the site of the Dorthy Talbye trial, where a mentally
ill woman was hanged for murdering her daughter, because at the time
Massachusetts made no distinction between insanity and criminal behavior. The story of the girls
in Salem experimenting with fortune-telling is, however, apocryphal.
William Hathorne's son, Judge John Hathorne, came to prominence in the late 17th century.
People generally believed witchcraft to be real. Nothing caused more fear in
the Puritan community than people who appeared to be possessed by demons, and
witchcraft was a serious felony. Judge Hathorne is the best known of the witch
trial judges, and he became known as the "Hanging Judge" for
sentencing witches to death.
Outside the witch museum is a statue of Roger Conant, first governor to the English Settlers in Salem although in context of the witch museum at first viewing you could believe the statue to be of a warlock.
Outside the witch museum is a statue of Roger Conant, first governor to the English Settlers in Salem although in context of the witch museum at first viewing you could believe the statue to be of a warlock.
Roger Conant (c.
1592 – 1679) arrived in Plymouth Colony from London early
in 1623/24 with the profession of salter. Early in his colonial life, he became
associated with those opposed to the Puritan authorities
in Plymouth and led the settlement to outlying areas, particularly in the Salem
area, which he is credited with founding. He was the first governor of English
settlers in Salem from 1626 to 1628.
English Origins
Roger Conant was baptized at East Budleigh, Devonshire on April 9, 1592. He
was the son of Richard and Agnes (Clarke) Conant. He later moved to London and
became a salter.
Life in New England
Contrary to some accounts that Roger Conant and his
family arrived in 1623 in the ship ‘Anne’, per Banks, only Roger’s
brother Christopher Conant is listed as being on the ‘Anne’ in 1623. In Bradford’s history, in addition to
letters to him by the London Adventurers, mention is made of an unnamed master
or journeyman salter who may have arrived in Plymouth in the ‘Charity’ in March
1623/24. It is thought that Bradford may have been describing Conant, and that
he arrived in Plymouth in 1624.
In
1625, Bradford learned that the long-time
minister of their Leiden congregation,
John Robinson, had died. Robinson had been the driving force behind all their
efforts to find a better place than England to live their lives and it was he
who cared for the many left at the Leiden congregation after the Mayflower's departure. After the
dispiriting news of Robinson's death, those in Plymouth began to lose the
fervor that helped them survive the grim early years there and began to fear
that all they had gained might eventually be destroyed. These dark thoughts
turned into mean-spirited fanaticism. At about that time, John Lyford, a
minister who had been sent over by the London Adventurers, was expelled from
Plymouth for secretly meeting with settlers who wished to return to the type of
worship that they had back in England. One of Lyford’s supporters, John Oldham,
was forced to run a gauntlet while Pilgrims beat him with the butt-ends of
their muskets. This punishment received the approval of Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow. The Adventurers were quite
displeased over what had happened to one of their men and criticized the
Pilgrims as “contentious, cruel and hard hearted, among your neighbors…”. Bradford later in his writings wrote that he
thought that Lyford and Oldham deserved their punishments. These actions
against the rebellion of Lyford and Oldham were possibly the reason Roger
Conant left Plymouth for other locations where he would later continue to be in
association with them against the Plymouth authorities.
In the years prior to and also after John
Robinson’s death, Plymouth Colony had lost about a quarter of its residents.
They had moved to other areas of New England or went back to England, or to Virginia. Some,
such as salter Roger Conant, found a place to work and worship peacefully in
the fishing and trading outposts along the New England coast at Nantasket and
Cape Ann.
Per Hubbard’s General History, about 1624 Conant
moved to Nantasket with his family and about a
year or so later relocated to Cape Ann, at the north end of Massachusetts Bay.
In another case of the new Pilgrim vindictiveness,
in 1625 Roger Conant was involved in a violent situation between Plymouth
Colony military Captain Myles Standish and some fishermen on Cape
Ann. Conant was so shocked by the violence that the Plymouth captain displayed
then that Conant later reported the incident in detail for Pilgrim historian
William Hubbard. In restating John Robinson’s earlier concerns about the way
the colony was turning to fanaticism and violence, Hubbard wrote, “Captain
Standish…never entered the school of our Savior Christ…or, if he was ever
there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no man.” Hubbard also
wrote about Standish; “so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little
stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper.” In 1626 Conant was chosen as the
first governor of the English settlers at Salem and was replaced in 1628 by
Gov. John Endicott.
Later years in Salem
Conant built the first Salem house on what is now
Essex Street, opposite the Town Market. In 1630 he was chosen as freeman, or
voting stockholder of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Conant was one of the
first two Salem representatives to the colony’s general court or legislature,
and was repeatedly elected a selectman by the people of Salem. When the
legislature granted communities the right to establish district courts, Roger
Conant served on numerous Salem quarterly juries for sixteen years. He also was
involved in civic activities over the years such as establishing town
boundaries and laying out land grants.
In 1639, his signature was one of the first ones on
the contract for enlarging the meeting house in Town Square for the First
Church in Salem. This document remains a part of the town records at City Hall.
Roger Conant was active in the affairs of Salem throughout his life.
During his very long lifetime Conant had a number
of family tragedies, including the death of his wife Sarah, and of sons Caleb,
Lot, Roger and Joshua. Only his son Exercise and possibly several daughters
succeeded him.
Family
Roger Conant and Sarah Horton married at St. Ann
Blackfriars, London on November 11, 1618 and had nine or ten children. She was
alive in November 1660 and may have died before March 1677/78 as she was not
named in her father’s will. Her burial place is unknown.
The cause of the symptoms of those who claimed
affliction continues to be a subject of interest. Various medical and
psychological explanations for the observed symptoms have been explored by
researchers, including psychological hysteriain response to Indian attacks, convulsive ergotism caused by eating rye bread made from grain infected by the fungus Claviceps
purpurea (a
natural substance from which LSD is derived), an epidemic of bird-borne encephalitis
lethargica,
and sleep paralysis to explain the nocturnal attacks alleged
by some of the accusers. Other modern historians are less inclined to believe
in biological explanations, preferring instead to explore motivations such as
jealousy, spite, and a need for attention to explain behavior that they contend was simply acting.
We returned to the ship around 3 pm and unfortunately did not have time to explore Boston before back on board for sailing time.
Salem witch trials
The Salem witch trials were
a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial
Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in
the executions of
twenty people, most of them women. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the
preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay: Salem Village (now Danvers), Salem
Town, Ipswich and Andover. The most
infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town.
One contemporary writer summarized the results of the trials:
And now Nineteen persons
having been hang'd, and one prest to death, and Eight
more condemned, in all Twenty and Eight, of which above a third part were
Members of some of the Churches of N. England, and more than half of them of a
good Conversation in general, and not one clear'd; about Fifty having confest
themselves to be Witches, of which not one Executed; above an Hundred and Fifty
in Prison, and Two Hundred more accused; the Special Commision of Oyer and
Terminer comes to a period.
—Robert Calef
Four other accused and an
infant child died in prison.
When I put an end to the Court
there ware at least fifty persons in prision (sic) in great misery by reason of
the extream cold and their poverty, most of them having only spectre evidence
against them and their mittimusses being
defective, I caused some of them to be lettout upon bayle and put the Judges
upon consideration of a way to reliefe others and to prevent them from
perishing in prision, (sic) upon which some of them were convinced and
acknowledged that their former proceedings were too violent and not grounded
upon a right foundation ... The stop put to the first method of
proceedings hath dissipated the blak cloud that threatened this Province with
destruccion.
The episode is one of the
nation's most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and has been used in
political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the
dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations and lapses in
due process.[3] It was not unique, but simply an American
example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials
in the Early Modern period. Many historians consider the
lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent
United States history.
More than once it has been
said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy
shattered.
Background
In 17th-century colonial North
America, the supernatural was considered part of everyday life; many people
believed that Satan was present and active on Earth. This concept emerged in Europe
during the fifteenth century and spread with the later colonization of North
America. Peasants used a kind of witchcraft to invoke particular charms for
farming and agriculture. Over time, the idea of white magic transformed into dark magic and became associated with demons and evil
spirits. From 1560 to 1670, witchcraft persecutions became common as
superstitions became associated with the devil.
In Against Modern
Sadducism (1668), Joseph Glanvill claimed that he could
prove the existence of witches and ghosts of the supernatural realm. Glanvill
wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection, and the [supernatural]
spirits. In his treatise, he claimed that ingenious men should believe in
witches and apparitions; if they doubted the reality of spirits, they not only
denied demons, but also the almighty God. Glanvill wanted to prove that the
supernatural could not be denied; those who did deny apparitions were
considered heretics for it
also disproved their beliefs in angels. Works by men such as Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to prove that
‘demons were alive’.
Witchcraft in New England
The executions at Salem were
not the first of their kind in the American colonies, nor even in New England.
Historian Clarence F. Jewett included a list of other people executed in New
England in The Memorial History of Boston: Including Suffolk County,
Massachusetts 1630–1880 (Ticknor and Company, 1881). He wrote:
The following is the list of
the 12 persons who were executed for witchcraft in New England before 1692,
when 24 other persons were executed at Salem, whose names are well known. It is
possible that the list is not complete ; but I have included all of which
I have any knowledge, and with such details as to names and dates as could be
ascertained: —
1647, — "Woman of Windsor,"
Connecticut (name unknown)[later identified as Alice Young], at Hartford. 1648,
— Margaret
Jones, of Charlestown, at Boston. 1648, —
Mary Johnson, at Hartford. 1650? — Henry Lake's wife, of Dorchester. 1650? —
Mrs. Kendall, of Cambridge. 1651, — Mary
Parsons, of Springfield, at Boston.
1651, — Goodwife Bassett, at Fairfield,
Conn. 1653, — Goodwife Knap, at Hartford. 1656, — Ann Hibbins, at Boston. 1662, — Goodman Greensmith, at
Hartford. 1662, — Goodwife Greensmith, at Hartford. 1688, — Goody Glover, at Boston."
Political context
The original 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was vacated in 1684, after which King James II installed
Sir Edmund Andros as
the Governor of the Dominion of
New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after
the "Glorious Revolution" in
England replaced the Catholic James II with
the Protestant co-rulers William and Mary.
Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Danforth, the colony's last leaders
under the old charter, resumed their posts as governor and deputy governor, but
lacked constitutional authority to rule, because the old charter had been
vacated. At the same time tensions erupted between English colonists settling
in "the Eastward" (the present-day coast of Maine) and French-supported Wabanaki Indians in
what came to be known as King William's War. This was 13
years after the devastating King Philip's War with
the Wampanoag and
other indigenous tribes in southern and western New England. In October 1690,
Sir William Phips led an
unsuccessful attack on
French-held Quebec. Between 1689 and 1692, Native Americans
continued to attack many English settlements along the coast, leading to the
abandonment of some of the settlements, and resulting in a flood of refugees
into areas like Essex County.
A new charter for the
enlarged Province of
Massachusetts Bay was given final approval in England on
October 16, 1691. News of the appointment of Phips as the new governor reached
Boston in late January, and a copy of the new charter arrived in Boston on
February 8, 1692. Phips arrived in Boston on May 14[12] and was sworn in as governor two days
later along with Lieutenant Governor William
Stoughton. One of the first orders of business for the new governor and council
on May 27, 1692, was the formal nomination of county justices of the peace,
sheriffs, and the commission of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle
the large numbers of people who were "thronging" the jails.
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have
postulated that without a valid charter, the colony had no legitimate form of
government to try capital cases until Phips arrived with the new
charter. This has been disputed by David Konig, who points out that
between charters, according to the Records of the Court of Assistants,
the colony tried and condemned a group of 14 pirates on January 27, 1690, for
acts of piracy and murder committed in August and October 1689.
Local context
Salem Village (present-day Danvers,
Massachusetts) was known for its many internal disputes, and for disputes between the
village and Salem Town (present-day Salem). Arguments
about property lines, grazing rights, and church privileges were rife, and
neighbors considered the population as "quarrelsome." In 1672, the
villagers had voted to hire a minister of their own, apart from Salem Town. The
first two ministers, James Bayley (1673–79) and George Burroughs (1680–83), stayed only a
few years each, departing after the congregation failed to pay their full rate.
Despite the ministers' rights being upheld by the General Court and the parish
admonished, each of the ministers still chose to leave. The third
minister, Deodat Lawson (1684–88),
stayed for a short time, leaving after the refusal of the church in Salem to
ordain him and not over issues with the congregation. The parish disagreed
about the choice of Samuel Parris as Salem Village's first
ordained minister. On June 18, 1689, the villagers agreed to hire Parris for
₤66 annually, "one third part in money and the other two third parts in
provisions", and use of the parsonage.
On October 10, 1689, however,
they voted to grant him the deed to the parsonage and two acres
(0.8 hectares) of land. This conflicted with a 1681 resolution which
stated that "it shall not be lawful for the inhabitants of this village to
convey the houses or lands or any other concerns belonging to the Ministry to
any particular persons or person: not for any cause by vote or other
ways".
Though the prior ministers'
fates and the level of contention in Salem Village were valid reasons for
caution in accepting the position, Reverend Parris increased the village's
divisions by delaying his acceptance. He did not seem to have any gift for
settling his new parishioners' disputes: by deliberately seeking out "iniquitous
behavior" in his congregation and making church members in good standing
suffer public penance for small infractions, he contributed significantly to
the tension within the village. Its bickering continued to grow unabated.
Historian Starkey suggests that, in this atmosphere, serious conflict may have
been inevitable.
Religious context
Prior to the constitutional
turmoil of the 1680s, Massachusetts government had been dominated by
conservative Puritan secular
leaders. Influenced by Calvinism, Puritans had opposed many of the traditions of
the Protestant Church of England, including use of the Book of Common Prayer, the use of
priestly vestments (cap and gown) during services, the use of the Holy Cross
during baptism, and
kneeling during the sacrament, all of which they believed constituted popery. King Charles I was hostile
to this point of view, and Anglican Church officials tried to repress these
dissenting views during the 1620s and 1630s. This resulted in some Puritans and
other religious minorities seeking refuge in the Netherlands, but ultimately
many made a major
migration to North America.
These immigrants established
several of the earliest colonies in New England, of which the Massachusetts Bay
Colony was the largest and most economically important. Self-governance came
naturally to them, since building a society based on their religious beliefs
was one of their goals. Colonial leaders were elected by the freemen of the
colony, those individuals who had had their religious experiences formally
examined and had been admitted to one of the colony's Puritan congregations.
The colonial leadership were prominent members of their congregations, and
regularly consulted with the local ministers on issues facing the colony.
In the early 1640s, England
erupted in civil war. The
Puritan-dominated Parliamentarians emerged
victorious, and the Crown was supplanted by the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in 1653. Its failure led
to restoration of the
old order under Charles II. Emigration
to New England slowed significantly in these years. In Massachusetts, a
successful merchant class began to develop that was less religiously motivated
than the colony's early settlers.
In Salem Village, as in the
colony at large, life was governed by the precepts of the Church, which was
Calvinist. Instrumental music, dancing, and celebration of holidays such
as Christmas and Easter were absolutely forbidden The only music allowed was the
unaccompanied singing of hymns—as the folk songs of the period were thought to
glorify human love and nature, they were rejected as antithetical to God. Toys
and especially dolls were forbidden as play was considered a frivolous waste of
time.
Children received an education
that emphasized religion and the need for strict piety to prevent their eternal
damnation. Villagers
were expected to go to the meeting house for three-hour sermons every Wednesday
and Sunday. Village life revolved around the meeting house, and the few
celebrations that were permitted, such as celebration of the harvest, were
centred there.
Local rumors of witchcraft
Prior to 1692, there had been
rumors of witchcraft in villages neighboring Salem Village and other
towns. Cotton Mather, a minister
of Boston's North Church (not to be confused with the later Anglican North Church of Paul Revere fame) was a prolific publisher of
pamphlets and a firm believer in witchcraft. In his book Memorable Providences
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), Mather describes his
"oracular observations" and how "stupendous witchcraft had
affected the children of Boston mason John Goodwin. Mather illustrates how the
Goodwins' eldest child had been tempted by the devil and stolen linen from the
washerwoman Goody Glover. Glover
was a disagreeable old woman described by her husband as a witch; this may have
been why she was accused of casting spells on the Goodwin children. After the
event, four out of six Goodwin children began to have strange fits, or what
some people referred to as "the disease of astonishment". The
manifestations attributed to the disease quickly became associated with
witchcraft. Symptoms included neck and back pains, tongues being drawn from
their throats, and loud random outcries; other symptoms included having no
control over their bodies such as becoming limber, flapping their arms like
birds, or trying to harm others as well as themselves. These symptoms would
fuel the craze of 1692.
Timeline
Most accounts begin with the
afflictions of the girls in the Parris household in January/February 1692 and
end with the last trials in May 1693. Some historians begin with earlier events
to place the trials in the wider context of other witch-hunts, and some end
later, to include information about restitution to victims and their families.
Initial events
.
.
In Salem Village, in February
1692, Betty Parris, age 9, and
her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11,
the daughter and niece, respectively, of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have
fits described as "beyond the power of Epileptic Fits or natural disease to
effect" by John Hale, the
minister of the nearby town of Beverly. The girls
screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under
furniture, and contorted themselves
into peculiar positions, according to the eyewitness account of Rev. Deodat Lawson, himself a former minister in
Salem Village. The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A
doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical
evidence of any ailment. Other young women in the village began to exhibit
similar behaviors. When Lawson preached in the Salem Village meetinghouse, he
was interrupted several times by outbursts of the afflicted.
The first three people accused
and arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams,
12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth
Hubbard were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. The accusation by Ann Putnam Jr. is seen by some historians as
evidence that a family feud may have been a major cause of the witch trials. At
the time, a vicious rivalry was underway between the Putnam and Porter
families, one which deeply polarized the people of Salem. Citizens would often
have heated debates, which escalated into full-fledged fighting, based solely
on their opinion of the feud. Good was a homeless beggar, known to seek food
and shelter from neighbors. She was accused of witchcraft because of her
appalling reputation. At her trial, she was accused of rejecting Puritan ideals
of self-control and discipline when she chose to torment and “scorn [children]
instead of leading them towards the path of salvation".
Sarah Osborne rarely attended
church meetings. She was accused of witchcraft because the Puritans believed
that Osborne had her own self-interests in mind following her remarriage to
an indentured servant. The
citizens of the town disapproved of her trying to control her son's inheritance
from her previous marriage.
Tituba, a black or Indian
slave, likely became a target because of her ethnic differences from most of
the other villagers. She was accused of attracting girls like Abigail Williams and Betty Parris with stories of enchantment from Malleus
Maleficarum. These tales about sexual encounters with
demons, swaying the minds of men, and fortune-telling were said to stimulate
the imaginations of girls and made Tituba an obvious target of
accusations. Each of these women was an outcast of a sort, satisfying many
of the character traits typical of the "usual suspects" for
witchcraft accusations and left to defend themselves. Brought before the local
magistrates on the complaint of witchcraft, they were interrogated for several
days, starting on March 1, 1692, then sent to jail.
In March, additional women
were accused of witchcraft: Martha Corey, Dorothy Good and Rebecca Nurse in Salem Village,
and Rachel Clinton in
nearby Ipswich. Martha
Corey had voiced skepticism about
the credibility of the girls' accusations, and thus drawn attention. The charges
against her and Rebecca Nurse deeply troubled the community because Martha
Corey was a full covenanted member of the Church in Salem Village, as was
Rebecca Nurse in the Church in Salem Town. If such upstanding people could be
witches, the townspeople conceived, then anybody could be a witch, and church
membership was no protection from accusation. Dorothy Good, the daughter
of Sarah Good, was only 4
years old, but not exempted from questioning by the magistrates; her answers
were construed as a confession that implicated her mother. In Ipswich, Rachel
Clinton was arrested for witchcraft at the end of March on charges unrelated to
the afflictions of the girls in Salem Village.
Accusations and examinations before local magistrates
The deposition of Abigail Williams v. George Jacobs, Sr.
When Sarah Cloyce (Nurse's sister) and Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor were arrested in April,
they were brought before John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, not
only in their capacity as local magistrates, but as members of the Governor's
Council, at a meeting in Salem Town. Present for the examination were Deputy
Governor Thomas Danforth, and Assistants Samuel Sewall, Samuel Appleton, James
Russell and Isaac Addington. Objections by Elizabeth's husband, John Proctor, during the
proceedings resulted in his arrest that day as well.
Within a week, Giles Corey (Martha's husband, and a covenanted church
member in Salem Town), Abigail Hobbs, Bridget Bishop, Mary Warren (a servant in the Proctor household and
sometime accuser) and Deliverance Hobbs (stepmother of Abigail
Hobbs) were arrested and examined. Abigail Hobbs, Mary Warren and Deliverance
Hobbs all confessed and began naming additional people as accomplices. More
arrests followed: Sarah Wildes, William Hobbs (husband of Deliverance and
father of Abigail), Nehemiah Abbott Jr., Mary Eastey (sister of Cloyce and Nurse), Edward
Bishop, Jr. and his wife Sarah Bishop, and Mary English.
On April 30, Rev. George Burroughs, Lydia Dustin, Susannah Martin, Dorcas Hoar, Sarah Morey and
Philip English (Mary's husband) were arrested. Nehemiah Abbott Jr. was released
because the accusers agreed he was not the person whose specter had afflicted
them. Mary Eastey was released for a few days after her initial arrest because
the accusers failed to confirm that it was she who had afflicted them; she was
arrested again when the accusers reconsidered. In May, accusations continued to
pour in, but some of those suspects began to evade apprehension. Multiple
warrants were issued before John Willard and Elizabeth Colson were apprehended;
George Jacobs Jr. and Daniel Andrews were not caught. Until this point, all the
proceedings were investigative, but on May 27, 1692, William Phips ordered the
establishment of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer for Suffolk, Essex and
Middlesex counties to prosecute the cases of those in jail. Warrants were
issued for more people. Sarah Osborne, one of the first three accused, died in
jail on May 10, 1692.
Warrants were issued for 36
more people, with examinations continuing to take place in Salem Village: Sarah Dustin(daughter of Lydia Dustin), Ann Sears, Bethiah
Carter Sr. and her daughter Bethiah Carter Jr., George Jacobs, Sr. and
his granddaughter Margaret Jacobs, John Willard, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Abigail Soames, George Jacobs, Jr. (son of
George Jacobs, Sr. and father of Margaret Jacobs), Daniel Andrew, Rebecca
Jacobs (wife of George Jacobs, Jr. and sister of Daniel Andrew), Sarah Buckley
and her daughter Mary Witheridge. Also included were Elizabeth Colson,
Elizabeth Hart, Thomas Farrar, Sr., Roger Toothaker, Sarah Proctor (daughter of
John and Elizabeth Proctor), Sarah Bassett (sister-in-law of Elizabeth
Proctor), Susannah Roots, Mary DeRich (another sister-in-law of Elizabeth
Proctor), Sarah Pease, Elizabeth Cary, Martha Carrier, Elizabeth Fosdick, Wilmot Redd, Sarah Rice,Elizabeth Howe, Capt. John Alden (son
of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins), William Proctor (son of
John and Elizabeth Proctor), John Flood, Mary Toothaker (wife of Roger
Toothaker and sister of Martha Carrier) and her daughter Margaret Toothaker,
and Arthur Abbott. When the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened at the end of
May, the total number of people in custody was 62. Cotton Mather wrote to one
of the judges, John Richards, a member
of his congregation, on May 31, 1692,[40] expressing his support of the
prosecutions, but cautioning him, "do not lay more stress on pure spectral evidence than it will bear... It
is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the Shapes of
persons not only innocent, but also very virtuous. Though I believe that the
just God then ordinarily provides a way for the speedy vindication of the
persons thus abused."
Formal prosecution:
The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town
on June 2, 1692, with William Stoughton, the new Lieutenant Governor, as Chief
Magistrate, Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney prosecuting the cases, and
Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop's case was the first brought to the
grand jury, who endorsed all the indictments against her. Bishop was described
as not living a Puritan lifestyle, for she wore black clothing and odd costumes,
which was against the Puritan code. When she was examined before her trial,
Bishop was asked about her coat, which had been awkwardly “cut or torn in two
ways”. This, along with her "immoral" lifestyle, accused her of a
being a witch. She went to trial the same day and was convicted. On June 3, the
grand jury endorsed indictments against Rebecca Nurse and John Willard, but it
is unclear why they did not go to trial immediately as well. Bishop was
executed by hanging on June 10, 1692.
Immediately following this
execution, the court adjourned for 20 days (until June 30) while it sought
advice from New England's most influential ministers "upon the state of
things as they then stood." Their collective response came back
dated June 15 and composed by Cotton Mather:
1. The
afflicted state of our poor neighbours, that are now suffering by molestations
from the invisible world, we apprehend so deplorable, that we think their
condition calls for the utmost help of all persons in their several capacities.
2. We cannot
but, with all thankfulness, acknowledge the success which the merciful God has
given unto the sedulous and assiduous endeavours of our honourable rulers, to
detect the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in the country,
humbly praying, that the discovery of those mysterious and mischievous
wickednesses may be perfected.
3. We judge
that, in the prosecution of these and all such witchcrafts, there is need of a
very critical and exquisite caution, lest by too much credulity for things
received only upon the Devil's authority, there be a door opened for a long
train of miserable consequences, and Satan get an advantage over us; for we
should not be ignorant of his devices.
4. As in
complaints upon witchcrafts, there may be matters of inquiry which do not
amount unto matters of presumption, and there may be matters of presumption
which yet may not be matters of conviction, so it is necessary, that all
proceedings thereabout be managed with an exceeding tenderness towards those
that may be complained of, especially if they have been persons formerly of an
unblemished reputation.
5. When the
first inquiry is made into the circumstances of such as may lie under the just
suspicion of witchcrafts, we could wish that there may be admitted as little as
is possible of such noise, company and openness as may too hastily expose them
that are examined, and that there may no thing be used as a test for the trial
of the suspected, the lawfulness whereof may be doubted among the people of
God; but that the directions given by such judicious writers as Perkins and
Bernard [be consulted in such a case].
6. Presumptions
whereupon persons may be committed, and, much more, convictions whereupon
persons may be condemned as guilty of witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable
than barely the accused person's being represented by a specter unto the
afflicted; inasmuch as it is an undoubted and notorious thing, that a demon
may, by God's permission, appear, even to ill purposes, in the shape of an
innocent, yea, and a virtuous man. Nor can we esteem alterations made in the
sufferers, by a look or touch of the accused, to be an infallible evidence of
guilt, but frequently liable to be abused by the Devil's legerdemains.
7. We know not
whether some remarkable affronts given to the Devils by our disbelieving those
testimonies whose whole force and strength is from them alone, may not put a
period unto the progress of the dreadful calamity begun upon us, in the
accusations of so many persons, whereof some, we hope, are yet clear from the
great transgression laid unto their charge.
8. Nevertheless,
we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government, the speedy and vigorous
prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the
direction given in the laws of God, and the wholesome statutes of the English
nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.
Hutchinson sums
the letter, "The two first and the last sections of this advice took away
the force of all the others, and the prosecutions went on with more vigor than
before." (Reprinting the letter years later in Magnalia,
Cotton Mather left out these "two first and the last" sections.)
Major Nathaniel Saltonstall Esq.
resigned from the court on or about June 16, presumably dissatisfied with the
letter and that it had not outright barred the admission of spectral evidence. According to Upham,
Saltonstall deserves the credit for "being the only public man of his day
who had the sense or courage to condemn the proceedings, at the start."
(chapt. VII) More people were accused, arrested and examined, but now in Salem
Town, by former local magistrates John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin and
Bartholomew Gedney, who had become judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Roger Toothaker died in prison on June 16, 1692.
From June 30 through early
July, grand juries endorsed indictments against Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe,
Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor, Martha Carrier, Sarah Wilds
and Dorcas Hoar. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin and Sarah Wildes,
along with Rebecca Nurse, went to trial at this time, where they were found
guilty. All five women were executed by hanging on July 19, 1692. In mid-July,
the constable in Andover invited the afflicted girls from Salem Village to
visit with his wife to try to determine who was causing her afflictions. Ann
Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr., and granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. all
confessed to being witches. Anthony Checkley was appointed by Governor Phips to
replace Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney when Newton took an appointment
in New Hampshire.
In August, grand juries
indicted George Burroughs, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey and George Jacobs, Sr.. Trial juries
convicted Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard,
Elizabeth Proctor, and John Proctor. Elizabeth Proctor was given a temporary
stay of execution because she was pregnant. On August 19, 1692, Martha Carrier,
George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, and John Proctor were
executed.
Mr. Burroughs was carried in a
Cart with others, through the streets of Salem, to Execution. When he was upon
the Ladder, he made a speech for the clearing of his Innocency, with such Solemn
and Serious Expressions as were to the Admiration of all present; his Prayer
(which he concluded by repeating the Lord's Prayer) [as witches were not
supposed to be able to recite] was so well worded, and uttered with such
composedness as such fervency of spirit, as was very Affecting, and drew Tears
from many, so that if seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the
execution. The accusers said the black Man [Devil] stood and dictated to him.
As soon as he was turned off [hung], Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a
Horse, addressed himself to the People, partly to declare that he [Mr.
Burroughs] was no ordained Minister, partly to possess the People of his guilt,
saying that the devil often had been transformed into the Angel of Light. And
this did somewhat appease the People, and the Executions went on; when he [Mr.
Burroughs] was cut down, he was dragged by a Halter to a Hole, or Grave,
between the Rocks, about two feet deep; his Shirt and Breeches being pulled
off, and an old pair of Trousers of one Executed put on his lower parts: he was
so put in, together with Willard and Carrier, that one of his Hands, and his
Chin, and a Foot of one of them, was left uncovered.
—Robert Calef, More
Wonders of the Invisible World
September 1692
In September, grand juries
indicted eighteen more people. The grand jury failed to indict William Proctor,
who was re-arrested on new charges. On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead at arraignment, and was
subjected to peine forte
et dure, a form of torture in which the subject is pressed beneath an
increasingly heavy load of stones, in an attempt to make him enter a plea. Four
pleaded guilty and eleven others were tried and found guilty.
September 20, Cotton Mather wrote to Stephen Sewall,
the clerk of the court: "That I may be the more capable to assist in
lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy..." requesting "...
a narrative of the evidence given in at the trials of half a dozen, or if you
please, a dozen, of the principal witches that have been condemned." On
September 22, 1692, eight more were executed, "After Execution Mr. Noyes
turning him to the Bodies, said, what a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands
of Hell hanging there."[45] One of the convicted, Dorcas Hoar, was given a temporary reprieve, with the
support of several ministers, to make a confession of being a witch. Mary Bradbury (aged 77) escaped.
Abigail Faulkner Sr. was pregnant and given a temporary reprieve (some reports
from that era say that Abigail's reprieve later became a stay of charges).
Mather quickly completed his account of the trials, Wonders of the
Invisible World and it was given to Phips when he returned from the
fighting in Maine in early October. Burr says both the Phip's letter and
Mather's manuscript "must have gone to London by the same ship" in
mid-October.
I hereby declare that as soon
as I came from fighting ... and understood what danger some of their innocent
subjects might be exposed to, if the evidence of the afflicted persons only did
prevaile either to the committing or trying any of them, I did before any
application was made unto me about it put a stop to the proceedings of the
Court and they are now stopt till their Majesties pleasure be known.
—Governor Phips, Boston,
October 12, 1692
October 29, Judge Sewall
writes "the Court of Oyer and Terminer count themselves thereby
dismissed... asked whether the Court of Oyer and Terminer should sit,
expressing some fear of Inconvenience by its fall, [the] Governour said it must
fall." (Sewall's Diary, I. 368.) Governor Phips' wife, Lady Mary Phips, was
among those "called out upon" by the afflicted. Spectral evidence was
once again in question. There would be more trials after the new year, but not
like before.
Superior Court of Judicature, 1693
In January 1693, the new
Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery
convened in Salem, Essex County, again headed by William Stoughton, as Chief
Justice, with Anthony Checkley continuing as the Attorney General, and Jonathan
Elatson as Clerk of the Court. The first five cases tried in January 1693 were
of the five people who had been indicted but not tried in September: Sarah
Buckley, Margaret Jacobs, Rebecca Jacobs, Mary Whittredge and Job Tookey. All
were found not guilty. Grand juries were held for many of those remaining in
jail. Charges were dismissed against many, but sixteen more people were
indicted and tried, three of whom were found guilty: Elizabeth Johnson Jr.,
Sarah Wardwell and Mary Post. When Stoughton wrote the warrants for the
execution of these women and the others remaining from the previous court,
Governor Phips pardoned them, sparing their lives. In late January/early
February, the Court sat again in Charlestown, Middlesex County, and held grand
juries and tried five people: Sarah Cole (of Lynn), Lydia Dustin & Sarah
Dustin, Mary Taylor and Mary Toothaker. All were found not guilty, but not
released until they paid their jail fees. Lydia Dustin died in jail on March
10, 1693. At the end of April, the Court convened in Boston, Suffolk County,
and cleared Capt. John Alden by
proclamation, and heard charges against a servant girl, Mary Watkins, for
falsely accusing her mistress of witchcraft. In May, the Court convened in
Ipswich, Essex County, held a variety of grand juries who dismissed charges
against all but five people. Susannah Post, Eunice Frye, Mary Bridges Jr., Mary
Barker and William Barker Jr. were all found not guilty at trial, putting an
end to the episode.
Legal procedures
Overview
After someone concluded that a
loss, illness or death had been caused by witchcraft, the accuser entered a
complaint against the alleged witch with the local magistrates.] If the complaint was deemed credible, the
magistrates had the person arrested[49] and brought in for a public examination,
essentially an interrogation, where the magistrates pressed the accused to
confess. If the magistrates at this local level were satisfied that the
complaint was well-founded, the prisoner was handed over to be dealt with by a
superior court. In 1692, the magistrates opted to wait for the arrival of the
new charter and governor, who would establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle these cases.
The next step, at the superior court level, was to summon witnesses before a
grand jury.
A person could be indicted on
charges of afflicting with witchcraft or for making an unlawful covenant
with the Devil. Once indicted, the defendant went to trial, sometimes on the
same day, as in the case of the first person indicted and tried on June
2, Bridget Bishop, who was
executed on June 10, 1692. There were four execution dates, with one person
executed on June 10, 1692, five executed on July 19, 1692 (Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe & Sarah Wildes) another five executed on August 19, 1692
(Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, Sr. and John Proctor), and eight
on September 22, 1692 (Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott).
Several others,
including Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor and
Abigail Faulkner, were convicted but given temporary reprieves because they
were pregnant. Five other women were convicted in 1692, but the sentence was
never carried out: Ann Foster(who later
died in prison), her daughter Mary Lacy Sr., Abigail Hobbs, Dorcas Hoar and Mary Bradbury.
Giles Corey, a 71-year-old farmer from the southeast end of
Salem (called Salem Farms), refused to enter a plea when he came to trial in
September. The judges applied an archaic form of punishment called peine
forte et dure, in which stones were piled on his chest until he could no
longer breathe. After two days of peine fort et dure, Corey died
without entering a plea.[56] His refusal to plead is usually explained
as a way of preventing his estate from being confiscated by the Crown, but,
according to historian Chadwick Hansen, much of Corey's property had already
been seized, and he had made a will in prison: "His death was a
protest ... against the methods of the court".[57] This echoes the perspective of a
contemporary critic of the trials, Robert Calef, who claimed, "Giles Corey
pleaded not Guilty to his Indictment, but would not put himself upon Tryal by
the Jury (they having cleared none upon Tryal) and knowing there would be the
same Witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what Death they would put
him to.
Not even in death were the
accused witches granted peace or respect. As convicted witches, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey had been excommunicated from their
churches and denied proper burials. As soon as the bodies of the accused were
cut down from the trees, they were thrown into a shallow grave and the crowd
dispersed. Oral history claims that the families of the dead reclaimed their
bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on family property. The
record books of the time do not mention the deaths of any of those executed.
Spectral evidence
Much, but not all, of the
evidence used against the accused was spectral evidence, or the testimony of the
afflicted who claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was
allegedly afflicting them. The theological dispute that ensued about the use of
this evidence centered on whether a person had to give permission to the Devil
for his/her shape to be used to afflict. Opponents claimed that the Devil was
able to use anyone's shape to afflict people, but the Court contended that the
Devil could not use a person's shape without that person's permission;
therefore, when the afflicted claimed to see the apparition of a specific person,
that was accepted as evidence that the accused had been complicit with the
Devil. Increase Mather and
other ministers sent a letter to the Court, "The Return of Several Ministers
Consulted", urging the magistrates not to convict on spectral evidence
alone. (Spectral evidence was later ruled inadmissible, which caused a dramatic
reduction in the rate of convictions and may have hastened the end of the
trials.) A copy of this letter was printed in Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience,
published in 1693. The publication A Tryal of
Witches, was used by the magistrates at Salem, when looking for a precedent in
allowing spectral evidence. Finding that no lesser person than the jurist Sir Matthew Hale had
permitted this evidence, supported by the eminent philosopher, physician and
author Thomas Browne, to be used
in the Bury St
Edmunds witch trial and the accusations against two Lowestoft women, held in 1662 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England, they also accepted its validity and
the trials proceeded.
Witch cake
At some point in February
1692, likely after the afflictions began but before specific names were
mentioned, a neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibly (or Sibley; aunt of the
afflicted Mary Walcott),
instructed John Indian, one of the minister's slaves, to make a witch
cake, using traditional English white magic to discover the identity of the
witch who was afflicting the girls. The cake, made from rye meal and urine from
the afflicted girls, was fed to a dog. According to English folk understanding
of how witches accomplished affliction, when the dog ate the cake, the witch
herself would be hurt because invisible particles she had sent to afflict the
girls remained in the girls' urine, and her cries of pain when the dog ate the
cake would identify her as the witch. This superstition was based on the
Cartesian "Doctrine of Effluvia", which posited that witches afflicted
by the use of "venomous and malignant particles, that were ejected from
the eye", according to the October 8, 1692 letter of Thomas Brattle, a contemporary critic of the
trials.
According to the Records
of the Salem-Village Church, Parris spoke with Sibly (or Sibley) privately
on March 25, 1692 about her "grand error" and accepted her
"sorrowful confession." During his Sunday sermon on March 27 he
addressed his congregation on the subject of the "calamities" that
had begun in his own household, but stated "it never brake forth to any
considerable light, until diabolical means were used, by the making of a cake
by my Indian man, who had his direction from this our sister, Mary Sibly",
going on to admonish all against the use of any kind of magic, even white magic,
because it was essentially, "going to the Devil for help against the
Devil." Mary Sibly (or Sibley) publicly acknowledged the error of her
actions before the congregation, who voted by a show of hands that they were
satisfied with her admission of error. Other instances appear in the records of
the episode that demonstrated a continued belief by members of the community in
this effluvia as legitimate evidence, including accounts in two statements
against Elizabeth Howethat people
had suggested cutting off and burning an ear of two different animals Howe was
thought to have afflicted, to prove she was the one who had bewitched them to
death.
Traditionally, the allegedly afflicted
girls are said to have been entertained by Parris' slave, Tituba, who supposedly taught them about voodoo in the parsonage kitchen in early 1692, although there is no
contemporary evidence to support the story. A variety of secondary sources,
starting with Charles W.
Upham in the 19th century, typically relate that a circle of the girls,
with Tituba's help, tried their hands at fortune telling using the white of an
egg and a mirror to create a primitive crystal ball to divine the professions
of their future spouses and scared one another when one supposedly saw the
shape of a coffin instead. The story is drawn from John Hale's book
about the trials, but in his account, only one of the girls, not a group of
them, had confessed to him afterwards that she had once tried this. Hale did
not mention Tituba as having any part of it, nor when it had occurred. Yet the
record of her pre-trial examination holds her giving an energetic confession,
speaking before the court of "creatures who inhabit the invisible
world," and "the dark rituals which bind them together in service of
Satan", implicating both Good and Osborne while asserting that "many
other people in the colony were engaged in the devil's conspiracy against the
Bay.
Tituba's race is often cited
as Carib-Indian or of African descent, but contemporary sources describe her
only as an "Indian". Research by Elaine Breslaw has suggested that
she may well have been captured in what is now Venezuela and brought toBarbados, and so may have been an Arawak Indian. Other slightly later
descriptions of her, by Gov. Thomas
Hutchinsonwriting his history of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in the 18th century, describe her as a "Spanish IndianIn that
day, that typically meant a Native American from the Carolinas/Georgia/Florida.
Touch test
The most infamous employment
of the belief in effluvia – and in direct opposition to what Parris had advised
his own parishioners in Salem Village – was the touch test used
in Andover during preliminary examinations in September 1692. If the accused
witch touched the victim while the victim was having a fit, and the fit then
stopped, that meant the accused was the person who had afflicted the victim. As
several of those accused later recounted, "We were blindfolded, and our
hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and
falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said. Some
led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that
we were guilty of afflicting them; whereupon we were all seized, as prisoners,
by a warrant from the justice of the peace and forthwith carried to Salem"
Rev. John Hale explained how this supposedly worked: "the Witch by the
cast of her eye sends forth a Malefick Venome into the Bewitched to cast him
into a fit, and therefore the touch of the hand doth by sympathy cause that venome
to return into the Body of the Witch again".
Other evidence
Other evidence included the
confessions of the accused; testimony by a confessed witch who identified
others as witches; the discovery of poppits (poppets),
books of palmistry and horoscopes, or pots of ointments in the possession or
home of the accused; and observation of what were called witch's teats on
the body of the accused. A witch's teat was said to be a mole or blemish
somewhere on the body that was insensitive to touch; discovery of such
insensitive areas was consideredde facto evidence of witchcraft.
Contemporary commentary on the trials
Various accounts and opinions
about the proceedings began to be published in 1692. Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem
Village, visited Salem Village in March and April 1692. Later that year, he
published in Boston an account of what he saw and heard, entitled, A
Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons
Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village: Which happened from the Nineteenth
of March, to the Fifth of April, 1692. Rev. William Milbourne, a Baptist
minister in Boston, publicly petitioned the General Assembly in early June
1692, challenging the use of spectral evidence by the Court. Milbourne had to
post £200 bond (equal to £27,319 today) or be arrested for "contriving,
writing and publishing the said scandalous Papers".
On June 15, 1692, twelve local
ministers — including Increase Mather and Samuel Willard — submitted The
Return of several Ministers to the Governor and Council in Boston,
cautioning the authorities not to rely entirely on the use of spectral
evidence, stating,
"Presumptions whereupon
persons may be Committed, and much more, Convictions whereupon persons may be
Condemned as Guilty of Witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable,
than barely the Accused Persons being Represented by a Spectre unto the
Afflicted".
.Sometime in
1692, minister of the Third Church
in Boston, Samuel Willard anonymously
published a short tract in Philadelphia entitled, "Some Miscellany
Observations On our present Debates respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue
Between S. & B." The authors were listed as "P.E. and J. A."
(Philip English and John Alden), but the work is generally attributed to
Willard. In it, two characters, S (Salem) and B (Boston), discuss the way the
proceedings were being conducted, with "B" urging caution about the
use of testimony from the afflicted and the confessors, stating, "whatever
comes from them is to be suspected; and it is dangerous using or crediting them
too far".
Sometime in September 1692, at
the request of Governor Phips, Cotton Mather wrote "Wonders of the
Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately
Executed in New-England," as a defense of the trials, to "help very
much flatten that fury which we now so much turn upon one
another". It was published in Boston and London in 1692, although
dated 1693, with an introductory letter of endorsement by William Stoughton,
the Chief Magistrate. The book included accounts of five trials, with much of
the material copied directly from the court records, which were supplied to
Mather by Stephen Sewall, his friend and Clerk of the Court.
Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather, published Cases of
Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, dated October 3, 1692, after the last
trials by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. (The title page mistakenly
lists the publication year as "1693".) In it, Mather repeated his
caution about the reliance on spectral evidence, stating "It were
better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person
should be Condemned".[77] Second and third editions of this book
were published in Boston and London in 1693, the third of which also included
Lawson's Narrative and the anonymous "A Further Account
of the Tryals of the New-England Witches, sent in a Letter from thence, to a
Gentleman in London."
Aftermath and closure
Although the last trial was
held in May 1693, public response to the events continued. In the decades
following the trials, the issues primarily had to do with establishing the innocence
of the individuals who were convicted and compensating the survivors and
families. In the following centuries, the descendants of those unjustly accused
and condemned have sought to honor their memories. The trials have figured in
American culture and been explored in numerous works of art and literature.
Reversals of attainder and compensation to the survivors and their
families
The first indication that
public calls for justice were not over occurred in 1695 whenThomas Maule, a noted
Quaker, publicly criticized the handling of the trials by the Puritan leaders
in Chapter 29 of his book Truth Held Forth and Maintained,
expanding on Increase Mather by
stating, "it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that
one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch". For
publishing this book, Maule was imprisoned twelve months before he was tried
and found not guilty.
On December 17, 1696, the
General Court ruled that there would be a fast day on January 14, 1697,
"referring to the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his
Instruments. On that day, Samuel Sewall asked Rev. Samuel Willard to read
aloud his apology to the congregation of Boston's South Church, "to take
the Blame & Shame" of the "late Commission of Oyer & Terminer
at Salem". Thomas Fiske and eleven other trial jurors also asked
forgiveness. From 1693-97, Robert Calef, a "weaver" and a cloth merchant in
Boston, collected correspondence, court records and petitions, and other
accounts of the trials, and placed them, for contrast, alongside portions of
Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, under the
title More Wonders of the Invisible World, Calef
could not get it published in Boston and he had to take it to London, where it
was published in 1700. Scholars of the trials-- Hutchinson, Upham, Burr, and
even Poole-- have relied on Calef's compilation of documents. John Hale, a
minister in Beverly who was present at many of the proceedings, had completed
his book, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in
1697, which was not published until 1702, after his death, and perhaps in
response to Calef's book. Expressing regret over the actions taken, Hale
admitted, "Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and
lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we
walked in the clouds, and could not see our way."
Various petitions were filed
between 1700 and 1703 with the Massachusetts government, demanding that the
convictions be formally reversed. Those tried and found guilty were considered
dead in the eyes of the law, and with convictions still on the books, those not
executed were vulnerable to further accusations. The General Court initially
reversed the attainder only for those who had filed petitions,[85] only three people who had been convicted
but not executed: Abigail Faulkner Sr., Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Wardwell. In
1703, another petition was filed, requesting a more equitable settlement
for those wrongly accused, but it wasn't until 1709, when the General Court
received a further request, that it took action on this proposal. In May 1709,
22 people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose relatives had been
convicted of witchcraft, presented the government with a petition in which they
demanded both a reversal of attainder and compensation for financial losses.
Repentance was evident within
the Salem Village church. Rev. Joseph Green and the members of the church voted
on February 14, 1703, after nearly two months of consideration, to reverse the
excommunication of Martha Corey. On August 25, 1706, when Ann Putnam Jr., one of the most active
accusers, joined the Salem Village church, she publicly asked forgiveness. She
claimed that she had not acted out of malice, but was being deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent people, and mentioned Rebecca Nurse in particular, and
was accepted for full membership.
On October 17, 1711, the
General Court passed a bill reversing the judgment against the 22 people listed
in the 1709 petition (there were seven additional people who had been convicted
but had not signed the petition, but there was no reversal of attainder for
them). Two months later, on December 17, 1711, Governor Joseph Dudley authorized
monetary compensation to the 22 people in the 1709 petition. The amount of 578
pounds 12 shillings was authorized to be divided among the survivors and relatives
of those accused, and most of the accounts were settled within a year,[91] but Phillip English's extensive claims
weren't settled until 1718. Finally, on March 6, 1712, Rev. Nicholas Noyes, and members of the Salem
church reversed Noyes' earlier excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Giles
Corey.
Memorials by descendants
Rebecca Nurse's descendants
erected an obelisk-shaped granite memorial in her memory in 1885 on the grounds
of the Nurse
Homestead in Danvers, with an inscription from John
Greenleaf Whittier. In 1892 an additional monument was erected in
honor of 40 neighbors who signed a petition in support of Nurse.
Not all the condemned had been
exonerated in the early 18th century, and so in 1957, descendants of the six
people who had been wrongly convicted and executed but who had not been
included in the bill for a reversal of attainder in 1711, or added to it in
1712, demanded that the General Court formally clear the names of their
ancestral family members. An act was passed pronouncing the innocence of those
accused, although it listed only Ann Pudeator by name. The others were listed only as
"certain other persons", phrasing which failed specifically to
name Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott.
The 300th anniversary of the
trials was marked in Salem and Danvers by a variety of events in 1992. A
memorial park was dedicated in Salem with a stone bench for each of those
executed in 1692. Speakers at the ceremony in August included Arthur Miller and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Danvers erected its own new memorial, and
reinterred bones unearthed in the 1950s, assumed to be those of George Jacobs, Sr., in a new
resting place at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. In 1992, The Danvers
Tercentennial Committee also persuaded the Massachusetts House of
Representatives to issue a resolution honoring those who had died. After much
convincing and hard work by Salem school teacher Paula Keene,
Representatives J. Michael Ruane and Paul Tirone and others, the names of all those not
previously listed were added to this resolution. When it was finally signed on
October 31, 2001, byGovernor Jane Swift, more than 300 years later, all were finally
proclaimed innocent.
In literature, media and popular culture
The story of the witchcraft
accusations, trials and executions has captured the imagination of writers and
artists in the centuries since the event took place, many of which
interpretations have taken liberties with the facts of the historical episode
in the name of literary and/or artistic license. Occurring at the intersection
between a gradually disappearing medieval past and an emerging enlightenment
and dealing with torture and confession, such interpretations draw attention to
the boundaries between the medieval and the postmedieval as cultural
constructions.
Medical theories about the reported afflictions
We returned to the ship around 3 pm and unfortunately did not have time to explore Boston before back on board for sailing time.
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