The Salem Witchcraft Trials
The Salem witchcraft trials took place in Massachusetts between the
years 1692 and 1693. At their centre was the extraordinary
behaviour of a group of girls and young women, who began having
fits, contorting their bodies and making strange noises. The group
included eleven year old Abigail Williams and her cousin, nine year
old Elizabeth Parris, the first two girls to become affected by the
strange fits, eighteen year old Elizabeth Booth, seventeen year old
Elizabeth Hubbard, nineteen year old Mercy Lewis, eighteen year old
Susan Sheldon, twenty year old Mary Warren, sixteen year old Mary
Walcott, twenty year old Sarah Churchill and twelve year old Ann
Puttnam. Later the hysterical behaviour spread to others.
There seemed no reason for the girls’ strange behaviour. After
consulting with some other ministers of the church, the local
minister, Samuel Parris, father of one of the affected girls,
decided to call on the local doctor, William Griggs, who employed
one of the other affected girls, Elizabeth Hubbard. Griggs was
unable to come up with any medical diagnosis for the condition of
the girls and finally stated that it was his belief that the girls
had been bewitched.
In order to cure the girls, it was believed that whoever had
bewitched them had to be identified and punished. The girls were
approached, questioned and asked to tell the authorities who was
responsible for their bewitched state. The real cause of their
behaviour remains unknown, although various suggestions have been
put forward, ranging from repressed sexuality due to the repression
of women, to local politics and feuds, to the presence of ergot
fungus in the flour, to simple mischievous deception and a desire
for attention.
A popular and plausible suggestion is that Elizabeth Parris and
Abigail Williams had become interested in the occult from stories
about voodoo told to them by Tituba, a servant the Reverend Parris
had brought with him from Barbados.
The girls and young women who were the accusers lived in a small
community and all knew each other well. They would have been used
to telling each other stories and exchanging secrets. Conditions
were therefore ripe for what was to follow. Once they began with
their accusations, the whole thing took on a life of its own, and it
would have been difficult to put a stop to it, even if they had
wanted to.
The girls were clever in their first choice of suspects. The first
three to be named were not people whom the community would rush to
defend since they were all in their own way on the very fringe of
society and none was a member of the church. Tituba was the first
to be named. Next were Sarah Osbourne and Sarah Good. The former
was an elderly disabled woman who had shocked the community by
living openly with a servant before marrying him, and the latter was
a beggar. These three outcasts were arrested and appeared before
local magistrates. The women were questioned and their accusers
were allowed to be present at the interrogations. It was then that
the occurrences began which were to make the Salem case so
remarkable. The girls were standing in front of the accused and
obviously not being touched by them, yet they claimed that they were
being pinched and bitten by them. It was the girls’ contention
that the women’s spectres were harming them, although such spectres
were only visible to the girls. They put on a convincing
performance of being physically tormented and often pointed to some
creature in the room, such as a bird in the rafters, as being the
embodiment of the spectre of one of the accused.
At the hearing Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne denied all charges,
but unfortunately for them, Tituba decided to make a full
confession, and implicating the other women. Tituba was the least
likely to be acquitted on a charge of witchcraft. There had always
been rumours in the village about her connection with the occult.
The confession of Tituba struck fear into the hearts of local
people. This was in part because of rumors that had circulated some
years previously to the effect that Salem village would be destroyed
by a group of witches and that the household of the local minister
would in some way be connected to this. As if in response to
Tituba’s confession and the increasing unease, the girls extended
their range of accused.
By this point the magistrates were much more inclined to believe the
girls than they had been originally, even when well respected women
of the village were named. Among these were Martha Corey and
Rebecca Nurse, both devout and regular churchgoers. Had such women
been among the first to be accused it is doubtful whether the
magistrates would have allowed the trials to go any further.
However, by this stage in the proceedings, anything could be
believed. The court simply believed everything the girls said, and
they began accusing people from outside Salem village itself, twenty
two communities eventually being involved.
There was often an element of vengeance in accusations of
witchcraft. Such an element was very probably inherent in the
charging of John and Elizabeth Proctor. They, too were upstanding
members of the community, but John Proctor had greatly offended one
of the girls, Mary Warren. She was a servant in the Proctor’s
household and had been beaten by her master when she had started
suffering fits and accusing people of being witches.
Yet another person was accused by the girls. This was George
Burroughs, a minister who had officiated at the church in Salem from
1680 to 1682. He had once lodged with the Puttnam family and had
incurred their hostility. He was accused by the girls of having his
spectre bite and pinch them, and it was alleged that this could be
substantiaited by the fact that the bite marks matched his teeth.
Another serious accusation made by the girls was that he had made
some of them sign a book supplied by the Devil, thereby making them
sign a pact with him.
And so the hysteria continued, and more and more people were
implicated. When a Justice of the Peace, Dudley Bradstreet, began
to be concerned at the scale of the accusations and at the calibre
of the people against whom they were leveled, he refused to sign any
more warrants.
It was a sign of the times that he was promptly accused, but he
escaped before he could be tried.
In a similar category was John Willard. A local farmer, he was a
deputy constable who had been involved in the arrest of the first
suspects. However, as time went on and the whole thing appeared to
be getting out of hand, he had second thoughts and was heard to say
that the real guilty ones were the girls themselves. This was
dangerous talk and having got wind of impending accusations against
him, he fled. He was, however, not as lucky as Bradstreet and he
was caught, charged and hanged.
As the hysteria continued, some of the girls appear to have had
second thoughts and to have shown signs of admitting deception.
Sarah Churchill actually admitted at one point to deceiving the
court when her employer, George Jacobs, was arrested and
interrogated.
The Salem witchcraft trials, in common with others in the American
colonies and in England, did not involve the horrendous physical
torture by instruments that were such a feature of European trials.
There was, however, an exception to this absence of torture, and
that was the torture of Giles Corey. The reason for his harsh
physical torture was that he refused to plead and remained silent
during the reading of the indictment against him. He thought that
if he did not answer to the charge he could not be tried and
convicted. It is possible that he knew that if he were convicted
his property would be confiscated and thought that if he could avoid
trial and conviction his property would remain his. The authorities
took a very dim view of his refusal to cooperate and decided to
punish him into answering the accusation. The punishment was cruel
and severe, especially when you consider that he was old man of
eighty. Corey was taken to a field, where he was held to the
ground, naked, by a series of stakes. He was then covered with a
large wooden board on which were placed more and more heavy stones.
Corey still refused to cooperate and he was crushed to death.
Such cruel treatment was against the law in America. However,
people were generally afraid to speak out, so nothing was done.
Corey's treatment was, thankfully, unusual but, although those
accused of witchcraft in Salem were not subjected to any physical
torture, their plight was nevertheless desperate. They were left to
languish in prison, usually chained
up, for months on end, not
knowing what their fate was to be but fearing the worst, worrying
about their families outside and all the time witnessing yet more
people joining their ranks.
Finally, in 1692 a new governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips,
was appointed by the Crown. He established a court of Oyer and
Terminer, an archaic legal term meaning to hear and to determine.
There had been much delay up
until then, but from June 2, when the
court first sat, little time was lost in trying and sentencing the
accused. The first of the accused to be tried, Bridget Bishop was
hanged on June 10.
There was concern over the use of so called spectral evidence, and
the concern was raised from a theological as well as from a legal
point of view. The local ministers advised the court against
placing too much value on spectral evidence alone, although this
advice was not always taken by the court.
One example of evidence of guilt concerned the behaviour of the
accusers in the presence of the accused. If one of the accused
looked at one of the accusers and the accuser collapsed, this was
taken of evidence that the accused was a witch.
Like many witchcraft trials elsewhere, the Salem trials could hardly
be considered just. The accused were often convicted purely on
unlikely evidence supplied by their accuser. Anyone accused by the
girls was thrown in prison to await trial, and after that a
conviction was almost a certainty. For the most part the accused
were denied legal representation. During interrogation, questions
were expressed in such a way that made it almost impossible for the
accused not to incriminate himself or herself. A case that
illustrates the lack of justice involves Rebecca Nurse. This much
respected member of the community was accused and tried but
acquitted. On hearing the verdict the girls went into fits. The
verdict was altered to guilty and Rebecca Nurse was
executed on July
19, 1692, along with Sarah good, Sarah Martin and others.
Those condemned to death were executed by hanging. Their bodies
were placed in shallow graves on Gallows' Hill, it being the general
consensus that witches should not be buried on hallowed ground.
In all nineteen people were executed, and by the time of these
executions the accusations were beginning to worry a great many
people. The girls themselves thought they could accuse anyone and
get away with it. In this assumption they were wrong. Their
credibility was called into question when they accused the wife of
the governor, Sir William Phips. This was a step too far, and on
October 29 the governor dissolved the court that had been trying the
cases. A new court was established and deprived of the right to
admit spectral evidence. This was an important measure. Without
spectral evidence most of the accused were acquitted.
When the trials ended, many people began to question whether they
should ever have taken place. Steps of atonement were taken by
clergy and state. In 1703 the colonial legislature of
Massachusetts began to issue retroactive amnesties to the convicted
and executed and began in 1711 to grant a degree of financial
comensation to the victims and
their families.
As for the girls, they were lucky not to escape punishment. In
general they appear not to have shown any desire to repent and to
ask forgiveness. Only the younger Ann Puttnam seems to have been
moved to make any form of reparation. It took her a long time to
get around to this, fourteen years in fact, and the confession when it came
was less than wholehearted. Delivering it in Salem church, she laid
much of the blame for the "guilt of innocent blood" on Satan,
claiming that he had deluded her.
