1692 - The Witches of Salem
Throughout history, accusations of witchcraft have been used as an excuse for the persecution of people whose traditions, cultures, and ideas were not easily understood or accepted by society even when those accusations were untrue. The newly settled Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts, exploded in 1692 with accusations of witchcraft and deviltry.
Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s faced a number of serious challenges to a peaceful social fabric. Salem was divided into a prosperous town and a farming village. The villagers, in turn, were split into factions that fiercely debated whether to seek ecclesiastical and political independence from the town. In 1689 the villagers won the right to establish their own church and chose the Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant, as their minister. His rigid ways and seemingly boundless demands for compensation increased the already present friction. The late seventeenth century also saw a increase in the number of black slaves in New England, which further unsettled the existing social order.
In February 1692, Betty Parris, Reverend Parris's daughter, as well as her friends Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, became ill with symptoms that doctors could not diagnose, including fits and delirium. Dr. Griggs, who attended to the "afflicted" girls, suggested that they might be bewitched. The group of adolescent girls became subject to strange fits.
They accused several women of being witches. The townspeople were appalled but not surprised: Belief in witchcraft was widespread throughout 17th-century America and Europe. the girls named their tormentors: Sarah Good, a poor woman; Sarah Osbourn, an elderly woman; and Tituba, a slave who had told them stories involving Vudou beliefs.
During this time, many people believed in witches and were quick to believe when someone was accused of witchcraft. A recent epidemic of small pox, threats of Indian attacks, and small town rivalries lead to this panic. This kind of group panic is sometimes called "mass hysteria."
Town officials convened a court to hear the charges of witchcraft. On March 1, 1692, authorities charged three women, Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and a slave woman named Tituba, with practicing witchcraft. Within a month, six women were convicted and hanged.
The hysteria grew, in large measure because the court permitted witnesses to testify that they had seen the accused as spirits or in visions, claimed to witness a person's spirit in a separate location from that same person's physical body. Such spectral evidence could neither be verified nor made subject to objective examination. By March 1692 nearly 150 men and women filled prisons from Salem and surrounding towns. These prisoners were alleged, or charged without proof, of practicing witchcraft. Many of them died in prison, some were hanged, and one was crushed to death.
By the fall of 1692, 20 victims, including several men, had been executed, and more than 100 others were in jail (where another five victims died) among them some of the towns most prominent citizens. When the charges threatened to spread beyond Salem, ministers throughout the colony called for an end to the trials. The governor of the colony agreed. Governor William Phips of Massachusetts put an end to the witch trials on October 29, 1692. Those still in jail were later acquitted or given reprieves.
Although an isolated incident, the Salem episode has long fascinated Americans. Most historians agree that Salem Village in 1692 experienced a kind of public hysteria, fueled by a genuine belief in the existence of witchcraft. While some of the girls may have been acting, many responsible adults became caught up in the frenzy as well.
Recently, ergot poisoning has been put forth by some as a previously unsuspected cause of the bizarre behaviors of the young adolescent girls who accused the townsfolk of witchcraft. When the evidence is weighed carefully both pro and con, it seems unlikely that ergotism explains much of what went on in colonial Salem.
Even more revealing is a closer analysis of the identities of the accused and the accusers. Salem Village, as much of colonial New England, was undergoing an economic and political transition from a largely agrarian, Puritan-dominated community to a more commercial, secular society. Many of the accusers were representatives of a traditional way of life tied to farming and the church, whereas a number of the accused witches were members of a rising commercial class of small shopkeepers and tradesmen. Salems obscure struggle for social and political power between older traditional groups and a newer commercial class was one repeated in communities throughout American history. It took a bizarre and deadly detour when its citizens were swept up by the conviction that the devil was loose in their homes.
The Salem witch trials also serve as a dramatic parable of the deadly consequences of making sensational, but false, charges. Three hundred years later, false accusations against a large number of people are still called a witch hunt.
Connecticut's witch trials were held in the mid to late 1600's, between 1647 and 1697. However, no alleged witches were executed after 1662. Although historians cannot say with absolute certainty what gave rise to the witch trials, many believe that fear was the primary caused. The colonists held strong religious beliefs and years of fighting Native Americans, floods, and epidemical sickness may have caused them to look for someone (Satan) to blame for their hardships. Suspected witches were sometimes dropped into a body of water to determine if they possessed evil spirits. The theory behind the so-called ducking test was that if the person sank she was innocent but if she floated she was guilty because the pure water cast out her evil spirit.
It appears that two states (Massachusetts and Virginia) granted witches posthumous pardons. On October 17, 1711, the governor and General Court reversed the conviction against several people tried as witches in 1692 and ordered restitution. Years later, on August 28, 1957, the General Court of Massachusetts issued a resolution (attached) (1) finding that Ann Pudeator and others executed for witchcraft in 1692 may have been illegally tried, convicted, and sentenced; (2) declaring its belief that witchcraft trials were shocking and the result of a wave of popular hysterical fear of the Devil in the community; and (3) declaring that the resolution did not (a) bestow rights that did not exist before its passage, (b) authorize any suits or deprive anyone of a suit or defense that existed before its passage, (c) alter property rights, or (d) require or permit the remission of any imposed penalty, fine, or forfeiture.
Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible, using the 17th-century case of witch trials (and fictionalizing it) to comment on a 20th-century phenomenonthe hunting of communists as if they were witches. Miller used the names of real 17th-century people, but he took many liberties in ascribing motivations to them. Miller was motivated to write The Crucible in the 1950s in order to criticize the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was leading a movement to find and prosecute suspected communists as if he were carrying out a witch trial.
By one account the last American witch trial on record took place in Pennsylvania in 1730 and was reported by Benjamin Franklin. But in the spring of 1741, the city of New York was swept by one of those wild panics that have always attended upon slavery. It forms the darkest blot upon the history of New-York.
In 1787 the Philadelphia City Sessions of the Mayors Court heard the case of a woman who died after being brutally treated by a mob who accused her of witchcraft. Five years later a German woman, aged around seventy, was one of four people who were subjected to violent popular justice in Fairfield County, South Carolina, under suspicion of witchcraft. They launched suits against their assaulters in the county court and won nominal damages. Then in 1796 the Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions of the Peace for the County of York, Maine, dealt with a vicious case of assault and battery against a suspected witch. Witch trials and executions continued into the 1770s in some German states, and the last legal executions for witchcraft took place in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1782, and in Posen, Poland, in 1793.
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