Salem Witch Trials

SALEM WITCH TRIALS

SALEM WITCH TRIALS. The witch panic began in Salem Village, in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the last weeks of 1691, when nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams—the daughter and niece, respectively, of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village—began to display odd behavior. Reverend Parris called upon local doctor William Griggs to determine the cause. Griggs informed Parris that he suspected the Devil's hand.

Under pressure from adults, the girls named three Village women as their tormentors: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, a West Indian slave who worked for the Parris household. On 29 February 1692, warrants went out for their arrest. Osborne and Good denied they were witches; Tituba confessed. All three were jailed in Boston.

Accusations, confessions, and trials escalated. At least forty-eight additional people testified to their own possession. Moreover, hundreds of non-possessed local residents testified against witches who had allegedly committed crimes, most especially maleficium (that is, causing misfortune, illness, accidents, or death). By early October, over 185 people from Salem and the surrounding towns had been named as witches. Twenty-four women and six men had been tried and convicted. Nineteen of them, mostly women, had been executed by hanging, and one man had died under interrogation. Over 100 people remained in jail. Several of them died awaiting trial.

In the face of increasing skepticism about evidence, however, and because of the relatively high stature of some of the accused, growing numbers of clergymen and political leaders voiced their opposition to the trials, convictions, and executions. The Court of Oyer and Terminer was dismissed; most subsequent trials ended in acquittal and all prior convictions were overturned.

Most historians who have examined the Salem witch-hunt maintain it was the result of underlying social tensions in late seventeenth-century Puritan Salem. Those tensions may have been rooted in gender conflict, dramatic economic change, or local politics. An accusation of witchcraft proved an effective way to control or punish a person labeled for a variety of reasons as an outsider.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hall, David D., ed. Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1692. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

Karlsen, Carol. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Leslie J. Lindenauer

See also vol. 9: Evidence Used Against Witches .