Salem Witchcraft

Salem Witchcraft. It began early in 1692 in Salem Village, an outlying region of the town of Salem, Massachusetts, and a community long beset by deep divisions, focused on the local church. The outbreak started in the household of the Village's beleaguered minister, Samuel Parris, where a group of girls engaged in fortune‐telling rituals. (The most active of these girls was twelve‐year‐old Ann Putnam, daughter of Parris's chief supporter.) By February the girls were experiencing fits, and witchcraft was diagnosed. Pressed to say who was “hurting” them, the girls first named three marginal neighborhood women, including Parris's West Indian slave Tituba. The three were questioned and jailed. But the girls' “afflictions” continued, and through the spring their accusations escalated, targeting people (some 30 percent of them male) who were increasingly respectable, pious, and prosperous.

In May, with the prisons filling up, the newly appointed Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court of Oyer and Terminer to try the cases. In early June, after the court condemned to death its first defendant, Bridget Bishop, one of the judges resigned in protest. The key legal dispute concerned the validity of “spectral” evidence, when the afflicted girls testified that they were being hurt by a visual representation of their tormentor—presumably the Devil in the accused person's shape. Although the court sought other corroboratory evidence (voluntary confession at best, or at least such circumstantial evidence as preternatural “witch's tits” in the genital region, or testimony that threats by the accused had been mysteriously fulfilled), spectral evidence was accepted. A number of accused persons did confess (Tituba among them), and none of these was executed. Approximately 150 people were jailed, and between June and September, twenty were hanged. (In addition, Giles Cory was pressed to death, in an old English legal procedure designed to force recalcitrant prisoners to plead to the charges against them.)

From the start, the trials had been opposed from many quarters, and early in October, Increase Mather and other prominent clergymen interceded to stop them. (“It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person be condemned,” Mather wrote.) Phips immediately halted the executions, and by the spring of 1693 the remaining prisoners were released. While Increase Mather's son Cotton defended the trials, public opinion rapidly shifted the other way. In 1697 the Massachusetts General Court declared an official day of atonement, and in 1711 it granted financial compensation to some of the victims or their families. Never again would anyone be tried for witchcraft in New England.

Although small in scale when compared to European witch trials, this was the largest such event in colonial America. In previous New England cases the clergy and the courts had generally acted to suppress witchcraft charges, distrusting them as folk superstition; but in 1692 these authorities, convinced of a satanic conspiracy to subvert the Puritan commonwealth, sided with the afflicted girls. Further, the trials took place at a time of political change in Massachusetts: in 1692 church members lost their monopoly over the franchise and the colony itself lost the right to choose its governor.

The trials are arguably the most infamous event in New England history, and the year 1692 remains etched in American consciousness. Fictionalized by writers from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Arthur Miller, Salem witchcraft has become an enduring if somewhat misplaced symbol of Puritanism.
See also Colonial Era; Mather, Increase and Cotton.

Bibliography

Paul Boyer and and Stephen Nissenbaum , Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, 1974.
Richard Godbeer , The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England, 1992.

Stephen Nissenbaum