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The salem witch trials.

Abram C. Van Engen Abram C. Van Engen Washington University in St. Louis
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.139
Published online: 22 November 2016

The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. What caused this conflict to erupt? Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers.

The primary explanations of Salem set the crisis within the context of larger developments in Puritan society. Though such developments could be traced to the beginning of Puritan settlement in New England, most commentators focus on shifts occurring near the end of the century. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. It was also a time when British imperial interests were on the rise, tightening and expanding an empire that had, at times, been somewhat loosely held together. In the midst of those expansions, British colonists and settlers faced numerous wars on their frontiers, especially in northern New England against French Catholics and their Wabanaki allies. Finally, New England underwent, resented, and sometimes resisted intense shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London. Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way for over fifty years. A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter or authority from 1689 until 1691. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original “New England Way,” and many lamented what they had lost. In other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier. All of these factors have been used to explain Salem.

When Governor William Phips finally halted the trials, nineteen had been executed, five had died in prison, and one man had been pressed to death for refusing to speak. Protests began almost immediately with the first examinations of the accused, and by the time the trials ended, almost all agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. Even so, the population could not necessarily agree on an explanation for what had occurred. Publishing any talk of the trials was prohibited, but that ban was quickly broken. Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literature—in poems, plays, and novels—has attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying “specter of Salem.”

witch-hunting
New England
17th century
cultural memory

What Happened in Salem

The fits began in January 1692 . Betty Parris, the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, and Abigail Williams, the minister’s eleven-year-old niece, were the first to be afflicted. As members of the minister’s household, they presented an embarrassing situation. The fits suggested that Satan could make his way even into the pastor’s house, possessing or demonizing beyond the minister’s ability to protect or defend. Moreover, Puritan theology taught that such afflictions usually came as chastisements from God, requiring the minister, Samuel Parris, to examine his ways and repent. Either because of his embarrassment or because he genuinely repented, Parris did not suspect witches for many weeks. He prayed. He fasted. He waited. After more than a month of continued fits, he finally called a doctor. When the doctor pronounced the girls bewitched, it both relieved a burden and added a new one. The girls were not possessed; they were attacked. But who the devil was bewitching them?

Mary Sibley, Parris’s neighbor, knew one way to find out. She ordered Parris’s slaves Tituba and John Indian to bake a witch cake—a rye bread mixed with urine from the afflicted children. This was called white magic, or countermagic, and it was long used and widely practiced in Puritan New England. Though uniformly condemned by the clergy (they believed all magic, for whatever purpose, worked only through the power of Satan), the practice of countermagic continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. Lay people did not necessarily associate magic with the devil, but approached it more pragmatically: if it healed it was good, and if it harmed it was bad.

The witch cake Sibley ordered apparently worked. When the dog ate it, the children identified their tormenters. It also produced collateral damage, however, for the same day the witch cake was baked, two more children fell ill: twelve-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., and seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, the doctor’s maid. The four girls collectively named three witches, and Samuel Parris had good reason to be relieved. Now, finally, he could lay the blame elsewhere. Not only were these witches the ones at work, but Sibley’s condemned usage of countermagic had “raised the devil” in Salem. He rebuked Sibley and forced her to confess before the church. Then he used the evidence she procured through countermagic to begin proceedings against the witches.

The first suspects were the predictable ones: Tituba, a slave from the West Indies; Sarah Good, a poor beggar who offended everyone; and Sarah Osborne, a bedridden widow who had scandalized the town by marrying her servant. 1 As many have shown, witch hunts were often directed primarily at women, and especially at poor, marginalized women or those who had transgressed social norms. As Carol Karlsen succinctly writes: “The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women … Especially in its Western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves. It confronts us too with systematic violence against women.” 2 Salem thus began as a limited witch hunt aimed at notorious women, a ritual that was not very common in New England compared to Europe, but one which certainly had its precedents. The community would purge itself of those who did not fit, and then it would reunite through the process of uncovering and overcoming the devil. 3 The local magistrates, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Gedney, presided over the first phase of examinations. Beginning with Sarah Good, Hathorne interrogated the defendants in an attempt to force confessions. Questions led with an assumption of guilt. Rather than asking whether Good injured the four children, Hathorne simply asked why she did. Good claimed her innocence, and each denial of guilt evoked a series of fits from the four afflicted girls. Finally, Good accused Osborne, attempting to shift the blame, but when the magistrates examined Osborne, much the same occurred.

It was when the court finally heard from Tituba that Salem exploded into an unprecedented affair. Under Hathorne’s pressure, Tituba confessed to being a witch, and that confession yielded several dramatic results. First, the afflictions of the girls ceased, confirming that confessions were the best way both to prevent further harm to the girls and to legitimate the actions of the court. Second, Tituba’s confession enabled her to detail the actions of other witches, her supposed accomplices. According to the trusted Puritan theologian William Perkins, a confessed witch who accused others offered valid testimony against them. Tituba explained that Good and Osborne had forced her to harm the girls, and the court believed her. Third, Tituba offered several elements in her confession—all guided by Judge Hathorne—that would become routine in future confessions: the devil’s book, the witches’ meetings, the description of a “black man,” Satanic masses, and the naming of other suspects. 4 Finally, and most significantly, Tituba claimed that Good and Osborne did not act alone. Tituba eventually testified to a total of nine witches, though she could not say who they were. Suddenly, a full witch conspiracy was underway, a war of Satan against the Puritan churches of New England. To survive, the godly would have to unmask their foes. 5

Ann Putnam Jr., took the lead in identifying these other witches, who turned out not to conform to the usual stereotypes. The next accused included Dorothy Good, Sarah’s four-year-old daughter; Martha Cory, a member of Samuel Parris’s church; and Rebecca Nurse, a widely respected matriarch, member of the nearby Salem Town church, and godly grandmother in the community. Meanwhile, the afflicted multiplied. Adults began to suffer fits, including Ann’s mother and Tituba’s husband, John Indian, and the fits spread to Mary Warren, the servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. John Proctor responded by beating her, which seemed to cure her of the problem, and apparently he proclaimed that if he were left alone with John Indian, he could beat the devil out of him as well. But when Mary recovered and turned against the afflicted, the afflicted turned against her: she was soon accused of witchcraft herself, revealing in its early days how difficult it would be to oppose the supposedly bewitched. 6 Before the judges, Mary claimed that “the afflicted persons did but dissemble.” Fits immediately ensued, so convincing in their performance that Mary reacted with fits of her own and was taken back to prison, unable to speak. In court the next day, Mary confessed to signing the devil’s book, but only because she had been tricked into doing it by the Proctors. Then she accused Giles Cory. She rejoined the ranks of the afflicted and spun out accusations in tandem with them, saving her own life but costing the lives of many more.

With the confession of Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, who would also soon join the afflicted, the trials turned their attention to Maine. Hobbs claimed to have become a witch in the woods of Casco Bay. All along the Maine frontier, the English Puritans were losing in a long war against the French and their Wabanaki allies. Wabanaki raids repeatedly wiped out Puritan towns, and several of the afflicted girls were orphans and refugees from the conflict. With Maine’s woes now present in the courtroom, accusations focused on the former Salem minister who had moved back to that frontier: George Burroughs. Burroughs was a Puritan minister with Baptist leanings who had preached in the divided Salem Village church a decade before; he had a reputation for mistreating wives and an uncanny ability to survive Indian raids. Both aspects made him suspect. At Salem, he became identified as the ringleader of the conspiracy, the minister of an inverted covenant of witches. He presided over black masses and bloody sacraments. He killed wives. He bewitched neighbors. He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England. When the court took up his case, more than thirty witnesses volunteered to damn him.

Until June, the examinations of the accused witches had not been able to proceed to actual trials because the colony lacked an official charter and an ability to try capital offenses. In June, the newly appointed governor, William Phips, arrived from England with a new charter, heard about the crisis in Salem, and immediately established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear and determine”). Stocked with high-ranking officials from Boston, this court could move from the initial depositions, testimonials, and examinations to grand jury indictments and finally jury trials. The court first tried Bridget Bishop on June 2. Bishop denied her guilt, which would prove a good way to die in Salem. The trial proceeded quickly, and on June 10, she was hanged.

At that point, Salem paused. Accusations and examinations had swept up a series of accused witches, mostly from Salem Village and its immediate vicinity. But now it had executed its first witch, a woman who disconcertingly refused to confess even on the scaffold. Before proceeding, the magistrates wanted some approval from Puritan ministers. Asked for their thoughts on the matter, several prominent ministers took two days to respond. Their response, “The Return of Several Ministers,” suggested caution, especially in the use of “spectral evidence” (seeing someone’s specter, or shape, harming either oneself or another). The strange use of spectral evidence—the claims of the afflicted to see, experience, know, and testify about the invisible world, along with the court’s reliance on such testimony to suspect, convict, and execute the accused—would become one of Salem’s most anomalous mysteries. The judges at Salem approached spectral evidence in direct violation of precedent and principle. Yet although “The Return of Several Ministers” urged caution in this regard, it did not overtly condemn the proceedings or the judges and ended by encouraging a “vigorous prosecution.” It was all the court wanted to hear. Ignoring all other ambiguities and cautions, the court pressed on, turning its attention in a second phase of trials from Salem Village to the nearby town of Andover, where a great number of accused persons quickly confessed—many doing so explicitly to save their lives. 7

The suffering of the accused did not begin with that first hanging of Bridget Bishop. It began rather with the accusation itself, the taint of dark magic and ungodly ways, the loss of reputation. For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. And suffering extended elsewhere as well, to the forfeiture of property and constrained conditions for surviving children, and to the prisons, which were wretched, unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous. The first to die at Salem was not Bridget Bishop but Sarah Osborne, the bedridden widow, who perished in jail a month before her case could even be heard. In total, nineteen would be executed, one man would be pressed to death between boards, and at least five would die in jail before Governor Phips, under growing opposition, would finally close down the Court of Oyer and Terminer—much to the dismay and indignation of its presiding judge, William Stoughton. Phips created another court to hear the remaining cases, and this second court cleared the jails, refused to accept former confessions, and acquitted all but three. Governor Phips immediately reprieved the convicted three. No one else would die for witchcraft in New England.

Explanations of the Salem Witch Trials

Most scholars agree on the basic narrative of the Salem witch trials. 8 Why it happened, however, is far from clear. Disagreements abound, with alternative explanations for the afflicted, the accused, the judges, the ministers, the magistrates, and the proceedings as a whole. Much about Salem begs for explanation. Not only was the witch hunt larger and more extensive than anything New England had ever seen, but those in authority acted quite differently than had their colleagues in prior cases. Young girls and others had fallen into fits and afflictions before; in fact, almost simultaneously with Salem, the same kinds of fits with the same sorts of accusations were beginning among a small group of girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Yet neither in neighboring Hartford in 1692 nor in the previous six decades did such afflictions lead to stuffed jails and mass executions.

No one has better laid out the full culture of witchcraft in Puritan New England than John Demos, and in the updated version of his book Entertaining Satan , Demos emphasizes two fundamental “themes”: that witchcraft in New England belonged to “the regular business of life in pre-modern times”—a part of the basic functioning of community—and that witchcraft was “a profoundly ‘emotional’ phenomenon (with fear and anger at its center, and lots of affect-laden fantasy flowing out in all directions).” 9 Yet Demos focuses on sporadic witch accusations and trials across New England, not massive witch hunts, and he offers no account of Salem. At Salem, something beyond the regular business of life broke out. What made Salem go so wrong?

Three prominent and overlapping explanations have come to the fore, each emphasizing a particular aspect. One early and influential account laid all the blame on economic development and communal division. In Salem Possessed , Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum saw Salem Village at war with forces of modernization that threatened a close-knit, traditional agricultural society. Mapping the houses of the afflicted against the houses of the accused, they found that most of the afflicted came from the western, more agricultural areas of Salem Village, while the accused tended to come from the eastern, more merchant-oriented society of Salem Town. From this map and other evidence, Boyer and Nissenbaum claimed that the coming of modern capitalism caused irreparable harm to the self-understanding and social fabric of the community, leading to a witch hunt. The cause of the Salem witch hunt was finally the economy, along with all the social factors that economic division and development entails. 10

A second major interpretation puts the primary emphasis on political instability. In 1684 , King James II revoked the colony’s founding charter and imposed a new government with a royally appointed governor named Edmond Andros. Andros was everything the Puritans hated: an autocratic, aristocratic Anglican who ignored the locals’ opinions and advice. When the Glorious Revolution occurred in 1689 , replacing James II with William and Mary, Massachusetts’s colonists jailed Andros and packed him off to England. From 1689 through 1691 , the colony had no charter and thus no official government. During this interim, it returned to the administration of the first charter, waiting for the outcome of negotiations between Increase Mather and the new king and queen. The new charter, which arrived in the midst of the Salem panic, mixed features of the first and second governments. Returning many rights to the Massachusetts citizens, it nonetheless retained a royally appointed governor and still required religious tolerance. Many opposed the charter, and some began to wonder if Puritan New England had run its course. This political instability, some have argued, caused the witch hunt. Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters. 11

Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. In King William’s War ( 1688–1697 ), New England suffered devastating defeats at the hands of the French and Indians along its northern border. Almost every attempt to mount a counteroffensive failed miserably. Towns were razed, casualties mounted, and captives were taken north and forced into Catholicism. In the guise of his minions, Satan wanted to destroy the godly community, and because of New England’s sins, God was allowing Satan to succeed. No one would be safe without a thoroughgoing reformation. Closer to Salem, these northern wars touched the lives of several participants in the witch hunt: some of the afflicted were war refugees, orphaned and traumatized; some of the accused, especially George Burroughs, had close ties to Maine; and some of the judges were responsible for terrible defeats and financial losses during the wars. Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflicted—several of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—Salem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause. 12

Each of these explanations has been used to make sense of Salem, and all have been found wanting. 13 More recently, scholars have emphasized the role of religion in accounts that combine features from all previous explanations. Even before Mary Beth Norton highlighted the wars of the northern frontier, Richard Godbeer noted them and combined them with several additional factors that served as “a series of external forces assault[ing] the colonists, imperiling not only their integrity as a political and spiritual community but even their very survival.” This “common trauma,” he noted, was often described in the language of invasion and external threat. 14 In Satan and Salem , Benjamin Ray similarly argues that “far from being precipitated by a single key person or circumstance, the Salem crisis was the result of a perfect storm of factors.” 15 That storm of factors, he explains, shared a common language of Satan’s attack. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft . This idea of a perfect “storm” emphasizes the coming together of multiple factors. King William’s War certainly matters, as Norton demonstrates; but so do other factors, such as economic instability, the lack of a stable government, the inexperience of a new governor, the past failings of ruling magistrates, and the personalities of Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and many others. Overall, it seems, what mattered most was that New England Puritans, in the midst of these crises—and partly as a result of them—saw themselves as God’s chosen people at war with a newly unleashed and angered Satan. It was a war they wanted to win, and the most self-assured Puritans became convinced that they could win this war by purging the land of all those who allied themselves with Satan and Satan’s cause. They came to see the devil anywhere, and they sought to defeat him everywhere.

The Many Participants in the Salem Witch Trials

Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. These groups often have defining characteristics, though they also divide into their own subgroups (local magistrates vs. Boston magistrates, for example, or the ministers in support of the trials vs. the ministers who opposed them). In addition, there are several individuals who significantly affected Salem: Samuel Parris, the town’s minister; Tituba, the minister’s slave who first confessed; Thomas Putnam Jr., the man whose family seemed particularly afflicted and whose depositions were especially successful against the accused; Governor Phips, who supported the trials, then closed them down, then tried to claim that he never knew what was happening; Increase Mather and his son Cotton, the prominent Boston ministers who divided over Salem while trying to make it appear as though they actually agreed. These personalities and groups have all received their own attention as important factors at Salem.

Salem begins with the afflicted: there are no trials without the seizures, screams, and fits. These afflictions began with young girls who would remain the core group of the afflicted, but they spread to a host of others, including males and adults (such as John Indian and Ann Putnam, Sr.). What explains the bewitched? A variety of notions have been advanced, and the only one consistently refuted has been the one that dominates popular imagination: ergot poisoning. According to this idea, the afflicted consumed a fungus that grows on moldy rye bread, causing symptoms similar to those of LSD. All scholars rule out this possibility. Much more likely is that the girls simply faked it. The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoning—the intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on command—suggests the possibility of fraud. All scholars agree that at least some fraud was involved, and certain members of the afflicted group, such as Mary Warren, seem particularly suspect. The Proctors’ servant ceased having fits, faced an accusation of witchcraft, became “afflicted” all over again, then laid the blame on the Proctors. Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud. 16

At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear. If friends, family members, respected ministers, and magistrates all believe that you are tormented by specters, at what point do you begin to believe them? So, too, hysteria can be contagious. Is it fraud to fall when others fall, or fear when others fear? Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as 2011 in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem. 17 The afflictions at Salem may have begun as genuine symptoms of anxiety or PTSD; at court, these fits might have continued as fraud, especially when the magistrates required repeat performances of affliction to convict the accused. 18

As for the accused, how did their names come to the afflicted? The first three names make sense: they fit the usual description of witches. But once witchcraft expanded to church members and Puritan ministers, does any rationale explain how one person came to be accused while another person escaped? Theories abound, beginning primarily with the economic disparities proposed in Salem Possessed , but most recent scholarship settles on the idea of religious division within the community. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him. As the witch hunt passed on from Salem Village to surrounding communities, accusers seemed to seek out those who were religiously corrupt in some way—those who failed to attend church regularly, who did not participate in sacraments, who failed to become full members of a church, or who had some kind of connection to Quakers, Baptists, or other religious dissidents. This religious rationale does not explain all accusations, but it seems to make the most sense of identifying the accused.

When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. Recently, attention has turned from the local antagonisms of the afflicted and the accused to the role of the judges and magistrates who seemed to push the trials forward. As Baker has written, “[N]o one would have died without the sanction of the judges. The judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer hold the answers to many of Salem’s riddles.” 19 These judges have become all the more interesting lately because scholarship has demonstrated just how oddly they behaved. At Salem, magistrates disregarded both precedent and advice. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of 26.2 percent. 20 For many years, Puritan magistrates and ministers had prevented the conviction and killing of supposed witches, in part because they had a different understanding of witchcraft than did most commoners. The elite defined the deed as a covenant with the devil; most of the non-elite saw it as a harmful use of magic. Common citizens brought their testimony of harm to magistrates, but harm in itself proved nothing. Successful prosecutions required either a confession or two witnesses to confirm that someone had made a pact with the devil. For sixty years, confessions were hard to come by and pacts with the devil were hard to prove. More important, in the previous several decades of Puritan New England, ministers and magistrates were decidedly uneasy about spectral evidence; it could identify a potential suspect , but it could never be used to convict. At Salem, spectral evidence convicted. It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. The changed use of spectral evidence would be one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of Salem, one that informs the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and an element that scholars continue trying to explain. 21 But spectral evidence was not the only anomaly. New England law had previously limited accusations of witchcraft and other crimes by requiring the posting of a bond; in order to curtail frivolous cases, people had to pay money in order to lodge a case with the court. At Salem, that requirement was dropped. As a result of the conditions surrounding witchcraft before Salem, not only were there fewer complaints made in previous decades, but those complaints were far less successfully prosecuted. For sixty years, commoners and lay people had pressed for the conviction of witches, and for just as many years their political and religious superiors had pressed back even harder. 22

At Salem, all of these precedents would be ignored or reversed. Bonds were not required for many months, swelling the number of complaints. Confessions, some of which were produced by illegal torture, saved the lives of those who confessed. Those doomed by their denials of guilt, meanwhile, were often convicted almost exclusively on the basis of spectral evidence. As the accused protested their innocence, the afflicted girls would fall, twist, scream and writhe, pointing to an invisible tormenter. Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not required—assuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. The court ignored the tomes on witchcraft that previous courts so carefully studied. Rather than tamping down and resisting the common people’s desire for prosecution, the magistrates at Salem accepted and encouraged it. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be 100 percent. 23 No one who came to trial would be acquitted. As one scholar aptly explains, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for whatever motives, the Salem judges wanted convictions.” 24

Why did the judges want convictions? Political instability may offer some psychological rationale for the behavior of court judges: several of them had worked for Andros’s hated government, and some had been involved in the defeats of King William’s War. Perhaps these judges needed a way to prove they were on the side of godly Puritans, while also finding a conspiracy of witches to be a handy excuse for their failures. 25 Religious tensions and perhaps a sense of spiritual unworthiness among these second-generation stalwart Puritans may also play a role: five of the nine judges had attended Harvard College in preparation for the ministry, but all had abandoned that path for other pursuits. In addition, as Baker reveals, these judges were mostly related to each other through marriage. The only unrelated judge was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and Saltonstall was the only judge to resign from the court in protest. 26 Yet it is important to realize that all the judges seemed to have been transformed at Salem: several had been involved previously in acquitting accused witches, questioning the spectral evidence they would come to rely upon at Salem. Why they suddenly sought convictions is difficult to determine, but if the judges had not so desperately wanted the prosecution to succeed, the witch hunt could never have taken off. For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in 1692 .

While the judges may have suffered from paranoia and guilt about the wars or their involvement in Andros’s government, on a more local level, the afflicted, their parents, and the prosecutors all seemed to dwell in a paranoid, anxious, and traumatized community. The records of the Salem witch trials are an endless testimony of suffering. Loss, despair, anxiety, and sorrow pour out of the testimonies. 27 And all of that heartache could finally be given an object, a scapegoat—someone to blame. Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Rather than losing children because of one’s sins, such losses could be understood as Satan’s attack, possibly launched against someone precisely because that person had remained faithful to God. Witches, in other words, changed the dynamics and experience of loss.

That may not have been the explicit rationale for many witnesses, but it certainly seems to have guided the thinking of Samuel Parris. Parris, the embattled minister whose children started throwing themselves at open flames, was the fourth pastor of Salem Village. The first three had short tenures, invited by one faction but opposed by another. Few had their salaries paid; all would leave Salem for less than stellar careers; and one, George Burroughs, would be hanged as a witch. Salem Village offered one of the lowest ministerial salaries in the entire colony, and its reputation of bitter factional divisions preceded it. In 1689 , no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. Samuel Parris had completed three years at Harvard before leaving to take over his father’s plantation in Barbados, which quickly failed. He tried his hand as a merchant in Boston and failed there, too. Finally, Salem Village asked him to preach. For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage. In his first sermon, he demanded that congregants love, serve, and obey him. He told them that by bringing sacraments to the church (allowed for the first time since it was established), he was removing the Lord’s reproach. Then he removed the Halfway Covenant that allowed God-fearing congregants who were not full members to baptize their children. These “halfway” congregants, whom Parris railed against, would either have to become full members by making a profession of faith before the church and undergoing the church’s scrutiny, or they would have to forgo baptizing their children. It was clear from the start that Samuel Parris would not heal this divided church.

The trouble with Parris seems especially evident from his preaching. Parris spoke unambiguously of the good and the bad, the godly and the ungodly, assigning “halfway” God-fearing congregants consistently to the latter category. As scholars have shown, Parris posed no neutral ground: all people were either of God or the devil, and his goal was to parse and separate. 28 Lacking the hesitation and self-doubt of many other Puritan ministers, Samuel Parris often presented himself as a Christ-like figure opposed by anti-Christian forces. From the moment he first began preaching, Parris spoke of cosmic battles. He emphasized Satan’s attack against the godly and interpreted resistance as the diabolical plot of the devil. On the Sunday before the first fits began in his home, Parris preached explicitly that Satan was attempting to “pull down” the church. Frequently, the concerned faction supporting Parris met at his house to discuss the crisis facing the church, strategizing how to deal with all those who opposed him. It makes sense, then, that his house is where the fits began. Without Parris, there would be no context for believing the testimony of the minister’s slave that a conspiracy of witches gathered outside his home and sought to overthrow his church. 29

But Parris was not the only Puritan to see Satan at work, gathering forces for a violent battle against godly New England. Nowhere does this perception of war appear more clearly than in the introductory frame of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World ( 1693 ). Written at the behest of the governor, deputy governor, and chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials, this text chooses five cases, selectively presents the evidence, and defends the court in its work for Christ. The overall defense of the court’s actions lay in the broader context the book establishes: “The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories,” Cotton Mather explains. Because they brought the gospel to Satan’s lands, Satan had become especially enraged and now pursued a grand plot to destroy the godly society that the Puritans had built. Like Samuel Parris, Cotton Mather’s book couched the Salem witch trials within the context of a cosmic battle.

Governor Phips liked that account of things. He sent Wonders of the Invisible World to London as the official history of Salem and prohibited anyone else from publishing on the subject once the trials ended. But the very need to silence opposition proved how few agreed with Cotton Mather. Resistance started mounting immediately, propelled by the case of Rebecca Nurse; during her examination, more than three dozen citizens signed a petition proclaiming her innocence and defending her good character. Petitions continued to grow during the trials, with more and more brave persons signing documents attempting to save the lives of their neighbors. No petition worked. Yet the rising cry of protest did finally have an effect, bringing the noise of opposition and resistance to those who held the most power in the colony. Soon Increase Mather joined the protests, publishing his own account of Salem while the trials were underway. In Cases of Conscience , Increase specifically delegitimized the court’s use of spectral evidence, undercutting the primary source of convictions. That book, along with the protests of several leading Boston ministers, finally convinced Governor Phips to stop the trials.

The trips to Salem by Increase and Cotton Mather reveal their different mentalities. When Cotton Mather went to Salem, he witnessed a group execution that included the supposed “King of Hell,” George Burroughs. At the scaffold, Burroughs composed himself with so much calm and seeming godliness, including a perfect recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (thought impossible for a witch), that many in the crowd began to turn against the executions. Burroughs looked more like a Protestant saint from the pages of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than like a satanic wizard bent on the destruction of Christianity. 30 As the crowd started to protest, Cotton Mather mounted a horse and convinced the crowd that the devil often appeared as an angel of light, winning them back to the executions, which then continued.

Yet that line of thinking—that the devil might appear as an angel of light—could also damn the very trials it was meant to support. In fact, such an idea served Increase Mather’s argument rejecting spectral evidence. If the devil could appear in any shape, then perhaps the devil had taken the shape of someone innocent. Crying out against specters might be playing right into the devil’s hands. When Increase Mather traveled to Salem, therefore, he did not go to encourage the executions; instead, he visited the jails and spoke with the accused, including many who had confessed. There he learned about the extreme pressures applied to them and found that many had confessed because they believed it would save their lives. While talking with them, he witnessed the suffering of innocent persons in terrible, sickening jails, and he turned against the trials for good. When Increase returned home, he wrote the book that would help bring them to a close.

The mysteries of Salem are many, various, and difficult to solve. Why were these people afflicted? Why were those people accused? What explains the motivations and behavior of Samuel Parris, and how much was Parris’s temperament able to set the terms that enabled the tragedy to occur? Why did the judges reverse decades of precedent in an effort to convict and execute as many as they could? And how did the ministers respond? Who supported the trials, who opposed them, and why? These kinds of questions have produced contested answers, all attempting to balance the relative weight of importance behind each actor or cause. Salem is filled with questions. And while extensive records survive, those records seldom offer answers able to settle all disputes.

Reading and Remembering the Salem Witch Trials

The abiding mystery of Salem seems one reason for its enduring legacy. Governor Phips attempted to ban any discussion of Salem, but within three years that ban was violated, and no future silencing could take place. Thomas Maule, a Quaker, was the first to challenge the official proscription, with Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695 . The book had a long chapter criticizing the government for its handling of Salem. It was burned and Maule was arrested, spending several months in prison before facing many of the same judges and prosecutors he had attacked. Yet Maule stood by what he wrote. First, he defended its claims; then, slyly, he argued that his authorship could not be proven: anyone could have put his name on the title page. The grand jury found him not guilty, and the ban was broken. From that moment forward, critiques and reassessments of Salem have poured from the presses. 31

Yet many of these skeptical voices were not so clear about what exactly had happened: mistakes were made, to be sure, but the precise nature of those errors could not be determined. The minister John Hale, for example, who was first an advocate and later a skeptic at Salem, explained, “Such was the darkness of the day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents [i.e., precedents], that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.” 32 Apologies eventually appeared from many involved, including the jury foreman, the afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr., and the judge Samuel Sewall, who desired “to take the blame and shame of it.” 33 Yet most of these apologies came in Hale’s variety; they were, for the most part, apologies of the confused. Something had gone wrong, but who was to blame? In 1706 , Ann Putnam Jr., now twenty-nine, desired “to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness from God and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.” But she did not say she faked her afflictions. Instead, she explained, “[I]t was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time.” 34

The darkness of Salem often seems the aspect most remembered today. In popular histories, the Puritans usually appear as stock figures of backward superstition—hateful, unenlightened religious bigots who saw witches in every shadow and enjoyed nothing so much as a good hanging. 35 As Gretchen Adams has shown, such accounts of Salem emerged most prominently in the nation’s first schoolbooks, when American historians praised their country for its moral progress. 36 Yet many have demonstrated that such an assessment fails to fit the evidence: after all, many of those involved at Salem welcomed the new sciences emerging in Europe. Some were among the most intelligent and advanced figures of their day. Cotton Mather, for example, would become the first New Englander inducted into the British Royal Society, and his work promoting smallpox inoculation in later years would save far more lives than Salem lost. As Sarah Rivett has carefully demonstrated, the way in which Puritans approached evidence and testimony during the Salem witch trials—even and especially spectral evidence—was inflected through their embrace of empiricism. “Rather than a symbol of a fading occult worldview,” Rivett writes, “the devil in Salem represented a phase of an emerging Enlightenment modernity.” Against popular histories that caricature the Puritans as premodern, irrational religious fanatics, Rivett writes simply and convincingly: “Irrationality does not suffice as an adequate explanation of Salem.” 37

Still, something seemed to change at Salem—or rather, Salem seemed to demonstrate that something drastic had already shifted. The Salem witch trials have been presented in various ways as the end of Puritan New England. Perhaps Salem helped usher in a new age of religious skepticism, though belief in witchcraft persisted. More important, the relationship of state to church seemed to change. As Ray writes, “[N]ever again would the state ask the church for advice.” 38 But Salem seemed to happen in part because the magistrates disregarded the ministers’ advice, while at the same time still feeling compelled to ask for it. The ministers, too, seemed to recognize their weakening authority in their ambiguous responses and their inability (at least in most cases) to confront the magistrates openly. 39 This deepening divide between magistrates and ministers suggests not only that the Salem witch crisis caused the breakdown of Puritan New England, but that it also resulted in part from the ministers’ loss of authority.

Histories of the Salem witch trials begin with the records of the trials, and those documents raise their own sorts of questions. Secondhand accounts from several witnesses survive, along with confessions, petitions, and many of the preparatory documents for trial (such as depositions, indictments, and examinations), but the records of the actual trials before the Court of Oyer and Terminer have gone missing. In addition, the record book of the Salem Village Church does not contain the crucial years. Beyond a catalogue of what exists or not, we also have to take into consideration who did the recording, an aspect of the records made newly available by the extraordinary 2009 edition Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . We know now, for example, that Thomas Putnam Jr., recorded (or “authored”) a great many depositions and testimonials—more than 120, amounting to more than one-third of the total number. Thomas Putnam and his extended family (including his afflicted wife, daughter, and servant) would account for 160 accusations and the prosecution of fifty-eight people, one-third of the total number accused and arrested. Moreover, Putnam’s ability to write or record these documents proved the power of his pen: his depositions were unusually successful. 40

The question of who wrote what and how documents were stylized, as well as questions of language and genre, shape our understanding of the surviving records and accounts. For example, Thomas Putnam has been noted for his use of stock phrases. Ray points out that the phrase “most grievously” appears 172 times in his descriptions of the suffering of the afflicted, while the phrases “grievously tortured” and “grievously tormented” appear forty-five times. 41 Was the use of such phrases responsible for Putnam’s strong results, and what does that tell us about the power of narrative or the expectations of audience during the Salem witch trials? As scholars have also highlighted, Putnam particularly loved to involve the heart. The depositions he “recorded” would often have an afflicted person saying: “I verily believe in my heart that [so-and-so] is a witch.” 42 These details about Putnam’s writings open the door to larger examinations of language and its effects. What stock phrases worked, and what made them work? Who else was involved in writing records, and how did their styles differ? Literary analysis could yield fresh results about how to read the records of the Salem witch trials.

Those fresh readings would be bolstered by two related approaches: borderlands studies and performance studies. For many years now, literary scholars have asked how to read and understand the texts produced at the meeting of two cultures. In particular, a methodology inflected by the concept of the “borderlands” offers ways of reading against the grain, helping, for instance, to locate Native American actors and Native American voices in texts written almost exclusively by Europeans. In the case of the Salem records we have a similar situation: How do we understand the actions and the voices of the accused in records written almost exclusively by the prosecution? How do we read the Salem witch trial records against the grain? It has always been known that the prosecution wrote most of the records that survive, but only recently have we learned just how much they were composed by particular individuals, such as Thomas Putnam Jr. With that understanding, we can now ask in new ways how to read what he and others produced. Performance studies could also open Salem with its rich theoretical understanding of “performance” and identity. Many have likened the Salem court to a stage. In fact, the spectacle of Salem, which brought together the afflicted, the accused, and the public, not only went against advice and precedent—previously, judges were urged to separate all parties and keep the afflicted individuals apart—it also provided the evidence later used to convict the accused. The spectral torments witnessed and performed during examinations became the basis of conviction. Performance studies thus has much to teach us about how to read Salem.

Beyond the actual events at Salem and their surviving records, there is also the remembering and remaking of Salem that has occurred ever since. Each generation has written its own account of Salem, though that writing proliferated in the wake of expanding education requirements and the new schoolbooks written to meet demand beginning in the early 1800s. In attempts to give the new nation a history and a tradition, Salem was invoked as a moral lesson: it represented the dark parts of the colonial past that the new United States had left behind. Novels, plays, and poetry dwelt on the tragedy as well. The first literary treatment of the trials, according to Gretchen Adams, was the 1817 epic poem The Sorceress, or Salem Delivered by Jonathan Scott. But as Adams explains, “By midcentury many notable nineteenth-century literary figures, including New England natives John Neal, John William De Forest, John Greenleaf Whittier, and of course Nathaniel Hawthorne produced major novels using the witchcraft trials as significant plot elements.” 43

As Adams indicates, perhaps the most famous author to wrestle with Salem was Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendant of Judge Hathorne who added the “w” to his name in order to distinguish himself from his ancestor. Salem lies at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as well as several short stories, especially “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “Young Goodman Brown.” In the short stories, Hawthorne dwells on the problem of spectral evidence. According to Michael Colacurcio, the link between the two tales told at Salem Gallows Hill in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” is that “both concern the Puritan problem of ‘specter evidence,’” in each case pointing readers to perceive “the truth of specter evidence as guilty projection”: that is, “in both cases the charges of diabolical evil probably reveals more about the accuser than the accused,” and such tendencies continue beyond a superstitious past. 44 The same concern with spectral evidence frames “Young Goodman Brown,” but here the question has changed to take up an issue from the trials themselves: if the devil can take any shape, and if those shapes were being used to identify the accused, then could the devil be trusted? In other words, and more deeply, how could one gain adequate knowledge of the invisible world and the true constitution of one’s neighbors and fellow church members? As Colacurcio aptly summarizes, the problem identified in “Young Goodman Brown” is that “the difficulty of detecting a witch is distressingly similar to the radically Puritan problem of discovering a saint.” And if one cannot adequately or accurately do either, then the Puritan experiment itself will fail. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne essentially claims that Salem revealed the fundamental flaw in Puritanism: the inability to discover the invisible through the visible, to judge the status of another’s soul through visible practice or deed. As Colacurcio puts it, “Ultimately, evidence fails.” 45

Meanwhile, some 19th-century literary treatments of Salem turned to the tragedy for a homegrown American sensationalism, lending Gothic features to American fiction. This was certainly the case with John Neal’s novel Rachel Dyer ( 1828 ) and, in more nuanced ways, it continued with Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables . Lawrence Buell analyzes such works as what he calls “provincial Gothic,” meaning “the use of Gothic conventions to anatomize the pathology of regional culture.” 46 In his account of this Gothic trend and its appeal, Buell gives one of the best summaries of how and why Salem made its way into the literary imagination of the nation and the nation’s writers in the 19th century. He writes, “We owe the fact that the Salem delusion is the best-known episode of early New England history next to the voyage of the Mayflower largely to Hawthorne and fellow gothicizers of his era, to whom witchcraft appealed … for a mixture of reasons: as an opportunity for proxy war against religious conservatives, as that instance from the regional past that resonated most strongly with the supernaturalism of traditional Gothic, and as a proof that New England culture was not so humdrum as early national critics had feared.” 47 But the appeal of Salem was not limited to the provincial Gothic; it also provides the plot and setting of several works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As Chadwick Hansen showed long ago, Longfellow’s play Giles Cory of Salem Farms , written in the wake of the Civil War, was the first account to transform Tituba into a half-black slave. 48 After Longfellow, others metamorphosed Tituba fully into an African American and finally into an African who was kidnapped as a child, even though nothing in the existing records lends support to such a claim and most scholars reject it. Tituba is one of many characters who has received her own rewritings through the years, including in the more recent and well-received novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem ( 1986 ) by Maryse Condé, which won the French Grand Prix award for women’s literature and was translated into English in 1992 .

As Condé’s novel reveals, the cultural memory and literary imagination of Salem lives on. During the Cold War, for example, Arthur Miller famously turned to Salem for a model that would lay bare the persecutions of supposed communists and subversives led by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Here again, the primary problem was one of evidence: What counts as a clear indication of either patriotism or subversion, a good soul or a soul bent against the common good? The evidence would prove “spectral” in its own way, and Miller found Salem to be a good site for showing why. As The Crucible continues being regularly performed, joined by ever fresher retellings and reimaginings, the cultural memory and function of Salem seems rich for even further exploration. While individual readings of particular literary usages abound (especially for Hawthorne), no specifically literary history of Salem exists—no study of its changing shape and operation in plays, poems, and fiction from 1817 to the present day. What does Salem do for us, and why do certain accounts of Salem predominate over others? Popular understandings of the event often emphasize the girls’ fortune-telling practices, Tituba’s “voodoo” spells, and ergot poisoning—all theories invented after the Civil War and all rejected by most scholars. Yet the tales live on. What do such stories do for the cultural memory of Salem that more accurate, scholarly accounts fail to accomplish? More generally, why do Americans keep remembering, reliving, and remaking Salem? What need does it meet?

However Salem is approached or remembered, it is clear that scholars and the general public will keep grappling with what happened there in 1692 . The Salem witch trials have formed one of the cornerstone cultural memories of American history, a turning point from Puritan New England to a province more aligned with British imperial interests. How much actually changed as a result of the trials is open to question, and scholars have offered a wide variety of answers. Some have even tried to link the trials to the eventual coming of the American Revolution, though such approaches seem rather shaky at best. Nonetheless, all agree that something changed, or that the tragedy came about because of deep shifts in the culture and control of Puritan New England. The significance of Salem lies in the meaning and perception of that change, along with all the possible explanations for why and how it occurred. Yet for all the answers proposed, the enduring legacy of the witch trials arises primarily from the persistent aura of mystery that surround them—this tragic event erupting against precedent and probability, supported and opposed by people at every level of society and in every station of life, spun out of control by eager magistrates and frightened girls, resulting in a massive injustice that New England would reckon with for many years, and that Americans would be haunted by ever since.

Select Primary Sources

Calef, Robert . More Wonders of the Invisible World . Salem, 1700. Reprint, Breinigsville, PA: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011.
Hall, David D. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693 . 2d ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.
Mather, Cotton . Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1693). Reprint, Lincoln, NB: Zea Books, 2011.
Mather, Increase . Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 1693) .
Rosenthal, Bernard , ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project .

Select Literary Sources

Condé, Maryse . I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem . Translated by Richard Philcox . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
de Forest, John William . Witching Times . New York: Putnam’s Magazine, 1856.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . The House of the Seven Gables . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1851.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Young Goodman Brown” (1846). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms.” In The New England Tragedies , by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
Miller, Arthur . The Crucible . New York: Viking, 1951.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

Looking into the underlying causes of the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.

In February 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem Village found itself at the center of a notorious case of mass hysteria: eight young women accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Trials ensued and, when the episode concluded in May 1693, fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for their supposed supernatural crimes.

The Salem witch trials occupy a unique place in our collective history. The mystery around the hysteria and miscarriage of justice continue to inspire new critiques, most recently with the recent release of The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff.

But what caused the mass hysteria, false accusations, and lapses in due process? Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories.

The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a “little ice age” that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself.

Emily Oster posits that the “little ice age” caused economic deterioration and food shortages that led to anti-witch fervor in communities in both the United States and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Temperatures began to drop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the coldest periods occurring from 1680 to 1730. The economic hardships and slowdown of population growth could have caused widespread scapegoating which, during this period, manifested itself as persecution of so-called witches, due to the widely accepted belief that “witches existed, were capable of causing physical harm to others and could control natural forces.”

Salem Village, where the witchcraft accusations began, was an agrarian, poorer counterpart to the neighboring Salem Town, which was populated by wealthy merchants. According to the oft-cited book Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Village was being torn apart by two opposing groups–largely agrarian townsfolk to the west and more business-minded villagers to the east, closer to the Town. “What was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be.” In a retrospective look at their book for a 2008 William and Mary Quarterly Forum , Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that as tensions between the two groups unfolded, “they followed deeply etched factional fault lines that, in turn, were influenced by anxieties and by differing levels of engagement with and access to the political and commercial opportunities unfolding in Salem Town.” As a result of increasing hostility, western villagers accused eastern neighbors of witchcraft.

But some critics including Benjamin C. Ray have called Boyer and Nissenbaum’s socio-economic theory into question . For one thing –the map they were using has been called into question. He writes: “A review of the court records shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is, in fact, highly interpretive and considerably incomplete.” Ray goes on:

Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed, geo graphic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different economic status.

On the other hand, the physiological theories for the mass hysteria and witchcraft accusations include both fungus poisoning and undiagnosed encephalitis.

Linnda Caporael argues that the girls suffered from convulsive ergotism, a condition caused by ergot, a type of fungus, found in rye and other grains. It produces hallucinatory, LSD-like effects in the afflicted and can cause victims to suffer from vertigo, crawling sensations on the skin, extremity tingling, headaches, hallucinations, and seizure-like muscle contractions. Rye was the most prevalent grain grown in the Massachusetts area at the time, and the damp climate and long storage period could have led to an ergot infestation of the grains.

One of the more controversial theories states that the girls suffered from an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica , an inflammation of the brain spread by insects and birds. Symptoms include fever, headaches, lethargy, double vision, abnormal eye movements, neck rigidity, behavioral changes, and tremors. In her 1999 book, A Fever in Salem , Laurie Winn Carlson argues that in the winter of 1691 and spring of 1692, some of the accusers exhibited these symptoms, and that a doctor had been called in to treat the girls. He couldn’t find an underlying physical cause, and therefore concluded that they suffered from possession by witchcraft, a common diagnoses of unseen conditions at the time.

The controversies surrounding the accusations, trials, and executions in Salem, 1692, continue to fascinate historians and we continue to ask why, in a society that should have known better, did this happen? Economic and physiological causes aside, the Salem witchcraft trials continue to act as a parable of caution against extremism in judicial processes.

Editor’s note: This post was edited to clarify that Salem Village was where the accusations began, not where the trials took place.

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The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records

New hampshire.

Ballet still from The Crucible, woman standing en pointe in front of 4 men.

The Scottish Ballet performs Helen Pickett’s ballet version of The Crucibl e, Arthur Miller’s play based on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Miller used historical records and texts to help construct his play.

—© Jane Hobson

On March 23, 1692, a warrant was issued for the arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good of Salem Village on “suspition of acts of Witchcraft.” She was taken into custody the next day and jailed with her mother, Sarah, who had been accused of the same capital crime three weeks earlier. Since witches were often shackled in jail, something like shackles must have been adapted to fit little Dorothy, the youngest person in Salem accused of practicing the devil’s magic. Over the next year, more than 150 women, men, and children from Salem Village (present-day Danvers) and neighboring communities were formally accused of practicing witchcraft. A third of those arrested confessed but were not necessarily given lighter sentences. In all, 19 were hanged, one pressed to death, and five others died in jail.

Trouble in the tiny Puritan village started in February 1692, when eleven-year-old Abigail Williams and nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris, daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, began acting strangely. The girls complained of bites, contorted their bodies, threw things, and fell into trances. A doctor’s examination concluded they were suffering from the evil effects of witchcraft. The “afflicted” girls were asked to name names, and they did.

“If you think about what’s going on in New England—threat of attack from warring tribes, unease about a new charter—and suddenly something strange happens in your household and you’re a minister. You know a witch was arrested in Chelmsford and another up in Ipswich. You believe that the devil is against Massachusetts, and you believe the devil is against your church, and you believe the devil is against you as a Protestant Puritan minister. And it’s in your house! There were reasons why it was credible that there could be witches in Salem Village,” says historian Margo Burns, the associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt .

Burns examines the witch trials through original-source documents in “The Capital Crime of Witchcraft: What the Primary Sources Tell Us,” a presentation sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Three women were taken into custody on March 1. Sarah Good, a beggar and mother, Sarah Osborne, a woman who hadn’t attended church in some time, and Tituba, Parris’s Indian slave, were all charged with witchcraft. Tituba confessed and identified more witches from Salem.

“It didn’t have to go any further than those three,” says Burns, “but they didn’t have a way to defend themselves. Just the usual suspects. All were marked for class and Tituba for race. John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the local magistrates, coerced a false confession out of Tituba. If it had been another time, it might just have stopped there. The next two people should not have had their cases go forward. Hathorne and Corwin could have said, ‘Okay, we don’t buy this. No, you didn’t see her, because we know this person. This is not true.’ But they held them over.”

The next two defendants were Rebecca Nurse, an ancestor of Burns, and Martha Cory, both fully covenanted church members and of high social standing. They were accused of witchcraft based on “spectral evidence,” which meant the court accepted testimony that disembodied spirits, or specters, were sent through dreams or visions by the accused with the help of Satan to harm the victims by stabbing, choking, biting, and jabbing them with pins. The accused were interrogated in public. During questioning, the purported victims exhibited dramatic reactions while townspeople watched.

“There were discussions going on between ministers,” says Burns. “It wasn’t so much whether specters existed, it was how you interpret it. The big discussion was whether the devil could impersonate somebody with or without their permission. So that was tantamount to saying Rebecca Nurse gave the devil permission to go out and afflict these girls in her image.”

In May, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases, presided over by William Stoughton. “The court didn’t convene until June 2, 1692, so over half those accused, around 70, were just piling up in the jail,” says Burns.

Just as the jails were filling up with accused witches, the number of those claiming affliction also ramped up. One of the accusers listed in the court documents of Sarah Good was her daughter, Dorothy, who was coerced during an interrogation.

A number of villagers petitioned the court on Nurse’s behalf. Nurse was found not guilty, but Stoughton sent the jurors to reconsider. They changed their verdict to guilty. She was hanged on July 19, with Sarah Good and three others.

Five more were hanged in August and eight in September. In October, Increase Mather, a prominent minister in Boston, denounced the use of spectral evidence: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.” That same month, Governor Phips terminated the special court. But that wasn’t the end. Cases would continue in a regular court in January. “When pious men and women who were in good standing in their own churches were accused, there was pushback,” says Burns.

The accusations ran their course in Salem Village, but not in Andover, where 48 were accused compared with 23 in Salem Village says Burns. “A lot of people were against spectral evidence, so confessions were now the gold standard to find people guilty. The confessions that came before were from people with no agency whatsoever, like little Dorothy. But when they got to Andover, the magistrates were really good at interrogating people in private. By September, they could coerce people like clockwork. There, a lot who confessed were children as young as six.” In 1693, the new Superior Court of Judicature tried the remaining cases and eventually cleared the jails. Phips pardoned all those sentenced to be executed by Stoughton in January 1693. The cases continued to be tried until mid May, but no one else was convicted. “The grand jury couldn’t even indict Tituba,” says Burns. The colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated many of the families. But the damage was done, and it was devastating.

On September 13, 1710, William Good went before the court to receive restitution for the losses he endured years earlier. In his petition he wrote:

To The Honourable Committee The humble representation Will’m. Goodof the Damage sustained by him in the year 1692. by reason of the sufferings of his family upon the account of supposed Witchcraft 1 My wife Sarah Good was In prison about four months & then Executed. 2 a sucking child dyed in prison before the Mothers Execution. 3 a child of 4 or 5 years old was in prison 7 or 8 months and being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very chargeable haveing little or no reason to govern herself. And I leave it unto the Honourable Court to Judge what damage I have sustained by such a destruction of my poor family. And so rest Your Honours humble servant *William Good Salem.

Good was issued £30.

Laura Wolff Scanlan is a writer in Wheaton, Illinois.

Republication statement

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Salem Witch Trials

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: November 4, 2011

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Belief in the supernatural—and specifically in the devil’s practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty—had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England . In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts ) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem).

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents’ suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren.

In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women—the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn—whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse—both regarded as upstanding members of church and community—and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused “witches” confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha’s husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton’s father) later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that “It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned.”

Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711.

Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play “The Crucible” (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist “witch hunts” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

HISTORY Vault: Salem Witch Trials

Experts dissect the facts—and the enduring mysteries—surrounding the courtroom trials of suspected witches in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692.

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The Salem Witch Trials: A legal bibliography

The law of the Salem Witch Trials is a fascinating mix of biblical passages and colonial statutes. According to Mark Podvia (see Timeline , PDF), the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted the following statute in 1641: “If any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exod . 22. 18. Levit . 20. 27. Deut . 18. 10. 11.” The statute encompasses passages from the Bible written circa 700 B.C. Exodus states: “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.” Leviticus prescribes the punishment. Witches and wizards “shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” And Deuteronomy states: “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

In Salem, the accusers and alleged victims came from a small group of girls aged nine to 19, including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. In January 1692, Betty and Abigail had strange fits. Rumors spread through the village attributing the fits to the devil and the work of his evil hands. The accusers claimed the witchcraft came mostly from women, with the notable exception of four-year old Dorcas Good.

The colony created the Court of Oyer and Terminer especially for the witchcraft trials. The law did not then use the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – if you made it to trial, the law presumed guilt. If the colony imprisoned you, you had to pay for your stay. Courts relied on three kinds of evidence: 1) confession, 2) testimony of two eyewitnesses to acts of witchcraft, or 3) spectral evidence (when the afflicted girls were having their fits, they would interact with an unseen assailant – the apparition of the witch tormenting them). According to Wendel Craker, no court ever convicted an accused of witchcraft on the basis of spectral evidence alone, but other forms of evidence were needed to corroborate the charge of witchcraft. Courts allowed “causal relationship” evidence, for example, to prove that the accused possessed or controlled an afflicted girl. Prior conflicts, bad acts by the accused, possession of materials used in spells, greater than average strength, and witch’s marks also counted as evidence of witchcraft. If the accused was female, a jury of women examined her body for “witch’s marks” which supposedly showed that a familiar had bitten or fed on the accused. Other evidence included the “touching test” (afficted girls tortured by fits became calm after touching the accused). Courts could not base convictions on confessions obtained through torture unless the accused reaffirmed the confession afterward, but if the accused recanted the confession, authorities usually tortured the accused further to obtain the confession again. If you recited the Lord’s Prayer, you were not a witch. The colony did not burn witches, it hanged them.

The Salem Witch Trials divided the community. Neighbor testified against neighbor. Children against parents. Husband against wife. Children died in prisons. Familes were destroyed. Churches removed from their congregations some of the persons accused of witchcraft. After the Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved, the Superior Court of Judicature took over the witchcraft cases. They disallowed spectral evidence. Most accusations of witchcraft then resulted in acquittals. An essay by Increase Mather, a prominent minister, may have helped stop the witch trials craze in Salem.

Researching the Salem Witch Trials is easier than it used to be. Most of the primary source materials (statutes, transcripts of court records, contemporary accounts) are available electronically. Useful databases include HeinOnline Legal Classics Library (see Trials for Witchcraft before the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 ; The Salem Witchcraft (Clair, Henry St., 1840); and “ Witch Trials ,” 1 Curious Cases and Amusing Actions at Law including Some Trials of Witches in the Seventeenth Century (1916) ), HeinOnline World Trials Library, HeinOnline Law Journal Library (also JSTOR, America: History & Life, Google Scholar, and the LexisNexis and Westlaw journal databases), Gale Encyclopedia of American Law (“ Salem Witch Trials “), Google Books, Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive. For books and articles on the Salem Witch Trials and witchcraft and the law generally, Library of Congress subject headings include:

Trials (Witchcraft) — History
Trials (Witchcraft) — Massachusetts — Salem
Witch hunting — Massachusetts — Salem
Witchcraft — Massachusetts — Salem — History — 17th century
Witchcraft — New England
Witches — Crimes against

Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive & Transcription Project (University of Virginia)(includes online searchable text of the transcription of court records as published in Boyer/Nissenbaum’s The Salem Witchcraft Papers , revised 2011, and e-versions of contemporary books)
Famous American Trials: Salem Witch Trials, 1692 (Prof. Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School)

Bibliography

Adams, Gretchen A. The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, BF1576.A33 2008).

Boyer, Paul & Stephen Nissenbaum, eds. The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 (Da Capo Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5S240 1977 )( digital edition , revised and augmented, 2011). 3v.

___________________________. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraf t (Harvard University Press, BF1576.B79 1974 ). See especially pages 1-59.

___________________________, eds. Salem Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Wadsworth Pub. Co., KA653.B75 1972 LawAnxS ).

Brown, David C. “The Case of Giles Corey.” EIHC ( Essex Institute Historical Collections , F72.E7E81 ) 121 (1985): 282-299.

___________. “ The Forfeitures of Salem, 1692 .” The William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 85-111.

Burns, William E. Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, BF1584.E9B87 2003 ). Includes a Chronology (1307-1793), “Salem Witch Trials” at pages 257-261, and a bibliography at pages 333-347.

Burr, George Lincoln. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (Barnes & Noble, BF1573.B6901 1963 ).

Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).

Craker, Wendel D. “Spectral Evidence, Non-Spectral Acts of Witchcraft, and Confession at Salem in 1692. ” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 331-358.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, BF1576.D38 1982 ).

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of the American Conscience (Fourth Estate, F67.S525 2005 ).

Godbeer, Richard. The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, XXKFM2478.8.W5G63 2011 ).

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem (G. Braziller, BF1576.H25 1969 ).

Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader (Da Capo Press, BF1576.H55 2000 ).

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History (University Press of Kansas, XXKFM2478.8.W5H645 1997 )(Landmark Law Cases & American Society).

______________. The Devil’s Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Johns Hopkins University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5H646 1996 ).

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Norton, BF1576.K370 1987 ).

Le Beau, Bryan F. The Story of the Salem Witch Trials: “We Walked in Clouds and We Could Not See Our Way” (Prentice Hall, 2d ed., XXKFM2478.8.W5L43 2010 )(DLL has 1998).

Levin, David. What Happened in Salem? (2d ed. Harcourt, Brace & Co. BF1575.L40 1960 ) (Documents Pertaining to the Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials). Compiles trial evidence documents, contemporary comments, and legal redress.

Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England, and Of Several Remarkable Curiosities Therein Occurring (1693) .

Mather, Increase. Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in Such As Are Accused with That Crime (1693).

Nevins, Winfield S. Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692 (North Shore Pub. Co., BF1576.N5 1892 ).

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 ( BF1575.N67 2002 )(legal analysis, with appendixes).

Powers, Edwin. Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692 A Documentary History (Beacon Press, KB4537.P39C8 1966 LawAnxN ).

Rosenthal, Bernard ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5R43 2009 )(includes Richard B. Trask, “Legal Procedures Used During the Salem Witch Trials and a Brief History of the Published Versions of the Records” at pages 44-63).

Ross, Lawrence J., Mark W. Podvia, & Karen Wahl. The Law of the Salem Witch Trials . American Association of Law Library, Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, July 23, 2012 (AALL2go – password needed to access .mp3 and program handout).

Starkey, Marion. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (A.A. Knopf, XXKFM2478.8.W5S73 1949 ).

Upham, Charles W. Salem Witchcraft: with an Account of Salem Village and a History of Witchcraft and Opinions on Kindred Subjects (Wiggin & Lunt, 1867). 2v.

Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (The University of Massachusetts Press, XXKFM2478.8.W5W4440 1984 ). Includes a chapter on “The Crime of Witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay Historical Background and Pattern of Prosecution.” Appendixes includes lists of legal actions against witchcraft prior to the Salem prosecutions, Massachusetts Bay witchcraft defamation suits, persons accused of witchcraft in Salem, confessors, allegations of ordinary witchcrafts by case, afflicted persons.

Young, Martha M. “ The Salem Witch Trials 300 Years Later: How Far Has the American Legal System Come? How Much Further Does It Need to Go? ” Tulane Law Review 64 (1989): 235-258.

General Resources

Mackay, Christopher S., trans. & ed. The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (authored by Heinrich Institoris & Jacobus Sprenger in 1487 – Dominican friars, who were both Inquistors and professors of theology at the University of Cologne)(Cambridge University Press, BF1569.M33 2009 ). This medieval text ( Der Hexenhammer in German) prescribes judicial procedures in cases of alleged witchcraft. In question-and-answer format. The judge should appoint as an advocate for the accused “an upright person who is not suspected of being fussy about legal niceties” as opposed to appointing “a litigious, evil-spirited person who could easily be corrupted by money” (p. 530).

“Judgment of a Witch.” The Fugger News-Letters 259-262 (The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1924). Also reprinted in The Portable Renaissance Reader .

Pagel, Scott B. The Literature of Witchcraft Trials: Books & Manuscripts from the Jacob Burns Law Library (University of Texas at Austin, BF1566.P243 2008 ) (Tarlton Law Library, Legal History Series, No. 9).

Witchcraft and the Law: A Selected Bibliography of Recent Publications (Christine Corcos, LSU Law)(includes mostly pre-2000 works).

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SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALS RESEARCH GUIDE

Explore digitized manuscripts and documents from the salem witch trials..

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings before county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people, including several children, were accused of witchcraft by their neighbors. In total, 25 people were executed or died in jail during the trials. The preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in various towns across the province: Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover, Topsfield, and Salem Town. The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 and the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both in Salem Town.

The original manuscripts in this collection were digitized as part of the New England’s Hidden Histories project and are held by our project partners, the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum . Further information about the collection can be found in the Phillips Library's finding aid .

Many of the documents were previously digitized by the University of Virginia as part of their Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project , which began in 1999. In 2017, members of the CLA and Phillips Library staff found several documents in the Phillips Library’s collection which had not yet been digitized. These documents were digitized as part of our New England's Hidden Histories project and may be accessed below or in our digital archive .

For ease of use, we have provided information about all of the documents in the collection here, regardless of where the digitized versions can be accessed. Documents only available through the University of Virginia site can be found in the Related Materials section.

MATERIALS DIGITIZED BY NEHH

These documents are organized alphabetically by the last name of the accused, and then in chronological order for each case. Links to the digitized records are provided for each individual. All documents previously digitized by the University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project are indicated with an asterisk next to each individual’s name and can be accessed on their website at https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/archives/eia.html .

Mary Barker*

Mary Barker of Andover was 13 years old in 1692, when she and other members of her family were accused of witchcraft by Samuel Martin and Moses Tyler. Shortly after her arrest on August 29, 1692, Barker confessed and accused two others (Goodwives Faulkner and Johnson) of forcing her to sign the "Devil's book." She was eventually found not guilty and released.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 August 29 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, and Jonathan Corwin

William Barker, Jr.*

14-year-old William Barker Jr. from Andover, MA was the first cousin of Mary Barker and was arrested shortly after her. William Jr.'s father, William Barker Sr., was also arrested but later escaped. On the day of William Jr.'s arrest (Sep. 1, 1692) he confessed to witchcraft and also accused one "Goody Parker" of the same crime. Court magistrates later arrested Mary Ayer Parker, one of several women with the Parker surname living in Andover, who was subsequently executed. This has led to speculation that Mary Ayer Parker was not the intended target of William Jr.'s accusation. William Jr. remained in prison until 1693 but was eventually acquitted.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 September 16 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Sarah Bridges*

17-year-old Sarah Bridges initially maintained her innocence upon her arrest on August 25, 1692. She did, however, accuse her stepsister, Hannah Post, of witchcraft in the same testimony. Later she would also confess, claiming that there were an additional 200 witches in the Salem area. She was found not guilty.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 August 25 Accusers: The Justices of Salem

Carrier Family

Several members of the Carrier family of Andover were accused of witchcraft. These included siblings Sarah (8), Thomas (10), Andrew (15), and Richard (18), along with their mother Martha Allen Carrier. Martha was arrested on May 28, 1962, and her children were also taken into custody and examined. Their mother was later found guilty and hanged along with George Burroughs, John Proctor, George Jacobs Sr., and John Willard on August 19, 1692. According to the account of John Proctor who was imprisoned with them, the Carrier children were coerced by torture into pleading guilty and testifying against their mother. They were later released.

Andrew Carrier*

Document: Examination Date: 1692 July 22 Accuser: Unsigned

Richard Carrier*

Sarah carrier*.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 September 2 Accuser: Dudley Bradstreet

Thomas Carrier, Jr.*

Document: Examination Date: 1692 September 2 Accuser: Dudley Bradstreet

Rebecca Eames

51-year-old Rebecca Eames was accused of practicing witchcraft on Timothy Swan, a claim corroborated by members of the Putman family and related individuals. She was arrested directly after the public execution of George Burroughs, Martha Allen Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor, and John Willard on August 19, 1692, having been accused of inflicting pain on a fellow spectator. Her son and grandson were later also accused. Eames was tried and convicted on September 17th along with nine others, all of whom were condemned to death. Four of the nine were hanged on September 22, but Eames was spared when the court dissolved in October. She remained in prison until early December, when she petitioned to be exonerated, claiming that she had pled guilty on the advice of fellow inmates Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey.

Document: Examination (2nd) Date: 1692 August 31 Accuser: Unsigned Document: Certification of Confession Date: 1692 September 15 Accuser: John Higginson

Ann Foster of Andover was a 75-year-old widow, originally from London. She was accused by the Salem children Ann Putnam Jr. and Mary Walcott of inflicting a fever on Elizabeth Ballard of Andover. Putnam and Walcott had been brought in by Salem magistrates to "detect" the witch responsible for the affliction. Foster refused to confess despite probable coercion by torture, but her resolve was broken when her accused daughter, Mary Foster Lacey, Sr. testified against her mother, presumably in an attempt to save herself and her child. The resulting guilty plea proved ineffectual and both women were sentenced to death on September 17, 1692. They were spared by the dissolution of the court in October, but Ann Foster died after 21 weeks in prison on December 3rd.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 July 21 Accuser: Unsigned

Sarah Good was one of the first three women to be accused of witchcraft in Salem in February 1692, along with Tituba and Sarah Osborne. Good had fallen on hard times after litigation erased her family's wealth and two consecutive marriages to paupers left her destitute. She was often homeless and earned a living by begging, probably leading to an unsavory reputation in the town. On February 25, 1692, Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris claimed to have been bewitched by Good, who was tried and found guilty despite maintaining her innocence throughout the entire process. The resulting death sentence was delayed because she was pregnant. The newborn child, Mercy Good, died shortly after birth. Good was hanged on July 19, 1692 along with Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wilds.

Document: Testimony Date: 1692 June 29 Accuser: Samuel Sibley

Sarah Hawks*

21-year-old Sarah Hawks was arrested for witchcraft along with her stepfather, Samuel Wardwell, her mother, Sarah Hawks Wardwell, and her half-sister Mercy Wardwell. Samuel Wardwell was found guilty and hanged on September 22, 1692, but Sarah and her other relatives escaped execution and were later released from prison.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 September 4 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Elizabeth How/Howe

Elizabeth How's involvement in the witchcraft crisis began ten years prior to the official trials in Salem. In 1682, a young girl from Topsfield named Hannah Trumble began experiencing fits and accused How of making her ill through witchcraft. How's reputation was irreparably damaged, and she was refused admittance to Ipswich Church. When the troubles began in Salem in 1692, How was again accused, this time of afflicting Mary Walcott and Abigail Willams. Their testimony was corroborated by Mercy Lewis, Mary Warren, Ann Putnam Jr., and several others in the town. How was arraigned in the first Salem trial on June 30, 1692, and, despite fervent support from family and friends, was found guilty and sentenced to death. She was executed along with Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Sarah Wilds and Susannah Martin on July 19th at Gallows Hill, Salem.

An earlier document in her case can be found in the Related Materials section below.

Document: Indictment (2nd) Date: 1692 June 29 Accusers: Samuel Pearly, Ruth Pearly, Mercy Lewis, Joseph Andrews, Sarah Andrews, Mary Wolcott, John Sherrin, Abigail Williams, Joseph Safford, Ann Putman [sic], Francis Leaves, Isack Cumins, Abraham Foster, and Lydia Foster

Johnson Family

Many members of the Johnson family were accused of witchcraft, though later ruled not guilty. Elizabeth Jr., the 22-year-old daughter of Elizabeth Johnson Sr. was the first to be accused and imprisoned on August 10, 1692, due to accusations (probably acquired under torture) by the Carrier family children. Johnson testified against them in turn, implicating the Carriers and many others in secret devilish rites, including Rev. George Burroughs, Captain John Floyd, Daniel Eames, and Mary Toothaker.

After her daughter, Elizabeth Jr., had languished in prison for many days, Elizabeth Sr. was also charged with practicing witchcraft on Martha Sprague of Boxford and Abigail Martin of Andover. She was arrested in late August 1692, along with her ten-year-old daughter Abigail, her son Stephen, and her sister Abigail Faulkner. Elizabeth and Abigail were arraigned together in court, with Elizabeth accusing her sister of threatening to "tear her in pieces" if she confessed. During her confession she accused several others, and implicated her teenage son, Stephen, who later also confessed.

Several factors may have exacerbated the Johnson family's victimization. Rev. Francis Dane, the family patriarch and father of Elizabeth Sr. was a witchcraft skeptic who voiced early opposition to the Salem trials. Elizabeth Johnson Sr.'s reputation was also negatively impacted by a prior conviction of fornication before marriage, with her late husband Stephen Johnson.

Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 August 10 Accuser: Dudley Bradstreet

Elizabeth Johnson, Sr.*

Document: Examination Date: 1692 August 30 Accusers: The Justices of Salem

Stephen Johnson*

Mary lacey, jr.*.

Mary Lacey, Jr. was the 18-year-old daughter of Mary Lacy, Sr. She was accused of witchcraft along with her mother and her maternal grandmother, Ann Foster. The two older women were found guilty and sentenced to death despite confessing in an attempt to avoid execution. They avoided hanging when the witchcraft crisis began to die down in October of 1692. However, Mary Jr.'s grandmother Ann Foster died in prison shortly after her trial. Mary Jr. was released on bond in October, 1692 and later found not guilty.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 July 21 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Mary Lacey, Sr.*

Daughter of Ann Foster of Andover, Mary Lacy, Sr. was accused shortly after her mother, on the 19th of July 1692, along with her daughter Mary Jr. The complaint was filed by Joseph Ballard of Andover, alleging that the women had afflicted his wife, Elizabeth Ballard. Mary Sr. confessed upon examination and also accused her mother, Ann Foster, stating that the two had "ridden upon a pole" to a witch meeting in Salem. She also accused Mary Bradbury, Elizabeth How, Rebecca Nurse, Richard Carrier, and Andrew Carrier. Mary Sr. was sentenced to death along with her mother. Although both mother and daughter ultimately avoided execution, the elderly Ann Foster died in prison shortly thereafter.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 July 21 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson Document: Indictment Date: 1692 September 14 Accuser: Unsigned

Mary Marston*

One of many residents of Andover to be accused of witchcraft, Marston was brought in on the testimony of Samuel Martin of Andover and Moses Tyler of Boxford, for allegedly afflicting Abigail Martin, Rose Foster, and Martha Sprague. She was examined, confessed, and was subsequently imprisoned throughout the remainder of 1692, despite a petition for release filed by her husband, John Marston. She was brought to trial early in 1693 but found not guilty.

Document: Examination and Confession Date: 1692 August 29 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Hannah Post*

Hannah Post of Boxford seems to have been an "afflicted" accuser at the trial of Mary Parker, but was herself later accused of witchcraft. During her examination she initially professed her innocence, but later stated that she had "signed the Devil's book." She also implicated her sister, Susanna Post, and Sarah and Mary Bridges. Post was imprisoned, but found not guilty on January 12, 1693.

Elizabeth Proctor

Wife of the accused and condemned John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor was targeted along with her husband, who had spoken out against the accusers during the controversial trial of Rebecca Nurse. Elizabeth's Quaker grandmother had also been accused of witchcraft in 1669, and this may have cast suspicion on Elizabeth by association. In spite of petitions of support from family friends, Elizabeth was found guilty of afflicting Mercy Lewis, Abigail Williams, John Indian, Mary Walcott, and Ann Putnam, and sentenced to death along with her husband, John, on August 5, 1692. She avoided execution because she was pregnant; by the time she had given birth, the witchcraft crisis had died down, and she was later acquitted and released. Because she was not included in her husband's will, she was left destitute for many years, although the family was later reimbursed for ₤150 in 1711.

Document: Testimony Date: 1692 April 4 Accusers: Samuel Parris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and Thomas Putman Document: Testimony (Positive) Date: 1692 August 5 Accuser: William Rayment, Jr.

Mary Toothaker*

Mary Toothaker's husband, the doctor Roger Toothaker, was accused and imprisoned for witchcraft in May 1692, for afflicting Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam, Jr., and Mary Walcott. He was sent to prison in Boston, where he died on June 16th, of apparently natural causes. After his arrest, Mary Toothaker and her daughter, Margaret, were also accused and imprisoned in the Salem jail. Mary's sister, Martha Carrier, was condemned by the court and hanged on August 10, 1692, but Mary and her daughter were tried and found not guilty in January of 1693. Mary was subsequently killed in an Abenaki or Pennacook raid on her hometown of Billerica in 1695.

Document: Examination and Confession Date: 1692 July 30 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Johanna Tyler*

Johanna Tyler, age 11, was accused of witchcraft along with her sisters, Hannah and Martha, and their mother, Mary Lovett Tyler, on September 7, 1692. Her confessional testimony stands out as one of the more detailed descriptions of alleged witchcraft given by a child during the Salem trials. Tyler was later released with her immediate family.

Document: Examination Date: 1692 September 16 Accusers: John Higginson and Thomas Wade

Mercy Wardwell*

19-year-old Mercy Wardwell's father, Samuel Wardwell, was convicted of witchcraft and later hanged on September 22, 1692. Mercy was imprisoned shortly after her father's arrest, on charges of afflicting Martha Sprague, Rose Foster, and Timothy Swan. Her mother, Sarah Wardwell, and half-sister, Sarah Hawks, Jr., would also be charged. Mercy confessed on September 15, 1692. She was never tried, and was released after the court dissolved in October.

Sarah Wardwell*

Wife of the condemned Samuel Wardwell, Sarah was arrested shortly after her husband, in August 1692. She took her infant daughter Rebecca with her to jail, and her daughters Mercy Wardwell and Sarah Hawks were also accused and imprisoned. Wardwell was examined on September 1, 1692 and subsequently confessed, implicating Ann Foster and Martha Carrier. She and her daughters were in jail when her husband was hanged on September 22, 1692. Sheriff George Corwin meanwhile confiscated large amounts of the Wardwells' property, as well as property in Lynn that had belonged to Sarah's first husband. She was tried and found guilty on January 2, 1693, but would later be pardoned.

Document: Confession Date: 1692 September 4 Accusers: Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and John Higginson

Sarah Wilds/Willes*

Sarah Wilds (née Averill) was 65 years old at the time of the Salem trials. Before her marriage to John Wilds in 1663, she had been censured for "too great intimacy with Thomas Wardell," and for the lesser offense of wearing a silk scarf, facts that may have lent her a poor reputation in the conservative Puritan community. The Wilds also feuded with the Gould family of Salem, who happened to be good friends with the Putnam accusers. These factors may have hastened Wilds' denunciation by Thomas Putnam, Jr. and John Buxton, who alleged that she had afflicted Ann Putnam, Jr., Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott. Other signatories also testified against her during the trials, including Humphrey Clark, Thomas Dorman, John Andrew, John Gould, Zacheus Perkins, Elizabeth Symonds, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and the Rev. John Hale. After several weeks of imprisonment in the Boston jail, Wilds was executed by hanging in Salem on July 19, 1692.

Further documents in this case can be found in the Related Materials section below.

Document: Testimony Date: 1692 April 22 Accusers: Nathaniel Ingersoll and Thomas Putnam

RELATED MATERIALS IN THE NEHH ARCHIVE

Danvers, mass. first church, 1689-1845.

The First Church of Danvers was founded in 1672 when a group of farmers who lived quite a distance from the Salem meetinghouse, of which they were members, petitioned for permission to erect a meetinghouse of their own. This collection contains the early records of the Danvers church, including records pertaining to membership, vital statistics, and church meetings. Of particular note are records pertaining to the confession and trial of Martha Corey (alternatively spelled Kory and Cory) in regards to the witchcraft controversy in Salem.

Salem, Mass. First Church, 1629-1843

The First Church of Salem, founded in 1629, was one of the first churches organized in New England. Salem's church, however, was the first truly Congregational parish with governance by church members. Notable founding members included Roger Conant, the founder of Salem, and John Endicott, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Various members were involved in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, including the daughter of the church's pastor, Rev. Samuel Parris, and the junior minister, Rev. Nicholas Noyes. Parishioners Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey, who were excommunicated and executed during the trials, were formerly full members of the First Church, Corey having been admitted one year prior in 1691. Both victims were posthumously readmitted in 1712.

MATERIALS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

These documents are organized alphabetically by the last name of the accused, and then in chronological order for each case. Links to the digitized records are provided for each individual.

George Burroughs

The only minister to be executed for witchcraft in American history, Rev. Burroughs was arrested on April 30th after members of the Putnam family, with whom he had already been embroiled in a lawsuit, testified against him for the crime of witchcraft. He was found guilty, owing in part to his perceived preternatural strength, and hanged on August 19, 1692. Burroughs was executed despite reciting the Lord's Prayer without error—something a witch was not thought to be capable of doing. Cotton Mather, minister from Boston and proponent of the witch trials, was instrumental in urging Burroughs' execution despite the reluctance of sympathetic onlookers.

Document: Indictment (3rd) at UVA Date: Undated Accusers: Ann Putnam, Mary Wolcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mary Warren Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 April 30 Accusers: Jonathan Walcott and Thomas Putnam Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 May 9 Accusers: John Putnam, Sr. and Rebecca Putnam

Martha Corey

The devout 72-year-old Martha Corey was accused of witchcraft in March of 1692, to the surprise of many in the village. A steadfast churchgoer, Corey did not believe in the existence of witches and witchcraft, and her vocal criticism of the accusers may have been the reason she was targeted. She was found guilty based on the testimony of members of the Putnam family and several others. During Corey's trial the accusing children, such as Ann Putnam Jr. and Mercy Lewis, claimed the "witch" was inflicting pain on them and demonstrated violent fits. Corey was found guilty and hanged on September 22, 1692, three days after her husband Giles Corey, also charged with witchcraft, had been pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea.

Document: Examination at UVA Date: 1692 March 21 Accusers: John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 May 31 Accuser: Ann Putnam, Sr.

Abigail Hobbs

17 year-old Abigail Hobbs was accused of witchcraft along with her parents in April 1692, by Mercy Lewis. Lewis, like the Hobbs, was a refugee from the dangerous Maine frontier. The Hobbs family had come to Salem to escape Wabenaki raids in Casco, ME, and during the witchcraft crisis were living on the outskirts of Salem Village. They were not church members, and their daughter Abigail had gained a reputation for roaming the forests at night, for mocking the institution of baptism by sprinkling water on her mother’s head, and for reciting the sacrament. After her arrest on April 18, 1692, Hobbs professed her innocence, but was eventually pressured into confessing that she had afflicted Mercy Lewis. However, Hobbs and her family avoided execution when the witchcraft proceedings died down in October 1692.

Document: Indictment (1st) at UVA Date: 1692 September 10 Accusers: Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Ann Putnam Document: Indictment (2nd) at UVA Date: 1692 September 10 Accusers: Unsigned

Elizabeth How's involvement in the witchcraft crisis began ten years prior to the official trials of Salem. In 1682, a young girl from Topsfield named Hannah Trumble began experiencing fits and accused How of making her ill through witchcraft. How's reputation was irreparably damaged, and she was refused admittance to Ipswich Church. When the troubles began in Salem in 1692, How was again accused, this time of afflicting Mary Walcott and Abigail Willams. Their testimony was corroborated by Mercy Lewis, Mary Warren, Ann Putnam, Jr., and several others in the town. How was arraigned in the first Salem trial on June 30, 1692, and, despite fervent support from family and friends, was found guilty and sentenced to death. She was executed along with Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Sarah Wilds, and Susannah Martin on July 19th at Gallows Hill, Salem.

A later document in her case can be found in the NEHH section above.

Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 June 30 Accuser: Nehemiah Abbot, Sr.

John Lee is mentioned in Elizabeth Fuller's deposition, in which he is said to have boasted "that he had laid one of Mr. Clairke's hogs fast aslepe." He was, however, never formally accused.

Document: Testimony at UVA Date: Undated Accuser: Elizabeth Fuller

Rebecca Nurse

Elderly and pious Rebecca Nurse was accused of witchcraft along with her two younger sisters, Sarah Towne Cloyce and Mary Towne Easty. Nurse, her husband, Francis, and their eight children were a highly respected churchgoing family, but had been involved in land disputes with the Putnams, which is likely the reason Nurse was targeted. Edward and John Putnam testified against her for the crime of witchcraft and a warrant was issued for her arrest on March 23, 1692.

There was a sizeable outpouring of support and positive testimony for Nurse. The jury initially ruled her "not guilty" but were immediately pressured to reconsider, and brought in a guilty verdict and death sentence. The Governor of Massachusetts Bay, Sir William Phips, intervened to pardon Nurse, but was also persuaded to reverse his decision by several of the Salem Village patriarchs. Nurse was subsequently excommunicated from her Salem church and executed by hanging on July 19, 1692. Her sister Mary Easty was later also found guilty and executed in September 1692.

Document: Testimony (Positive) at UVA Date: 1692 March 24 Accusers: Elizabeth Porter and Israel Porter Document: Testimony (Positive) at UVA Date: 1692 March 24 Accuser: Peter Cloyse Document: Testimony (Positive) at UVA Date: 1692 March 24 Accuser: Daniel Andrew Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 May 31 Accuser: Ann Putnam, Sr.

Mary Parker

Mary Parker of Andover was a rich widow in charge of two hundred acres of land inherited from her late husband, Nathan Parker. She had no known disputes with anyone in Andover or Salem, but was named in William Barker, Jr.'s confession testimony and accused of afflicting Sarah Phelps, Hannah Bigsby, and Martha Sprague with witchcraft. She was examined on September 2, 1692, whereupon several "afflicted girls" present fell into fits and accused her of harming them. Parker was tried on September 16th and executed shortly afterwards on September 22nd. There have been several theories posited to explain her seemingly random accusation; these include confusion with another woman of the same name in Andover, or perhaps a vendetta against the Parkers by the presiding officer in the trial, Thomas Chandler, who was previously a family friend.

Document: Indictment at UVA Date: 1692 September 16 Accusers: Unsigned

John Proctor

Successful farmer and tavern-owner John Proctor first butted heads with the Salem accusers during the arrest and trial of elderly Rebecca Nurse, who he believed was falsely accused. Mary Warren, a servant of the Proctors, subsequently began experiencing fits and accused Giles Corey of afflicting her, a claim of which Proctor was also highly critical, threatening to beat the girl if the fits continued. On April 8, 1692, Jonathan Walcott and Nathaniel Ingersoll officially accused John's wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft. During Elizabeth's trial, John Proctor railed further against the perceived machinations of the accusers. As a result, they also accused him, and he was subsequently arrested.

On July 23, Proctor and other accused inmates wrote a letter to the sympathetic clergy of Boston, urging them to intervene in the Salem trials. The letter included allegations of torture and forced confessions. Ultimately the clergymen did intervene, but not before Proctor himself was hanged on August 5, 1692. Several of his relatives were also arrested but not executed, including his children Benjamin, William, and Sarah.

Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 April 11 Accuser: Joseph Pope

Sarah Wilds/Willes

Sarah Wilds (née Averill) was 65 years old at the time of the Salem trials. Before her marriage to John Wilds in 1663, she had been censured for "too great intimacy with Thomas Wardell," and for the lesser offense of wearing a silk scarf, facts which may have lent her a poor reputation in the conservative Puritan community. The Wilds also feuded with the Gould family of Salem, who happened to be good friends with the Putnam accusers. These factors may have hastened Wilds' denunciation by Thomas Putnam, Jr. and John Buxton, who alleged that she had afflicted Ann Putnam, Jr., Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott. Other signatories also testified against her during the trials, including Humphrey Clark, Thomas Dorman, John Andrew, John Gould, Zacheus Perkins, Elizabeth Symonds, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and the Rev. John Hale. After several weeks of imprisonment in the Boston jail, Wilds was executed by hanging in Salem on July 19, 1692.

Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 April 22 Accusers: Nathaniel Ingersoll and Thomas Putnam Document: Indictment at UVA Date: 1692 June 30 Accusers: Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam, and Mary Wolcott Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 June 30 Accuser: John Andrew Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 June 30 Accuser: Ann Putnam, Jr. Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 June 30 Accuser: Mary Walcott Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: Humphrey Clark Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: Thomas Dorman Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: John Gould Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: John Hale Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: Zacheus Perkins Document: Testimony at UVA Date: 1692 July 2 Accuser: Elizabeth Symonds

Document: Account of Jailkeeper at UVA Date: 1692-3 Author: William Dounlon

MORE RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHING THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Salem witch trials collection from the peabody essex museum, the salem witch trials documentary archive and transcription project, the danvers archival center.

This digital resource has been made possible in part by the Council on Library and Information Resources, through a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Pre-Colonial Mass
17th Century Mass
18th Century Mass
19th Century Mass

Salem Witch Trials: Primary Sources

The primary sources of the Salem Witch Trials offer a wealth of information on these infamous trials.

These sources include official court records as well as several books, diaries and letters written by the various people involved in the trials.

Many of these primary sources were published in the latter half of 1692, while the trials were still going on.

Hoping to stop further arrests and to calm the hysteria, Governor Phips banned the publication of all books regarding the Salem Witch Trials in late October of 1692, as he explained in a letter to William Blathwayt of the Privy Council:

“I have also put a stop to the printing of any discourses one way or another, that may increase the needless disputes of people upon this occasion, because I saw a likelihood of kindling an inextinguishable flame if I should admit any public and open contests.”

Many historians have pointed out that this ban is essentially the first government cover up in American history and was designed to stifle the growing opposition to the trials because it was a threat to the government of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

The majority of these primary sources were critical of the trials and made strong arguments against how the trials were conducted.

In order to defend its actions, the Massachusetts government asked Boston minister Cotton Mather to write a book about the trials in which he justified the trials and the way they were conducted.

Mather’s book was published in late October of 1692, after the ban had taken affect but included a disclaimer explaining that the book was authorized by the colonial government.

Even though the ban was in effect, it couldn’t stop the circulation of some unpublished letters criticizing the trials and the ban was eventually broken with the publications of various books by people who were either involved in or had witnessed the events of the trials.

The following is a list of primary sources of the Salem Witch Trials:

(Disclaimer: This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

♦ A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village by Deodat Lawson

Published in 1692, this 10-page narrative by Deodat Lawson is about Lawson’s personal observations of the events at Salem in the spring of 1692.

Lawson had a personal interest in Salem because he had been the minister at Salem Village from 1687 to 1688 but was denied the position of full minister after several parishioners objected to his permanent tenure as a result of ongoing disputes between the parishioners.

The narrative was written after Lawson had been invited to Salem to serve as a guest preacher for the sabbath service on March 20, 1692 and his sermon was interrupted several times by some of the afflicted girls in attendance.

Since this type of behavior was so unusual for young children in Puritan society, Lawson decided to dig deeper into the events at Salem village and, as a result, wrote what became the first eyewitness account of the Salem Witch Trials.

After spending a month in Salem, Parris returned to Boston where the manuscript was published by Boston publisher Benjamin Harris and “sold at his shop, over-against the Old-Meeting-House.,1692.”

In 1704, Lawson wrote another account of the Salem Witch Trials, a sermon titled “Christ’s Fidelity the only Shield against Satan’s Malignity,” aka “Witchcraft in Salem,” which was published in London in 1704.

♦ Robert Pike Letter to Judge Jonathan Corwin

On August 9, 1692, Robert Pike, the Massachusetts Bay councilor and Salisbury magistrate, wrote a personal letter to Judge Corwin expressing his concerns with the admission of spectral evidence in the trials.

In the letter, Pike argues that spectral evidence is unreliable because these alleged visions and apparitions are “more commonly false and delusive than real, and cannot be known when they are real and when feigned.”

Pike goes on to argue that spectral evidence is considered unreliable evidence for three specific reasons:

1. Apparitions and visions are sometimes caused by delusion. 2. The devil himself can appear in the shape of a person without their knowledge. 3. Even if an apparition was real, it is impossible to know whether it is real or a delusion.

Pike also points out how illogical it is that these accused witches would plead innocent but then incriminate themselves by using witchcraft openly in the courtroom, as the accusers stated they were doing, and suggests that the accusers were delusional or possibly possessed.

It is not known what Corwin thought of the letter since there is no record of a reply or response.

Although Pike previously supported the testimony of several accusers against Salisbury native Susannah Martin, he eventually came out against the Salem Witch Trials and also signed an affidavit in defense of another accused Salisbury woman, Mary Bradbury, who was his son’s mother-in-law.

Pike’s letter to Corwin was later republished in a number of books, such as Salem Witchcraft by Charles W. Upham and The New Puritan: New England Two Hundred Years Ago by James Shephard Pike.

♦ Thomas Brattle’s Letter to an Unnamed Clergyman

On October 8, 1692, Thomas Brattle, a Boston merchant, wrote a letter to an unnamed English clergyman in which he criticized the Salem Witch Trials.

In the letter, Brattle criticizes the methods in which the accused are examined, points out the unreliablity of confessions from the accused, denounces the use of spectral evidence and criticizes the practice of relying on the “afflicted girls” for information on suspected witches.

Brattle supports his argument against spectral evidence by stating that it is actually the work of the devil:

“I think it will appear evident to any one, that the Devil’s information is the fundamental testimony that is gone upon in the apprehending of the aforesaid people…Liberty was evermore accounted the great priviledge of an Englishman; but certainly, if the Devil will be heard against us, and his testimony taken, to the seizing and apprehending us, our liberty vanishes, and we are fools if we boast our liberty.”

Brattle also argues that consulting with the afflicted girls for information on their alleged supernatural knowledge is absurd:

“It is true, I know no reason why these afflicted may not be consulted as well as any other, if so be that it was only their natural and ordinary knowledge that was had recourse to: but it is not on this notion that these afflicted children are sought onto; but as they have a supernatural knowledge; a knowledge which they obtain by their holding correspondence with spectres and evill spirits, as they themselves grant. This consulting of these afflicted children, as abovesaid, seems to me to be a very grosse evill, a real abomination, not fitt to be known in N.E.”

The letter circulated widely in Boston at the time and continues to be studied due to its reasoned and secular arguments against the trials.

The letter was later published in a number of books, such as Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648-1706 by George Lincoln Burr and What Happened in Salem: Documents Pertaining to the 17th Century Witchcraft Trials by David Levin.

♦ Some Miscellany Observations on Our Present Debates Regarding Witchcraft in a Dialogue Between S & B by P.E. And J.A.

Published in mid-October of 1692, this 16-page book by Samuel Willard criticizes the use of spectral evidence in the Salem Witch Trials.

The book is structured as a debate between “S and B,” which stands for Salem and Boston, with Willard’s views being represented by Boston.

While both sides agree that witches exist, Boston argues that the accused witches should only be convicted if sufficient evidence is found while Salem argues that spectral evidence is sufficient.

Boston goes on to argue that spectral evidence is insufficient because the afflicted girls are possessed, not bewitched, but Salem argues that they were indeed bewitched because they display the “seven signs of one bewitched.”

Boston then counters that this argument is tricky because it is possible to be both bewitched and possessed at the same time:

“I dispute not that ; though I find force to be very confused in this point : but supposing them bewitched, they may be possessed too: and it is an ordinary thing for a possession to be introduced by a bewitching, as there are many instances in history do confirm.”

The book was published under assumed names to protect Willard from being prosecuted. The initials “P.E. And J.A.” are the initials of Philip English and John Alden who were two accused witches who had fled Salem.

The book was also listed as having been published in Philadelphia when it was actually published in Boston as another way to avoid prosecution.

The book is located in the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society and is also available on the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project website.

♦ The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England by Cotton Mather

Published in October of 1692, this book by Boston minister Cotton Mather discusses a number of witchcraft cases in New England during the 17th century, including the Salem Witch Trials.

The book is considered both a justification for and an official defense of the verdicts in the Salem Witch Trials.

Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather

In the book, Mather states that New England is under attack by the Devil and argues these instances of witchcraft are proof of that claim.

Mather goes on to explain that a witch who had been executed 40 years prior had warned the Massachusetts Bay Colony of a “horrible plot against the country by witchcraft” which Mather states finally seems to have been uncovered in Salem, the first settlement of the colony:

“And we have now with horror seen the discovery of such witchcraft! An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our English settlements.”

The book contains descriptions of the six most notorious cases of witchcraft: George Burrough, Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Martha Carrier and a witchcraft case in England against Rose Cullender and Amy Duny.

Although Mather wasn’t directly involved in the Salem Witch Trials, he gave the judges advice on what is considered acceptable evidence of witchcraft by the church, attended some of the executions and even intervened in one of the executions after Reverend George Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer perfectly upon the ladder and dissent began to grow in the crowd.

After Burroughs was pushed off the ladder and hanged, Mather reassured the crowd that Burroughs wasn’t an ordained minister and that he was in fact guilty, which seemed to appease them and allowed the remaining executions that day to continue.

Some historians argue that the book doesn’t reflect how Mather really felt about the trials since his personal letters and diaries reflect a much more cautious view of spectral evidence and of the trials in general.

Robert Calef points out, in his own book More Wonders of the Invisible World, that Mather’s language in the book shows that the work was actually more propaganda than it was a historical account and that Mather wrote it as he did solely to please the government officials who had appointed him to write it:

“Martin is called one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world; in his account of Martha Carrier, he is pleased to call her a rampant hag, & c. These expressions, as they manifest that he wrote more like an advocate than an historian, so also that those that were his employers were not mistaken in their choice of him for that work…” Calef (276).

The Wonders of the Invisible World was the first official book ever written on the Salem Witch Trials and was only published because it was officially authorized and commissioned by the Massachusetts colonial government.

♦ More Wonders of the Invisible World by Robert Calef

Written in 1697 and published in 1700, this book by Boston cloth merchant Robert Calef denounces the Salem Witch Trials and Cotton Mather’s role in it.

The book was written as a response to Cotton Mather’s book Wonders of the Invisible World and contains evidence not presented in the trials, such as the juror’s apologies and some of the accuser’s confessions of lying.

More Wonders of the Invisible World by Robert Calef

The book also criticizes the use of spectral evidence and criticizes Puritans for their “unscriptual” belief in witches, arguing that the Bible makes no mention of witchcraft and therefore gives no basis for the existence of witches’ pacts with the devil.

Calef then concludes the book by stating that Mather’s actions were “highly criminal” and his beliefs in witches and witchcraft made him “guilty of of sacrilege in the highest nature…”

The book consists of five parts: Part 1: Cotton Mather’s account of Margaret Rule from the fall of 1693; Part 2: Letters to Mather and his reply relating to witchcraft; Part 3: The conflict between the Salem village residents and Samuel Parris; Part IV: Letters discussing whether the recent opinions about witchcraft are orthodox; Part V: a short history of the Salem Witch Trials written by Cotton Mather.

Calef wrote the book after a visit to Salem in the spring and summer of 1692, during which he witnessed and described many of the events of the trials, such as some of the executions.

In fact, Calef’s description of the execution site was one of many sources that later helped researchers identify Proctor’s Ledge as the site of the hangings in 2016.

The book was printed in London in 1700 and then later reprinted in Salem in 1823.

♦ Cause of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits by Increase Mather

Published around November or December of 1692, but postdated to 1693 to comply with Phip’s ban, this book by Increase Mather criticizes the court’s use of spectral evidence and other evidence, such as the touch test.

Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits by Increase Mather

In the book, Mather argued that specters could take the shape of innocent people and therefore rendered spectral evidence invalid. Mather referenced scriptures from the Bible and historical stories to illustrate his point:

“Argu I. There are several scriptures from which we may infer the possibility of what is affirmed. I. We find that the devil by the instigation of the witch at Endor appeared in the likeness of the prophet Samuel…But that is was a demon represent Samuel has been evidenced by learned and orthodox writers: especially (e) Peter Martyr, (f) Balduinus, (t) Lavater, and our incomparable John Rainolde…And that evil angels have sometimes appeared in the likeness of of living absent persons is a thing abundantly confirmed in history…Paulus and Palladius did both of them profess to Austin, that one in his shape had divers times, and in divers places appeared them (k) Thyreus; mentions several apparitions of absent living persons, which happened in his time…Nevertheless, it is evident from another scripture, viz, that in, 2 Cor 11. 14. For Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of light. He seems to be what he is not, and makes others seem to be what they are not…Third scripture to our purpose is that, in Re: 12 10 where the devil is called the accuser of the brethren…”

Mather also argues that another cause of these visions and specters is that the afflicted persons might be possessed by evil spirits.

Overall, Mather’s main problem with the use of this spectral evidence is the religious consequences of it:

“To take away the life of any one; meerly because a spectre or devil, in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them, will bring the guilt of the innocent blood on the land.”

Mather finished writing the book on October 3, 1692 and sent it to Governor Phips and presented a summary of the book to the assembly of ministers in Boston for their approval.

The manuscript circulated widely in Boston before it was finally published. Before its publication, Mather added a postscript that strongly supported the use of confessions as evidence, stating:

“More than one or two of those now in prison, have freely and credibly acknowledged their communion and and familiarity with the spirits of darkness.”

♦ Truth Held Forth & Maintained by Thomas Maule

Published in 1695, this 260 pamphlet by Salem shopkeeper Thomas Maule criticizes the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay for their treatment of Quakers and for their mismanagement of the Salem Witch Trials.

In the pamphlet, Maule criticizes the use of spectral evidence in the trials, argues that many of the accused witch’s confessions were forced and states that God would adversely judge the prosecutors of the Salem Witch Trials.

On December 14, 1695, Sheriff George Corwin arrested Maule for printing the pamphlet “without license of authority”, and seized the 31 copies in his possession. Corwin then took Maule to the Salem jail and then burned the confiscated copies (Hildeburn 305.)

On December 16, 1695, Maule was brought before the council for printing the book but refused to answer any questions. The remaining copies were ordered to be burned.

Maule was finally tried in 1696 and acquitted of all charges.

♦ A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft by John Hale

Written in 1697 and published posthumously in 1702, this book by John Hale, who was the pastor of the Church of Christ in Beverly, Mass, is a critique of the Salem Witch Trials.

The book discusses various witchcraft cases in New England from 1648 to 1692 and includes the events that led up to the Salem Witch Trials, many of which Hale witnessed firsthand.

A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft by John Hale

Some of the events described in the book include how some of the “afflicted girls” dabbled in folk magic and fortune-telling techniques shortly before they became ill, what the afflicted girls symptoms were, how Tituba baked a “witch cake” with the help of a neighbor to identify who was bewitching the girls, how Tituba’s confession prompted officials to examine more suspects and also includes brief mentions of other accused Salem witches.

Hale concludes the book by stating that it was Satan, not witches, who hurt and tormented the afflicted girls.

Hale first became involved in the Salem Witch Trials when, on March 11, 1692, he was asked by Reverend Samuel Parris to observe the afflicted girls symptoms in order to determined what was wrong with them.

Hale later attended many of the court cases, often prayed with the accused and supported the work of the court but ultimately reconsidered his support when his wife, Sarah Noyes Hale, was herself accused of the crime on November 14, 1692.

♦ Court Records

The court records from the Salem Witch Trials include examinations of the accused witches, depositions, testimonies, petitions, formal examinations, arrest warrants and death warrants.

These court records are available on the website of the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project and were also published in a book, titled The Salem Witchcraft Papers which was edited by Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum.

♦ The Cotton Mather Papers

Reverend Cotton Mather was a prolific writer and kept a diary from 1681-1724, wrote and published numerous sermons, and wrote many letters.

Mather’s collection of papers include a number of letters and diary entries related to the Salem Witch Trials, such as his many letters to the judges of the trials, his letters to the other ministers involved in the trials and his letters to his grandfather, John Cotton.

Some of Mather’s letters were later published in a multi-volume book, titled The Mather Papers and his diary was published in a book, titled Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1724 , along with many of his letters.

Mather’s letters to the Salem judges and to his grandfather are also available on the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project website.

Mather’s entire collection of papers are also located in the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

♦ Samuel Parris’ Sermons

Reverend Samuel Parris, pastor of the Salem Village church, delivered a series of sermons between 1689 and the autumn of 1692 related to the Salem Witch Trials.

Some historians have accused Parris of causing the Salem Witch Trials by preaching many frightening and foreboding sermons that may have possibly caused panic among his anxious and stressed parishioners.

For example, in his March 27, 1692 sermon, Parris preached that the Devil had infiltrated the church:

“Our Lord Jesus Christ knows how many Devils there are in his Church, & who they are…. What is meant here by Devils. One of you is a Devil. And by Devil is ordinarily meant any wicked Angel or Spirit: Sometimes it is put for the Prince or head of the evil Spirits, or fallen Angels. Sometimes it is used for vile & wicked persons, the worst of such, who for their villany & impiety do most resemble Devils & wicked Spirits.”

Parris’ sermons are in his manuscript sermon notebook, located in the records of the Connecticut Historical Society, and were also published in a book, titled The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694 , which was edited by James F. Cooper and Kenneth P. Minkema.

♦ Salem Village Church Record Books

Like many churches, the Salem Village church kept records of the events at the church and the people involved. The records were written by the pastor of the church at the time.

Samuel Parris served as the pastor from 1689 to 1696 and wrote all of the records from that time period. He was replaced by Joseph Green, who wrote all of the records from 1697 to 1753 during the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials.

The records describe events such as Mary Sibley’s confession to the congregation that she had instructed Tituba to bake what was later described as a “witch cake” in order to find out who was bewitching the afflicted girls.

Parris’ records also mention the absence of many of the dissenting parishioners during and after the trials, the excommunication of Martha Corey after her conviction of witchcraft and the efforts by some of the parishioners to remove Parris from his position due to his involvement in the trials.

Green’s records mention the failed attempt to revoke Martha Corey’s excommunication in 1702, Ann Putnam’s confession in 1706 to being “made an instrument for ye accuseing of severall persons of a grievous crime” during the trials and the successful attempt to revoke Martha Corey’s excommunication in 1707.

The Salem Village Church record books are in the Danvers Archival Center, First Church Collection, in Danvers, Mass and were also published in a book, titled Salem-Village Witchcraft which was edited by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum.

♦ Diary of Samuel Sewall

Samuel Sewall was one of the judges of the court of Oyer and Terminer, which was a special court set up to hear the Salem Witch Trials cases.

Sewall kept a diary, from 1672 to 1729, in which he described many of the events of the trials, such as Giles Corey’s death, the confession of Dorcas Hoar, the dismissal of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, his meetings the following year with some of the surviving accused witches, and his public apology for his role in the trials.

All 11 volumes of Sewall’s diaries are located in the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, Massachusetts and were also later published in a multi-volume book, titled the Diary of Samuel Sewall.

Selected excerpts of Sewall’s diaries related specifically to the Salem Witch Trials, from volume five of his diary, are available on the website of the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.

For more info on this topic, check out the following articles on Salem Witch Trials secondary sources , the best Salem Witch Trials books and Salem Witch Trials websites .

Sources: Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World. Salem: Cushing and Appleton, 1823. Hildeburn, Charles R. “Printing in New York in the Seventeenth Century.” The American Historical Magazine , Vol 3, The Americana Society, 1908. 304-305. Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. DaCapo Press, 2000. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706. Edited by George Lincoln Burr, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. Ray, Benjamin C. Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Miller, Jon. “Deodat Lawson, ‘Witchcraft in Salem’ (1704).” Jon Miller , www.jonmiller.org/materials/2006/05/deodat_lawson_w.html Goss, David K. Documents of the Salem Witch Trials . ABC-CLIO, 2018. “Samuel Sewall Diaries, 1672-1729.” Massachusetts Historical Society, www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0243 “17th Century Documents & Books.” Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, University of Virginia, salem.lib.virginia.edu/17docs.html “Deodat Lawson: A Brief and True Narrative.” History Department , Hanover College, history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/212law.html “A Guide to the On-Line Primary Sources of the Salem Witch Trials.” 17th Century Colonial New England, www.17thc.us/primarysources/

2 thoughts on “ Salem Witch Trials: Primary Sources ”

This is a really good cite. Great from NHD thank you.

Thank you! As a descendant of Mary (TOWNE) ESTEY, I have a verify, verify, verify approach to family history and primary sources are always part of the quest.

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Introduction

Witchcraft operations in salem, cause and trial of the witchdoctors, in the courtroom, defense of the accused, challenges of the trials, works cited.

Salem is a village in Massachusetts, which is a state in the New England region, in the North East of the United States of America. In the year 1692, it was afflicted by a certain kind of mysticism that drove some of the villagers into hysteria.

The hysteria manifested first in young girls whereby the girls exploded into bizarre behavior whose natural cause could not be traced. The young girls could be seized with convulsions, blasphemous screaming and melodramatic behaviors which were not normal. Since the physical source could not be traced, the community was led to believe that witches had invaded Salem.

The term witch should be understood and used in caution here. This is necessary in order for one to understand the trials of the witch in Salem. During the 17 th century it was believed that a witch is a person who had made a treaty with the devil so that there will be an exchange of a soul for evil powers which the witch can use to torment human beings (MacBain, 4). It is quite normal for victims of these powers to claim to have experienced horrible dreams and illusions.

They would also experience physical pain and exhibit bizarre habits which could be alarming to the community. The perpetrators of this evil act would be identified by the villagers, investigated, tried and then condemned if found guilty. In a village such as Salem, a person found guilty of performing witchcraft would be hanged. Thus the word witch is a strong word used as an accusation of Satan’s treaties. If someone were found involved in this pact, it would lead to death. Salem villagers were religious.

Thus religiously speaking, a witch is a follower of an ancient pagan belief system (MacBain, 4). The discovery of this fact led to a series of activities aimed at flushing out all the witchdoctors who had run amok with their evil activities. Since Sale was a religious village, its inhabitants began praying and fasting in order to get rid of this satanic evil (Sutter 5).

Witchcraft in operation could manifest in several ways. All of these ways alter the normal and natural ways things operate and cause abnormal things to happen (Sutter 7). The effects were usually seen in human beings, animals and plants. Salem was not an exemption. Witchcraft would go as far as killing infants and adults (Fradin & Fradin, 9). Some of the witches would kill domesticated animals (Sutter 7).

There were two young girls who were under the devil’s influence as a result of witchraft activities. These girls were brought to the investigators who forced them to reveal the people who controlled their bizarre characters (Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect 2).

As a result three women were identified. After close examination, it was revealed that the afflicted girls were having demonic illusions. One of them called Tituba who was a slave girl, said that she had seen the devil appearing to her either as a hog or a huge dog (Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect 4).

At first three women were identified and denounced as having colluded with the devil in bringing such atrocities into the village. These women were quite marginal to the village. Afterwards, more and more women were accused. A special case relates to this woman, Martha Corey, who was quite different from other people who had been convicted. This is because she was a noble congregant of the religious organizations in the village (Wilson 8).

Thus the fact that she was a witch revealed the magnitude of influence Satan had gained in the community. As the accusatory conditions continued to intensify, things took a strange turn in the lives of the witchdoctors. Many witchdoctors were identified, investigated, charged, and condemned. They would late be put to death (Goss 9). Some of them would face the gallows, one died under the pressure of stones and another one died in prison while awaiting trial (Goss 12).

There were at least 168 people who were accused of practicing witchcraft in 1692. Out of these, nineteen had been found guilty. They were hanged by October of the same year. However, no one who had pleaded guilty of practicing witchcraft was killed.

Salem is now the modern town of Danvers. The hysteria caused by two young girls marks the beginning of an interesting story. The two young girls namely Betty and Abigail, while in the court, behaved in a bizarre way that was far from natural. After careful diagnosis by Dr. William Griggs, it was found out that there was no natural cause of their mysterious behavior.

Dr. Griggs could not diagnose any medical condition that is why he finally diagnosed bewitchment. In those days, religious people believed that witchcraft was a cause of diseases and death and that witches gained their powers from the devil. This is the reason why the witches responsible would be killed so that they may finish off the devil’s operations.

Under enough pressure, the young girls named names of those who were responsible for their behaviors. Instead of admitting that their behavior started as a game, they connected their story with religious phenomena. Therefore, their slave girl, Totuba, was among the first three slaves to be accused after warrants of arrest were given (Goss 12).

The three appeared before the three Salem Town Magistrates in the house of Nathaniel Ingersoll. During the time when women were testifying in this trial, the young girls cried out loud claiming that the woman’s apparition was roaming the room while biting and beating them up. The spirit also appeared as an animal or a bird. After wide investigations, the slave girl did admit that she was indeed a witch.

As reasons for her actions, Tituba said that a dog, black in color, had threatened her before ordering her to cause harm to the young girls. Another thing that she claimed was that she used to attend witches meetings with her fellow convicted witches. Because of the success of this court, an intensive campaign was launched to hunt for more witches. As a result, the young girls were put under pressure to name other witches involved so that they can be tried.

Another witch was brought before the magistrates. She was called Martha. Although she maintained her calmness, the young ladies actions were enough to expose her. They were tormented and anguished throughout the court proceedings. The husband of Martha was also present and he against her.

Rebecca Nurse was the next woman to be brought before the magistrates. She was an outstanding puritan member who was also a prominent member of the community. Other women had joined the group of the afflicted girls. By this time the Magistrates had been convinced beyond doubt that whatever the afflicted girls said was true.

Other victims of Salem trials were John and Elizabeth Proctor who had been strong opponents of the Salem Witch trials since the beginning, a factor that worked against them. There was this victim called Sarah Cloyse who followed suite. She was the sister to Rebecca Nurse. Cloyse became a victim when she tried to oppose the trials and was in the process mentioned by the girls.

Another difficult case for the magistrate came when a mental woman was brought before them. Her name was Abigail Hobbs. However instead of acquitting her as insane, the court ruled against her as a witch because of the young girls actions. In April 21, the same year, the lies of Abigail caused the arrest of nine more people who came from far beyond the borders of the town of Salem.

Thus the witch trial of Salem was able to diversify to other surrounding communities and the number of these communities grew to 22. There is one peculiar incident that happened in the court of Salem when the two girls reviewed their accusations against Nehemiah Abbot. Hence Abbot was lucky enough to be released by the court making it to be the only time such an incident ever occurred (Oliver 2).

As it was at that time, Massachusetts had no formal charter. Therefore all the people who had been accused had to be held in prison until the time when a new charter was brought by the new governor in November, 1692. However, the new governor had no interest with the trials. He therefore established a court of Oyer and Terminar to do the job. New magistrates were brought to hear the cases (Oliver 3). By mid the following year, about one hundred people had been charged and imprisoned because of involving in witchcraft activities.

It was until June 2, 1693 that the particular Salem court had its first sitting thus causing Bridget Bishop to be the first person to be tried and was also found guilty of the offence. What followed was the signing of her death warranty by the three justices. She was then hanged on June 10, and later on buried in a shallow grave on Gallows Hill.

When Justice Saltonstall resigned from this court and doubted the entire issue, he was also accused of witchcraft. The next convicts to appear were also found guilty and sentenced to death. During the course of the next trial which involved Sarah Wilds and Elizabeth How as defendants, Reverend Samuel Willard was also found to be guilty of practicing witchcraft. However he never appeared before the three magistrates since he was friends with some of them who gave him some protection.

This is an open indication that there were some innocent people whom the justices sent to their death (Paralumun 41). The young girls became celebrities in this field. Due to this celebrity status they were sent to other towns beyond Salem to help in the search for witches. By this time, twenty four people had died because of engaging in witchcraft or witchcraft-related activities. Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill in the small town of Salem while others died in prison waiting to be tried in court (Paralumun 14).

As it is well known, any person being accused in a court of law has the right to ask for professional help. In Salem, this was also the case although many other cases in New England did not allow any professional help for people convicted of witchcraft in a court of law. Hence in this episode, many prominent people rose to defend the accused. Most of those people who rose to defend the accused were close friends and family members of the accused.

The court that was formed to investigate, charge and convict such cases in Salem was not short of its challenges. This is because in these cases, there were two parties. During this episode, both parties were comprised of prominent village leaders. Also, the defenders of the accused offered strong opposition because they were powerful members in the village council (Sutter 3).

The other challenge came from political reasons. Two years ago, the courts were suspended. Thus the trials of these people would take months to happen. People accused of practicing this act would be charged and held in jail for months before they could be tried. This was also the period of political instability. Thus whenever a conflict would arise, between towns and people, the government could not interfere by intervening. Thus these animosities were left to play out unchecked.

The Salem Witch trials indicated several things that happened in the society. Witchcraft was so prevalent at that time. Evil in this town was at its high level of operation. On the other hand, the trials revealed an aspect of corruption whereby the justices exhibited corruption by granting the reverend court protection when he was accused of practicing witchcraft. As a recap therefore, the Salem Witch trials were not based on the whole truth since the two young girls did not speak the truth as the process was nearing the end.

Fradin, Judith B & Fradin, Dennis B. The Salem Witch Trials . Marshall Cavendish. 2008. Print.

Goss, K. David. The Salem Witch Trials: A Reference Guide . Greenwood Publishing Group. 2008. Print.

MacBain, Jenny. The Salem Which Trials: A Primary Source History of the Witchcraft Trails in Salem, Massachusetts . The Rosen Publishing Group. 2003. Print.

Oliver, Benjamin D. The Salem Witchcrafts Trial 1692 . The Web Chronology Project. 1997. Web.

Paralumun (2010). Salem Witch Trials. Web.

Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect . Oppapers.Com. 2010. Web.

Salem Witchcraft Trials. Oppapers.Com. 2010. Web.

Sutter, Tim. Salem Witchcraft: The Events and Causes of the Salem witch Trials . Salem Witch Trials. 2003. Web.

Wilson, Lori L. The Salem Witch Trials . Twenty-First Century Books. 1997. Print.

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The Roots of Mass Hysteria: Causes of the Salem Witch Trials

This essay is about the causes of the Salem witch trials of 1692. It explores the complex interplay of religious zeal, social and economic tensions, psychological factors, and flawed legal practices that led to the tragic event. The Puritan fear of the devil and witchcraft, combined with local conflicts and the behavior of young girls in Salem Village, created an atmosphere ripe for hysteria. The acceptance of spectral evidence by the courts further fueled the accusations. The essay examines how these elements converged to cause mass hysteria, leading to the execution of twenty people and highlighting the dangers of irrational fear and injustice.

How it works

The Salem witch trials of 1692 persist as one of the most notorious chronicles in American annals, where a progression of judicial inquiries and prosecutions culminated in the execution of twenty individuals, predominantly women, accused of sorcery. The origins of this calamitous event are manifold, entailing a convoluted interplay of societal, theological, and psychological elements. Grasping the incitement of the hysteria in Salem necessitates scrutinizing the temporal context and the distinctive pressures confronting the Puritan community.

At the core of the Salem witch trials was the entrenched theological paradigm that permeated the Puritan existence.

Salem, akin to much of New England, stood as a bastion of Puritan settlement where apprehension of malevolent forces and supernatural phenomena held sway. The Puritans espoused the belief that Satan was actively laboring to undermine their righteous community, and sorcery was deemed an existential menace. This fervent religiosity engendered an environment conducive to allegations of sorcery, particularly in the aftermath of anomalous or inexplicable phenomena.

Economic and social fissures also played a pivotal role in fomenting the witch trials. Salem Village, the epicenter of the accusations, was embroiled in a period of discord and strife. Conflicts over land ownership, grazing rights, and ecclesiastical privileges roiled the village. The community stood divided between advocates for the autonomy of Salem Village from the more affluent Salem Town and those in opposition. These schisms fostered an atmosphere of suspicion and animosity, facilitating the transmutation of personal grievances into accusations of sorcery.

Another contributing factor was the involvement of juveniles and young women in the initial accusations. In January 1692, a cohort of young girls in Salem Village commenced exhibiting peculiar behaviors, including convulsions, contortions, and vocal outbursts. Under interrogation, they professed to be possessed by demonic entities and implicated numerous local women in acts of sorcery. The participation of minors introduced a layer of complexity to the situation. In Puritan society, children were expected to comport themselves dutifully and were often regarded as guileless and truthful. Consequently, the girls’ accusations were accorded considerable credence, and their melodramatic conduct served to exacerbate the hysteria.

Psychological explications also furnish insights into the events in Salem. The phenomenon of collective hysteria, wherein a cohort of individuals manifests analogous symptoms of a psychosomatic disorder, could elucidate the aberrant behaviors exhibited by the accusers. The pervasive stress and trepidation within the community, compounded by the stringent and oppressive social milieu, may have precipitated these psychosomatic manifestations. The girls’ conduct might have constituted a subconscious response to the oppressive circumstances in which they lived, an endeavor to garner attention and assert autonomy in a society that severely circumscribed their agency.

Moreover, the legal and judicial frameworks of the era were ill-equipped to adjudicate such cases. The reliance on “spectral evidence,” wherein accusers purported to witness the apparition or ethereal manifestation of the accused engaging in sorcery, proved particularly problematic. This form of evidence was impervious to refutation and hinged heavily upon the subjective experiences of the accusers. The court’s acceptance of spectral evidence rendered it arduous for the accused to mount a defense once an allegation had been proffered. This legal backdrop facilitated the proliferation of hysteria, as an increasing number of individuals were implicated based on tenuous and fantastical testimony.

The aftermath of the Salem witch trials witnessed a gradual acknowledgment of the grave injustices perpetrated. As the fervor abated, doubts arose regarding the legitimacy of the adjudications and the veracity of the evidence adduced. Prominent figures, including Increase Mather and Samuel Sewall, expressed contrition and censure for the proceedings. In 1697, the Massachusetts General Court designated a day of fasting and introspection in remembrance of the Salem tragedy, and in 1702, the adjudications were deemed unlawful. Restitutions were eventually disbursed to the families of the victims, and the event left an indelible scar on the American collective consciousness.

In summation, the Salem witch trials were an amalgam of theological fervor, socioeconomic discord, psychological influences, and flawed legal methodologies. The adjudications serve as a poignant admonition of the perils of collective hysteria and the imperative of due process and rationality in the face of apprehension and mistrust. By delving into the antecedents of the Salem witch trials, we can glean insights into the unfolding of such a tragic episode and contemplate the lessons it imparts for contemporary society.

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Essay Example: The Salem witch trials of 1692 persist as one of the most notorious chronicles in American annals, where a progression of judicial inquiries and prosecutions culminated in the execution of twenty individuals, predominantly women, accused of sorcery. The origins of this calamitous
The Salem Witch Trials Critical Essays
Salem Witch Trials 1692-1693. An infamous episode in American history, the Salem witch trials of 1692 resulted in the execution by hanging of fourteen women and five men accused of being witches ...
Research paper- Salem Witch Trials
The Dark History of the Salem Witch Trials. Julie Ho HIST 2111. Julie Ho Professor Thomas HIST 2111 12 September 2021. The Dark History of the Salem Witch Trials The Salem Witch Trials was a series of people accused and tried for practicing witchcraft which took place between February 1692 through May 1693 in colonial Massachusetts.
Research Paper On Salem Witch Trials
Research Paper on Salem Witch Trials - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. research paper on salem witch trials
Salem Witch Trials Outline
Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Outline Format Directions: Complete your introduction on notebook paper (or you may type it). Use this template to guide your work. I. Introduction (In your introduction, be sure to include a general description of the event, when it occurred and where it occurred.)

Article contents

What Happened in Salem

Explanations of the Salem Witch Trials

The Many Participants in the Salem Witch Trials

Reading and Remembering the Salem Witch Trials

Select Primary Sources

Select Literary Sources

Further Reading

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What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

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The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records

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Salem Witch Trials

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

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The Salem Witch Trials: A legal bibliography

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SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALS RESEARCH GUIDE

MATERIALS DIGITIZED BY NEHH

Mary Barker*

William Barker, Jr.*

Sarah Bridges*

Carrier Family

Andrew Carrier*

Richard Carrier*

Thomas Carrier, Jr.*

Rebecca Eames

Sarah Hawks*

Elizabeth How/Howe

Johnson Family

Elizabeth Johnson, Jr.

Elizabeth Johnson, Sr.*

Stephen Johnson*

Mary Lacey, Sr.*

Mary Marston*

Hannah Post*

Elizabeth Proctor

Mary Toothaker*

Johanna Tyler*

Mercy Wardwell*

Sarah Wardwell*

Sarah Wilds/Willes*

RELATED MATERIALS IN THE NEHH ARCHIVE

Salem, Mass. First Church, 1629-1843

MATERIALS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

George Burroughs

Martha Corey

Abigail Hobbs

Rebecca Nurse

Mary Parker

John Proctor

Sarah Wilds/Willes

MORE RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHING THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Salem Witch Trials: Primary Sources

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The Salem Witch Trials

The Salem Witch Trials History Research Paper

Introduction

The Roots of Mass Hysteria: Causes of the Salem Witch Trials

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