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The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary by Douglas Linder

O Christian Martyr Who for Truth could

die

When all about thee Owned the hideous

lie!

The world, redeemed from superstition's

sway,

Is breathing freer for thy sake today. --Words written by John Greenleaf Whittier

and inscribed on a monument marking the

grave of Rebecca Nurse, one of the

condemned "witches" of Salem.

From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem

Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under

heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of

others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without

trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through

Puritan Massachusetts ended.

Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about

this tragedy was inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier

war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal

jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that

occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.

In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village,

invited Samuel Parris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in

Barbados, to preach in the Village church. A year later, after negotiations over

salary, inflation adjustments, and free firewood, Parris accepted the job as Village

minister. He moved to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, his six-year-old

daughter Betty, niece Abagail Williams, and his Indian slave Tituba, acquired by

Parris in Barbados.

The Salem that became the new home of Parris was in the midst of change: a

mercantile elite was beginning to develop, prominent people were becoming less

willing to assume positions as town leaders, two clans (the Putnams and the

Porters) were competing for control of the village and its pulpit, and a debate was

raging over how independent Salem Village, tied more to the interior agricultural

regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea trade.

Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young Betty

Parris became strangely ill. She dashed about, dove under furniture, contorted in

pain, and complained of fever. The cause of her symptoms may have been some

combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional

psychosis. The symptoms also could have been caused, as Linda Caporael argued in

a 1976 article in Science magazine, by a disease called "convulsive ergotism"

brought on by injesting rye--eaten as a cereal and as a common ingredient of bread--

infected with ergot. (Ergot is caused by a fungus which invades developing kernels

of rye grain, especially under warm and damp conditions such as existed at the time

of the previous rye harvest in Salem. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a

crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and--most interestingly--

hallucinations. The hallucinogenic drug LSD is a dervivative of ergot.) Many of the

symptoms or convulsive ergotism seem to match those attributed to Betty Parris,

but there is no way of knowing with any certainty if she in fact suffered from the

disease--and the theory would not explain the afflictions suffered by others in Salem

later in the year.

At the time, however, there was another theory to explain the girls' symptoms.

Cotton Mather had recently published a popular book, "Memorable Providences,"

describing the suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's

behavior in some ways mirrored that of the afflicted person described in Mather's

widely read and discussed book. It was easy to believe in 1692 in Salem, with an

Indian war raging less than seventy miles away (and many refugees from the war

in the area) that the devil was close at hand. Sudden and violent death occupied

minds.

Talk of witchcraft increased when other playmates of Betty, including eleven-

year-old Ann Putnam, seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott, began to

exhibit similar unusual behavior. When his own nostrums failed to effect a cure,

William Griggs, a doctor called to examine the girls, suggested that the girls'

problems might have a supernatural origin. The widespread belief that witches

targeted children made the doctor's diagnosis seem increasing likely.

A neighbor, Mary Sibley, proposed a form of counter magic. She told Tituba to

bake a rye cake with the urine of the afflicted victim and feed the cake to a dog.

(Dogs were believed to be used by witches as agents to carry out their devilish

commands.) By this time, suspicion had already begun to focus on Tituba, who had

been known to tell the girls tales of omens, voodoo, and witchcraft from her native

folklore. Her participation in the urine cake episode made her an even more

obvious scapegoat for the inexplicable.

Meanwhile, the number of girls afflicted continued to grow, rising to seven with

the addition of Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, and Mary

Warren. According to historian Peter Hoffer, the girls "turned themselves from a

circle of friends into a gang of juvenile delinquents." ( Many people of the period

complained that young people lacked the piety and sense of purpose of the founders'

generation.) The girls contorted into grotesque poses, fell down into frozen postures,

and complained of biting and pinching sensations. In a village where everyone

believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the

suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession.

Sometime after February 25, when Tituba baked the witch cake, and February

29, when arrest warrants were issued against Tituba and two other women, Betty

Parris and Abigail Williams named their afflictors and the witchhunt began. The

consistency of the two girls' accusations suggests strongly that the girls worked out

their stories together. Soon Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis were also reporting

seeing "witches flying through the winter mist." The prominent Putnam family

supported the girls' accusations, putting considerable impetus behind the

prosecutions.

The first three to be accused of witchcraft were Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah

Osborn. Tituba was an obvious choice. Good was a beggar and social misfit who

lived wherever someone would house her, and Osborn was old, quarrelsome, and

had not attended church for over a year. The Putnams brought their complaint

against the three women to county magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John

Hathorne, who scheduled examinations for the suspected witches for March 1, 1692

in Ingersoll's tavern. When hundreds showed up, the examinations were moved to

the meeting house. At the examinations, the girls described attacks by the specters

of the three women, and fell into their by then perfected pattern of contortions when

in the presence of one of the suspects. Other villagers came forward to offer stories

of cheese and butter mysteriously gone bad or animals born with deformities after

visits by one of the suspects. The magistrates, in the common practice of the time,

asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had

they seen Satan? How, if they were not witches, did they explain the contortions

seemingly caused by their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates

that the magistrates thought the women guilty.

The matter might have ended with admonishments were it not for Tituba. After

first adamantly denying any guilt, afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba

claimed that she was approached by a tall man from Boston--obviously Satan--who

sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to

do his work. Yes, Tituba declared, she was a witch, and moreover she and four other

witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on their poles. She

had tried to run to Reverend Parris for counsel, she said, but the devil had blocked

her path. Tituba's confession succeeded in transforming her from a possible

scapegoat to a central figure in the expanding prosecutions. Her confession also

served to silence most skeptics, and Parris and other local ministers began witch

hunting with zeal.

Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began

attacking the afflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary

Easty were accused of witchcraft. During a March 20 church service, Ann Putnam

suddenly shouted, "Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her

yellow bird between her fingers!" Soon Ann's mother, Ann Putnam, Sr., would join

the accusers. Dorcas Good, four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, became the first

child to be accused of witchcraft when three of the girls complained that they were

bitten by the specter of Dorcas. (The four-year-old was arrested, kept in jail for eight

months, watched her mother get carried off to the gallows, and would "cry her heart

out, and go insane.") The girls accusations and their ever more polished

performances, including the new act of being struck dumb, played to large and

believing audiences.

Stuck in jail with the damning testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted,

suspects began to see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance Hobbs

became the second witch to confess, admitting to pinching three of the girls at the

Devil's command and flying on a pole to attend a witches' Sabbath in an open field.

Jails approached capacity and the colony "teetered on the brink of chaos" when

Governor Phips returned from England. Fast action, he decided, was required.

Phips created a new court, the "court of oyer and terminer," to hear the

witchcraft cases. Five judges, including three close friends of Cotton Mather, were

appointed to the court. Chief Justice, and most influential member of the court,

was a gung-ho witch hunter named William Stoughton. Mather urged Stoughton

and the other judges to credit confessions and admit "spectral evidence" (testimony

by afflicted persons that they had been visited by a suspect's specter). Ministers

were looked to for guidance by the judges, who were generally without legal

training, on matters pertaining to witchcraft. Mather's advice was heeded. The

judges also decided to allow the so-called "touching test" (defendants were asked to

touch afflicted persons to see if their touch, as was generally assumed of the touch

of witches, would stop their contortions) and examination of the bodies of accused

for evidence of "witches' marks" (moles or the like upon which a witch's familiar

might suck). Evidence that would be excluded from modern courtrooms-- hearsay,

gossip, stories, unsupported assertions, surmises-- was also generally admitted.

Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking in Salem:

accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify under oath on

their behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. Defendants could, however,

speak for themselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers. The

degree to which defendants in Salem were able to take advantage of their modest

protections varied considerably, depending on their own acuteness and their

influence in the community.

The first accused witch to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop. Almost sixty

years old, owner of a tavern where patrons could drink cider ale and play

shuffleboard (even on the Sabbath), critical of her neighbors, and reluctant to pay

her her bills, Bishop was a likely candidate for an accusation of witchcraft. The fact

that Thomas Newton, special prosecutor, selected Bishop for his first prosecution

suggests that he believed the stronger case could be made against her than any of

the other suspect witches. At Bishop's trial on June 2, 1692, a field hand testified

that he saw Bishop's image stealing eggs and then saw her transform herself into a

cat. Deliverance Hobbs, by then probably insane, and Mary Warren, both confessed

witches, testified that Bishop was one of them. A villager named Samuel Grey told

the court that Bishop visited his bed at night and tormented him. A jury of matrons

assigned to examine Bishop's body reported that they found an "excrescence of

flesh." Several of the afflicted girls testified that Bishop's specter afflicted them.

Numerous other villagers described why they thought Bishop was responsible for

various bits of bad luck that had befallen them. There was even testimony that

while being transported under guard past the Salem meeting house, she looked at

the building and caused a part of it to fall to the ground. Bishop's jury returned a

verdict of guilty . One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, aghast at the conduct of

the trial, resigned from the court. Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death

warrant, and on June 10, 1692, Bishop was carted to Gallows Hill and hanged.

As the summer of 1692 warmed, the pace of trials picked up. Not all defendants

were as disreputable as Bridget Bishop. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected

woman whose specter, according to Ann Putnam, Jr. and Abagail Williams,

attacked them in mid March of 1692. Ann Putnam, Sr. added her complaint that

Nurse demanded that she sign the Devil's book, then pinched her. Nurse was one of

three Towne sisters , all identified as witches, who were members of a Topsfield

family that had a long-standing quarrel with the Putnam family. Apart from the

evidence of Putnam family members, the major piece of evidence against Nurse

appeared to be testimony indicating that soon after Nurse lectured Benjamin

Houlton for allowing his pig to root in her garden, Houlton died. The Nurse jury

returned a verdict of not guilty, much to the displeasure of Chief Justice Stoughton,

who told the jury to go back and consider again a statement of Nurse's that might

be considered an admission of guilt (but more likely an indication of confusion about

the question, as Nurse was old and nearly deaf). The jury reconvened, this time

coming back with a verdict of guilty. On July 19, 1692, Nurse rode with four other

convicted witches to Gallows Hill.

Persons who scoffed at accusations of witchcraft risked becoming targets of

accusations themselves. One man who was openly critical of the trials paid for his

skepticism with his life. John Proctor, a central figure in Arthur Miller's

fictionalized account of the Salem witchhunt, The Crucible, was an opinionated

tavern owner who openly denounced the witchhunt. Testifying against Proctor

were Ann Putnam, Abagail Williams, Indian John (a slave of Samuel Parris who

worked in a competing tavern), and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Booth, who testified

that ghosts had come to her and accused Proctor of serial murder. Proctor fought

back, accusing confessed witches of lying, complaining of torture, and demanding

that his trial be moved to Boston. The efforts proved futile. Proctor was hanged.

His wife Elizabeth, who was also convicted of witchcraft, was spared execution

because of her pregnancy (reprieved "for the belly").

No execution caused more unease in Salem than that of the village's ex-minister,

George Burroughs. Burroughs, who was living in Maine in 1692, was identified by

several of his accusers as the ringleader of the witches. Ann Putnam claimed that

Burroughs bewitched soldiers during a failed military campaign against Wabanakis

in 1688-89, the first of a string of military disasters that could be blamed on an

Indian-Devil alliance. In her interesting book, In the Devil's Snare, historian Mary

Beth Norton argues that the large number of accusations against Burroughs, and

his linkage to the frontier war, is the key to understanding the Salem trials. Norton

contends that the enthusiasm of the Salem court in prosecuting the witchcraft cases

owed in no small measure to the judges' desire to shift the "blame for their own

inadequate defense of the frontier." Many of the judges, Norton points out, played

lead roles in a war effort that had been markedly unsuccessful.

Among the thirty accusers of Burroughs was nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, a

refugee of the frontier wars. Lewis, the most imaginative and forceful of the young

accusers, offered unusually vivid testimony against Burroughs. Lewis told the court

that Burroughs flew her to the top of a mountain and, pointing toward the

surrounding land, promised her all the kingdoms if only she would sign in his book

(a story very similar to that found in Matthew 4:8). Lewis said, "I would not writ if

he had throwed me down on one hundred pitchforks." At an execution, a defendant

in the Puritan colonies was expected to confess, and thus to save his soul. When

Burroughs on Gallows Hill continued to insist on his innocence and then recited the

Lord's Prayer perfectly (something witches were thought incapable of doing), the

crowd reportedly was "greatly moved." The agitation of the crowd caused Cotton

Mather to intervene and remind the crowd that Burroughs had had his day in court

and lost.

One victim of the Salem witchhunt was not hanged, but rather pressed under

heavy stones until his death. Such was the fate of octogenarian Giles Corey who,

after spending five months in chains in a Salem jail with his also accused wife, had

nothing but contempt for the proceedings. Seeing the futility of a trial and hoping

that by avoiding a conviction his farm, that would otherwise go the state, might go

to his two sons-in-law, Corey refused to stand for trial. The penalty for such a

refusal was peine et fort, or pressing. Three days after Corey's death, on September

22, 1692, eight more convicted witches, including Giles' wife Martha, were hanged.

They were the last victims of the witchhunt.

By early autumn of 1692, Salem's lust for blood was ebbing. Doubts were

developing as to how so many respectable people could be guilty. Reverend John

Hale said, " It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in

so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil's lap at once." The

educated elite of the colony began efforts to end the witch-hunting hysteria that had

enveloped Salem. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, published what has been

called "America's first tract on evidence," a work entitled Cases of Conscience, which

argued that it "were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one

innocent person should be condemned." Increase Mather urged the court to exclude

spectral evidence. Samuel Willard, a highly regarded Boston minister, circulated

Some Miscellany Observations, which suggested that the Devil might create the

specter of an innocent person. Mather's and Willard's works were given to Governor

Phips. The writings most likely influenced the decision of Phips to order the court to

exclude spectral evidence and touching tests and to require proof of guilt by clear

and convincing evidence. With spectral evidence not admitted, twenty-eight of the

last thirty-three witchcraft trials ended in acquittals. The three convicted witches

were later pardoned. In May of 1693, Phips released from prison all remaining

accused or convicted witches.

By the time the witchhunt ended, nineteen convicted witches were executed, at

least four accused witches had died in prison, and one man, Giles Corey, had been

pressed to death. About one to two hundred other persons were arrested and

imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Two dogs were executed as suspected accomplices

of witches.

Scholars have noted potentially telling differences between the accused and the

accusers in Salem. Most of the accused lived to the south of, and were generally

better off financially, than most of the accusers. In a number of cases, accusing

families stood to gain property from the convictions of accused witches. Also, the

accused and the accusers generally took opposite sides in a congregational schism

that had split the Salem community before the outbreak of hysteria. While many of

the accused witches supported former minister George Burroughs, the families that

included the accusers had--for the most part--played leading roles in forcing

Burroughs to leave Salem. The conclusion that many scholars draw from these

patterns is that property disputes and congregational feuds played a major role in

determining who lived, and who died, in 1692.

A period of atonement began in the colony following the release of the surviving

accused witches. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, issued a public confession of

guilt and an apology. Several jurors came forward to say that they were "sadly

deluded and mistaken" in their judgments. Reverend Samuel Parris conceded errors

of judgment, but mostly shifted blame to others. Parris was replaced as minister of

Salem village by Thomas Green, who devoted his career to putting his torn

congregation back together. Governor Phips blamed the entire affair on William

Stoughton. Stoughton, clearly more to blame than anyone for the tragic episode,

refused to apologize or explain himself. He criticized Phips for interfering just when

he was about to "clear the land" of witches. Stoughton became the next governor of

Massachusetts.

The witches disappeared, but witchhunting in America did not. Each generation

must learn the lessons of history or risk repeating its mistakes. Salem should warn

us to think hard about how to best safeguard and improve our system of justice.