Dozens of townsfolk were then put on trial in a courtroom gripped by paranoid visions and panic, as depicted in Arthur Miller's famous play, "The Crucible" -- and in a screen adaptation starring Daniel Day Lewis. Growing doubts about the Salem trials eventually brought them to an end, but not before 20 people had been put to death. Massachusetts has long since apologized and atoned -- a little too late for the victims, needless to say.
On the plus side, their memory has also turned modern-day Salem into a popular tourist destination. Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. As workers of magic, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century, when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness.
The western Alps introduced her to lurid orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female, inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. Though weak willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably commanding. The English witch made the trip to North America largely intact. She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on her body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms, ointments, and poppets, doll-like effigies.
Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest.
They stole babies and penises. The Massachusetts witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of an unopened letter, spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off the ground.
Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in Matters were murkier when it came to the wily figure with six thousand years of experience, the master of disguise who could cause things to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe things of yourself that were not true.
He turned up in New England as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster, or as a fast-moving turtle. Even Cotton Mather was unsure what language he spoke. He was a pervasive presence, however: the air pulsed with his minions. Typically in Massachusetts, he wore a high-crowned hat, as he had in an earlier Swedish invasion, which Mather documented in his book.
Mather did not mention the brightly colored scarf that the Devil wound around his hat. By May, , eight Salem girls had claimed to be enchanted by individuals whom most of them had never met. Several served as visionaries; relatives of the ailing made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might be only eleven or twelve, but under adult supervision they could explain how several head of cattle had frozen to death, several communities away, six years earlier.
In the courtroom, they provided prophetic direction, cautioning that a suspect would soon topple a child, or cause a woman to levitate. With their help, at least sixty witches had been deposed and jailed by the end of the month, more than the Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the winter began to roast in the sweltering spring.
On May 27th, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases. A political shape-shifter, Stoughton had served in five prior Massachusetts regimes. He had helped to unseat the reviled royal governor, on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He possessed one of the finest legal minds in the colony. The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch to hang on the tenth.
It also requested a bit of guidance. During the next days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their reply, a circumspect, eight-paragraph document, delivered mid-month. Acknowledging the enormity of the crisis, he issued a paean to good government. In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on spectral evidence—evidence visible only to the enchanted, who conversed with the Devil or with his confederates.
Mather would insist on the point throughout the summer. Mather wondered whether the entire calamity might be resolved if the court discounted those testimonies. A month later, Ann Foster, a seventy-two-year-old widow from neighboring Andover, submitted to the first of several Salem interrogations.
Initially, she denied all involvement with sorcery. Soon enough, she began to unspool a fantastical tale. The Devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He promised prosperity, along with the gift of afflicting at a glance. She had not seen him in six months, but her ill-tempered neighbor, Martha Carrier, had been in touch on his behalf.
She worked her sorcery with poppets. There were twenty-five people in the meadow, where a former Salem village minister officiated. Three days later, from jail, Foster added a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to her account. The justices soon learned that Foster had failed to come clean, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had neither flown nor crashed alone on that Salem-bound pole: a third rider had travelled silently behind Foster.
So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a newly arrested suspect, on July 20th. Foster had also withheld the details of a chilling ceremony. The Devil had baptized his recruits, dipping their heads in water, six at a time. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river, to which he had carried Lacey in his arms. On July 21st, Ann Foster appeared before the magistrates for the fourth time.
She did not, and seemed taken aback. Warren shared with the court what a spectre had confided in her: Foster had recruited her own daughter. The authorities understood that she had done so about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct?
At this, Mary Lacey was called. How shall we get clear of this evil one? Her mother, Lacey revealed, rode first on the stick. Mary Warren fell at once into fits. At first, the younger Lacey was unhelpful. Asked to smile at Warren without hurting her, Mary Lacey failed. Warren collapsed to the floor. She could only agree, although she seemed to be working from a different definition: a recalcitrant child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had, she insisted, signed no diabolical pact.
The ideal Puritan girl was a sterling amalgam of modesty, piety, and tireless industry. She was to speak neither too soon nor too much. She read her Scripture twice daily.
Fourteen was the dividing line in law, for slander among other matters. The father was the master of the family, its soul, the governor of all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He sat vigil in the sickroom. A roaring girl wrestled aloud with the demons who would assault her the following year: she was well aware that she was fatherless—how often did they need to remind her as much? But she was hardly an orphan.
The justices reminded Mary Lacey, Jr. She was more profligate with details than her mother or her grandmother had been. It was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation—Cotton Mather included—could be relied on for the most luxuriant reports. It appeared easier to describe satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that she cavorted with the Devil.
The older woman had so often scolded that the Devil should fetch her away. Her wish had come true! She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches. Officials led in her grandmother; three generations of enchantresses stood before the justices.
Why did you persuade me and, oh, grandmother, do not you deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time. By the end of July, it was clear that— with the help of a minister mastermind—the Devil intended to topple the Church and subvert the country, something he had never before attempted in New England.
Certain patterns emerged as well. It bordered on heresy to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked man.
It could be wise to name names before anyone mentioned yours. It was safer to be afflicted than accused. Increasingly, you slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your accuser.
Bewitched women choked with fits, whereas men—who stepped forward only once the trials had begun—tended to submit to paralyzing bedroom visits. Imputations proved impossible to outrun. The word of two ministers could not save an accused parishioner.
Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church membership offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside homeless five-year-old girls. No one ever suffered afflictions without being able to name a witch. Many braced for a knock at the door.
The court met again early in August, when three men were convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a much younger one; and John Proctor, the first village man to have been accused. Tipping his hand a little, he called once for compassion for the accused, twice for pity for the justices. They were, after all, up against the greatest sophist in existence. They labored to restore the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for a hazardous operation.
The following day, Mather wrote excitedly to an uncle in Plymouth. God was working in miracles. They identified their ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon. The demonic mastermind was a minister in his early forties named George Burroughs. He had grown up in Maryland and graduated from Harvard in , narrowly missing Samuel Parris.
He was in his late twenties when he first arrived in Salem village, where he spent three contentious years. The colony created the Court of Oyer and Terminer especially for the witchcraft trials. 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 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. 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. 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.
For books and articles on the Salem Witch Trials and witchcraft and the law generally, Library of Congress subject headings include:. Adams, Gretchen A. A33 W5S digital edition , revised and augmented, B79 See especially pages B75 LawAnxS. Brown, David C. E7E81 : Burns, William E. E9B87 Burr, George Lincoln. B
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