The Wicked Witches of Salem
The Salem Witchcraft trials in Massachusetts during 1692 resulted in nineteen innocent deaths. Many men and women were hanged and one man was pressed to death. Although Salem was home to the witchcraft trials, the hysteria spread to many towns around Massachusetts. The witchcraft trials are responsible for hundreds of innocent deaths over time.
It began at the end of 1691 when a few girls in the town of Salem were seen dancing in the woods. Dancing and partaking in amusing activities was against the Puritan religion. This type of activity, brought on associations with the Devil. The girls gathered in Reverend Samuel Parris' house where their Indian slave named Tituba, headed the rituals. Soon after Tituba and the girls had begun to practice these rituals, the girls who had been involved became very sick and crazy. They cried, had constant tantrums, and twitched, they were considered bewitched. The family called in the town’s doctor, and they were treated for many illnesses but nothing seemed to help. Weeks later the doctors ran out of reasons for their strange behavior. All of their symptoms seemed to lead to one belief, that they were possessed by the Devil (ushistory.org, 2016).
At first, the families of the children could not find anyone to accuse for being the witch responsible for possessing the children. Then, in February of 1692, the girls began to see hazy shadows and believed that these shadows were of the people who had done this to them. After more and more children became “victims” of the witchcraft, the hunting for the witches began to get more serious. Trying to find who to blame for the girls’ sickness became the main priority of the doctors of Salem. By the end of February 1692, not one, but three witches had been named. These women were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, which were all residents of Salem Village. These three women were sentenced to jail until they were able to find someone to actually confess to the crimes.
The entire community of Salem increased their efforts to find the witches who were bringing such horrible events to their village. The children still were not able to come up with names for their perpetrators until a thirteen-year-old girl, Ann Putnam, cried out the name of Martha Corey.
From this point on, after Ann Putnam’s accusation, the girls of Salem showed no hesitation in naming the witches who had brought this upon them. The number of people accused was monumental, and the court had very little time to examine each accusation thoroughly. Soon, anyone who was called a witch was jailed, whether it was a man, woman, child, or adult. Even Dorcas Good, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good was accused and thrown into jail. A four-year-old child who was barely old enough to make coherent sentences, was convicted of being a witch and “taking supernatural revenge on the possessed for taking away her parents” (history.com Staff, 2011). This is how paranoid the people of Salem had become.
Everyone jumped at the mention of a witch, afraid that they would be the next person to become a possessed victim of their mysterious black magic. The villagers went from the four-year-old girl to seventy-one-year-old Rebecca Nurse followed by forty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Proctor. Both of these women who were from very wealthy, prosperous homes, were imprisoned because people thought Rebecca Nurse’s mother and Elizabeth Proctor’s grandmother practiced black magic when they were alive. Now at this point, anyone who was a family member of an accused witch was most likely to end up in jail also.
Next, John Proctor became the first male to be charged for being a witch. He stood by his wife and claimed she was innocent and spoke out against the court. After John Proctor a long list of alleged witches followed. Mary Easty and Sarah Cloyce, sisters of Rebecca Nurse who had expressed their negative feelings about the trials were locked up in jail. Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, Susanna Martin of Amesbury, and Bridget Bishop of Salem Town were all taken to jail to be put on trial because they had been convicted of committing witchcraft crimes. Afterwards, many of Elizabeth Proctor’s children were named along with her sister and sister-in-law just because they were associated with Elizabeth Proctor. Also, Martha Corey’s husband was put in jail to be brought to trial. The most shocking was the arrest of George Burroughs, the onetime pastor of Salem Village church. Many villagers thought that he would have become the “ring leader of them all,” and so he was sentenced to jail (Schiff, 2015).
While accusations were occurring as routine events for the people of Salem, some came to think that perhaps this outbreak was not related to witchcraft after all. A few in the village had doubted the validity of the trials from the beginning, and as time went on they felt more confident and sure that their beliefs were true. The protests from the people against the trials were not heard at first, and the members of the court insisted on treating people accused of being witches as the Devil’s servants. Most ministers of Salem warned the government against accepting these testimonies from the very start of the trials. They said the spirits the girls saw could be just hallucinations resulting from their sickness, or they could be the Devil in disguise, but government officials ignored them.
Hundreds of these local residents came into the court to help testify against crimes alleged witches had committed years, even decades, before. Although many people volunteered to come forward and speak out against these witches, they were very concerned about maleficium, the ability of a witch to do harm to another person through supernatural means (Blumberg, 2007). The townspeople were afraid that after testifying against the accused witch, she may put an evil spell on them. Another concern was that the possessed would be forced to sign a Satanic pact, and if they did not do so then the witches would inflict pain upon them until they did.
The trials in themselves were a big contradiction. People who pleaded innocent were tortured until they “confessed” that they were guilty. One form of torture was the accused would be pressed by a heavy weight until they confessed. Giles Corey, husband of Martha Corey, was pressed to death when he refused say that he was involved with the Devil and that he was guilty. One form of torture, though, was even more absurd. The witch’s head would be forced underwater and kept there for a certain period of time. If she came up alive everyone said she had magical powers which kept her from drowning, and then she would be executed. If they lifted her up and she was dead then she was presumed innocent, but that was completely pointless. Either way the accused were killed.
Many people accused others of being witches if they disliked them or if they were outsiders in society. Witches on trial were encouraged to give names of their fellow witches and to confess to their evil deeds. In exchange they would be granted a less severe punishment. The witches on trial would confess even if they were innocent, and they would also accuse other innocent people of being witches. The government saw that there was no real way to make sure the person was a witch before executing them and there was a great chance that they may be killing innocent people (Linder, 2015).
Many times, the Puritans were blamed for the trials, encouraging witchcraft fears, and the number of people affected by them. Some people believe that the Puritans blamed anyone who was different and outgoing as being a witch. This was because the Puritans had always suspected, as one of their main beliefs, that the Devil envied their way of life and was constantly trying his best to make their lives miserable. Their goal in life was to “purify the organization of their church” and to rid it of any sign of the Devil. (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015). By accusing so many people of being witches, they thought they were purifying the church and their community. Although the law is innocent until proven guilty, in the case of the witchcraft trials, the accused witches were guilty until proven innocent. Not many were given the chance to prove themselves to be innocent.
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Works cited
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