Salem, Massachusetts By Jordyn Head

On January 20, 1692 Abigail Williams and Betty Parris got a strange illness and a doctor declared they were bewitched. Witches were men and women who made deals with the devil and in return Satan gave them special powers. People would accuse people of being witches. Convicted witches were killed. Nineteen people were convicted and they were all executed by hanging.

One woman arrested because they believed she practiced witchcraft.

Some people doubted that so many people were witches. Governor William Phips started the trials so they could find out who were the real witches and who were the wrongly accused. Historians believed that Abigail Williams and Betty Parris weren’t afflicted by witchcraft and that the convicted weren’t witches.

Sir William Phips

Fear fueled the panic and made the townspeople accuse the innocent of being witches. Adding to the fear were the battles with Native Americans in nearby New Hampshire and southern Maine. They were concerned that they might attack Salem.

Native Americans attacking a settlement in

New Hampshire.

Salem was settled in 1626. The Puritans settled in Massachusetts so they could worship as they choose. They are very religious and ruled based on their beliefs. Puritans believed that Satan was real and he tried to make people disobey God and the teachings in the Bible. They were believed to be the devil’s servants. Puritan ministers said that women were more likely to become witches because they were morally weak and more easily to reject God.

A minister preaching the word of god to the Puritans.

No one knows what really afflicted Abigail Williams and Betty Parris. The sickness caused the girls to look as though someone had bit and pinched them. Their arms and backs twisted in unnatural ways.

The girls accused the family’s slave Tituba of bewitching them. Tituba admitted to learning some witchcraft from her previous owner but she denied being a witch. Then two more girls accused Tituba of witchcraft and two other women as witches.

Young girls accuse the slave Tituba of

bewitching them.

One of the women accused was Sarah Good. Earlier her neighbors had claimed that she was a witch, but she hadn’t been arrested. The second woman who was accused was Sarah Osborne.

Sarah Good pleads not guilty of witchcraft.

On February 29, 1692, several men from Salem Village visited local officials. The men formally accused Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne of witchcraft. The accused were questioned about their actions. Sarah Good denied that she was a witch or that she harmed the afflicted girls. Osborne also denied the charge.

William Stoughton served as the lead

judge.

Tituba admitted that “the devil came to me and bid me to serve him.” Tituba also said that she, Osborne, and Good had signed a book in blood, showing that they had made a deal with the devil. As people were accused, they were thrown in jail and there they would wait until their trials if they didn’t confess to being witches.

Recorded confession from Tituba during her trial.

In March 1692, Deodat Lawson talked about the devil’s work in Salem and he said God had allowed Satan to come into the town and harm the girls. God was punishing them because they had disobeyed his teachings. People became even more suspicious about their neighbors. They thought anyone around them could be a witch.

Deodat Lawson

By April two more women had joined Tituba and confessed to being witches. One of them was a teenager named Abigail Hobbs. Hobbs said that she had first met the devil three or four years earlier. After Hobbs confessed, more than 50 people were accused during the next two months. Abigail Hobbs confesses to being a

witch.

A recent historical study suggests that some of the afflicted people connected the devil with the Indians. They believed the Native Americans did the devil’s work, unless they became Christians.

In May, Massachusetts Governor Phips called for a court to meet in Salem and decide if the accused people were actually witches. Tituba and other confessed witches did not have to go to court. Under English law, witches weren’t allowed to speak in court. Officials believed they couldn’t be trusted to speak the truth, since they didn’t worship God. Confessed witches avoided the death sentence, even though they had to stay in jail. Only the convicted witches who didn’t admit their crimes were killed. This helps explain why more people who were innocent began to confess to being witches.

Accused witches beg for mercy.

The witch trials started on June 2, 1692. Bridget Bishop was the first accused to appear before the court. Over and over again she insisted she wasn’t a witch. The jury didn’t believe her, and she received a death sentence. About a week later, she was hanged.

By the end of June, five more people were found guilty of witchcraft. One of them was Rebecca Nurse. Rebecca was a 71-year-old grandmother. Abigail Williams and others said Nurse had afflicted them. Nurse’s family collected signatures from people who swore she was a good Christian. On June 30, the jury found her not guilty. The judge asked the jury to reconsider their verdict. When the jury asked Nurse a question, she didn’t answer because she had hearing problems and was probably upset about the trial. The jury assumed she didn’t answer because she truly was guilty. This time the jury convicted her of witchcraft and sentenced her to die.

Rebecca Nurse

By the end of the September 1692, 19 men and women had been hanged for being witches. Several confessed witches died in jail. One of the accused, Giles Corey was 80 years old and a member of the Congregational Church. He refused to enter a plea to the charge of witchcraft. As punishment, Salem officials put a wooden board on Corey’s chest as he lay on the ground and the officials piled stones on the board until the weight killed Corey.

As the autumn of 1692 began, dozens of accused witches were still waiting to go on trial. People in Salem and Boston were beginning to think that the Salem witch hunt had gone too far. Some leaders doubted that one small region of Massachusetts could have so many witches. Other people thought the witch trials had gone too far after the execution of Rebecca Nurse. They couldn’t believe that a women who had always been a good Christian would work for the devil. The death of Giles Corey also upset some residents of Salem.

Rebecca Nurse’s memorial was built in

1885.

Thomas Brattle was a Boston merchant and also a scientist. He was one of the harshest critics of the witch trials. Brattle especially disliked one test used to determine if a person was a witch. In this test an afflicted person touched an accused witch. People believed that the devil’s power inside the victim would flow back into the witch and the victim would no longer be afflicted. Brattle argued that the test was a superstitious method and not scientific.

The letter that Thomas Brattle sent protesting the use of the “touch

test.”

Finally Governor Phips stopped the arrests of alleged witches. He also freed many of the accused witches and closed down the court. In January 1693 almost all of the accused witches were freed. In May, Phips pardoned all the remaining witches. The Salem witch trials marked the last major witch hunt in colonial America.

The Salem cemetery where most of the Salem witches were buried.

Several young children were accused of witchcraft. Four-year-old

Dorcas Good, daughter of Sarah Good, was the youngest. She was

released from jail.

Scientists and historians think the cause for the sickness that

afflicted Abigail Williams and Betty Parris was probably a diseases

or poisoning from a mold in the air.

By the time Governor Phips stopped the trials even his wife had

been accused of witchcraft.

One historian reported that Tituba claimed that Samuel Parris

beat her so she would confess to being a witch. Tituba was

released from jail in 1693 and went to work for a new master.

Fast Facts

Four-year-old Dorcas Good in her trial.

Images from Google Image Search.Call To Freedom. “Salem Witch Trials.” Page

108.By Sterling Stuckey and Linda Kerrigan

Salvucci.The Salem Witch Trials. By Michael Burgan.

Bibliography