FILED · 1692 · REFORMED · HISTORICAL

The Salem Witch Trials

A nine-month panic in colonial Massachusetts produced more than 200 accusations of witchcraft and the executions of twenty people — nineteen by hanging and one pressed to death — before the colonial governor halted the proceedings.

Reformed · Reformation · Historical violence

What happened

Beginning in January 1692 in Salem Village (now Danvers) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a group of young women and girls began to exhibit fits, contortions, and complaints of being tormented by unseen assailants. The local Puritan minister, Samuel Parris, and consulting physicians attributed the symptoms to witchcraft.

Over the following nine months, more than 200 people across Essex County were accused of witchcraft. The colonial governor, William Phips, established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the accusations. The court admitted spectral evidence — testimony that the accuser had been tormented by a spectral apparition of the accused — which under contemporary Puritan demonology was understood to indicate that the accused had given Satan permission to use her likeness, and was therefore in a covenant with him.

Between June and September 1692, the court tried and convicted twenty-eight people of witchcraft. Nineteen were executed by hanging: Bridget Bishop (10 June); Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes (19 July); George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Jacobs Sr., and John Proctor (19 August); and Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary Parker (22 September). Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death with stones on 19 September in an attempt to compel him to plead. At least five additional accused individuals died in prison.

In October 1692, the Reverend Increase Mather published Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, an influential argument against the admissibility of spectral evidence. Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer on 29 October. The successor Superior Court of Judicature tried the remaining accused but without spectral evidence; almost all were acquitted, and Phips pardoned those who had been convicted.

Subsequent acknowledgement

In 1697, the Massachusetts colonial legislature declared 14 January a day of public fasting in penitence for the trials. The trial judge Samuel Sewall publicly confessed his error on that day from a pew at the Old South Meeting House. The Reverend John Hale published A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in 1702, the first systematic Puritan-internal critique of the proceedings.

In 1711, the legislature passed a bill restoring the civil rights of the convicted and providing limited financial reparation to surviving families. Some of the convicted were not formally exonerated until 1957; the last five — Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott — were exonerated by the Massachusetts legislature on 31 October 2001.

Significance

Salem is the founding case of American jurisprudence on the failure of legal proceedings under public panic, the founding case of American jurisprudence on inadmissibility of unreviewable testimonial evidence, and the most studied single episode of witchcraft prosecution in the Anglophone historical record. The conventional understanding that mass witch-burnings occurred at Salem is a common misconception: the executions were by hanging, except for Giles Corey's pressing. None of the accused was burned.

The trials occurred under the doctrinal authority of the Puritan Congregational ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The historical responsibility of the colonial Puritan religious establishment for the proceedings was acknowledged at the time, in subsequent legislative and ministerial acts of reparation, and in modern scholarship.

Sources

  • Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
  • Bernard Rosenthal et al. (eds.), Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Comprehensive court records.
  • Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown, 2015).
  • Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (1693).
  • John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (1702).
  • Resolve of the Massachusetts General Court, exoneration of remaining convicted Salem defendants, 31 October 2001.