In 1692, in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fourteen American women and five American men were hanged after jury trials in which they had been found guilty of being witches and having “afflicted” girls and some other members of their community, in league with the devil. Another man died while being “pressed” between boards because he stubbornly would not enter a plea. Many more died in jail of disease while awaiting their trials.
Hundreds more had been accused and sent to jail for indeterminate periods; some had been “cried out on” but not charged for various reasons, some having to do with bias of the judges or politicians.
At least fifty-five people confessed to being witches; almost all were spared execution; most named others as witches. The ones who were executed were the ones who proclaimed their innocence.
The episode dragged on until the next year, when the hysteria finally cooled. Eventually, there was the usual political backlash, an attempted cover-up, then a whitewash, and finally, an admission that it had all been a mistake. There was an apology and an attempt to provide restitution to the families of the innocent condemned victims. Substantial sums were paid out.
Today, we look back on the events in amazement, feeling superior to those ignorant superstitious people who abetted the killing, torture, and persecution of so many of their innocent neighbors. There were many causes for the “outbreak” of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem and nearby towns, a confluence of several phenomena that made it happen. It can happen again.
Although it is very unlikely that, in our enlightened age, we would fall into another spell of witchcraft mania, we certainly have and will again pursue the kind of passion that result in “witch hunts.” The tendency to seek scapegoats to blame and punish for the evils that befall us is an all too enduring human trait. A look back, therefore, may be worthwhile as lessons for us.
THE LEGAL SYSTEM
All of the trials were conducted lawfully—that is, according to the laws and customs of the time. The judges were respected and experienced jurists who were responsive and responsible to the political hierarchy, their consciences, and popular will. The community’s political leaders were democratically elected by “freemen” who also made up the juries. All these men were educated and civilized Englishmen. Although the judges weren’t trained as lawyers, they were familiar with English legal procedures and rules.
THE BACKGROUND: Economy / Climate / Wars
The settlers of the time were under great stress from all sides. After the landing at Plymouth in 1620, several settlements had been founded along the coast of Massachusetts. Each was authorized by royal charter. Unlike the Jamestown settlement, they survived and even prospered—by farming, fishing, and trade with Native tribes, with the other English colonies, and with their competitors, the French to the north in Quebec province, and as far south as the Caribbean islands.
But there were hard times, too. The climate in the 1600’s was part of what is now known as The Little Ice Age, that struck the Northern Hemisphere intermittently for three hundred years from the 1400’s. It meant bitter winters, dry summers, and consequently, as in the decade of the 1680’s, drought and famine.
There were also wars between English settlers and Natives who allied with the French to challenge the borders. Massachusetts claimed the Maine territory as part of its colony and settled it with families that migrated from Salem and its environs (Essex County).
By 1690, the French and Natives were winning the border battles, rolling back English settlements, sending the surviving families back to Salem. The remnants of those families, often widowed women and children, were impoverished and depressed, adding to the financial burden of the community. Their presence was resented by many. Some in those impoverished families soon became “afflicted” victims of witches; others were accused of being witches.
INTERNAL DISPUTES: Land / Inheritance / Status
There were also land disputes that played a role. Greed is universal and eternal. (In the 1930’s and 40’s, Europeans turned on their Jewish neighbors and Californians turned on their Japanese friends, and in both cases, property and businesses became available at panic prices.) In Salem, some long-standing land claims were settled by accusations of witchcraft.
In the seventy odd years since the founding, some families became wealthy and prominent, spawning political and religious leaders and losers, leading to inevitable jealousies. There was a complicated weaving of intermarriage among these families. There were losers among these families, too. Disfavored sons who resented successful older siblings, who had inherited greater shares of property from parents. Some daughters had bad marriages. Some granddaughters would denounce their grandparents as witches.
RELIGION AND THE LAW
Of course, the cause that seems most obvious is the religious element. The Mayflower Pilgrims of 1620 were Protestant fundamentalists who were called Puritans by their critics. Their sect was more extreme than other dissenters, demanding complete separation from, rather than merely reform of, the established Anglican Church, that they deemed to be corrupt. The Crown government was eager to get rid of them, and allowed them to emigrate to the New World, to establish a colony.
The government they set up was a theocracy, in which there was no separation between religious leaders and political government. Local laws defined violations of morals—as defined by the clergy as crimes, enforceable by punishments—from fines, to imprisonment, and death. Not only were the definitions and punishments dependent on religious interpretation, so were the rules of adjudication.
CRIMINAL TRIAL PROCEDURE
The witch trials were conducted in an open and formal way. Transcripts of most of them were preserved, so there is a record of the testimony of witnesses, the summations of prosecutors, and the rulings of judges. However, the English criminal law of the time did not give the accused the right to representation by a lawyer.
Great weight was given to confessions, and there were many, because the current practice permitted torture, and coercion by persuasion. Most persuasive was the promise that the accused witch would not be hanged if she (or he) repented by admitting guilt and naming other witches.
The strongest evidence against the accused was given by alleged victims who claimed to have been “afflicted” by the witch or the witch’s “specter.” The specter was believed to be a manifestation that a witch was able to project in order to be somewhere other than where her body was at any time.
The “affliction” might be “possession” but often it was vaguer than that. The victim, typically an adolescent girl, would seem to have inexplicable symptoms: shaking fits, sudden unconsciousness, whirling, speaking in gibberish, uncontrollable seizures. Doctors admitted they were stumped; the causes were beyond their knowledge or experience.
When in doubt about the cause of a strange phenomenon, the traditional response is to turn to God. If AIDS and Covid-19 can be ascribed to “God’s will” by many in the 21st Century, it should be no mystery why it was believed by a vast majority of Christian Europeans and their transplanted colonists in the 17th Century.
The Judeo-Christian Bible is full of references to witches as associated with Satan, devil worship, and pagan rituals. For those who believed that the words of scripture were sacred and literal truths, the existence of the devil and of witches was as real as the line between goodness and evil.
To reinforce the faith, learned ministers preached from the pulpit, using the devil and witches as more than mere metaphor for evil, but as concrete risks to those who would not follow the strict teachings of the Bible … and of course, the warnings of the Church … and its wise and saintly spokesman, the minister, himself.
In Salem, preachers warned that winter and war and drought and crop failure all were the work of the devil … or were warnings from God because of the failure of the flock to follow His laws. The Native tribesmen were called devils, and their hostility to the English settlers who had stolen their lands was considered to be the devil’s doing rather than justifiable anger.
It so happened that Church attendance at this time was falling, partly due to an influx of non-Puritans. These included Baptists and Quakers, as well as some of the hated Catholics—influenced by the hated French. There were slaves from Haiti and other French colonies, who also practiced secret pagan rituals, such as making “poppets” or what we know as voodoo dolls.
The first woman accused of being a witch in Salem was named Tituba, a South American dark-skinned slave. To save herself, she named names—of mostly elderly Puritan women. The ones she fingered were eccentric, or different in some way. Some had been gossiped about for years as possibly being witches.
Imagine a homeless, possible mentally ill old woman living on the fringes of the community. She dresses in rags, smells rank, begs for alms, and curses those who refuse to help her. She mumbles and cackles inappropriately to herself. The children make fun of her and some are afraid of her. She is probably a widow, or a spinster, possibly one who has no relatives in the town. She has no one to defend her when the accusations fly. Perhaps she even relishes the attention she gets, admits that she hates and resents and curses others.
LESSONS FOR A JUSTICE SYSTEM
I am always interested in legal history and the witch trials had some interesting evidentiary quirks.
The issue for the judges to decide was not whether witches did exist. That was a given: they certainly did, the Bible said so. There had been ample precedent for hundreds of years in Europe. England and even in the American colonies in the recent past, of instances of witchcraft.
The issue for the legal system was how to know if the accused was, in fact, a witch. For this they had use of experts who had written detailed treatises describing the appearance of witches, their habits, their associations and their rituals. They also devised tests that they hoped would conclusively prove the point.
In other parts of Christian Europe, going back to the Middle Ages, suspects had been tested by being dumped into a body of water. If they floated, it meant they were rejected by good spirits that resided in water (water being a symbol of purity, as in baptismal rites). If they stayed under, they were innocent. A defect in this test was that some defendants drowned to prove their innocence.
The “touch test” was deemed to be a more humane and rational test. It presumed that a witch who had afflicted a victim had the power to lift the affliction merely by touching the victim. These tests were done in open court. The afflicted young woman would be brought in to face the accused.
The girl would often go into her trance—begin convulsions or other actions that showed she was possessed. The accused witch was then ordered to touch her. The symptoms ceased immediately, thus proving guilt.
Remember, there were no defense lawyers to challenge this evidence. However, one skeptical judge ordered an experiment. He had the victim brought into the court blindfolded. He had her touched by someone else. She had no convulsions.
The prosecutor scoffed. The experts explained that the power of the witch required use of her “evil eye” to afflict. If blindfolded the girl was immune to the evil eye.
The judge then had another victim brought into court to face the accused. The convulsions began. Then the girl was blindfolded. She was touched by someone else. The convulsions stopped.
The prosecutor answered that obviously the girl was bewitched into believing that she had been touched by a witch.
The defendant was convicted and hanged.
The existence of witches was so ingrained in Christian culture that even one of the enlightened minds of the century was trapped by it.
Robert Boyle is considered to be the first modern chemist who championed the scientific method as a means to find the truth. He was also a theologian and spent much of his energy to try to use science to prove the existence of God. One of his efforts was to find a cure for the evil eye and the touch of witches.
He never succeeded but it shows how often faith stubbornly resists all evidence. (There are trained scientists today who stubbornly try to prove creationism and those who deny climate change.)
Another courtroom example is interesting. The judges asserted that they wanted to weed out groundless charges, to distinguish between those alleged victims who really were afflicted and those who might be faking.
There was historical precedent for fakery in this area.
In one famous case, King James I had proved that a woman who was able to spew pins from her mouth, nose, and vagina was performing tricks. In other cases—some in England, others in the colonies—girls had recanted, admitting that they had “dissembled” in order to gain some advantage, to avoid punishment, or to avenge some perceived slight.
In Salem, Mary Warren was one of the accusers. Mary was an indentured servant to John Procter and his wife. She accused them of witchcraft. She then recanted after Procter whipped her for lying. He took her before the court, and she admitted that she had made up the story.
She then accused other girls in the court of lying as well. Lying under oath, bearing false witness, was as heinous a crime as witchcraft. The girls began to writhe, screaming that Mary was bewitched.
Mary then was arrested and put in jail as were the Procters. Now that she was safe from their beatings, Mary flipped again, now claiming that Procter had bewitched her into recanting.
The judges found Mary’s testimony to be credible despite all of this, found the Procters both guilty, and hanged them.
Mary had claimed that Procter’s “specter” had beaten her and attacked her while she was in bed. Other girls made similar claims about other men.
Historians now speculate that Procter, among other men in Salem, were abusive, beating their servants regularly. There is some evidence in diaries and other writings of sexual abuse as well. If true, it suggests motives for accusations against some of the men who were among the more powerful in the community: some ministers even.
ENVIRONMENT / MYSOGYNY / PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS
Although clearly, fakery played a role in the testimony, there are other explanations that historians and modern science have explored.
Some have surmised that the rye that was used to make bread might have been infested with a spore that is known to have hallucinogenic side effects. However, the evidence for this is weak, considering that everyone in the settlement ate the bread and only certain people showed symptoms, some of which were inconsistent with that poison.
Others point to the fact that most of the accusers were girls and young women who had little or no power in the male dominated and repressive society. They were doomed to be servants or drudges. Many were orphans or children of widows, without dowries, and therefore with little hope of marriages that might improve their status.
Two of the first accusers were daughters of a prominent minister, who was famous for fire and brimstone sermons, warning that the devil was rampant in the town. He was not popular, and attendance in his church was falling—and thus his salary. His daughters were facing a bleak, frightening future. Their father encouraged their revelations, publicizing them to prove he was right.
Another man, Thomas Putnam, Jr., was responsible for accusations against thirty-five people. His wife, daughter, and a servant all claimed to be afflicted. Putnam testified on their behalf, per the law’s provision that men appeared in court to represent their women.
Putnam also had a job in the court. He transcribed many witness depositions that were read to the court in order to obtain indictments. Historians who examined them note that the wording in most of these statements is almost identical. Also, some paragraphs use different inks, suggesting they were written at a later time. The passages often embellish the claims made in the early paragraphs, suggesting that Putnam was biased and creative.
When these sorts of discrepancies are found in modern statements, such as police arrest reports, it casts substantial doubt on the veracity of the documents. The Salem courts had no trouble with any of these evidentiary problems. Perhaps allowing lawyers to intercede for the defendants might have helped.
Why did so many people show similar symptoms? Were they all faking? The symptoms of many of the victims seemed to be real enough. Were they all great actors?
Modern thought looks to other examples for medical or psychiatric explanations. For instance, in 2011, in the small upstate New York town of Le Roy, some teenage girls began showing similar bizarre symptoms: fits, tics, and other strange behavior. Although some of the girls and their families attributed the illnesses to environmental causes—nearby toxic dumps and other causes of pollution—testing eliminated those causes, partly because it only struck a few of the six hundred students at the school.
Instead, mental health experts called it “Conversion Disorder,” an ailment that had first been described in the 19th Century by pioneering psychiatrists, including Freud. The term refers to the mind’s process of dealing with mental stresses by converting them into physical ailments.
It turns out that there were many of the same stresses in 2011 Le Roy, NY, that afflicted 1692 Salem. The town was in financial trouble due to lost industry. The future for these high schoolers was cloudy. Some were from troubled homes where parents were unemployed and depressed, divorced, or on the brink of homelessness.
The ailment strikes a small percentage of the population with severe symptoms, but it is also susceptible to the power of suggestion among peer groups. This used to be called “mass hysteria,” but that is a dated term.
Now it is called “Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI).” Some event exposes symptoms in one person, perhaps an epileptic or psychotic episode. Another person, similarly situated, begins to break down and it spreads. Although they are a susceptible group due to the stresses involved and the nature of peer pressure, MPI isn’t limited to adolescents.
In 2004, a Canadian bus driver saw a Middle Eastern appearing man enter his bus. He stared at the man through the mirror as he drove. The driver became nauseous. The man apparently resented the attention. He left the bus, making a nasty remark, that the bus driver heard as: “It is going to be a bad day.”
The driver began to vomit. Passengers, including a paramedic, came to his aid. He told them what happened and what was said. They too became sick, vomiting and sweating.
The bus was examined thoroughly for evidence of “bioterrorism,” the press calling it “the toxic bus.” But none was found; rather, it was another example of MPI.
The stresses for the girls and others in Salem were immense. In that culture, children were powerless, and females especially had little to hope for improving their lot. Many of those involved had been traumatized by the wars that caused deaths of fathers. They had been terrorized by fear of Native attacks. They had heard tales of horrible atrocities by the pagans.
These children were imbued with a visceral terror of the devil and their parents and ministers had told them that the devil was on the loose, that he wanted their souls. But there were conflicting values at the time.
The fervor of the original settlers had diminished with the next generation. Trade and prosperity showed the power of materialism. Some of the stories the girls told included witches’ promises of wealth and fashionable clothes. They had weird dreams of Natives kidnapping them, stealing their clothes, enslaving them.
There is no perfect answer that explains all of the known facts of the cases. Part of the problem is that historians are dependent on the written contemporary records. That record is lengthy, including depositions, trial transcripts, diaries, articles, copies of sermons and speeches. But there are many gaps in the record. And it was long, long ago.
Any finding of fact that is based on someone’s writing depends on who did the writing. As in the case of Mr. Putnam, was he impartial, or was he biased? In recounting testimony of witnesses, the transcripts are seldom verbatim. Instead they report statements or summaries of statements made by witnesses in court.
A few question and answer transcripts show clearly that leading questions were asked, of witnesses, and in interrogation of defendants. For example:
Q: Sarah Good what evil spirit have you familiarity with?
GOOD: None.
Q: Have you made no contract with the devil?
GOOD: No.
Q: Why do you hurt these children?
GOOD: I do not hurt them. I scorn it.
Q: Who do you employ then to do it?
GOOD: I employ no body.
Q: What creature do you employ then?
GOOD: No creature but I am falsely accused.
Q: Sarah Good do you not see now what you have done why do you not tell us the truth, why do you thus torment these poor children? Good: “I do not torment them.”
Witnesses weren’t separated during testimony to preclude parroting answers. The evidence is replete with instances where one “victim’s” writhing triggered another to imitate the action, and then the others followed.
RELIGIOUS POLITICS
One of the most ardent proponents for the trials was Reverend Samuel Parris, who pressed for indictments against women accused of bewitching his wife and daughters. Parris had a strong motive to force the issue. His church had been failing, partly due to his refusal to agree to allow “halfway covenants,” which allowed people to be members of the church without fully committing themselves.
For months he had been preaching that the devil was rampant in the town and that God would punish Salem for its loss of religious purity. In the legal system of the time, men were authorized to testify for their wives and children. The trials vindicated his ministry. Certainly, his bias was so obvious that his questions to the females and his reporting of their responses to the court should have been doubted, if not held inadmissible.
DISSENTERS
The trials went on for many months. There were skeptics from the start, but they were in the minority. A few judges quit, in distaste for what they were experiencing. A few politicians began to sense that it had gone too far.
Some of the religious leaders began to question the doctrinal practice of relying on “spectral testimony” and then even doubted the use of “evil eye” and “touch test.”
Eventually, this kind of evidence was ruled inadmissible in witch trials. More people then were acquitted. Eventually, ministers began to preach that it had all been a terrible mistake. In fact, the devil had caused the guilty verdicts and hangings. Apologies were issued; restitution in the form of money was granted to families of the innocent who were hanged or died in custody.
MYTHOLOGY / IRONY
The Pilgrims, we were taught in school, fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. In the New World, they found freedom to worship as they wished. This is part of our proud heritage.
History tells us that one of the 1620 Mayflower passengers, John Alden, married another, Priscilla Mullins.
In 1858, H.W. Longfellow imagined a romantic triangle involving them and a soldier named Miles Standish.
In reality, the Aldens had ten children. One was John Alden, Jr., who, in 1692, was one of those convicted of witchcraft.
Bathsheba Pope was a Quaker who lived among the Puritans in Salem. Bathsheba and her husband Joseph had been persecuted by the Puritans for their religious differences. To spite them, the Popes claimed to have been “afflicted” by the specters of three Puritans, including John Procter.
In 1953, Arthur Miller used Procter as a character in his drama, “The Crucible,” which he saw as a parable about the McCarthy Era red-baiting. In 1996, Daniel Day-Lewis played him in the movie. In reality, all three of those accused by the Mr. and Mrs. Pope were hanged.)
In another historical irony, Bathsheba’s sister, Abiah, became Benjamin Franklin’s mother. Ben, born 1706, sixteen years after the witch trials ended, became known as a leader of the American Enlightenment in the 18th Century.
Thus, only one generation separated an aunt and uncle who condemned witches from their nephew who became the next century’s vocal proponent of reason, law, and science.
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