Salem Witch Trials

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of twenty people, fourteen of them women, and all but one by hanging. Five others (including two infant children) died in prison.

Twelve other women had previously been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. Despite being generally known as the Salem Witch Trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns: Salem Village (now Danvers), Salem Town, Ipswich, and Andover. The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town.

The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.^[1] It was not unique, but a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place also in Europe. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent United States history. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered."^[2]

At the 300th anniversary events in 1992 to commemorate the victims of the trials, a park was dedicated in Salem and a memorial in Danvers. In November 2001, an act passed by the Massachusetts legislature, exonerated 5 people ^[3], while another one, passed in 1957, had previously exonerated 6 other victims. ^[4] As of 2004 there was still talk about exonerating all the victims ^[5], though some think that happened in the 19th century as the Massachusetts colonial legislature was asked to reverse the attainders of “George Burroughs and others” ^[6]. In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its Gallows Hill Project team had determined the execution site in Salem, where the nineteen "witches" had been hanged. The city owns the site and is planning to establish a memorial to the victims.^[7]

• 1Background
  • 1.1Claimed witchcraft executions in New England
  • 1.2Political context
  • 1.3Local context
  • 1.4Religious context
  • 1.5Local rumors of witchcraft
• 2Timeline
  • 2.1Initial events
  • 2.2Accusations and examinations before local magistrates
  • 2.3Formal prosecution: The Court of Oyer and Terminer
  • 2.4September 1692
  • 2.5Superior Court of Judicature, 1693
• 3Legal procedures
  • 3.1Overview
  • 3.2Spectral evidence
  • 3.3Witch cake
  • 3.4Touch test
  • 3.5Other evidence
  • 3.6Contemporary commentary on the trials
• 4Aftermath and closure
  • 4.1Reversals of attainder and compensation to the survivors and their families
  • 4.2Memorials by descendants
• 5In literature, media and popular culture
• 6Medical theories about the reported afflictions
• 7See also
• 8References
• 9Bibliography
• 10Further reading
• 11External links

Background

Further information: Protests against early modern witch trials

Whilst the witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued on the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies. The events in 1692/1693 in Salem became a brief outburst of a sort of hysteria in the New World, while the practice was already waning in most of Europe.

In Against Modern Sadducism (1668) ^[8]^, Joseph Glanvill claimed that he could prove the existence of witches and ghosts of the supernatural realm. Glanvill wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection, and the [supernatural] spirits."^[9]

In his treatise, Glanvill claimed that ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions; if they doubted the reality of spirits, they not only denied demons, but also the almighty God. Glanvill wanted to prove that the supernatural could not be denied; those who did deny apparitions were considered heretics for it also disproved their beliefs in angels.^[9] Works by men such as Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to prove that "demons were alive."^[10]

Claimed witchcraft executions in New England

The earliest recorded witchcraft execution was that of Alse Young in 1647 in Hartford, Connecticut. Historian Clarence F. Jewett included a list of other people executed in New England in The Memorial History of Boston: Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts 1630–1880 (Ticknor and Company, 1881).^[11]

Political context

Governor SirWilliam Phips(1651–1695)

New England had been settled by religious refugees seeking to build a pure, Bible-based society.^[] They lived closely with the sense of the supernatural. The original 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was vacated in 1684,^[12] after which King James II installed Sir Edmund Andros as the Governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after the "Glorious Revolution" in England replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant co-rulers William and Mary.

Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Danforth, the colony's last leaders under the old charter, resumed their posts as governor and deputy governor, but lacked constitutional authority to rule, because the old charter had been vacated. At the same time, tensions erupted between English colonists settling in "the Eastward" (the present-day coast of Maine) and French-supported Wabanaki Indians of that territory in what came to be known as King William's War. This was thirteen years after the devastating King Philip's War with the Wampanoag and other indigenous tribes in southern and western New England.[citation ^needed] In October 1690, Sir William Phips led an unsuccessful attack on French-held Quebec. Between 1689 and 1692, Native Americans continued to attack many English settlements along the Maine coast, leading to the abandonment of some of the settlements, and resulting in a flood of refugees into areas like Essex County.^[]

A new charter for the enlarged Province of Massachusetts Bay was given final approval in England on October 16, 1691.^[13] News of the appointment of Phips as the new governor reached Boston in late January,^[14] and a copy of the new charter reached Boston on February 8, 1692.^[15] Phips arrived in Boston on May 14^[16] and was sworn in as governor two days later, along with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton.^[17] One of the first orders of business for the new governor and council on May 27, 1692, was the formal nomination of county justices of the peace, sheriffs, and the commission of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the large numbers of people who were "thronging" the jails.^[18]

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have postulated that without a valid charter, the colony had no legitimate form of government to try capital cases until Phips arrived with the new charter.^[19] This has been disputed by David Konig. He points out that between charters, according to the Records of the Court of Assistants, the colony tried and condemned a group of fourteen pirates on January 27, 1690, for acts of piracy and murder committed in August and October 1689.^[20]

Local context...

Salem witch trials - Wikipedia

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Multimedia:

Episode #187- What Bewitched Salem? (Part I)Our Fake History Part 2 of 3