Chasity Keulemans

Scared Parents and Bored Teenagers 

            I chose the Salem Witch Trials for my research post.  I have always heard of the mass hysteria that occurred so long ago.  I have watched so many movies and read a few books that portray this time in history as a time of great secrecy and fear.  I have seen movies portray these witch trials as a simple accusation, a possible point of a finger, and all of a sudden, you are a witch.  I want to know what started this mass hysteria and placed these God fearing colonists into such a massive uproar.

            I began to read about all of the events that came together to cause such a calamity.   When you combine what happened over the months that led up to this trial you begin to see frightened people lashing out at the unknown.  A new pastor had been hired to work in Salem and his daughter began having strange fits.  The pastor brought an Indian slave with him and she began telling tales of voodoo and omens from her native folklore.  Cotton Mather also had just written a book about witchcraft.  All of these things started to come together and cause a great uproar in the town.  Many other young girls (playmates of the pastor’s daughter) also began to have fits, and when the town doctor could not explain what was causing their illness, he simply suggested that their problems had a supernatural origin.  In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected condition of the girls became an obsession. Cotton Mather had written a book called Memorable Provinces describing the suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's behavior in some ways was the same as the person described in Mather's book. 

The Indian slave (Tituba) having been close to the children and talking of voodoo and the supernatural was the first to be accused of witchcraft.  Two other women were also accused.  The women went before the county magistrates, who scheduled examinations for the suspected witches for March 1, 1692.  It was normal for the magistrates to ask these same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had they seen Satan? How, if they were not witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates that the magistrates thought the women guilty.  The whole thing may have blown over if it hadn’t been for Tituba.  After sticking to her story through several hours of questioning, she began telling an elaborate story about being a witch and flying through the forest on poles with the other two accused.  She even goes as far as to say that she had tried to go to the Reverend for counsel, but her path had been blocked by the devil.  No one knows why she flipped like this; speculation is that she thought that she was going to be used as a scapegoat.  Whatever her reason, her confession helped to quiet most cynics, and local ministers began witch hunting with zeal.

Many girls begin to accuse all sorts of people and the jails become full of innocent victims.  Dorcas Good, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, was the first child accused of witchcraft when three girls said that they were bitten by the specter of Dorcas.  Dorcas spent eight months in jail and watched her mother hanged at the gallows.   Stuck in jail with the testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted, suspects began to see confession as a way out.  With the jails reaching capacity something had to be done.  Governor Phelps, having just returned from England came up with a system for the trial of Witches.  Evidence that would be excluded from modern courtrooms, hearsay, gossip, stories, was generally admitted. Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking in Salem: accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify under oath on their behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal.  Defendants could, however, speak for themselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers.  The degree to which defendants in Salem were able to take advantage of their modest protections varied considerably, depending on their own acuteness and their influence in the community.   Persons who scoffed at accusations of witchcraft risked becoming targets of accusations themselves.  By the end of 1692, doubts were emerging as to how so many trustworthy people could be witches. Reverend John Hale said, “It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil's lap at once."  The educated people of the colony began efforts to end the witch-hunting hysteria that had shrouded Salem. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, published what has been called "America's first tract on evidence," a work entitled Cases of Conscience, which argued that it "were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned."  By the time the witch-hunt ended, nineteen convicted witches were executed, at least four accused witches had died in prison, and one man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death. About one to two hundred other persons were arrested and imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Two dogs were even executed as suspected familiars of witches.  

            I found that from June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, who were all convicted of witchcraft, were taken to Gallows Hill for hanging.  Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to go to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens suffered in jail for months without trials.  Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria ended.  I think that these people were more afraid of the devil than anything else.  I think that even though there are several causes for the Salem witch trials, one can obviously see that the main cause of the witch trials was scared parents and bored teenagers.

Bibliography

Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraftsand Possessions (1689).

    (n.d.). School of Law | University of Missouri-Kansas City. Retrieved March 22, 2012, from

         http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/

SALEM VILLAGE RECORD BOOK Transcription published in installments in The Historical

    Collections of the Danvers Historical Society, 1924-1931 . (n.d.). University of Virginia    

        Library. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public

The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. (n.d.). UMKC School of Law. Retrieved March 24, 2012,

    from http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ft