Ann Putnam was one of the influential figures in the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. She was born in 1679 to Thomas Putnam and Ann Carr Putnam, and was only twelve years old at the beginning of the hysteria that would grip the town. During the witch trials, Ann Putnam played a significant role by accusing several individuals of practicing witchcraft. She was among the first to accuse people such as Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, leading to their arrests and subsequent trials. Ann's accusations were fueled by her own personal experiences and beliefs. Ann Putnam's family was deeply involved in the trials, with her father, Thomas Putnam, being one of the leading accusers and her mother, Ann Carr Putnam, also making accusations.
Nurse denied all of their accusations and was actually found not guilty at the end of her trial in June of 1692. However, upon reading the verdict in the courtroom, the afflicted girls began to suffer fits and Chief Justice William Stoughton asked the jury to reconsider their decision.
In September, the afflicted girls visited Gloucester, at the invitation of Ebenezer Babson, whose mother was complaining of seeing spectral visions of Indians and French soldiers. The deposition of Ann Putnam, Jr, who testifieth and saith that on the 13th March, 1691 92, I saw the apparition of Goody Nurse, and she did immediately afflict me, but I did not know what her name was then, though I knew where she used to sit in our meetinghouse.
Ann Putnam's family was deeply involved in the trials, with her father, Thomas Putnam, being one of the leading accusers and her mother, Ann Carr Putnam, also making accusations. It is believed that the Putnam family had personal vendettas and deep-seated rivalries with some of those accused, which may have influenced their involvement in the trials. Ann Putnam herself claimed to have been afflicted by the spirits of the accused witches.
Thomas, Ann (Sr.), and Ann (Jr.) Putnam Home, Site(s) of
The Thomas Putnam family of Salem Village, who were principal accusers during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692, lived on the southwest side of Hathorne Hill in 1692.
Danielle Drive, Danvers, MA, USA
Danielle Drive, Danvers, MA, USA
More About Thomas, Ann (Sr.), and Ann (Jr.) Putnam Home, Site(s) of
Three principal accusers during the Salem witch trials in 1692 were members of the Putnam family: Sergeant Thomas Putnam (1652-1699), his wife Ann (Carr) Putnam (1661-1699), and their oldest daughter Ann Jr. (1680-1716). At the time of the trials, the Putnam clan owned hundreds of acres in the western part of Salem Village, on and around Hathorne Hill (originally settled by William Hathorne, father of Court of Oyer and Terminer judge John Hathorne). Thomas and his family were living in a house on the southwest side of the hill, while his brother Edward and his half-brother Joseph both lived nearby.
Thomas Putnam (Jr.) was from the third generation of Putnams in Salem Village. He was the eldest son of Thomas Putnam (Sr.), who himself was the eldest son of John Putnam, one of the founders of Salem Village who had arrived from England in the 1640s. The Putnams were a powerful and wealthy family, yet by the 1690s, Thomas Putnam was seeing his prospects diminish as property continued to be divided with each generation. He watched as neighbors like the Porters and the Nurses, who lived closer to Salem Town, became more prosperous. Thomas Putman had also aligned himself with the new village minister in 1689, Samuel Parris, a man who did not have everyone’s support. Disagreements about the minister’s wage, and firewood, and ownership of the parsonage caused ongoing division in the community.
Perhaps Thomas Putnam resented his neighbors’ successes, both economically and politically. Something drove him, along with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, to accuse neighbors, and strangers, with practicing witchcraft. Many of their accusations resulted in the execution of innocent people.
Twenty-six-year-old Thomas married Ann Carr of Salisbury, MA, the youngest of ten children, in 1678. She was 17 years old. The couple lived in Salem Village after their marriage, on a 150-acre farm bordered by the Ipswich River, given to them by Thomas’ father. Early in their married life, a community disagreement was brewing. At that time, Ann’s sister Mary was married to James Bailey (aka Bayley), Salem Village’s first minister. As would happen over and over, the village disagreed over their minister’s leadership, and the newly-married Putnams found themselves on the opposite “side” from some of their neighbors. Bailey left the village. More factionalism was to come.
Ann Sr. was at the center of the witchcraft delusion, along with her husband. Like many women in the seventeenth century, Ann Sr. had suffered trauma in her life, losing some of her siblings at an early age, losing children of her own, and watching as her sisters lost infants. In 1692, Ann had recently lost a child and was pregnant again. She was also fearful, like many, of native and French attacks. The tragedies she’d suffered, and her fear, may have caused her visions of ghosts and witches. It was Ann Sr. who often encouraged her young daughter Ann to name names.
The “afflictions” of young girls in Salem Village began in the winter of 1692, in the parsonage, with 9-year-old Betty Parris, daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams. Other neighborhood girls soon joined in. By March, the Reverend had removed his daughter from the environment, sending her to live with friends in Salem Town. Once Betty was gone, 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr. became the “leader” of a group of 17-to-20-year-old girls, young and older women, and even men, as the accusations escalated. Although there were other Putnam siblings, only Ann appears in the records as an accuser. Why would a 12-year-old-girl claim her neighbors, and strangers, were practicing witchcraft?
It was often her parents who encouraged Ann’s identification of “witches,” so she may have been used as a tool of revenge against their perceived enemies. People gathered at the Putnam house to discuss the presence of witches in their midst, so Ann likely heard all of the latest gossip. Reverend Parris constantly warned of evil in his sermons, frightening many of his parishioners, including young and impressionable children. Young girls in the seventeenth century were invisible and had no power, but the “afflicted” girls became the center of attention and wielded great influence. The feeling had to be addictive. Once the accusations grew, and more people were caught up in the fear, one can imagine how impossible it was to regain control of the situation.
Whatever her motives, Ann Putnam Jr. accused 18 of the 20 people who were eventually executed, and more than 40 more who were jailed.
In 1699, an unknown illness killed both of her parents within two weeks of each other. Thomas was 46-years-old. Ann Sr. was 36. Ann Putnam Jr. was left to raise her siblings. In 1706, with encouragement from Salem Village’s new minister Joseph Green, Ann stood in front of the village congregation while Green read her apology aloud, which included these words:
“And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused.”
Ann died, unmarried, at the age of 36, in 1716.
Another person in the Putnam household who was at the center of the accusations was family servant Mercy Lewis. She was a core member of the Salem Village girls who were in attendance at many of the examinations, almost as active an accuser as Ann Putnam Jr. She was one of the earliest to join the accusing group, experiencing afflictions by March.
Mercy, 17-years-old in 1692, was one of the accusers who had experienced native attacks in Maine as a small child. In 1676, when just a toddler, a Wabanaki attack in Falmouth, Maine, killed her grandparents, uncles, and cousins. She and her parents survived by fleeing to an island, along with their minister, George Burroughs. After the attack, Burroughs moved to Salisbury, MA and would later be hired as the second minister in Salem Village (a position he held from 1681-1683). The Lewis family moved to Salem Town for a short time, before returning to Casco Bay in 1683. In 1689, Mercy was orphaned at the age of 16 when her parents were killed in another native attack. She may have lived for a short time, as a servant, in the house of George Burroughs, also back in Maine after his short-lived ministry in Salem Village. Mercy eventually moved south again and became a servant in the home of Thomas and Ann Putnam.
Mercy Lewis’ traumatic past likely colored her behavior. When Martha Corey visited the Putnam home in March, inquiring why she had been falsely accused of witchcraft, Mercy’s torments were so strong that, according to Marilynne Roach in The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege, “two or three men were needed to restrain her.” It took several strong men to keep her from being pulled, invisibly, into the fire. In April, she had a vision of bright light. Was this an angel of God, or the devil in disguise? She once saw the specter of Reverend Burroughs, a man she’d known since childhood, who now, she claimed, told her he was working for the devil himself.
Burroughs was eventually arrested and brought to Salem Town for questioning. Before his May 9 examination, Mercy said she had been abducted by Burroughs and shown the kingdoms of the world from a mountain top, all of which, he said, could be hers if she made a pact with the devil. Mercy was also afflicted by the specter of Mary Easty in May. By this time, she may have left the employ of Thomas Putnam and was working for his cousin, Constable John Putnam Jr.; at least, a significant event took place at Constable Putnam’s home.
The accused Mary Easty, arrested on April 21, had been released from jail after about a month when the afflicted girls could no longer definitively identify her as their tormentor at a subsequent examination. Only Mercy Lewis continued to accuse her. Writhing and choking in bed at the Constable’s home, and crying out “Pray for the salvation of my soul,” Mercy was visited by some of the other girls – Ann Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams, and Mary Walcott – who identified Easty and John Willard as her tormentors. More neighbors gathered around to keep vigil, fearing Mercy would die from her seizures. She survived, slowly recovering after Mary Easty was re-arrested and placed in chains, after only a few days of freedom. According to historian Mary Beth Norton, in her book In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, “Essentially, single-handedly, Mercy Lewis had prevented Easty from being freed, a development that underscores her leadership of the sufferers.”
Mercy Lewis’ torments continued into 1693. Two years later, she bore a child out of wedlock in New Hampshire, and later married a man named Allen and moved to Boston.
In 1692, the Thomas Putnam family lived on the southwest side of Hathorne Hill, approximately in the area of what is today Danielle Drive. (For many years, a house that stands back from Putnam Lane was misidentified as the Putnam House, but was likely built circa 1891.) Shortly after the trials were over, the family built a new house farther up the hill, in the general area of what is today Dayton and Maple Streets. It was here that the family was living when Thomas and Ann Sr. died in 1699, and here where Ann Putnam Jr. raised her siblings.
In Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", the reader is able to learn about the trials and tribulations of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In the play, a "death-ridden" woman named Ann Putnam is introduced as obsessed with the deaths of her seven babies, none of which lived past infancy. She eventually has another child, Ruth, but neglects Ruth's needs because she is so obsessed with her loss. A gossiping, inconsiderate, hateful woman, Ann lives to sensationalize usual events and stir up as much drama as possible, using personal vengeance against townspeople to create wild accusations which had no basis in truth. Mrs. Putnam shows her flair for melodrama and bitter nature by lashing out at undeserving people like Rebecca Nurse and Goody Osbourne. She is jealous of these two women because Rebecca has healthy children and grandchildren and Goody was a midwife to her during three pregnancies. She proves she does not actually care for the sickness Betty Parris endures by only asking about how high she flew the moment she enters the room, rather than showing concern for her health. She makes ferocious accusations against her neighbors for seemingly no reason other than her dislike for them. She seems almost giddy when she learns that her former midwife has been accused and will likely be put to death. In part due to Ann Putnam's taste for drama, the Salem Witch Trials were able to capitalize on the frantic fear of witchcraft and more than twenty people ended up hanged or dead.
She would exhibit unusual fits and convulsions, allegedly caused by the witches' curses. Her testimonies, along with those of other young girls who experienced similar symptoms, were given great weight in the trials. The afflicted girls would accuse those believed to be witches and provide detailed accounts of their alleged interactions with the devil. However, in later years, Ann Putnam would publicly express remorse for her involvement in the witch trials. She admitted that she had been misled by her parents and others in making false accusations. She asked for forgiveness and stated that she had been deceived by powerful figures in the community who manipulated her and others for their own purposes. The life of Ann Putnam, like many others involved in the Salem Witch Trials, illustrates the devastating consequences of mass hysteria and the dangers of unchecked accusations. Her story serves as a reminder of the importance of skepticism and critical thinking, especially in times of fear and uncertainty. The events of the Salem Witch Trials continue to resonate as a cautionary tale and a dark chapter in American history..
Reviews for "The Influence of Ann Putnam's Family on Her Involvement in the Salem Witch Trials"
1. John - 1 star - I found "Ann Putnam's Salem Witch Life" to be a boring and poorly written book. The storyline was confusing and there were too many unnecessary details that didn't contribute to the overall plot. The characters lacked depth and I didn't feel any connection to them. Overall, I was disappointed with this book and would not recommend it to others.
2. Sarah - 2 stars - "Ann Putnam's Salem Witch Life" had an interesting premise but failed to deliver a captivating story. The pacing was slow and the writing style was monotonous, making it hard for me to stay engaged. The author's attempts at creating suspense fell flat, as the plot became predictable and lacked any surprises. While the historical context was fascinating, I felt like the book didn't explore it enough. Overall, it fell short of my expectations.
3. Mark - 1 star - I had high hopes for "Ann Putnam's Salem Witch Life" but I was sorely disappointed. The writing style was dry and unappealing, making it difficult for me to get through the pages. The characters felt one-dimensional and lacked personality, making it hard for me to care about their fates. Additionally, the book seemed to drag on with unnecessary descriptions that added little to the overall story. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for an engaging read.