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42 Overview of the Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials of 1692 were the earliest examples of mass hysteria in the country.
Introduction
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 20 people, 14 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 for witchcraft in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. 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. What happened in colonial America was not unique, but rather an example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials that occurred during the early modern period throughout England and France.
Puritan Beliefs and Witchcraft
Like many other Europeans, the Puritans of New England believed in the supernatural. Every event in the colonies appeared to be a sign of God’s mercy or judgment, and it was commonly believed that witches allied themselves with the Devil to carry out evil deeds or cause deliberate harm. Events such as the sickness or death of children, the loss of cattle, and other catastrophes were often blamed on the work of witches.
Women were more susceptible to suspicions of witchcraft because they were perceived, in Puritan society, to have weaker constitutions that were more likely to be inhabited by the Devil. Women healers with knowledge of herbal remedies—things that could often deemed “pagan” by Puritans—were particularly at risk of being accused of witchcraft.
Hundreds were accused of witchcraft including townspeople whose habits or appearance bothered their neighbors or who appeared threatening for any reason. Women made up the vast majority of suspects and those who were executed. Prior to 1692, there had been rumors of witchcraft in villages neighboring Salem Village and other towns. Cotton Mather, a minister of Boston’s North Church (not to be confused with the later Anglican North Church associated with Paul Revere), was a prolific publisher of pamphlets, including some that expressed his belief in witchcraft.
The Salem Trials
In Salem Village, in February 1692, Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, began to have fits in which they screamed, threw things, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions. A doctor could find no physical evidence of any ailment, and other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. Colonists suspected witchcraft and accusations began to spread.
The first three people accused and arrested for allegedly causing the afflictions were Sarah Good (a homeless beggar), Sarah Osborne (a woman who rarely attended church), and Tituba (an African or American Indian slave). Each of these women was a kind of outcast and exhibited many of the character traits typical of the “usual suspects” for witchcraft accusations. They were left to defend themselves.
Throughout the year, more women and some men were arrested, including citizens in good standing, and colonists began to fear that anyone could be a witch. Many of the accusers who prosecuted the suspected witches had been traumatized by the American Indian wars on the frontier and by unprecedented political and cultural changes in New England. Relying on their belief in witchcraft to help make sense of their changing world, Puritan authorities executed 20 people and caused the deaths of several others before the trials were over.
Figure 1. Map Of Salem Village, 1692
Figure 1. “Map Of Salem Village, 1692,” William Upham, Wikimedia, Public Domain.
Witch trials
The Salem Witch Trials: The Real History Behind One of the Most Terrifying Events in Colonial History
Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (Milan, Italy: 1608)
The Salem Witch trials occupy a large space in the American imagination. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Hocus Pocus, Arthur Miller to American Horror Story, American pop culture is saturated in retellings of this horrifying episode in colonial history. It is easy to feel like we’ve long known everything there is to know about it.
Above and Top: Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for witchcraft, T.H. Matteson, 1855 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
But over the last 10 years, historians have been hard at work reexamining the documentary evidence of the trials. While I was researching the event for my new unit of Women and the American Story , Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783 (debuting November 5), I learned a number of fascinating new facts that have recontextualized how I teach this history.
Nearly everything we think we know about Tituba is wrong.
It turns out 19th century writers and illustrators weren’t so keen on facts. (John W. Ehninger, Detail from “Look Into This Glass,” The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902]. HathiTrust.)
The figure of Tituba looms large in the story of the Salem Witch trials. In the popular narrative of the trials, she is the black woman enslaved by Rev. Samuel Parris. Her stories of African magic and mythology plant the idea of witchcraft in the impressionable minds of Parris’s young daughter and niece. In some retellings, Tituba actually performs small acts of magic for the girls to entertain them on long winter evenings.
The actual Tituba bore no resemblance to this popular construction. In fact, Tituba was a Native woman, not black. Every existing historical account of the trials refers to her as a Native woman, and it was not until the 19th century that she was reinvented. It is important to correct this misidentification, because the myth that she was black perpetuates the erasure of Native enslavement in the New England colonies.
Tituba did belong to the Parris household, but there is no evidence that she told stories or performed magic for the household’s young women. This was another 19th-century fabrication to enliven the story. Tituba was the first woman to confess to practicing witchcraft in Salem, and her graphic confession was the spark that lit the flames of the hysteria. But later in her life, Tituba revealed that she had confessed only because Parris beat her until she agreed to do as he said.
The wide disparity between the life of the real Tituba and the mythology that has grown up around her is a useful example of how popular depictions of historical events can become distorted over time. For Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783, I wrote a new biography of Tituba that takes current historical thinking into account (also available November 5, like the unit!). Asking students to compare the factual history of Tituba with popular depictions teaches a valuable lesson about taking all popular depictions of history with a grain of salt, and the importance of always returning to the source.
The Salem witch hysteria was not an isolated incident.
In Bermuda they resorted to trial by ordeal, and this poor woman tried to drown herself to prove her innocence. (Jeane Gardnier Trial of Witchcraft, Bermuda Importation License and Copy of 1651 May 19, 1651. New-York Historical Society Library.)
A lot of the conversation around the Salem Witch Trials is centered around figuring out how such a hysteria could have happened in the first place. Was it boredom? Cold weather? Ergot poisoning?
The trouble is, most of these theories treat the Salem hysteria as an isolated incident, when in fact it was one episode of a much larger trend that swept both Europe and the American colonies. Witch trials and executions took place in Europe from the mid-1500s, and what happened in Salem was not even the first large-scale panic in the Americas. Eleven accused witches were executed in Connecticut between 1647 and 1697 and 10 were executed in Bermuda between 1651 and 1655. Although these other such hysterias did not unfold as rapidly as the Salem witch trials, their existence indicates that Salem was not a one-time fluke. They were part of the larger European cultural landscape, and the causes were probably not so simple as a case of bad grain. Which brings us to our final point…
There were other colonial hysterias.
The 1741 trials left such an impression on the public that when David Grim made his map of New York seventy-two years later he included the sites where convicted rebels were hanged and burned at the stake. (David Grim, A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they were in the Years 1742-1743 & 1744, 1813. New-York Historical Society Library)
Only 49 years after the outbreak of the Salem witch hysteria, the people of New York City panicked over rumors of a possible slave uprising. Hundreds of men and women were arrested on hearsay evidence given by other accused conspirators, and before the end of summer 1741, thirty-four people had been executed and seventy enslaved people had been deported to the Caribbean colonies. The parallels to Salem witch trials are startling, and that isn’t just historical hindsight talking: at the height of the trials New York governor Cadwallader Colden received an anonymous letter urging him to reflect on the Salem Witch Trials and put an end to the current madness. To read an account of a black woman’s experience of these events, check out Settler Colonialism and Revolution, 1692-1783 when it goes live on November 5.
The comparisons between these two events offer tantalizing possibilities for further research and debate. What was it about life in Europe and the American colonies that spawned these kinds of crises? Was this happening on other continents or in other cultures? Have humans moved past this kind of madness, or have we simply evolved our responses to match the world we live in?
Overall, my research into the Salem witch trials reinforced that it is our job as educators to be sure we are staying abreast of the most recent developments in historical research, and to make sure we aren’t perpetuating the inaccuracies of popular culture served up as history. The truth is always more interesting than fiction, and it’s a lot more fun to learn the facts for yourself.
Written by Allyson Schettino, Associate Director of School Programs, New-York Historical Society
Background to the Witch Trials
During the medieval period, there was widespread belief in magic across Christian Europe. The medieval Roman Catholic Church, which then dominated a large swath of the continent, divided magic into two forms—natural magic, which was acceptable because it was viewed as merely taking note of the powers in nature that were created by God, and demonic magic, which was frowned upon and associated with demonology.
It was also during the medieval period that the concept of Satan, the Biblical Devil, began to develop into a more threatening form. Around the year 1000, when there were increasing fears that the end of the world would soon come in Christendom, the idea of the Devil had become prominent.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the concept of the witch in Christendom underwent a relatively radical change. No longer were witches viewed as sorcerers who had been deceived by the Devil into practicing magic that went against the powers of God. Instead they became all-out malevolent Devil-worshippers, who had made pacts with him in which they had to renounce Christianity and devote themselves to Satanism. As a part of this, it was believed that they gained new, supernatural powers that enabled them to work magic, which they would use against Christians.
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A Witch feeding her familiars
An image of a witch and her familiar spirits taken from a publication that dealt with the witch trials of Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, and Mother Margaret in Windsor, 1579.
While the witch trials only really began in the 15th century, with the start of the early modern period, many of their causes had been developing during the previous centuries, with the persecution of heresy by the medieval Inquisition during the late 12th and the 13th centuries, and during the late medieval period, during which the idea of witchcraft or sorcery gradually changed and adapted. An important turning point was the Black Death of 1348–1350, which killed a large percentage of the European population, and which many Christians believed had been caused by evil forces.
Beginnings of the Witch Trials
While the idea of witchcraft began to mingle with the persecution of heretics even in the 14th century, the beginning of the witch hunts as a phenomenon in its own right became apparent during the first half of the 15th century in southeastern France and western Switzerland, in communities of the Western Alps, in what was at the time Burgundy and Savoy.
Here, the cause of eliminating the supposed Satanic witches from society was taken up by a number of individuals; Claude Tholosan for instance had tried over two hundred people, accusing them of witchcraft in Briançon, Dauphiné, by 1420.
While early trials fall still within the late medieval period, the peak of the witch hunt was during the period of the European wars of religion, between about 1580 and 1630. Over the entire duration of the phenomenon of some three centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 100,000 people were executed.
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