Salem witch trials - Hysteria, Accusations, Executions (2024)

On May 27, 1692, after weeks of informal hearings accompanied by imprisonments, Sir William Phips (also spelled Phipps), the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, interceded and ordered the convening of an official Court of Oyer (“to hear”) and Terminer (“to decide”) in Salem Town. Presided over by William Stoughton, the colony’s lieutenant governor, the court consisted of seven judges. The accused were forced to defend themselves without aid of counsel. Most damning for them was the admission of “spectral evidence”—that is, claims by the victims that they had seen and been attacked (pinched, bitten, contorted) by spectres of the accused, whose forms Satan allegedly had assumed to work his evil. Even as the accused testified on the witness stand, the girls and young women who had accused them writhed, whimpered, and babbled in the gallery, seemingly providing evidence of the spectre’s demonic presence. Those who confessed—or who confessed and named other witches—were spared the court’s vengeance, owing to the Puritan belief that they would receive their punishment from God. Those who insisted upon their innocence met harsher fates, becoming martyrs to their own sense of justice. Many in the community who viewed the unfolding events as travesties remained mute, afraid that they would be punished for raising objections to the proceedings by being accused of witchcraft themselves.

On June 2 Bridget Bishop—who had been accused and found innocent of witchery some 12 years earlier—was the first of the defendants to be convicted. On June 10 she was hanged on what became known as Gallows Hill in Salem Village. On July 19 five more convicted persons were hanged, including Nurse and Good (the latter of whom responded to her conviction by saying that she was no more a witch than the judge was a wizard). George Burroughs, who had served as a minister in Salem Village from 1680 to 1683, was summoned from his new home in Maine and accused of being the witches’ ringleader. He too was convicted and, along with four others, was hanged on August 19. As he stood on the gallows, he recited the Lord’s Prayer perfectly—something no witch was thought to be capable of doing—raising doubts about his guilt for some in attendance, though their protests were refuted, most notably by Mather, who was present. (Mather’s role in the trials in general was complex, as he at various times seemingly both condoned and questioned aspects of the proceedings.) On September 22 eight more convicted persons were hanged, including Martha Corey, whose octogenarian husband, Giles, upon being accused of witchcraft and refusing to enter a plea, had been subjected to peine forte et dure (“strong and hard punishment”) and pressed beneath heavy stones for two days until he died.

As the trials progressed, accusations spread to individuals from other communities, among them, Beverly, Malden, Gloucester, Andover, Lynn, Marblehead, Charlestown, and Boston. On October 3 Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather, an influential minister and the president of Harvard, condemned the use of spectral evidence and instead favoured direct accusations:

The devil never assists men to do supernatural things undesired. When, therefore, such like things shall be testified against the accused party, not by specters, which are devils in the shape of persons either living or dead, but by real men or women who may be credited, it is proof enough that such a one has that conversation and correspondence with the devil as that he or she, whoever they be, ought to be exterminated from among men. This notwithstanding I will add: It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.

On October 29, as the accusations of witchcraft extended to include his own wife, Governor Phips once again stepped in, ordering a halt to the proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. In their place he established a Superior Court of Judicature, which was instructed not to admit spectral evidence. Trials resumed in January and February, but of the 56 persons indicted, only 3 were convicted, and they, along with everyone held in custody, had been pardoned by Phips by May 1693 as the trials came to an end. Nineteen persons had been hanged, and another five (not counting Giles Corey) had died in custody.

Aftermath and legacy

In the years to come, there would be individual and institutional acts of repentance by many of those involved in the trials. In January 1697 the General Court of Massachusetts declared a day of fasting and contemplation for the tragedy that had resulted from the trials. That month, Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, publicly acknowledged his own error and guilt in the proceedings. In 1702 the General Court declared that the trials had been unlawful. In 1706 Ann Putnam, Jr., apologized for her role as an accuser. Twenty-two of the 33 individuals who had been convicted were exonerated in 1711 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which also paid some £600 to the families of the victims. In 1957 the state of Massachusetts formally apologized for the trials. It was not until 2001, however, that the last 11 of the convicted were fully exonerated.

The abuses of the Salem witch trials would contribute to changes in U.S. court procedures, playing a role in the advent of the guarantee of the right to legal representation, the right to cross-examine one’s accuser, and the presumption of innocence rather than of guilt. The Salem trials and the witch hunt as metaphors for the persecution of minority groups remained powerful symbols into the 20th and 21st centuries, owing in no small measure to playwright Arthur Miller’s use in The Crucible (1953) of the events and individuals from 1692 as allegorical stand-ins for the anticommunist hearing led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.