The Salem Witch Trials

To see how these elements come together, a recital of the facts is in order. Between May and October of 1692, 20 women and men in Salem, Massachusetts, were executed for witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged; one 80-year-old man was crushed to death by stones. What appears to have begun with ghost stories told to adolescent girls by a slave named Tituba metamorphosed into eight girls' accusations that they had been bewitched. At the urging of Salem clergymen, a special court of judges was convened to investigate and prosecute, and the scope of accusation and denunciation enlarged dramatically, with neighbors, family members, servants, and masters denouncing one another.

Multiple explanations have been offered for the Salem witch trials: mass hysteria, a project of grabbing, land, personal property, and/or social prestige in the religious community of Salem, hallucinogenic eff

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nn Putnam, and others) "were afflicted with unknown 'distempers.'" Caporeal's account is that Parris summoned doctors who could find no somatic cause, one eventually suggesting witchcraft as the culprit. The whole matter might have been dropped, but one of Parris's neighbors aided his slave "in the concocting of a 'witch cake' in order to determine if witchcraft was present." That slave's name was Tituba. After the cake episode the girls started making violent accusations, starting with Tituba and parishioners Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn, then Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, and soon extending to Giles Corey, Martha's husband, and farther afield. Tituba, fearful of prosecution and otherwise unsophisticated, testified to being approached by Satan. Lindner's view is that Tituba's confession "silence[d] most skeptics, and Parris and other local ministers began witch hunting with zeal." By this time Massachusetts Bay Governor Sir William Phips, lately arrived from England, had appointed judges well acquainted with Cotton Mather, chief among them William Stoughton, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Samuel Sewall. There is a monotone character to the Salem trial transcripts. People who criticized the trials were accused, and the
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