But guilt over this grizzly episode gradually ate into the New England conscience, and in 1697 Massachusetts held a public fast to mourn the blood that had been unjustly shed.Ī descendant of one of the witchcraft judges, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), dwelt in his writings on hidden guilt-sexual, moral, and psychological. In this selection, written a year after the Salem episode, Cotton Mather (1663-1728), one of New England's leading Puritan theologians, defends the trials, depicting New England as a battleground where the forces of God and the forces of Satan will clash. Further, they had drawn the word salem from Jerusalem, hoping that this new village would serve as a foundation for a new Jerusalem. The word 'salem' means peace, and the town's founders had hoped that Salem would be a village of peace.

The witch trials offer a window into the anxieties and social tensions that accompanied New England's increasing integration into the Atlantic economy.įor the educated Puritan elite, there was double irony in the fact that the witch scare erupted in Salem. It drew upon preexisting rivalries and disputes within the rapidly-growing Massachusetts port town: between urban and rural residents between wealthier commercially-oriented merchants and subsistence-oriented farmers and between Congregationalists and other religious denominations: Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers. The Salem witch scare had complex social roots. Further, the court permitted the use of psychological pressure and even torture to obtain confessions and ruled that anyone who confessed, identified fellow witches, and repented would go free.

The special court set up in Salem allowed the use of 'spectral evidence': testimony from victims of a vision that they had of the person who was tormenting them.

But when England revoked Massachusetts's charter in 1685, it threw the judicial system into disarray. In previous witch trials, judges had imposed high standards of proof which resulted in a majority of the accused being acquitted. What was unique about the Salem witch trials was the number of people who were accused and convicted. During the seventeenth century, some 32 people were executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. In the half century before the Salem trials, more than 80 people were put on trial for witchcraft in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone. Constitution, a Philadelphia mob killed an accused witch.

As late as 1787, outside of Independence Hall where the framers were drafting the U.S. In continental Europe, where witch hunts were much more common than in America, thousands of people were executed, often isolated and impoverished older women who were regarded as a drain on community resources. The Salem witch trials were not a unique event. Most people in the early modern world believed in the existence of witches who gained supernatural power by signing a pact with Satan.

The wonders of the invisible world