Hanging the Innocent in Salem, Massachusetts

An 1853 painting depicts an accused woman being examined during one of the Salem witch trials.

Sarah Good insisted on being heard. Given the chance to save her soul by confessing herself a witch, she spat at the presiding minister: “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!” Good was hanged along with four other women on this date in 1692, July 19, in the first mass execution of what would become known at the Salem witch trials.

The first recorded witch hunts in Europe occurred in the eleventh century, and the persecutions were often associated with plagues, famines, and political upheavals. The Reformation produced the Great European Witch Hunt—actually many separate hunts—which began in France and Switzerland in 1428. Over the next two centuries, the hunts spread through Germany and central Europe, resulting in the torture and execution of thousands, mostly women.

The English were never keen on witch hunts, though English law condemned witches to death in accordance with Biblical injunctions. The persecution of witches was likewise sporadic in the American colonies and practically unknown outside of New England. Witch hunting was on the wane in Europe and America at the time the Salem hysteria broke out.

What sparked the frenzy? The answer will never be known for certain. New England in the late seventeenth century was in transition from the communal, faith-drenched idealism of the first generation of settlers to a more commercial, materialistic, and competitive society. Envy and land hunger were infecting families of unequal economic status; factions were growing increasingly contentious. Sexual repression, the constricted role of women in Puritan society, and the ongoing threat of violence from nearby Indians probably also played a role.

Why Salem? The village of 550 (today known as Danvers) was a fishing and trading port on the shore of Massachusetts Bay. In the 1690s merchants were gaining increasing power, while farmers, including the influential Putnam family, were losing influence. The town was noted for its animosities. Three ministers had been hired and fired at the local church during the previous two decades. The fourth, Samuel Parris, struggled to deal with the factional community. He would play a central role in the trials.

Parris’s daughter Betty, 9, his niece Abigail Williams, 11, and Ann Putnam, 12, were among the first children afflicted by what would come to be seen as witchcraft. Some said their imaginations had been inflamed by the stories of Tituba, an Indian slave in the Parris household who had been raised in Barbados, though there is no hard evidence of this. Along with other village children, these young people made accusations against more than 40 witches, including many enemies of the Putnam clan.

At first the girls’ hysterical afflictions were mysterious. They “were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves,” according to Rev. John Hale, who was called in from nearby Beverly as an expert on witchcraft.

By the end of February 1692 accusations of witchcraft had been made against Tituba, a Salem beggar woman named Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, a woman of declining fortunes who had neglected to attend church services.

That witches existed was a commonplace that few questioned. The law was clear: Anyone proven a witch was to be put to death. Absent a confession, two witnesses to malicious magic or superhuman feats were needed. But magistrates could also bring the afflicted person and the accused face to face and observe their reactions. They could search for “witches teats,” a blemish by which a witch might suckle her familiar spirits. The judges at Salem also allowed controversial “spectral” evidence, testimony that the accused witch’s spirit, rather than the woman herself, had inflicted harm.

The initial accusations were flung at powerless outcasts, but by March women of substantial influence in the community were being accused. Martha Corey, an upstanding member of the congregation, was incredulous at the accusations. She burst out laughing at her hearing and urged the magistrates not to believe the “distracted children.” She was convicted. So was Dorothy Good, Sarah’s daughter, who had admitted that she had “a little snake that used to suck on the lowest joint” of her finger. She was four years old, the youngest of the accused witches.

The pace of the accusations accelerated that spring. By June, 70 people stood accused, 25 from Salem, the rest from surrounding communities. The witch hunt had grown into a frenzy of accusation and retribution. The girls of Salem were invited to other towns where they pointed the accusing finger at those deemed in league with the devil.

Giles Corey, Martha’s husband, refused to answer the charges against him, standing mute to avoid having his property confiscated after his death (as would have happened if he had submitted to a trial and been convicted). The court ordered that “great weights” be piled on him until he pled to his charges. Legend has him uttering “More weight” as he was legally crushed to death.

Some of the accused “faced violent, distracting, and dragooning methods.” They were questioned relentlessly, forced to stand without sleep for hours on end, until they finally confessed. The paradox that fueled it all was that witches who confessed were almost never hanged but were expected to name others, continuing the cycle.

The frenzy had run its course by October. Governor William Phips released many of the prisoners, who were suffering from cold and deprivation in jails not designed to accommodate such a crime wave. Nineteen innocent people had been hanged, and as many as 17 had died in jail. By the end of the year the girls had fallen silent. In 1706 Ann Putnam, now a grown woman, confessed that a “great delusion of Satan” had prompted her testimony that sent so many to their deaths.

The incident at Salem was brought starkly to modern consciousness by the 1953 production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. The play drew an analogy between Salem and the fervid hunt for Communists by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other red-baiters. Miller claimed that he was most interested in the broader human themes of betrayal, courage, and cruelty. He was a guest of honor at the 1991 unveiling of the design for a memorial to the victims of the Salem trials.

The social dynamics behind Salem are hardly a thing of the past. The trials were echoed in the daycare molestation accusations that swept the country in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, a New Jersey nursery school teacher was convicted in 1988 of 115 counts of sexual abuse against her students. Relying on the coerced testimony of toddlers, prosecutors made preposterous charges against her. Other teachers were afraid to come to her defense for fear of being accused. She was found guilty and sentenced to 47 years in prison. She served five years before her conviction was overturned on appeal.

Today Salem commemorates its lethal spasm of intolerance with tourist attractions like the Witch History Museum (“meet Tituba in Reverend Parris’s kitchen”) and the Witch Dungeon Museum (“Come raise the devil!”).

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).