經(jīng)典案例:The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary

O Christian Martyr Who for Truth could die When all about thee Owned the hideous lie! Theworld, redeemed from superstition's sway, Is breathing freer for thy sake today.

——Words written by John Greenleaf Whittier and inscribed on a monument marking the graveof Rebecca Nurse, one of the condemned witches of Salem.

From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted ofwitchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Anotherman of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to atrial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozenslanguished in jail for months without trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteriathat swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended.

Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedywas inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economicconditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account forthe spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of1692.

In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village, invited SamuelParris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in Barbados, to preach in theVillage church. A year later, after negotiations over salary, inflation adjustments, and freefirewood, Parris accepted the job as Village minister. He moved to Salem Village with his wifeElizabeth, his six-year-old daughter Betty, niece Abagail Williams, and his Indian slave Tituba,acquired by Parris in Barbados.

The Salem that became the new home of Parris was in the midst of change: a mercantile elitewas beginning to develop, prominent people were becoming less willing to assume positionsas town leaders, two clans (the Putnams and the Porters) were competing for control of thevillage and its pulpit, and a debate was raging over how independent Salem Village, tied moreto the interior agricultural regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea trade.

Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young Betty Parris becamestrangely ill. She dashed about, dove under furniture, contorted in pain, and complained offever. The cause of her symptoms may have been some combination of stress, asthma,guilt, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis, but there were other theories.?CottonMather had recently published a popular book, Memorable Providences, describing thesuspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's behavior in some waysmirrored that of the afflicted person described in Mather's widely read and discussed book. Itwas easy to believe in 1692 in Salem, with an Indian war raging less than seventy miles away(and many refugees from the war in the area) that the devil was close at hand. Sudden andviolent death occupied minds.

Talk of witchcraft increased when other playmates of Betty, including eleven-year-old AnnPutnam, seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott, began to exhibit similar unusualbehavior. When his own nostrums failed to effect a cure, William Griggs, a doctor called toexamine the girls, suggested that the girls' problems might have a supernatural origin. Thewidespread belief that witches targeted children made the doctor's diagnosis seem increasinglikely.

A neighbor, Mary Sibley, proposed a form of counter magic. She told Tituba to bake a rye cakewith the urine of the afflicted victim and feed the cake to a dog. (Dogs were believed to be usedby witches as agents to carry out their devilish commands.) By this time, suspicion had alreadybegun to focus on Tituba, who had been known to tell the girls tales of omens, voodoo, andwitchcraft from her native folklore. Her participation in the urine cake episode made her aneven more obvious scapegoat for the inexplicable.

Meanwhile, the number of girls afflicted continued to grow, rising to seven with the addition ofAnn Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, and Mary Warren. According to historianPeter Hoffer, the girls turned themselves from a circle of friends into a gang of juveniledelinquents. ( Many people of the period complained that young people lacked the piety andsense of purpose of the founders' generation.) The girls contorted into grotesque poses, felldown into frozen postures, and complained of biting and pinching sensations. In a village whereeveryone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, thesuspected affliction of the girls became an obsession.

Sometime after February 25, when Tituba baked the witch cake, and February 29, when arrestwarrants were issued against Tituba and two other women, Betty Parris and Abigail Williamsnamed their afflictors and the witchhunt began. The consistency of the two girls' accusationssuggests strongly that the girls worked out their stories together. Soon Ann Putnam and MercyLewis were also reporting seeing witches flying through the winter mist. The prominentPutnam family supported the girls' accusations, putting considerable impetus behind theprosecutions.

The first three to be accused of witchcraft were Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn. Titubawas an obvious choice. Good was a beggar and social misfit who lived wherever someonewould house her, and Osborn was old, quarrelsome, and had not attended church for over ayear. The Putnams brought their complaint against the three women to county magistratesJonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, who scheduled examinations for the suspected witches forMarch 1, 1692 in Ingersoll's tavern. When hundreds showed up, the examinations were movedto the meeting house. At the examinations, the girls described attacks by the specters of thethree women, and fell into their by then perfected pattern of contortions when in thepresence of one of the suspects. Other villagers came forward to offer stories of cheese andbutter mysteriously gone bad or animals born with deformities after visits by one of thesuspects. The magistrates, in the common practice of the time, asked the same questions ofeach suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had they seen Satan? How, if they are werenot witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by their presence? The styleand form of the questions indicates that the magistrates thought the women guilty.

The matter might have ended with admonishments were it not for Tituba. After first adamantlydenying any guilt, afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba claimed that she wasapproached by a tall man from Boston--obviously Satan--who sometimes appeared as a dog ora hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work. Yes, Tituba declared, she wasa witch, and moreover she and four other witches, including Good and Osborn, had flownthrough the air on their poles. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for counsel, she said,but the devil had blocked her path. Tituba's confession succeeded in transforming her from apossible scapegoat to a central figure in the expanding prosecutions. Her confession alsoserved to silence most skeptics, and Parris and other local ministers began witch hunting withzeal.

Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began attacking theafflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary Easty were accused ofwitchcraft. During a March 20 church service, Ann Putnam suddenly shouted, Look whereGoodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers! Soon Ann'smother, Ann Putnam, Sr., would join the accusers. Dorcas Good, four-year-old daughter ofSarah Good, became the first child to be accused of witchcraft when three of the girlscomplained that they were bitten by the specter of Dorcas. (The four-year-old was arrested,kept in jail for eight months, watched her mother get carried off to the gallows, and would cryher heart out, and go insane.) The girls accusations and their ever more polishedperformances, including the new act of being struck dumb, played to large and believingaudiences.

Stuck in jail with the damning testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted, suspects beganto see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance Hobbs became the second witchto confess, admitting to pinching three of the girls at the Devil's command and flying on apole to attend a witches' Sabbath in an open field. Jails approached capacity and the colonyteetered on the brink of chaos when Governor Phips returned from England. Fast action, hedecided, was required.

Phips created a new court, the court of oyer and terminer, to hear the witchcraft cases. Fivejudges, including three close friends of Cotton Mather, were appointed to the court. ChiefJustice, and most influential member of the court, was a gung-ho witch hunter named WilliamStoughton. Mather urged Stoughton and the other judges to credit confessions and admitspectral evidence (testimony by afflicted persons that they had been visited by a suspect'sspecter). Ministers were looked to for guidance by the judges, who were generally withoutlegal training, on matters pertaining to witchcraft. Mather's advice was heeded. the judges alsodecided to allow the so-called touching test (defendants were asked to touch afflicted personsto see if their touch, as was generally assumed of the touch of witches, would stop theircontortions) and examination of the bodies of accused for evidence of witches' marks (molesor the like upon which a witch's familiar might suck). Evidence that would be excluded frommodern courtrooms-- hearsay, gossip, stories, unsupported assertions, surmises-- was alsogenerally admitted. Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking inSalem: accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify under oath ontheir behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. Defendants could, however, speak forthemselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers. The degree to whichdefendants in Salem were able to take advantage of their modest protections variedconsiderably, depending on their own acuteness and their influence in the community.