The Salem Witch Trials

Late-seventeenth-century Massachusetts was an anxious place. King Philip’s War of 1675–1676 had devastated New England, tensions with Native peoples endured, and the colony was in political turmoil. Salem Village (now Danvers), a rural community about five miles north of Salem Town, was divided by bitter quarrels among leading families such as the Putnams and the Nurses. Its minister was the Reverend Samuel Parris.

Historians point to many causes: local rivalries and family feuds, political turmoil, the enduring trauma of war, and a faulty legal process in which confessing — and accusing others — became the surest way for the accused to save their own lives. Some scholars have even suggested low-level environmental contamination. The court gave spectral evidence an unprecedented status, turning neighbors’ fears and grudges into convictions.

In early 1692 Parris’s daughter Betty and her twelve-year-old cousin Abigail Williams began to suffer strange fits, which were diagnosed as witchcraft. On February 29 warrants were issued for three women: Sarah Good, a poor and disreputable woman; Sarah Osborne; and Tituba, a Native American or African woman enslaved in the Parris household. Tituba confessed, setting a fatal pattern: the accused who confessed and named others were spared, while those who insisted on their innocence were condemned. Accusations spread to respected church members such as Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, and to Andover, Ipswich, and other towns.

On May 27 Governor William Phips created a special Court of Oyer and Terminer. Its first defendant, Bridget Bishop, was convicted largely on spectral evidence and hanged on June 10. When a jury found Rebecca Nurse not guilty, the judges told it to reconsider, and she was hanged on July 19. The minister George Burroughs declared his innocence on the gallows ladder and recited the Lord’s Prayer — which Increase Mather believed no witch could do perfectly — moving spectators to tears, but he was hanged anyway. Giles Corey refused to submit to a trial and was slowly crushed under heavy stones in September. In all, between June 10 and September 22 the court in Salem sent twenty people to their deaths. As doubts about spectral evidence mounted among ministers, Phips closed the court on October 29.

As the scale of the injustice sank in, Phips threw out the death sentence of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr., convicted in 1693. Some of the jailed could not leave until their prison fees were paid — Tituba remained in jail for thirteen months after Parris refused to pay hers. In 1697 Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, issued a public confession of his wrongdoing.

Over the following centuries dozens of the accused were officially cleared, though some names were overlooked. The last, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was formally exonerated in 2022 after an eighth-grade civics class in North Andover took up her case. Salem itself, where a memorial now marks an execution site, has become a center of remembrance and tourism, with reenactments of the trials. The trials remain a warning about scapegoating, the danger of convicting people on evidence that cannot be tested, and how quickly a community can turn on its own members.