Log inSign up for FREE
Library

📝 #2 Salem Witch Trials

Last updated about 1 year ago
42 questions
Video: I Was There - The Dark History of the Salem Witch Trials
Required
1
"So much of what we've watched, read, and heard [about the Salem Witch Trials] just _______ ."
Required
1

Most "witches" in Salem were executed by public hanging.

Required
1

What crime were Betty and Abigail committing when they watched the cracked eggs to tell their future?

Required
1

Which religion were the majority of people in Salem in the 1600s?

Required
1

Medical science was "barely past folklore" in the late-1600s.

Required
1

The girls who were experiencing "the fits" in Salem claimed they were under spells cast by witches. What are two other explanations that should have been considered?

Required
1
The adults around the girls start to _______ to the girls that someone around them may be harming them.
Required
1

Check off all of the reasons why Tituba may have confessed to being a witch.

Required
1

About 175 people in Salem were accused of being witches and 20 of them were executed.

Required
1

Check off some of the lessons that we should learn from the Salem Witch Trials.

Salem Witch Trials: What Caused the Hysteria?
Though the Salem witch trials were far from the only persecutions over witchcraft in 17th-century colonial America, they loom the largest in public consciousness and popular culture today. Over the course of several months in 1692, a total of between 144 and 185 women, children and men were accused of witchcraft, and 19 were executed after local courts found them guilty.

As the witch panic spread throughout the region that year, increasing numbers of people became involved with the trials—as accusers, the accused, local government officials, clergymen, and members of the courts.
Required
1

The Salem Witch Trials were the only witchcraft trials in the 17th century.

Required
1

About how long did the trials last?

Required
1

About how many people in Salem were executed for witchcraft?

By the time the Salem witch trials began in 1692, the legal tradition of trying people suspected of practicing witchcraft had been well-established in Europe, where the persecution of witches took place from roughly the 15th through 17th centuries...

The accusations in Salem began in early 1692, when two girls, ages nine and 11, came down with a mysterious illness. “They were sick for about a month before their parents brought in a doctor, who concluded that it looked like witchcraft,” says Rachel Christ-Doane, the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum.

Looking back from the 21st century, it may seem unthinkable that a doctor would point to witchcraft as the cause of a patient’s illness, but Scott says that it was considered a legitimate diagnosis at the time.

“It’s hard for us to understand how real the devil and witches and the threat they posed were to the Puritans—or how important,” she explains. “Witchcraft was the second capital crime listed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s criminal code.”
Required
1

Europeans had been putting suspected witches on trial for hundreds of years prior to the Salem Witch Trials.

Required
1

A medical doctor was responsible for determining that the girls' afflictions were the result of witchcraft.

Required
1

Based on what we know so far, what do you think is the definition of "capital crime"?

Required
1

The people in Salem were not familiar with the concept of witchcraft prior to the Salem Witch Trials.

When the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the first governor, John Winthrop, delivered a sermon famously proclaiming the colony “a Citty [sic] upon a Hill”—in this case, meaning a model Christian society with no separation of church and state. But as growing numbers of Quakers and Christians of other denominations arrived in Massachusetts, it became more religiously diverse.

“By the 1690s, God-fearing Puritans represented a smaller proportion of the population of New England than at any point in the 17th century,” says Kathleen M. Brown, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. “Even though percentage-wise, the Puritan influence was weaker than it had been earlier in the century, it was still leaving a big imprint on society.”

This included mainstream acceptance of Providence: the Puritans’ belief that the events of everyday life on Earth happened in accordance with God’s will.

“This was particularly true when they were talking about the fate of colonial settlements in the land grab, or disease epidemics that would sweep through and kill people, or a terrible storm,” Brown explains. “Providence, along with the notion that there was evil at work through Satan—[including] through the activities of witches who might turn to the devil to exert supernatural power—informed the way Puritans understood the natural world and the spiritual world.”

Similarly, despite their waning power, the Puritans’ societal structure remained firmly in place when the Salem witch trials began. “The Puritan colony was a very patriarchal and hierarchical place,” Scott says, noting that this included the view that people, particularly women, who stepped outside of their prescribed roles in society were looked upon with suspicion.
Required
1
The Puritans founded Massachusetts with the intention of making it a model _______ society with _______ .
Required
1

Massachusetts was more religiously diverse in 1692 than it was in 1630.

1
If there was a disease epidemic, a terrible storm, or a loss of land to native peoples, most Puritans would have said it happened because __________ or __________.
1
The Puritan social structure was both very _______ and _______ , which means that women who stepped outside of their prescribed role were looked up on with _______ .
When the Salem witch trials began in 1692, King Philip’s War, also known as Metacom’s Rebellion, was still fresh in the minds of the colonial settlers. The Native Americans’ last-ditch attempt to stop English colonization of their land officially concluded in 1676, but the violent conflict and bloodshed had never ended on the northern border of the Massachusetts colony.

“The colonial settlers were still encroaching on land that had been in the hands of Native Americans for thousands of years, and Native peoples were hitting back,” Brown explains. “It wasn’t hard for Massachusetts Puritans to think about the devil embodied in what the Native Americans were doing, because they're not Christian, they’re in a mortal combat with Puritan Christianity and the whole colonial settler enterprise, and the Massachusetts Puritans really believed in their own divine mission.”

Along the same lines, when the colony’s leaders reflected on the poor job they had done defending its northern boundary, Brown says that it’s not much of a stretch to think that they understood it all to mean that God was trying to tell them something, and “doesn't seem to be very happy.”
Required
1

In the late-1600s, Native Americans were rebelling against European settlements in Massachusetts.

Required
1

The Puritans saw their fight against the Native Americans as a "divine mission" from God.

It would have been one thing for the Puritans to view the contagion of both the mysterious illness spreading amongst the young women of Salem, and the subsequent accusations of witchcraft, as a sign that God is angry and the devil is at work. However, as Brown points out, in order for those accusations to gain the kind of traction they had in Salem—making it to trial, and, eventually, imprisoning and executing people—there had to be widespread buy-in from public officials.

“You need ministers saying, ‘Yes, these are signs of the devil in our midst,’” Brown explains. “You need magistrates doing interrogations and deciding to lock people up in jail and put them on trial. You need judges who are willing to believe the spectral evidence. You need all of the official apparatus of government and of justice to be on board with it to produce the kind of outcome you get at Salem.”

According to some scholars, most notably, historian Mary Beth Norton, local leaders in Salem were so receptive to the accusations of witchcraft, and on board with implementing draconian laws and policies in part because of the precariousness of the Massachusetts colonial settlement at that time.

High-ranking Puritans were concerned about their church’s dwindling numbers. “By the time [the Salem witch trials] take place, the Puritans are less dominant politically, religiously [and] culturally,” Brown explains.

The final decades of the 17th century were a time of political uncertainty in Salem as well. In 1684, King Charles II of England revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter. Seven years later, the new ruling monarchs, King William III and Queen Mary II, issued a new charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and, at the urging of influential Puritan clergyman Increase Mather, appointed Maine-born William Phips governor of the colony.

By the time Mather and Phips returned to Massachusetts with the new charter in May 1692, Salem’s jails were already filled with people accused of practicing witchcraft.

“You can make the argument that the legal system [in place prior to May 1692] made it possible for the witch trials to happen,” says Christ-Doane. “They [didn’t] have a charter, and their courts were dysfunctional, and that allows them to make unusual procedural decisions that lead to so many people being convicted of witchcraft.”

This included relying heavily, and sometimes exclusively, on spectral evidence—or, testimony from witnesses claiming that the accused person appeared to them and caused them harm in a vision or dream—even though it was widely considered unacceptable in legal practice at the time.
Required
1

Why do historians believe that so many people in Salem became accusers and victims of the witchcraft hysteria?

Required
1

Check off all of the reasons why the people of Salem were living through precarious times in the late-1600s.

Required
1
The term "_______ evidence" refers to testimony where someone claims that the accused person appeared to them and caused them harm in a vision or dream."
Required
1

The legal proceedings in the Salem Witch Trials followed the standard legal proceedings of the late 1600s.

How the Salem Witch Trials Influenced the American Legal System
In early 1692, several girls in the colonial Massachusetts village of Salem began exhibiting strange symptoms, including twitching, barking, and complaining of being pinched or pricked by invisible pins. The afflicted girls soon accused several local women of bewitching them, beginning a flood of accusations that threw Salem and the surrounding areas into full-blown hysteria.

The trials that ensued became a cautionary tale as the accused lacked many of the legal protections we take for granted today.

By the time William Phips, the newly appointed royal governor of Massachusetts Bay Province, arrived from England that May, accused witches packed local jails. At the time, the colony was operating without a charter, since the Crown had revoked the previous one due to repeated violations. Phips brought with him a new royal charter that gave the colony’s legislature the right to establish a court. But the process would take time, and Phips had to act quickly.

In a fateful decision, Governor Phips created a special court to try the accused witches of Salem. It was known as the Court of Oyer and Terminer, meaning “to hear and determine” in the Old Northern French that was still standard in English courts at the time. While remnants of this legal language still endure in the modern American legal system —the phrase “oyez, oyez, oyez” begins proceedings in the U.S. Supreme Court, among others—the Court of Oyer and Terminer bore little resemblance to the courts we know today.
Required
1

When the Salem Witch Trials happened, Massachusetts was in the process of revising its legal system.

Required
1

Massachusetts courts in 1692 looked almost identical to our court system today.

When an accused witch appeared in front of the Court of Oyer and Terminer during the Salem witch trials, the law assumed they were guilty. Today, the presumption of innocence, or the idea that an individual accused of a crime is “innocent until proven guilty,” is one of the fundamental rights underlying the U.S. criminal justice system.

With roots in English common law, the presumption of innocence is nonetheless absent from key legal documents such as the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights of 1689. It’s not mentioned in the Constitution either, but statutes and court decisions, including the Supreme Court decisions in Coffin v. United States (1895) and Taylor v. Kentucky (1978), later established the presumption of innocence as one of the basic requirements for a fair trial—something none of the accused witches of Salem received.
Required
1

Massachusetts courts have always been based on the legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty."

Required
1

The concept "presumption of innocence" is considered an essential part of our legal system today.

Required
1

Salem residents who were accused of witchcraft were considered "guilty until proven innocent."

According to Len Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who has taught seminars on the Salem witch trials, the U.S. legal system “includes two vital protections that were absent in Salem, making the tragedy almost inevitable.”

The first is the hearsay rule, a complex legal doctrine that essentially prevents the use at trial of statements made outside of court. Today, the hearsay rule “plays a critical role in ensuring that the evidence admitted is reliable and is based on the personal knowledge of witnesses,” Niehoff explained in an email interview. “It prevents the admission of rumors, assumptions, and community gossip—precisely the sorts of things that drove the Salem trials.”

Debate over allowing hearsay in court trials had begun by the time of the Salem trials, but the doctrine evolved slowly. In a Harvard Law Review article published in 1904, J.H. Wigmore wrote that the “history of the hearsay rule, as a distinct and living idea, begins only in the 1500s and it does not gain complete development and final precision until the early 1700s.”

The second key legal protection that accused witches at the Salem trials lacked was the right to be represented by counsel. “There were no defense lawyers present or allowed at these proceedings to object while their clients were being questioned, or to cross-examine those who testified,” Niehoff says. The inability to cross-examine was particularly damning, he points out, because “most of the witnesses against the accused witches could have been very effectively challenged.”
Required
1

The hearsay rule allows statements made outside of court to be used at trial.

Required
1

The purpose of the hearsay rule is to prevent rumors and gossip from being introduced in court.

Required
1

Hearsay was not admissible in court during the Salem Witch Trials.

Required
1

All of the residents accused of witchcraft were allowed to have a lawyer defend them.

Required
1

Most historians agree that had the accused been given lawyers, most of them would not have been found guilty.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer also relied heavily on spectral evidence. This evidence, according to U.S. Legal.com “refers to a witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the accused person’s physical body was at another location.” The court’s acceptance of spectral evidence was controversial from the start, as it differed from accepted legal practice at the time.

Following the execution of Bridget Bishop, who became the first accused witch to be hanged on June 10, 1692, Governor Phips asked a group of the colony’s leading ministers, including Increase Mather and his son, Cotton, for their opinion on the witchcraft proceedings, and the use of spectral evidence in particular. In a response written on behalf of the group, Cotton Mather urged caution regarding spectral evidence, suggesting that the Devil could in fact assume the shape of an innocent person. But the statement closed with support for the court, as the ministers encouraged “the speedy and vigorous Prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious.”

Despite the ministers’ tepid warning, the Court of Oyer and Terminer continued to convict accused witches on the basis of spectral evidence. The crisis reached its height in late September 1692, when seven women and one man were hanged as witches on a single day. By then, however, public support for the court was waning. Increase Mather went public with his strong opposition to the use of spectral evidence in witchcraft trials in early October, arguing in his treatise Cases of Conscience that “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned.”

“It's important to note that the trials didn't end because people stopped believing in witches,” Niehoff points out. “They ended because people stopped believing the trials were doing an effective job at identifying who the witches were.”
Required
1

The use of spectral evidence was controversial, even in 1692.

Required
1

A number of "witches" were found guilty based on the use of spectral evidence at their trials.

Required
1

The Salem Witch Trials finally ended when people stopped believing in witches.

On October 29, 1692, Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, a decision that marked the beginning of the end for the Salem witch trials. By May 1693, Phips had pardoned and released all those remaining in prison on witchcraft charges.

In the years to come, judges and juries (and even one of the main accusers) apologized for their roles in the trials. Then in 1711 Massachusetts passed legislation exonerating those executed as witches and paying restitution to their families.

Nearly a century after the crisis in Salem, during debate over ratification of the Constitution, anti-Federalist delegates (successfully) argued that the document needed a "Bill of Rights" to guard against the violation of individual citizens’ fundamental freedoms by the federal government.

Such arguments may have implicitly drawn strength from the negative example of the Salem witch trials, when accused witches were deprived of even the most basic rights they should have been granted under English common law. That lesson continued to resonate in the centuries to come, especially during periods of crisis such as the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the Cold War era.

“It is in my view difficult to draw a direct line from the Salem witch trials to a specific existing legal doctrine, but I would argue that they have had an immense influence on how we think about the law,” Niehoff says.

“The trials are filled with cautionary tales about how catastrophically bad things can go when legal proceedings fail to offer certain minimum guarantees. They also provide a perpetual reminder of the consequences of fear unchecked by the sort of reasoned judgment that the law demands.”
Required
1

Those convicted of witchcraft in Salem were eventually pardoned or exonerated by the government of Massachusetts.

Required
1

The Salem Witch Trials likely influenced our modern legal system, including the protections that we are guaranteed if we go on trial.