Hill holds Samuel Parris, pastor of Salem Village in 1692, most responsible for the hysteria that sent 19 men and women to the hanging tree and caused several other deaths. Parris used Puritanism's "terrifying absolutes of good and evil" to reduce life in his parsonage to a daily trauma of fear, guilt and suspicion.
According to an account published in 1700, Parris, impressionable 9-year-old daughter, Betty, and his 11-year-old orphaned niece, Abigail, began "getting into holes, and creeping under chairs and stools, and to use sturdy odd postures and antic gestures, uttering foolish, ridiculous speeches." A doctor suggested the girls were "under an evil hand" and a neighbor, Mary Sibley, urged Parris, Caribbean slave couple, Tituba and John Indian, to bake a "witch cake" containing Betty and Abigail's urine. The plan was to feed it to the dog and see if the animal would act strangely.
Parris discovered the scheme and denounced Sibley from his pulpit with a call to arms: "The Devil hath been raised amongst us." When the girls screamed that Tituba's specter was pinching and pricking them, Parris beat the servant to get a confession of witchcraft. In her terror, Tituba tried to mollify her accusers with a partial but dangerous admission. She said her old mistress in Barbados had taught her "some means to be used for the discovery of a witch and for the prevention of being bewitched." Four other girls, seeing Betty and Abigail's fits and the sympathetic attention they were getting, began to writhe, choke and babble. They screamed out the names of two tormentors in league with Tituba: Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, both outcasts in Salem. Good was a beggar and the weak-witted Osborne was believed to have lived in sin with her indentured servant before they married, an offense punishable by whipping.
Village leaders, including the powerful Thomas and Edward Putnam, filed a complaint with the Salem magistrates accusing Tituba, Good and Osborne of using witchcraft to hurt the afflicted girls. Constables apprehended the three women on March 1, 1692, and at 10 o,clock that morning brought them to the meeting house to be examined.
Chief magistrate John Hathorne--ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter --assumed guilt with his very first question: "Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?" When she refused to confess, he told the afflicted girls to look at Good to see if this was the person who had been hurting them. The record states: "So they all did look upon her and ... presently they were all tormented." They twisted their limbs, collapsed, choked and fainted. The three women were jailed and the precedent for convicting on "spectral evidence" was set for the trials to come.
Why did hysteria overwhelm all sense of justice? The accusers felt threatened and disinherited. Indians had killed one in 10 settlers in a 1675 war--more deaths per capita than in any other American conflict--and the colonists were having trouble negotiating a new charter from London, without which they had no legal rights to their lands.
Significantly, Thomas Putnam and Parris had both been deprived of family wealth. In their battle to keep the moral, political and socioeconomic authority that Puritanism granted them, they drafted the emotionally vulnerable: Of the eight girls who screamed out the names of witches, three or four were orphans and two others had lost one parent.
By mid-May, 36 accused witches were in jail. Some were "tied neck and heels" for 24 hours or longer to force confessions. Four died in prison. The magistrates sent Good's 4 1/2-year-old daughter, Dorcas, to the dungeons, where she endured eight months of terror and went insane.
The new governor of the colony, Sir William Phipps, established an ad hoc court to try the accused witches. The trials proceeded just as the examinations had; the girls, fits and descriptions of specters were admitted as evidence.
In June, Bridget Bishop was the first to be convicted and hanged, in part because she had a previous conviction for marital quarreling. Five were hanged in July, and 13 more in August and September. They went heroically to their deaths, enduring the merciless mocking of the crowd as they climbed the ladder to the noose. One man was pressed to death with stones piled on his chest after he refused to give testimony at his trial. Legend holds that his only words during the pressing were "more weights." About 200 men and women were accused and 150 imprisoned.
The witch-hunt ended when the girls overreached by naming Lady Phipps, wife of the governor. On Oct. 3, Increase Mather, the leading Boston minister and politician, delivered a sermon that cast serious doubt on the value of spectral evidence in trying witches. The ad hoc court was dismissed on Oct. 29, but no one was held accountable for the deaths and suffering.
Parris quit Salem Village and his replacement filled a diary, not as Parris did with his imaginary demons, but with observations on the natural world. In this, he prefigured a flowering of the human spirit that another minister in the region, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would achieve 150 years later. Joseph C. Haney is a senior editor at Reader's Digest
COPYRIGHT 1996 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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