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      The Salem Witch Trials is an immense topic about which much has been written, both good and bad. It is impossible to cover the breadth of it in one article, but I wish to discuss in some depth the first three women who stood accused of witchcraft. Their stories can tell us much about the trials and views on witchcraft at the time. I will also attempt to place the witch trials within some historical context which is all too often ignored. There are many theories on what caused the accusations and what motivated the accusers. I have my suspicions but there is no conclusive answer as to the why of this grim episode. We will never know why this happened and the sources that survive shed as much confusion as they do light on the motives of those involved. 

           Americans often forget just how brutal early life in Massachusetts Bay was. At the time of our story the Colony was sixty-two years old, and they had been hard years. King Phillip’s War had devastated the Colony fifteen years before. This is the bloodiest per capita war in American history, with nearly thirty percent of the European population of the Colony being killed. War with the Native American and their French allies had returned, and refugees filled the Colony at the time of the Trials. Demographics were also changing with the increasing introduction of slaves, both Native American and those from the Caribbean, to the formerly homogenous white and Puritan Community. The Colony had suffered a severe smallpox epidemic and was in the midst of one of the coldest winters on record when Salem’s young girls began to act strangely. Witchcraft was also seen as an ever-present threat. The Puritan theocracy that ruled the Colony believed that the Devil was constantly tempting good people and he must continuously be overcome.  Importantly they also believed that women were more vulnerable to these temptations. The witch trials were not an isolated incident in the Americas. In 1647, a Connecticut woman became the first person hanged in the Americas for witchcraft. Connecticut would hang ten more alleged witches in the next thirty years. There had been several witch trials in the English Caribbean in the twenty-five years before Salem’s (literal) witch hunt. A woman had been executed in Maryland for witchcraft two decades before the Trials in Salem. Most importantly, four years before Goody Glover was executed in Boston for bewitching several young children in a way that is extremely similar to the symptoms described by Salem’s girls. This case received much attention and Cotton Mather, one of the most important people in early Massachusetts, published Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possession about his experiences with the afflicted children. It was widely read, and Mather was consulted frequently during Salem’s witch hunts and trials. There was much uncertainty and anxiety in Massachusetts Bay at the time.

           Tensions were particularly high between Salem Town and Salem Village. The Village, where the majority of the accusers came from, was a more rural and agricultural community. Salem Town, home to the majority of the accused, was a more entrepreneurial focused town. There tended to be strong family rivalries between the Village and Town, with a few families dominating each. Some historians have suggested that certain families exploited the Trials to settle scores with their rivals. This is difficult to prove, although it was a common feature of other European witch trials, so it can’t be dismissed out of hand. Tensions were further exacerbated in November 1689 when Reverend Samuel Paris was appointed minister of both Town and Village. He does not seem to have been the type of man to build bridges and he only made divisions worse. He was deeply unhappy with his salary and the way he had been treated. It has been suggested by some historians that he is responsible for the original accusations as a way to increase his own standing. This is impossible to prove one way or another, but he is an easy person to dislike regardless. His daughter and niece were the first to fall ill and this in some ways made the Witch Trials more of a factional issue. People who supported him tended to be more likely to be accusers than the accused. One of his slaves Tituba would be the first accused witch.

           Witch hunting had been a common feature of Europe since the 14^th Century and was actually on the decline in Europe at the time of the Trials. Salem’s Trials would borrow heavily from European traditions, especially the English tradition, but with important exceptions. While it was a capital crime in England to be convicted of witchcraft, it rarely was successfully prosecuted, and executions were even more rare. England had a comparably high standard of proof and did not generally allow the use of spectral evidence. Spectral evidence is testimony that a person’s ghostly specter is sent out by a witch to torment the person. Since the specter is visible only to the afflicted, it is problematic as proof. To be clear, no one seriously doubted that these specters were real, but there was intense debate over whether a witch could send only their specter or that of an innocent person. The magistrates in Salem began the trial by conclusively declaring that the specter of an innocent person could not be sent by a witch. This conclusion would doom many to the gallows. 

Other European traditions which allowed spectral evidence unsurprisingly resulted in a lot more executions because it is impossible to prove you are not a witch. English law also rarely permitted torture against accused witches where other nations were more willing to employee it. Salem again broke with English tradition and allowed the torture of many of the accused. It is important to remember whatever theories one has of the motive behind the accusations, everyone in Salem would have believed in the threat of witches. That belief made the hysteria all the more widespread and desperate.

Those who are familiar with European witch trials will not be surprised to learn that all three of the original witches were marginal members of society. Accused witches throughout history tend to have a lot of similar characteristics. The tend to be poor, of low social standing, seen as burdens by their communities, and generally be disliked by their neighbors. The rich and powerful were rarely accused of witchcraft and when they where it was usually a result of a private feud. When things went wrong people tended to remember the old women cursing them for not giving her food. As is so often the case, these vulnerable members were convenient scapegoats. Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne fit this archetype all too well. 

Little is known for certain about Tituba and much has been editorialized and mythologized after the fact. What is known for sure is that she was a slave purchased by Samuel Paris in Barbados. She is most commonly described as a native of Central America but is also sometimes described as Native American. She cared for Paris’s daughter and niece, who were the first two children to fall ill. Her status in the community made her an easy target. Suspicion about her first came to the fore when, either of her own volition or at the suggestion of a neighbor, she made a “witch cake” in an attempt to counteract the suspected witchcraft. This is an English folk belief where rye and the urine of the inflicted is made into a cake and fed to a dog in the belief that dogs were often familiars for witches. If done properly it could save the afflicted person. When Paris found out about this, he was furious and beat Tituba for attempting such sorcery.

 When Ann Putnam accused Tituba, several other girls confirmed that she was a witch. Tituba originally refused to confess but Paris later beat her until she confessed. Long after the fact, while languishing in jail, Tituba recanted and told the magistrates she had only confessed because of the beatings and other abuse she suffered at her owner’s hands. Tituba’s confession, a purported version of which survives, has her signing her name in the Devil’s Book in blood, hurting the girls reluctantly, dealing with animal familiars, many strange happenings, and most importantly condemning Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne as also having signed the book. She told her accusers that she had seen other names but could not read them. This helped fuel the hysteria of a wider coven of witches in Salem. Tituba painted a picture of herself as a reluctant pawn of other witches, who made her do things to avoid punishment. This lurid account creates the framework that subsequent confessions would follow. Following her confession, she was taken to Boston jail and left to languish. Paris refused to pay her bail, and it seems that everyone simply forgot about her. She was indicted for witchcraft but never brought to trial. She spent more than a year in jail, by which time the witch trials had come to an end and an anonymous person paid her bail. One abnormality of the Salem’s Witch Trials is those who confessed survived and those who refused died. This is not common in any tradition of European Witch hunting. Sadly, the last we know of her was Paris selling her to another master, at which point she fades out of the historical record.   

Sarah Osborne was an outcast for an unusual reason. Unlike her alleged conspirators she was not poor. She had married a rich man and lived on a 150-acre farm. Her problems began when her first husband died. She quickly married an Irish indentured servant who was seen as scandalously beneath her. Her husband had left the property to their sons when they came of age. She and her new husband tried to gain control of the land in defiance of the Will. Whatever regard the community still had for her after the marriage was lost during this affair, which was still being litigated when she was accused. Those that suspect personal motives in the accusation will point out that a member of the Putnam family was the Executor of the estate that was being litigated. Damningly in the eyes of her Puritan community, Osborne had not attended church in three years because of a long illness. After Ann Putnam’s initial accusation, she was accused by several other girls of sending a specter to hurt or pinch them. One said she would stab her with knitting needles. Osborne was defiant and refused to confess. She also refused to accuse anyone else of witchcraft which happened all too often in Salem. Osborne was sent to jail and held in awful conditions. While she was in jail her accusers continued to accuse her of sending her specter to hurt them. She was thereafter held always in chains. Already an ill woman, she would die on May 20, 1693, at the age of 49 years old. She was the first person to die as a result of the Trials, killed by the inhumane conditions the accused were held in. At least four others are known to have died in custody awaiting trial.    

Of the three, Sarah Good fits the archetypical European witch the best. Good came from a wealthy family but when her father died, his estate was tied up in litigation for years and she received little. She married a poor indentured servant who soon died saddling her with large debts. Her second marriage was an unhappy one that struggled to pay the debts of her first marriage. The family was destitute and homeless. They lived hand to mouth, renting rooms, and relying on the charity of their neighbors. Good seems to have been fiery and outspoken, which did not endear her in the Puritan community. She increasingly had reputation for being disagreeable and few wanted to have dealings with her. Her hard life showed in her appearance, although only thirty-eight at the time of her accusation Good looked decades older. The couple and their five-year-old daughter Dorothy were looked upon as a nuisance and burden.

           

           Ann Putnam was the first, but by no means the only, person to accuse Good of witchcraft. Good was accused of all sorts of spectral attacks on the children of Salem. She would have been the first women tried for witchcraft had she not been pregnant at the time. Pregnant women could not be executed under English law because the unborn child was considered innocent. It would not be until later in the witch-hunt that the court would attempt trying pregnant women for capital crimes (the attempt was vetoed by the governor). Good was kept in the same dreadful conditions as the other accused until she gave birth. Given the conditions, it is tragic yet unsurprising that the child did not long survive its birth. When questioned, Good staunchly denied her guilt and insisted that she was being falsely accused. Upon seeing some of the accusers having fits, she suggested that it might have been Sarah Osborne who caused their malady. Good would be the second accused witch brought to trial before a special Court of Oyer and Terminer (Bridget Bishop was tried first and later hanged on June 10, 1692, in the interim). The special tribunal by commission was deemed necessary because the volume of accusations was too much for the normal courts in Salem to handle. She was tried before several magistrates and a jury. Some ten witnesses testified against her, with the usual accusations of spectral attacks. The low point of the proceeding was when one accuser said she had been spectrally stabbed by Good and produced a broken knife point that had been left in the wound. A man in the crowd spoke up at that point, producing the broken knife that the accuser had seen broken the day before. The witness was told to only tell the truth from now on and allowed to continue testifying without further action by the court. More compelling was the testimony of her family. William Good never quite said his wife was a witch but said enough other awful things about her character that it hardly mattered. Five-year-old Dorothy Good was terrified into testifying against her mother. She told the court that her mother had given her a snake that bit her, which played into the well-known concept of witch’s familiars. Not only did this help convict her mother it would also lead to the child being arrested for witchcraft. Good was convicted and sentenced to die by hanging. 

           Good would die in the first mass hanging of the witch trials, along with five other women, on July 19, 1692. They were led out of town to a large hill upon which the hanging tree was located. The women all struggled to get to the top of the hill after their long incarcerations. None would help them. Good was made to stand on a crate while the executioner Reverend Nicholas Noyes demanded she confess and save her soul. He had a habit of taunting the condemned prior to their executions. Good is said to have screamed at him, “You’re a liar! I’m no more a witch then you are a wizard! If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink!” With that the crate was pulled away and Good would have slowly strangled. Five more women would follow her that day and a total of thirteen other accused witches suffered the same fate before the madness would finally end. They were not permitted a Christian burial and their bodies were thrown into a ditch. Interestingly, Noyes would die years later of an aneurysm that caused him to choke on his own blood.  

       The Good family’s story somehow gets more tragic from there. Dorothy was accused of sending her specter to attack some of the accusers and pinching them. This, combined with her testimony at her mother’s trial, led to her arrest and imprisonment. She was interrogated for two weeks before confessing that she was a witch. Most scholars believe she thought she would be allowed to stay with her mother if she confessed. Since the spectral attacks continued, she like Sarah Osborne was kept in heavy chains. She could barely move and was in constant pain. Her jailers were deaf to her pleas for help. Since her father was so poor it took him eight months to earn enough money to bail her out. But the damage had been done. Dorothy never recovered mentally from her ordeal and was forever thereafter insane. She would need to be constantly looked after for the rest of her life. 

          As the trials went on and the accusations continued to spread something odd (by the standards of a witch hunt) began to happen. It wasn’t only the outsiders who were accused but wealthy, powerful, and upstanding pillars of the community as well. Many of them would die, which is very out of character for how witch hunts generally progress. Eventually this led to the colony’s governor deciding enough was enough. I suspect that an accusation against his wife had something to do with it. First, he explicitly banned the use of any spectral evidence. Many had spoken out against this practice, and several would be condemned and hanged as witches for doing so. When a new round of trials still resulted in convictions, he pardoned the accused and shut down the trials. The hundred still in jail were pardoned and further trials banned. But, by that point the damage had been done. Many lives had been destroyed and pretty much everyone involved was horrified and embarrassed. In 1702 the trials would be declared unlawful and in 1711 the legislature would pass a bill restoring the good names of those accused and paying restitution to survivors or the families of the dead. Tituba did not receive restitution because of her status as a slave. 

Witch trials are a black mark on legal history. Salem’s trials took away what little due process an accused witch usually enjoyed, which made them somehow worse. Yet this is not the takeaway you would get from most pop culture references about Salem. The town has become a mecca for witchcraft and the occult. This is a strange way to remember the false accusation of witches and their executions. Most references to Salem seem to always depict the residents as actual witches. I cannot say authoritatively that no one in Salem was a witch but I can say it was never proven in court without so called spectral evidence. We should remember that all of the evil that was done in Salem was accomplished through misuse of the legal system and not its absence. Magistrates oversaw the trials, a prosecutor presented the case, and a jury of their peers sent nineteen people to their deaths for witchcraft.