The people of Salem believed witches were residing in Salem and people had sold themselves to Satan. Citizens were persecuted for being accused of either of these things. Innocent people were forced to stand trial, imprisoned, tortured, and even killed.
It is estimated that about people were accused in Salem. The people of Salem did not have the knowledge that we have today. For example, the towns lack of medical knowledge. Also a girl named Ruth Putnam could not wake up. With the medical knowledge that we have today there are numerous things that it could have been. One thing that Ruth or Betty could have had is epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a neurological condition that causes seizures. During a seizure a person could become faint or confused and end up in an unconscious state where they are unresponsive. The unconscious state a person is in when they have an epileptic seizure is similar to how Betty and Ruth were unable to wake up.
The witch trials are an important historical event as it resulted in the deaths of dozens of innocent people. Premium Salem witch trials , Witchcraft Words 10 Pages.
Bryan F. Le Beau. The Salem Witch Trials has been a debatable topic for many historians enamored by its deviation from the normal as seen in Europe or other European Colonies in North America. In the first two chapters. Premium Salem witch trials , Witchcraft Words 5 Pages. HOME How the salem witch trials impacted american literature. Page 1 of 50 - About Essays.
Salem Witch Trials understandable that the witch trials in the Massachusetts area would become such hysteria. Many opposed the charter, and some began to wonder if Puritan New England had run its course. This political instability, some have argued, caused the witch hunt. Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters.
Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally.
Almost every attempt to mount a counteroffensive failed miserably. Towns were razed, casualties mounted, and captives were taken north and forced into Catholicism. No one would be safe without a thoroughgoing reformation. Closer to Salem, these northern wars touched the lives of several participants in the witch hunt: some of the afflicted were war refugees, orphaned and traumatized; some of the accused, especially George Burroughs, had close ties to Maine; and some of the judges were responsible for terrible defeats and financial losses during the wars.
Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflicted—several of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—Salem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause.
Each of these explanations has been used to make sense of Salem, and all have been found wanting. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft.
They came to see the devil anywhere, and they sought to defeat him everywhere. Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. These groups often have defining characteristics, though they also divide into their own subgroups local magistrates vs. Boston magistrates, for example, or the ministers in support of the trials vs.
These personalities and groups have all received their own attention as important factors at Salem. Salem begins with the afflicted: there are no trials without the seizures, screams, and fits.
These afflictions began with young girls who would remain the core group of the afflicted, but they spread to a host of others, including males and adults such as John Indian and Ann Putnam, Sr. What explains the bewitched? A variety of notions have been advanced, and the only one consistently refuted has been the one that dominates popular imagination: ergot poisoning.
According to this idea, the afflicted consumed a fungus that grows on moldy rye bread, causing symptoms similar to those of LSD. All scholars rule out this possibility. Much more likely is that the girls simply faked it. The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoning—the intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on command—suggests the possibility of fraud.
All scholars agree that at least some fraud was involved, and certain members of the afflicted group, such as Mary Warren, seem particularly suspect. Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud. At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear.
If friends, family members, respected ministers, and magistrates all believe that you are tormented by specters, at what point do you begin to believe them? So, too, hysteria can be contagious. Is it fraud to fall when others fall, or fear when others fear? Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem.
As for the accused, how did their names come to the afflicted? The first three names make sense: they fit the usual description of witches. But once witchcraft expanded to church members and Puritan ministers, does any rationale explain how one person came to be accused while another person escaped?
Theories abound, beginning primarily with the economic disparities proposed in Salem Possessed , but most recent scholarship settles on the idea of religious division within the community. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him.
As the witch hunt passed on from Salem Village to surrounding communities, accusers seemed to seek out those who were religiously corrupt in some way—those who failed to attend church regularly, who did not participate in sacraments, who failed to become full members of a church, or who had some kind of connection to Quakers, Baptists, or other religious dissidents.
This religious rationale does not explain all accusations, but it seems to make the most sense of identifying the accused. When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. Recently, attention has turned from the local antagonisms of the afflicted and the accused to the role of the judges and magistrates who seemed to push the trials forward.
At Salem, magistrates disregarded both precedent and advice. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of The elite defined the deed as a covenant with the devil; most of the non-elite saw it as a harmful use of magic. Common citizens brought their testimony of harm to magistrates, but harm in itself proved nothing. Successful prosecutions required either a confession or two witnesses to confirm that someone had made a pact with the devil.
For sixty years, confessions were hard to come by and pacts with the devil were hard to prove. More important, in the previous several decades of Puritan New England, ministers and magistrates were decidedly uneasy about spectral evidence; it could identify a potential suspect , but it could never be used to convict.
At Salem, spectral evidence convicted. It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. The changed use of spectral evidence would be one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of Salem, one that informs the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and an element that scholars continue trying to explain.
New England law had previously limited accusations of witchcraft and other crimes by requiring the posting of a bond; in order to curtail frivolous cases, people had to pay money in order to lodge a case with the court. At Salem, that requirement was dropped. As a result of the conditions surrounding witchcraft before Salem, not only were there fewer complaints made in previous decades, but those complaints were far less successfully prosecuted.
For sixty years, commoners and lay people had pressed for the conviction of witches, and for just as many years their political and religious superiors had pressed back even harder. At Salem, all of these precedents would be ignored or reversed.
Bonds were not required for many months, swelling the number of complaints. Confessions, some of which were produced by illegal torture, saved the lives of those who confessed. Those doomed by their denials of guilt, meanwhile, were often convicted almost exclusively on the basis of spectral evidence. As the accused protested their innocence, the afflicted girls would fall, twist, scream and writhe, pointing to an invisible tormenter.
Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not required—assuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. The court ignored the tomes on witchcraft that previous courts so carefully studied. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be percent. Why did the judges want convictions?
Perhaps these judges needed a way to prove they were on the side of godly Puritans, while also finding a conspiracy of witches to be a handy excuse for their failures. In addition, as Baker reveals, these judges were mostly related to each other through marriage. The only unrelated judge was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and Saltonstall was the only judge to resign from the court in protest. Why they suddenly sought convictions is difficult to determine, but if the judges had not so desperately wanted the prosecution to succeed, the witch hunt could never have taken off.
For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in The records of the Salem witch trials are an endless testimony of suffering. Loss, despair, anxiety, and sorrow pour out of the testimonies.
Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Witches, in other words, changed the dynamics and experience of loss. That may not have been the explicit rationale for many witnesses, but it certainly seems to have guided the thinking of Samuel Parris. Parris, the embattled minister whose children started throwing themselves at open flames, was the fourth pastor of Salem Village.
The first three had short tenures, invited by one faction but opposed by another. Few had their salaries paid; all would leave Salem for less than stellar careers; and one, George Burroughs, would be hanged as a witch.
Salem Village offered one of the lowest ministerial salaries in the entire colony, and its reputation of bitter factional divisions preceded it.
In , no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. He tried his hand as a merchant in Boston and failed there, too. Finally, Salem Village asked him to preach. For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage.
In his first sermon, he demanded that congregants love, serve, and obey him. Then he removed the Halfway Covenant that allowed God-fearing congregants who were not full members to baptize their children. It was clear from the start that Samuel Parris would not heal this divided church. The trouble with Parris seems especially evident from his preaching. As scholars have shown, Parris posed no neutral ground: all people were either of God or the devil, and his goal was to parse and separate.
From the moment he first began preaching, Parris spoke of cosmic battles. Frequently, the concerned faction supporting Parris met at his house to discuss the crisis facing the church, strategizing how to deal with all those who opposed him. It makes sense, then, that his house is where the fits began.
But Parris was not the only Puritan to see Satan at work, gathering forces for a violent battle against godly New England. Written at the behest of the governor, deputy governor, and chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials, this text chooses five cases, selectively presents the evidence, and defends the court in its work for Christ.
Governor Phips liked that account of things. He sent Wonders of the Invisible World to London as the official history of Salem and prohibited anyone else from publishing on the subject once the trials ended.
But the very need to silence opposition proved how few agreed with Cotton Mather. Resistance started mounting immediately, propelled by the case of Rebecca Nurse; during her examination, more than three dozen citizens signed a petition proclaiming her innocence and defending her good character.
Petitions continued to grow during the trials, with more and more brave persons signing documents attempting to save the lives of their neighbors. No petition worked.
Yet the rising cry of protest did finally have an effect, bringing the noise of opposition and resistance to those who held the most power in the colony. Soon Increase Mather joined the protests, publishing his own account of Salem while the trials were underway.
The people of this society from the moment they were born were invested into this lifestyle, and it would follow them into the afterlife. They believed in the existence of an afterlife and that their crimes before death would follow them there [Stone 3].
In order to ensure that everyone could read the Bible there was an emphasis on literacy. Members of the society were expected to abide by a strict morale code and adhere to a rigorous church schedule. Anyone who chose to rebel was worthy of punishment from god. The Puritans were deeply devoted to God and strongly believe in his power, they were afraid of the punishment he would cast upon them.
Therefore they try to avoid partaking in activities that would categorize them as sinners at any cost. For puritans holiness was a matter of the soul, being unable to attain this would mean you were unworthy.
As a child being born into the Puritan society would mean that you were told stories of hellfire and made to fear eternal domination if one was sinful [Stone 3]. The amount of faith they had in god was immense, but they equally believed in the existence of the Devil. This fear in the devil meant that by association witches; practitioners of the dark arts who were influenced by the devil, were also sinners.
In this situation almost anybody could be accused of practicing magic. But contrary to the misogyny centered European witch hunts, the Salem trials had several men who were tried and hanged. During the trials it was uncommon for a women to accuse her husband of witchcraft, but this courtesy wasnt extended to them. There were a number of men who would eagerly accuse their wives. Similar to this situation it was uncommon for the men to accuse other men [Washington Post].
The accused women were commonly childless, or they were considered to be old hags. Not only were the women in their community mainly accused, but a vast number of Native Americans were also accused of colluding with the devil. This was due to the reason that that the Natives did not worship any god or have a religion. In the eyes of the puritans it meant that they could easily succumb to the influence of the devil [Stone 5].
An example of this would be Tituba; the mixed race Native Indian and African slave from Barbados, who was accused of witchcraft by the girls in the Parish household. It can be said that the Puritan ideology is a form of theocracy. Theocracy is a form of government where religion plays a pivotal part in the final judgment. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary theocracy is a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.
This form of government was commonly followed by early civilizations and started to diminish after the age of enlightenment [Encyclopedia Britannica]. Contrary to what sources have said it can be seen that this form of government was followed during the time of the Salem witch trials.
The Salem Witch trials are an example of how religious extremism and misogyny lead to the ill-fated death of many people. As mentioned above there men, who were also a part of the trial, but in contrast to the number of men who were hanged there was a greater number of women who were hanged. The fact that there were men who were willing to claim their wives as witches was a result in the piety they had towards god.
The puritans had blind faith in what was preached in the bible. What is ironic about this situation is that the ones who mainly accused people of witchcraft were not those of a lower and less educated background, but those where who were well known in society and had the most knowledge about witches. The unfair amount of accusations throw at women in comparison to those thrown at men during the witch trials can easily be seen.
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