The proceedings in witchcraft in 1692 to us who are two hundred and twenty years removed from the scene, seem, at first, impossible, then mortifying, and persuasive of disowning our fathers and forgetting the period of their folly. At best, the occurrence furnishes the wildest and saddest chapter in our New England history.

Antiquity of the Witch
and Her Legal Status

The doctrine of familiar spirits was current in most ancient times. It is possible that immediately after the fall in Adam the imprisoned spirit of man began to assert its former freedom and ability. The old Scriptures depicted the witch’s character, gave warning of her blighting influence, and enacted heavy penalties against employing her agency. In Exodus, xxii. 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” In Leviticus, xx. 27: “A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” In Deuteronomy, xviii. 9-12: “When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or any observer of times, or any enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer; for all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.”

The Colonial Laws and
Their Biblical Origin

The colonial laws to which New England witches were amenable, codified by Rev. Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, who had had extensive legal training and practice before entering the ministry, were published in 1641. Mr. Ward^[2] followed Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver, in great measure, but he distanced England in mildness and was far ahead of his time in scope. With him, however, the witch found no favor. Death was the punishment for witchcraft, first and last, and the Puritan, whose sure palladium of civil and religious freedom was the Bible, obeyed the precept to the letter, his highest knowledge and authority.

The Modern Witch and
Her Terrible Persecution

The modern witch, it is said, had her birth near the beginning of the Christian era. Her persecution began about two hundred years later. From that time hundreds of thousands of victims were immolated to appease the inconsiderate and insatiate demands of her persecutors.

In the earliest years witches were generally burned, and in the first one hundred and fifty years it is estimated thirty thousand thus perished. Later, in France, in one century, an almost incredible number suffered—one thousand in a single diocese. In the century, 1600 to 1700, two hundred were hanged in England, one thousand were burned in Scotland, and a much greater number on the Continent.

The American Witch and
Views of the Educated

In America there were witch trials—in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania,^[3]—some years before 1692. In Boston, 1648, Margaret Jones, of malignant touch, was hanged, and Mrs. Ann (Wm.) Hebbins, in 1655. In Springfield, 1651, Mrs. Mary (Hugh) Parsons was hanged. In Ipswich quarter court, 1652, a man was sentenced to pay a fine of twenty shillings, or to be whipped for “having familiarity with the Devil.”

The doctrine of witches was embraced not only by the common people, but also by the learned; Tycho Brahe, the prince of astronomers, and Kepler, his student, Martin Luther, the bold theologian, and Melancthon, the gentle; the silver-tongued Dr. Watts and the pious Baxter, who styled a disbeliever in witchcraft “an obdurate Sadducee,” and others whom time fails me to mention.

Old Crone Lore and
Three Notable Dissenters

Witch stories were a social entertainment, to the mingled fear and merriment of guests and the positive foreboding of children. Who even now among the older people has forgotten the crone lore of our grandmothers—how witches would seize a red-hot iron, glide into a heated oven, ride through the air on enchanted broomsticks, and how stalwart men would stalk through keyholes, supported and directed by Satanic power! It was believed that witches made an actual, deliberate, and formal compact with Satan.

There were, however, two or three persons of learning and influence in the Province who (to their great credit, be it said) dared to oppose the doctrine of witches—the celebrated Rev. Samuel Willard, of the Old South Church, Boston,—Maj. Nathaniel Saltonstall, who declined a seat upon the bench rather than participate in the witch trials,—and Rev. John Higginson (son of Rev. Francis, the first minister of Salem), who was cautious and held himself aloof; for his conscience whispered he had gone too far against the Quakers.

The New England witch was supposed to be an old woman of attenuated form, somewhat bent; clothed in lively colors and ample skirts; having a darting and piercing eye, a head sporting disheveled hair and crowned with a sugar-loaf hat, a carlin’s cheek, a falcated chin bent to meet an aquiline nose, by both of which was formed a Neapolitan bay, her mouth in the background resembling Vesuvius in eruption; and riding an enchanted broomstick with a black cat as guide.

Salem Village, the location of the hideous catastrophe, was the northern precinct of Salem; and when it was incorporated Danvers, its name became Danvers Center. Quite recently (1910) the trolley car company changed the name to Danvers Highlands, but in the steam car nomenclature it is Collins Street. From Town House Square in Salem to the Highlands a trolley ride costs a nickel; the distance is five miles, and every mile a pleasure.

Ingersoll and His Tavern
Revs. Bailey, Burroughs, Lawson

Nathaniel Ingersoll occupied the central location in the village; a man of industry and thrift; a licensed innkeeper, who sold liquor by the quart on Sunday; a kind of chief of police; managed the defenses against the Indians; a benevolent man, and was chosen deacon. His name does not figure in the witch trials, and the witches have left no records of the influence of his tavern in the results. The open plat of ground in front of his tavern was called Ingersoll’s Common. Farther up the street, at No. 5, is a plat of ground he gave for “a training field forever.” Capt. Dea. Jonathan Walcott was a neighbor, as was also Sergt. Thomas Putnam, parish clerk.

• 1. Locates the church there at present.
• 2. Locates the church of 1692.
• 3. Locates the Ingersoll Tavern and the present parsonage.
• 4. Locates the Parris house where the mischief began.
• 5. Locates the entrance to the Ingersoll Training Field.
• The narrow lane leading to No. 4 is a right of way for all.

Rev. James Bailey, near his majority, a recent graduate of Harvard, began to preach (not as pastor) there in 1671, and created a division. Rev. George Burroughs succeeded him in 1680, but matters grew worse. In 1683 Rev. Deodat Lawson began and gave no better results.

Mr. Burroughs was a short, stout man, very muscular and of very dark complexion. He was a Harvard graduate of 1670. Most of the witches knew him; and his complexion and extraordinary strength argued his connection with the black art and the muscular devil.

Rev. Deodat Lawson (Deo-dat-um), a “God-given” cataplasm for the tumor of unrest, social discords, and animosities that had their rise in Bailey’s ministry! With Lawson, the suppuration began; for the deviltry had gone from seance to families and the church, where the unwhipped girls cried out from time to time, “enough of that”; “see the yellow bird on the minister’s hat”; “now name your text”; “look how she sits”; to all which Mr. Lawson’s simplicity testifies: these things “did something interrupt me in my first prayer, being so unusual.”

Rev. Samuel Parris, Student
West Indian Trader, First Pastor

The wound was treated and cleansed during the ministry of Rev. Samuel Parris. He was born in London, about 1653, had been a merchant in Boston and the Spanish Main, and had studied at Harvard. He succeeded Mr. Lawson and was ordained and installed their first pastor, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1689. He left in 1696. The unanimity of the church since he left has been as marked as the schism was before he left.

Mr. Parris’s home was at No. 4 on the map. His house probably did not survive the year 1717. His meetinghouse stood a little to the east of the Ingersoll Tavern, probably the flat spot now marked by rose bushes and weeds, and maybe by a large, flat stone in the wall, which stone may have served as a doorstep. A beautiful modern church edifice now graces the corner opposite Ingersoll’s old corner, while the parsonage occupies the Ingersoll site.

John and His Tituba
Rev. S. Parris’s Slaves

Mr. Parris brought with him from the Spanish Main, as his slaves, a couple called John Indian and his wife, Tituba. The ignorance of the Spanish population found its summit of pleasure in dancing, singing, sleight of hand, palmistry, fortune-telling, magic, and necromancy (or spirit communication with the dead); and John and his Tituba in all those things were fully up to date.

Parris’s Witch School, Apt
Pupils, Their Personnel

To the pastor’s house (as he wrote, “When these calamities first began, which was at my house”) the village maidens, by surreption, went under the tuition of Tituba. Those of us who have some remembrance of the rise of spiritualism, the phenomenon of table-tipping, and the slightly more refined practice of the Élite with scribbling planchet, can picture in some degree Tituba’s pupils and how they got there.

Of those pupils (“children,” as the court called them) two were of the pastor’s family—Ann Williams, aged eleven, and his daughter, whom he quickly sent away; Ann Putnam, daughter of Ann and Sergeant Thomas, a precocious miss of only twelve, who easily became a leader; Mary Warren, domestic in John Proctor’s family, aged twenty; Susannah Sheldon and Elizabeth Booth, neighbors and eighteen; Sarah Churchill, helper to George Jacobs, senior; Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, former domestic for Mrs. Burroughs, and Mary Walcott, daughter of Deacon Jonathan, each of them eighteen.

Had those “children,” the pioneers of the awfully fatal mischief, been scourged at the whipping post,

if needful, and John and his Tituba been returned to their native soil, no doubt the horrible tragedy would have been averted. The Shafflin girl in Peabody was cured “when a timely whipping brought her to her senses.” So was Dinah Sylvester, of Mansfield, when given her choice of a whipping or owning and abandoning her error.

Casting out Devils
“Still the Wonder Grew”

But, instead, Mr. Parris, in fashion of the vaunted prowess of Cotton Mather and other pedantic, astute, aspiring ministers, to show their efficiency in “casting out devils,” called in the clergy, the deacons, and the elders, and held, February 11th, a day of fasting and prayer. “And still the wonder grew.”

A Portentous Leap Day
“The Greatest Show on Earth”

It was high time, and some leading citizens took the initiative. A complaint was lodged against Tituba Feb. 25, 1692. The first warrants were issued the 29th, the leap day of the year, and Sarah Good, Sarah Osbun, and Tituba Indian were apprehended. They were examined March 1st and ordered to jail in Boston, to await the action of the higher court.

The examinations were to be held in Ingersoll’s Tavern, but the crowd was so great on Ingersoll’s Common, that the court adjourned to the meeting house. The magistrates were John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, assistants. They went over from Salem, attended by the marshal, constables, and their aids, and all of them arrayed in the garb of court authority and the attractive insignia of official station. Their advent into the village was marked by an ostentation of whatever grandeur and splendor they had at command. To the gaping multitude it was “the greatest show on earth,” while the trials proved a “Wild West.”

Sarah Good, a broken-down outcast, deserted by her husband, begging food from house to house, was first examined; the last examined was Tituba, the chief offender.

Unwarrantable Usurpation
Names of the Court and Jury

The Province took formal charge in re April 11, 1692. Simon Bradstreet was governor. He had been honored with thirteen annual elections by the people to that office. He was then eighty-six years of age, the “Grand Old Man” of his time. He struck the keynote at first in an opinion that the witch evidence was insufficient. With honor crowned he passed into history as “The Old Charter Governor.”

The high action of Deputy-Governor Danforth and his Counsel, who were the court, gave Éclat to the proceedings and consternation filled the county. In October, 1691, a new charter was signed, and Sir Wm. Phipps was appointed governor. He arrived in Boston with the new charter, Saturday, May 14, 1692. William Stoughton was made deputy-governor, in place of Thomas Danforth.

In this change from popular government Increase Mather, an early president of Harvard College, was a “power behind the throne.” The new charter had his approval and Sir Wm. Phipps, its first governor, was his nominee. Phipps was “a well-meaning man, inclined to superstition,” and Mather admired his “incompetency.” Stoughton was a man “of cold affections, proud, self willed, and covetous of distinction, and universally hated by the people.” He was appointed deputy-governor to please Cotton Mather, son of Increase. Cotton in his race for glory ran amuck. He was a man of “overweening vanity,” panting for fame, and the strenuous mover in the trials. He harangued the populace and sermonized on witchcraft; he wrote a book: “The Trials of Witches,” and even on horseback, at the hanging of Rev. George Burroughs, he harangued the people gathered there, lest they interfere and rob the gallows.

Increase Mather Father

Cotton Mather Son

By the new charter courts of justice were to be established by the General Court. The witch trials were, therefore, stranded and must remain in statu quo, apparently, for several months, while awaiting the action of the General Court. The Governor, however, by “an unwarrantable usurpation of authority,” organized a court of final hearing, called Oyer and Terminer, to act in the pending cases.

Deputy-Governor Stoughton was appointed chief justice, and Nathaniel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, who declined to serve, and was succeeded by Jonathan Corwin, of Salem; Major John Richards, of Boston; Major Bartholomew Gedney, of Salem; Mr. Wait Winthrop, Mr. Peter Sargent, and Capt. Samuel Sewell, of Boston, Associate Justices.

The panel of the Jury of Inquest was Thomas Fisk, foreman; William Fisk, John Bachelor, Thomas Fisk, Jr., John Dane, Joseph Eveleth, Thomas Perley, Sr., John Peabody, Thomas Perkins, Samuel Sayer, Andrew Eliot, and Henry Herrick, Sr.

The commissions of the court were dated Friday, May 27th; the court convened Thursday, June 2d; Bridget Bishop, of Salem, was convicted Wednesday, the 8th, and hanged Friday, the 10th. The court, by adjournment, next sat Wednesday, the 29th of June; then by several adjournments, it was to sit the 1st of November.

The day on which Bridget Bishop was hanged, June 10th, the General Court enacted a law of the old charter for capital cases, and under it presumably the subsequent witch trials were held, while the personnel of the court remained the same.

Trials Arrested, Court Suspended
List of Those Hanged

The General Court in October established the Superior Court of Judicature and gave it jurisdiction in witch cases. Governor Phipps immediately arrested the witch trials, and suspended the court. Oyer and Terminer was dissolved. These were hanged:

Friday, June 10th

• 1. Bishop, Bridget, wife of Edward, of Salem.

Tuesday, July 19th

• 1. Good, Sarah, of the village.
• 2. Wildes, Sarah, daughter of Wm., of Topsfield.
• 3. Howe, Elizabeth, wife of James, Jr., of Ipswich Farms.
• 4. Nourse, Rebecca, wife of Francis, of the village.
• 5. Martin, Susannah, of Amesbury.

• 1. Burroughs, Rev. George, of Casco. See above.
• 2. Proctor, John, of Peabody.
• 3. Jacobs, George, of the Village, eighty years old.
• 4. Willard, John, apprehended at Groton.
• 5. Carryer, Martha, wife of Thomas, of Andover.

Thursday, September 22d

• 1. Cory, Martha, wife of Giles, of Peabody.
• 2. Æstey, Mary, wife of Isaac, of Topsfield.
• 3. Parker, Alice, wife of John, of Salem.
• 4. Pudeator, Ann, widow of Jacob.
• 5. Scott, Margaret, widow of Benj., of Rowley.
• 6. Read, Wilmot, wife of Samuel, of Marblehead.
• 7. Wardwell, Samuel, of Andover.
• 8. Parker, Mary, of Salem.

Monday, September 19th

Giles Cory would not plead to the indictment, and was pressed to death. In modern law one thus mute is understood to plead not guilty, but at that period one must plead before he could be put on trial, and might be tortured till he pleaded or died. Mr. Cory would not countenance any phase or feature of witchcraft.

Tuesday, May 10th

Died in prison Sarah Osbun, condemned, wife of Alexander.

Saturday, December 3d

Died in prison, Ann Foster, widow of Andrew, of Andover, who died, 1685, aged 106.

Elizabeth Proctor, widow of John (above), was reprieved on account of her condition, then pardoned.

Mrs. Thomas Bradbury, of Salisbury, daughter of John Perkins, of Ipswich, eighty years old, condemned, then acquitted.

Rebecca Eames, wife of Robert, of Boxford, condemned, reprieved.

Elizabeth Morse, of Newbury, reprieved.

Abigail Falkner and Elizabeth Johnson, both of Andover, daughters of Rev. Francis Dane, were respectively thirteen and five months in jail.

Mary Lacey, wife of Lawrence, daughter of Andrew and Ann Foster (above), confessed, accused her mother of bewitching her, and escaped punishment.

As above there were twenty-eight convictions, nineteen persons were hanged, and one was pressed to death, “fifty-five were pardoned, one hundred and fifty more were imprisoned, and two hundred others or more were accused.” Several dogs were accused, and one of Danvers and another of Andover were executed.

Let it now be noted and remembered, that no witch or wizard was ever burned to death in Salem town or Essex county.

The Beginning of the End
Rev. John Hale’s Change of Heart

Early in October, 1692, the wild and extravagant methods of the court had penetrated every community, and by relation or friendship, almost every family, and too, accusations rested upon families of the wealthy and the learned, of clergymen and laymen, and even it was whispered upon one of the judges of the court and the wife of the governor; and it was only when the ruthless authority of the law invaded those homes that the fury of the storm abated. When Rev. John Hale, of Beverly, who had been conspicuously active in the convictions, found his wife in the diabolical toils, he experienced a sudden change of heart, and prayed for peace. The time was ripe; Mr. Hale’s sentiments echoed from every home. The establishment of the new court (Wm. Stoughton, Chief Justice, Thomas Danforth, Wait Winthrop, John Richards, and Samuel Sewell, Associate Justices) and the abolition of the old court, helped the cause.

In the January next following fifty persons were indicted. All who were tried were acquitted except three, who were pardoned. All who were not tried were discharged on the payment of thirty shillings each. In the following May, when a jail delivery had been decreed, one hundred and fifty went forth.

Lofty Character of the Condemned
Judge Joseph Story’s Tribute

Those who suffered were a remarkable company of men and women. They came from the humble walks in life, but most of them were old in experience and solidified in character and sentiments. Though they were posted as criminals, taunted with aspersions, forbidden counsel in law and religion, and had every word of defense twisted into a semblance of condemnation, yet they exhibited the true nobility of life in truth and righteousness; they counted their lives not dear to them, could they only reach the goal of their hope in God their Saviour.

But after all we must not judge the actors in this frenzied delusion harshly or rashly. Hon. Joseph Story, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, writes: “Surely our ancestors had no special reason for shame in a belief which had the universal sanction of their own and all former ages, which counted in its train philosophers as well as enthusiasts, which was graced by the learning of prelates as well as by the countenance of kings, which the law supported by its mandates, and the purest judges felt no compulsions in enforcing.”

Or the place where “The Witches” were hanged is on Proctor Street, Salem, marked off on this map by the dotted lines. The cross locates “The Crevice,” where the corpses were thrown. To touch a witch corpse was malignant; yet some bodies were taken away for burial at home.

Giles Cory was pressed to death in the field corner of St. Peters and Brown Streets, opposite the jail then on Church Street, corner of St. Peters Street, Salem.