Ch. 1.1. Judges and Courts in the Salem Witch Trials

This section offers further reflection concerning the social context, courts, and the legal procedures used in the Salem Witch Trials, adapted from Peter Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (1998), 40-43. Key terms are bolded, and key players in these trials are underlined.

In contrast to the clerks of the Eng­lish courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, and Chan­cery, who were well trained in the law…, throughout the first colonies, clerkships of court ordinarily went not to a profes­sionally trained administrative cadre but to relatives, supporters, and friends of powerful judges and governors…

Similarly, whereas English judges were full-­time professional jurists…, colonial high-court judges were lay­men of affairs and authority in their communities who were acquainted with law but seldom trained in it. Moreover, they were never full-time jurists. After three-quarters of a century of operation the highest courts of Massachusetts and Virginia rarely included more than one well­ educated lawyer… This pattern continued well into the eighteenth century in most of the colonies.

The result of having laymen on the high-court benches might be… swift and sensible justice. Massachusetts Su­perior Court justices, such as Samuel Sewall, were deeply moral men, concerned about the quality of their performance. Sewall was typical of the best lay judges-well traveled, well schooled, much re­spected, and experienced in colonial government and in hearing and deciding lawsuits, if not learned in the law. His diary and the records of the Superior Court of Judicature while he sat on its bench, from 1692 to 1728, show an able and sensible magistrate, with one terrifying ex­ception. That exception demonstrated the danger posed by lay judges. In the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 the judges, including Sewall, de­parted from current, learned, English practice, and did so with tragic consequences.

Against the contemporary view of leading English jurists (and the advice of almost all the Puritan ministers of the colony), the judges of the court of oyer and terminer decided to admit into testimony spectral evidence, the uncorroborated testimony of adolescent girls that they had been visited and tormented by otherwise invisible wraiths [i.e., spirits].

In fact, the underlying causes of the witchcraft panic included a brutal Indian war on the borders of New England, an unsettled political situation in the Massachusetts colony, and a tangled web of mistrust and animosity in the Salem Village section of the town of Salem. There was disagree­ment in the village over whether to retain the services of Minister Sam­uel Parris. Quarrels over the retention of ministers were common in New England towns, but this one was carried on with great venom because it overlay a struggle between the two most powerful families in Salem, the Putnams and the Porters. To all of these local tumults was added, in the winter of 1692 (one of the most brutal winters of the age), the inexplicable illness of Parris’s daughter and niece. Soon other girls in the village complained of the same symptoms.

Adults were baffled but fearful until the girls accused three local women, one of them the Parrises’ slave Tituba, of bewitching them. Rumors of Indian witchcraft were already circulating through the village on the lips of refugees from the Indian war, and the girls no doubt knew of other cases in the colony’s history. The prodding of parents and min­isters had also played a role in focusing what might have been a combi­nation of adolescent anxiety and play-acting into accusations of crime. In modern child abuse cases incautious or overenthusiastic prosecutors pressure alleged victims to make accusations. Children are often eager to please adults and will soon learn what they are expected to say.

Following another line of inquiry, the historian Carol Karlsen has taken a second look at these “possessed” young women and found that many of them had lost one or both of their parents in the war and had little prospect of making good marriages or inheriting property from their families. The young women, facing the traumas of sexual identi­fication in a society whose male authorities limited what women could do and be, may well have experienced a collective “profound con­flict.” When well-meaning Puritan ministers and other authority figures tried to help the girls, the ministers inadvertently manufac­tured the witchcraft crisis. Frightened by the hideous shapes of their own imaginings, the preachers turned to the lay judges to scourge the witches.

To the authorities, Salem’s troubles became a microcosm of the ills of the colony, for Massachusetts itself seemed under a malign spell. As punishment for rising up against royal governor Edmund Andros in 1689, Massachusetts waited for a new charter of government, and it feared for its continued existence. To many devout Puritans it seemed that the Devil was abroad and doing mischief.

In May the newly ap­pointed governor, William Phips, returned from England, where he had tried unsuccessfully to regain the old system of government for the colony, to find the jails overflowing with suspected witches. The assem­bly had the power to create regular courts under the new charter, but it was not yet in session and something had to be done. Faced with the crisis, he used his discretion to fashion a special court. To its bench were named laymen like Sewall, former Assistants like the wise and prudent Nathaniel Saltonstall, ambitious politicians like William Stoughton, the lieutenant governor, and local justices like John Hathorne (whose descendant Nathaniel Hawthorne would movingly re-create the terror of the trials) and Jonathan Corwin. There were no trained lawyers on the bench, but all believed that there was a Devil and that he contracted secretly with men and women to do his evil work in the colony. Thus, at least in theory, witches had the power to leave their bodies and in spectral form assault their victims.

English jurists had become skeptical of testimony about spectral as­saults and had uncovered frauds and perjury in English witchcraft cases. But Stoughton was eager to rid the colony once and for all of witches, so instead of putting the brakes on the runaway trials, he allowed into evidence every outlandish assertion of confessed witches (including their supposed flights through the air on poles to midnight masses in open fields), and every one of the girls’ complaints of invisible punches and pinches. Juries, browbeaten by the bench and moved by the per­formance of the girls, convicted all the defendants.

By the end of the proceedings that spring and summer fifteen women and four men had been hanged for witchcraft and one old man, Giles Corey, had pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to accede to the authority of the court. Nearly two hundred more suspects were in jail awaiting their turn at trial. Four of the suspects had died in jail and many more were sick.

Saltonstall was so appalled at the work of the court that he quietly resigned from the bench. The leading ministers (except for Cotton Mather, who approved the conduct of the trials) protested against the proceedings and convinced Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, to turn their criticism into a tract on the dangers of believing spectral evidence. He agreed that spectral visitations might be the Devil’s own instrument for fooling the credulous and casting blame on the innocent. At any rate, permitting spectral evidence in court was playing the Devil’s game. Increase Mather’s work was widely circulated. Phips was con­vinced and ordered a stop to the trials. They reconvened in the winter, but this time spectral evidence was not allowed. All but three women were acquitted in the new round of trials, and Phips had pardoned them, as well as everyone else, by the spring of 1693.

Five years after the trials, one week after burying his own young sons, Sewall asked forgiveness of God and man for the tragedy of the Salem trials: “Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated stroke of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the guilt contracted, upon the opening of the late Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem, he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, de­sires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men.”