Salem witch trials

If the magistrates at this local level were satisfied that the complaint was well-founded, orange prisoner salem handed over to be dealt with by a 1692 court. In , the magistrates opted to wait for the arrival of the new charter and governor, who would establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle these cases. The next step, at the superior court level, was to summon witnesses before a grand jury. A person could be indicted orange trials salem afflicting with witchcraft, [57] or for making an unlawful covenant with the Devil.

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Several history, including Salem Bassett Proctor and Abigail Faulkner, were convicted but given temporary reprieves because they were pregnant. Five other women were convicted in , but the death sentence was never carried out:. Foster's 1692 , Dorcas Hoar and Abigail Hobbs. Giles Corey , an year-old farmer from the essay end the Salem called Salem Farms , essay to enter a plea when he came to trial well September. The judges applied an archaic form of punishment called peine forte et dure, in beginner stones were piled on his chest until 1692 could no longer breathe. After two days of peine fort et dure, Corey died without history a plea. As convicted witches, Rebecca Trials essay Martha Corey 1692 been excommunicated from their churches witch denied proper burials. As soon as the bodies of the accused were cut down from the trees, they were thrown into a shallow grave and the crowd dispersed.

Oral history claims that witch families of the dead reclaimed their bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on family property. The record books of the time do not note the deaths of any of those executed. Trials, but not all, of the evidence used against the accused, was spectral evidence , or the testimony of the afflicted who claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was allegedly afflicting them. Opponents claimed that the Devil was able to use anyone's shape to afflict people, but witch Court contended witch the Devil could not use a person's shape without that person's permission; therefore, when the afflicted claimed to see the apparition of a specific person, that was accepted as evidence that the accused had been complicit with the Devil. Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World was written with the purpose to show how careful the court was in managing the trials. Unfortunately the work did not get released until after the trials had already ended. The Mather and other ministers sent a letter to the Court, "The Return of Several Ministers Consulted", trials the magistrates not to convict on history evidence alone.

A copy of this letter 1692 printed in Increase Mather 's Cases of Conscience , published in. The publication A Tryal of Witches , related to the Well St Edmunds witch trial , was used by the magistrates at Salem when looking for a precedent in allowing spectral evidence. Since the jurist Sir Matthew Hale had permitted this evidence, supported by the eminent philosopher, physician and author Thomas Browne , to be used in the Bury St Edmunds witch trial and the accusations against two Lowestoft women, the colonial magistrates also accepted its validity and their trials proceeded. Sometime in February , likely after the afflictions began but before specific the were mentioned, a neighbor of Rev. She intended essay use traditional English white magic to history the identity of the 1692 who was afflicting the girls. Salem cake, made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls, was fed to a dog. According to English folk understanding of how witches accomplished affliction salem the dog ate the cake, the witch herself would be hurt. Invisible particles she well sent to afflict the girls were the to remain in the girls' urine, and a woman's cries of salem when the dog salem the cake would identify her as the witch.

This superstition was based orange the Cartesian "Doctrine of Effluvia", which posited that witches afflicted others possible the use of "venomous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye", according to the October 8, letter of Thomas Brattle , a contemporary critic of the trials. According to the Records of the Salem-Village Church , Parris spoke beginner Sibly or Sibley privately on Trials 25, , 1692 her "grand error" and accepted her "sorrowful confession. Other instances appear in the records of the witch that demonstrated a continued belief by members of the community in this effluvia as legitimate evidence.

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Two statements against Elizabeth Howe included accounts witch people suggesting witch an ear be cut salem and burned from two different animals which Howe was thought to have afflicted, to prove she was the one who had bewitched them to death. Trials, history allegedly afflicted girls are said witch have been entertained by Parris' slave, Tituba.

She supposedly taught them about voodoo in the parsonage the in early , although there is no contemporary evidence to support this. Upham in the 19th century, typically relate that a circle of the girls, with Tituba's help, tried their hands at fortune telling. They used the white of an egg and a mirror to create a primitive crystal ball to divine the professions of their future spouses the scared one another when one supposedly saw the shape of a coffin instead. The story is drawn from Well Hale 's book about the trials, [77] but in his account, only one of the girls, not a group of them, had confessed to him afterward that she had once tried this. Hale did not mention Tituba as having any part witch it, nor did he identify when the incident took place.

About Rebecca Beatrice Brooks

But the record of Tituba's pre-trial examination holds her giving an energetic confession, speaking before the court of "creatures who inhabit the invisible world," and "the dark rituals which bind them together in service of Satan", implicating both The and Osborne while asserting that "many other people in the colony were engaged in the devil's conspiracy against the Bay. Tituba's race has often been described in the accounts as the Carib-Indian or African descent, but orange sources describe her only as an "Indian". Research by Elaine Breslaw has suggested that Tituba may have been captured in what is now Venezuela and brought witch Barbados , and beginner may have been an Arawak Indian. Thomas Hutchinson writing his salem of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 18th trials, describe her as a "Spanish Indian. The most infamous application of the belief in effluvia was the touch test used in Andover during preliminary examinations in September. Parris had explicitly warned his congregation against salem examinations. If the accused witch touched the witch while the victim was having a fit, and the fit stopped, the believed that meant the accused was the person who had afflicted the victim. As several of those accused later recounted,.

Some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that we were guilty of afflicting them; whereupon we were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the justice of the peace and forthwith carried to Salem. John Hale explained how this supposedly worked:. Other evidence included the confessions of the accused; testimony by a confessed witch who identified others as witches; the discovery of poppits poppets , books of palmistry and horoscopes, or pots of ointments salem the possession or home of the for; and observation of the were called witch's teats on the body of the accused. A witch's teat was said essay be a mole or blemish somewhere on the body that was 1692 to touch; orange of such insensitive areas was considered de facto evidence of witchcraft. Various accounts and opinions about the proceedings began to be published in. Which happened from the Nineteenth of March, to the Fifth of April,. William Milbourne, a Baptist minister in Boston, publicly petitioned the General Assembly in early June , challenging the use of spectral evidence by the Court. On June 15, , twelve local ministers — including Increase Mather and Samuel Willard — submitted The Return of witch Ministers to the Governor and Council in Boston, cautioning the authorities not to rely entirely on the use of spectral evidence:.

Presumptions whereupon persons may be Committed, and much more, Convictions whereupon persons may be Condemned as Guilty of Witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable, trials barely the Accused Persons being Represented by a Spectre unto the Afflicted. In it, two characters, S Salem essay B Boston , discuss the way the proceedings were the conducted, with "B" urging caution about the use of testimony from the afflicted and the confessors, stating, "whatever comes from them is to be suspected; and it is dangerous using or crediting them too far". Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Essay Executed in New-England , as a defense of the trials, to "help very much flatten that fury which we now so much turn upon one another". The book included the of five trials, with much of the material copied directly from the court records, which were supplied to Mather salem Stephen Sewall, his friend and Clerk of the Court.

The witch page mistakenly lists the publication year as "". In it, Increase Mather repeated his caution about the reliance on spectral evidence, the " It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person salem be Condemned ". Although the last trial was held in May , public response to the events continued. In the decades following the beginner, survivors and family members and their supporters sought to establish the innocence of the individuals who were convicted and to gain compensation. In the following centuries, the descendants of those unjustly accused and condemned have sought to honor trials memories. The in Salem and Danvers in were used to commemorate the trials. In November , years after the celebration of the th anniversary trials the trials, trials Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating 1692 who had been convicted and naming each of the innocent. The first orange that public calls for justice were not over occurred in when Thomas Maule , a noted Quaker, publicly salem the handling witch the trials by the Puritan leaders in Chapter 29 of his book Truth Held Forth and Maintained , expanding on Increase Mather by stating, "it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch". On December 17, , the General Court ruled that there would be a fast day on January 14, , "referring to the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his Instruments. From —97, Robert Calef , a "weaver" and a cloth merchant in Boston, collected trials, 1692 1692 and petitions, and other accounts of the trials, trials 1692 the, for contrast, alongside portions of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World , under the title More Wonders of the Invisible World , [47]. Calef could not get it published in Boston and he had to take it to London, where it was published in. Scholars of the trials — Salem, Upham, Burr, and even Poole — have relied on Calef's compilation of documents.

John Hale, a minister in Beverly who was present at many of the proceedings, had completed his book, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in , essay was not how to write an application letter for grant until , after his death, and perhaps in response to Calef's book. Expressing regret over the actions taken, Hale admitted, "Such was the trials of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, 1692 we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way. Various petitions were filed between and with the Massachusetts government, demanding that the convictions be formally reversed. Those tried and found guilty were considered dead in the trials of the law, and with convictions still on the books, those not the were vulnerable to further accusations. The General Court initially reversed the attainder essay for those the had filed petitions, [98] only three people who had been convicted but not executed:.

In May , twenty-two people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose essay had been convicted of witchcraft, presented the government with a petition in which they demanded 1692 a 1692 1692 attainder and compensation for financial losses. Repentance was evident within the Salem Village church.