Salem Witch Trials: Aftermath and Closure

Although the last trial was held May 1693, public response to the events still continued.  For many decades after, survivors and family members (and their supporters) sought to establish the innocence of the individuals convicted and gain compensation.  The descendants of those unjustly accused and condemned sought to honor their memories.  Events in Salem and Danvers in 1992 used to commemorate the trials.  In November 2001, years after the celebration of the 300^th anniversary of the trials, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating all who had been convicted and naming each of the innocent.  The trials are a part of American culture and explored in numerous works of art, literature, and film.

Reversals of Attainder and Compensation to the Survivors and Their Families

The first indication that public calls for justice were not over occurred in 1695 when Thomas Maule, a noted Quaker, publicly criticized the handling of the trials by Puritan leaders in Chapter 29 of his book “Truth Held Forth and Maintained”, expanding on Increase Mather’s idea, 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”.  Maule was imprisoned for twelve months for publication of his book before being tried and found not guilty.

The General Court ruled on December 17, 1696, that there would a fast day on January 17, 1697, “referring to the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his Instruments.”  On that day, Samuel Sewall asked Rev. Samuel Willard to read aloud the apology to the congregation of Boston’s South Church, “to take the Blame & Shame” of the “late Commission of Oyer & Terminer at Salem”.  Thomas Fiske and elven other trial jurors also asked forgiveness.

From 1693-97, Robert Calef, a “weaver” and a cloth merchant in Boston, collected correspondence, court records and petitions, and other accounts of the trials, and placed them, for contrast, alongside portions of Cotton Mather’s “Wonders of the Invisible World”, under the title “More Wonders of the Invisible World”.

Not able to publish it in Boston, Calef took it to London and published in 1700.  Scholars of the trials—Hutchinson, Upham, Burr, and even Poole—relied on Calef’s compilation of documents.  John Hale, a minister in Beverly was present at many of the proceedings, completed his book, “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in 1697”, was not published until 1702, after his death, and perhaps in response to Calef’s book.    Expressing regret over the actions taken, Hale admitted, “Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.”

Various petitions were filed between 1700 and 1703 with the Massachusetts government, demanding that the convictions be formally reversed.  Those tried and found guilty were considered dead in the eyes of the law, and with convictions still on the books, those not executed were vulnerable to further accusations.  The General Court initially reversed the attainder only for those who had filed petitions, only three people who had been convicted but not executed:  Abigail Faulkner, Sr., Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Wardwell.  In 1703, another petition was filed, requesting a more equitable settlement for those wrongly accused, but it was not until 1709, when the General Court received further request, that it took action on this proposal.  In May 1709, twenty-two people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose relatives had been convicted of witchcraft, presented the government with a petition in which they demanded both a reversal of attainder and compensation for financial losses.

Repentance was evident within the Salem Village Church.  Rev. Joseph Green and members of the church voted on February 14, 1703, after nearly two months of consideration, to reverse the excommunication of Martha Corey.  On August 25, 1706, when Ann Putnam, Jr., one of the most active accusers, joined the Salem Village Church, publicly asked forgiveness.  She claimed that while she had not acted out of malice, but had been deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent people, mentioning Rebecca Nurse, in particular, and was accepted for full membership.

October 17, 1711, the General Court passed a bill reversing the judgment against the twenty-two people listed in the 1709 petition (there were seven additional people who had been convicted but had not signed the petition, but there was no reversal of attainder for them).  Two months later, on December 17, 1711, Governor Joseph Dudley authorized monetary compensation to the twenty-two people in the 1709 petition.  The amount of £578 12s was authorized to be divided among the survivors and relatives of those accused, and most of the accounts were settled within a year, but Philip English’s extensive claims were not settled until 1718.  Finally, on March 6, 1712, Rev. Nicholas Noyes and members of the Salem church reversed Noyes’ earlier excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey.

Memorials

Rebecca Nurse’s descendants erected an obelisk-shaped granite memorial in her memory in 1885 on the grounds of the Nurse Homestead in Danvers, with an inscription from John Greenleaf Whittier.  In 1892, an additional monument was erected in honor of forty neighbors who signed a petition in support of Nurse.

Not every condemned was exonerated in early 18^th century.  In 1957, descendants of the six people who had been wrongly convicted and executed but not included in the bill for reversal of attainder in 1711, or added to it in 1712, demanded the General Court formally clear the names and their ancestral family members.  An act was passed pronouncing the innocence of those accused, although it only listed Ann Pudeator by name, the others were listed only as “certain other persons”, phrasing which failed specifically to name:  Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott.

The 300^th anniversary of the trials was marked in 1992 in Salem and Danvers by a variety of events.  A memorial park was dedicated in Salem which included stone slab benches inserted in the stone wall of the park for each of those executed in 1692.  Speakers at the ceremony in August included playwright Arthur Miller and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.  Danvers erected its own new memorial, an reinterred bones unearthed in the 1950s, assumed to be those of George Jacobs, Sr., in a new resting place at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead.

In 1992, the Danvers Tercentennial Committee persuaded the Massachusetts House of Representatives to issue a resolution honoring those who had died.  After extensive efforts by Paula Keene, a Salem schoolteacher, state representatives J. Michael Ruane and Paul Tirone, along with others, issued a bill where the names of all those not previously listed were to be added to this resolution.  When it was finally signed on October 31, 2001, by Governor Jane Swift, more than 300 years later, all were finally proclaimed innocent.

In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its project tea had determined the execution site on Gallows Hill in Salem, where nineteen “witches” had been hanged in public.  Members of the Gallows Hill Project worked with the city of Salem using old maps and documentation, as well as sophisticated GIS and ground-penetrating radar technology, to survey the area of what became known as Proctor’s Ledge.  The city owns the property and plans to install a memorial there to the innocent victims.  A documentary, Gallows Hill – Nineteen, is in production about the events.