Salem Witch Trials: Legal Procedures

Overview

Whenever someone concluded that a loss, illness, or death was caused by witchcraft, the accuser entered a complaint against the alleged witch with local magistrates.  If the complaint was credible, magistrates had the accused arrested and brought before public examination – an interrogation where magistrates usually pressed the accused to confess.

If the magistrates were satisfied that the complaint was well-founded, the prisoner was handed over for trial by the superior court.  In 1692, magistrates opted to wait for the arrival of a new charter and governor, who would establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle cases.  The superior court summoned witnesses before a grand jury.

A person was indicted on charges of afflicting someone with witchcraft, or for making an unlawful covenant with the Devil.  Once indicted, the defendant went to trial, sometimes on the same day, as was the case of Bridget Bishop, the first person indicted and tried on June 2, and executed eight days later, on June 10, 1692.

There were four execution dates, with one person executed on June 10, 1692, five on July 19, 1692 (Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes), another five executed on August 19, 1692 (Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, Sr., and John Proctor), and eight on September 22, 1692 (Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott).

Several were given temporary reprieves after being convicted due to pregnancy, including Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor and Abigail Faulkner.  Five other women who were convicted in 1692, but the death sentence was never carried out:  Mary Bradbury (in absentia), Ann Foster (died later in prison), Mary Lacey, Sr. (Foster’s daughter), Dorcas Hoar and Abigail Hobbs.

81-year-0ld farmer from the southeast end of Salem (Salem Farms), Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea at his trial in September.  The judges used an archaic form of punishment, peine forte et dure, where stones were piled on top of his chest until he could no longer breathe.  Corey died two days later, not entering a plea.  Corey’s refusal explains why his estate was not confiscated by the Crown, but according to historian Chadwick Hansen, much of Corey’s property was being seized and he made a will in prison: “his death was a protest … against the methods of the court.”  Contemporary critic of the trial, Robert Calef wrote: “Giles Corey pleaded not Guilty to his indictment, but would not himself upon Tryal by the Jury (they having cleared none upon Tryal) and knowing there would be the same Witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what Death they would put him to.”

As convicted witches, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey were excommunicated from their churches and denied proper burials.  After their bodies were cut from the tree, they were tossed in a shallow grave and the spectators dispersed.  Oral history claims the families of the dead reclaimed the bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on family property.  Record books during this time do not note the deaths of any of those executed.

Spectral Evidence

Most, but not all, of the evidence used against the accused, was spectral evidence, or testimony of the afflicted who claimed to see apparition or shape of the person who allegedly afflicted them.  theological dispute ensued about the use of this evidence was based on whether a person had to give person to the Devil for his/her shape to be used to afflict.  Opponents claimed the Devil was able to use anyone’s shape to afflict people, but the Court contended 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, it was accepted as evidence that the accused had been complicit with the Devil.

Cotton Mather’s “The Wonders of the Invisible World was written to show how careful the court managed the trials.  But the work did not get released until after the trials were ended.  Mather explained how he felt spectral evidence was presumptive and didn’t stand alone to warrant conviction.  Robert Calef, a strong critic against Cotton Mather, stated in his own book “More Wonders of the Invisible World” that by confessing an accused would not be brought to trial, such in the cases of Tituba and Dorcas Good.

Increase Mather as well as other ministers sent letters to the Court, “The Return of Several Ministers Consulted”, urging magistrates not to convict on spectral evidence alone.  (The court later ruled that spectral evidence was inadmissible, causing a dramatic reduction in convictions and hastening an end to the trials.)  A copy of this letter was printed in Increase Mather’s “Cases of Conscience,” which was published in 1693.  The publication, “A Tryal of Witches,” relating to the 1662 Bury St Edmunds witch trial, was used by magistrates at Salem as precedent in allowing spectral evidence.  Jurist Sir Matthew Hale permitted this evidence, supporting the eminent philosopher, physician and author Thomas Browne, to be used in the Bury St Edmund witch trial and the accusations against two Lowestoft women, the colonial magistrates accepted its validity and the trials proceeded.

Witch Cake

Sometime around February 1692, possibly before specific names were mentioned, a neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibly (or Sibly, aunt of Mary Walcott). Instructed John Indian, one of the minister’s slaves, to make a witch cake.  She intended to use traditional English white magic to find the identity of the witch afflicting the girls.  The 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, when a dog ate the cake, the witch herself would be hurt.  Invisible particles she had sent to afflict the girls were believed to remain in the girls’ urine, and a woman’s cries of pain when a dog ate the cake would identify her as the witch.  This superstition was based on Cartesian “Doctrine of Effluvia,” which posited that witches afflicted others by the use of “venomous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye”, according to the October 8, 1692 letter of Thomas Brattle, a contemporary critic of the witch trials.

Records of Salem Village Church show Parris spoke with Sibly (or Sibley) privately on March 25, 1692 about her “grand error” and accepted her “sorrowful confession.”  In his Sunday sermon to his congregation on March 27 addressed the subject of “calamities” that had begun in his household, but stated, “it never brake forth to any considerable light, until diabolical means were used, by the making of a cake by my Indian man, who had his direction from this our sister, Mary Sibly.”  He admonished his congregation against the use of any kind of magic, even white magic, because it was essentially, “going to the Devil for help against the Devil.”  Mary  Sibly (or Sibley) publicly acknowledged the “error” of her actions before the congregation, and a show of hands voted that they were satisfied with her admission.

Other instances appear in the records demonstrating a belief by members of the communicating in this effluvia as legitimate evidence.  Two statements against Elizabeth Howe included accounts of people suggesting that an ear be cut off and burned from two different animals which Howe was thought to have afflicted, proving she was the one who had bewitched them to death.

Traditionally, the afflicted girls are said to have been entertained by Parris’ slave, Tituba, as she allegedly taught them about voodoo in the parsonage kitchen in early 1692, (despite there being no evidence to support this).  A variety of secondary sources, starting with Charles W. Upham in the 19^th century, relate that a circle of 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 and scared one another when supposedly saw the shape of a coffin.  The story comes from John Hale’s book about the trials, but his version only states that only one girl actually tried this, an Hale doesn’t mention Tituba as having any part of this, nor did he identify when the incident took place.  Tituba’s pre-trial examination gives an energetic confession as she speaks before the court, “creatures who inhabit the invisible world,” and “the dark rituals which bind them together in service of Satan”, implicating both Good and Osborne while asserting that “many other people in the colony engaged in the devil’s conspiracy against the Bay.”

Tituba’s race is described as Carib-Indian or African descent, but contemporary sources say she is an “Indian”.  Researcher Elaine Breslaw suggests Tituba may have been captured in Venezuela and brought to Barbados, making her an Arawak Indian.  Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, in writing his history of Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 18^th century, describe her as a “Spanish Indian.”  During this day, this meant a Native American from the Carolinas/Georgia/Florida.

Touch Test

An infamous application of the belief in effluvia was the touch test used in Andover during preliminary examinations in September 1692.  Despite Parris explicitly warning his congregations against using this examination, but supposedly if the accused witch touched the victim while the victim was having a fit, and the fit stopped, observers believed it meant the accused was the person who afflicted the victim.  Several of those accused later recounted:

“…we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said.  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.”

The Rev. John Hale explained how it worked: “the Witch by the cast of her eye sends forth a Malefick Venome into the Bewitched to cast him into a fit, and therefore the touch of the hand doth by sympathy cause that venome to return into the Body of the Witch again”.

Other Evidence

Other evidence included 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 in the possession or home of the accused; and observation of what were called witch’s teats on the body of the accused.  A witch’s teat is a mole or blemish anywhere on the body insensitive to touch; this discovery of insensitive areas was considered de facto evidence of witchcraft.

Contemporary Commentary on the Trials

Several accounts about the Salem witch trials started being published in 1692.  Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village, visited Salem Village in March and April 1692, and later that year published his own account of what he saw and heard, titled, “A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village:  Which Happened from the Nineteenth of March, to the Fifth of April, 1692.”

Rev. William Millbourne, a Baptist minister in Boston, publicly petitioned the General Assembly early June 1692, challenging the use of spectral evidence by the Court.  Milbourne had to post £200 bond (equal to £30,754, or $42,000 USD today) or be arrested for “contriving, writing and publishing the said scandalous Papers”.

On June 15, 1692, twelve local ministers—including Increase Mather and Samuel Willard—submitted “The Return of Several Ministers” to the Governor and Council in Boston, cautioning the authorities not to rely 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, than barely the Accused Persons being Represented by a Spectre unto the Afflicted.”

Sometime in 1692, minister of the Third Church o Boston, Samuel Willard anonymously published a short tract in Philadelphia titled, “Some Miscellany Observations On Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue Between S & B.”  The authors were listed as “P.E and J.A.” (Philip English and John Alden), but the work is attributed to Willard.  In it, two characters, S (Salem) and B (Boston), discuss the proceedings were 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 the too far”.

Sometime in September 1692, Governor Phips requested Cotton Mather to write the “Wonders of the Invisible World:  Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately 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”.  Published in Boston and London in 1692, but dated 1693, the introductory letter of endorsements by William Stoughton, Chief Magistrate.  The material is taken directly from court records, supplied to Mather by Stephen Sewall, his friend and Clerk of the Court.

Mather’s father, Increase Mather, published “Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits”, dated October 3, 1692, after the last trials by the Court of Oyer and Terminer.  (The title page mistakenly lists the publication year as “1693”.)  Increase Mather repeats his caution about the reliance on spectral evidence, stating “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned”.  Second and third editions were published in Boston and London in 1693.  The third edition included Lawson’s Narrative and the anonymous “A Further Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches”, sent in a Letter from thence, to a Gentleman in London.