The Crucible Essay: The Salem Witch Trials

The trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts Bay with the cases being brought to the local magistrates of the town. The trials were a result of several young girls who had fallen ill and began to experience “fits” (Source K). Controversy stirred in the town after a local doctor of the town said that they were something from something of the supernatural (Source K). Before one can look at the individual cases of the black witches who were persecuted for witchcraft, one must gain an understanding of the nature of these

Many people were accused of being witches in 1692 and hung or pressed to death for their crime, many others were thrown in prison for life. When the Salem Witch Trials Hysteria of 1692 swept Salem Village and surrounding areas, it was not a happy time. Many of the people living in Salem at the time were Protestants seeking religious freedom. Protestants were very religious people and looked to the Bible for help as God’s words were all true. One of the subjects that the Bible addressed was the Devil and how he possessed people to make them witches. When two young girls asked a West Indian slave woman be the name of Tituba to show them their fortunes, they begun to get more curious about her abilities. Tituba showed them the “magic” she knew from her former tribe, but when the young girls started acting strangely, she was accused for being a witch along side two other local white women. Instead of pleading guilty, Tituba confessed that she was a witch and told the audience of her trial that there were 6 more witches amongst them. This lead to a hectic frenzy to find the remaining witches and it turned neighbors onto each other, husbands on wives and entire families were thrown into prison for their crime. The three main reasons for the Salem Witch Trials Hysteria of 1692 were a group of young girls looking for attention, neighbor conflicts and gender/status/age.

By confessing, Tituba escaped the very dangerous trials that those who denied their charges were put through. One test that the citizens of Salem claimed would reveal if one was a witch or not, is the swimming test. It was thought that witches rejected baptism; therefore water would refuse their bodies. An accused witch would be taken to the closest body of water and stripped nude. Then they would be bound and thrown in the water. If they sank, then they were innocent and if they floated, then they were witches. However the flaw in this test is that it was very dangerous. Many who were thrown into the rivers drowned because of currents and the fact that they were bound. Another test that was harmful to those who went through it was the picking and scratching test. It was thought that witch marks could not feel pain or bleed.

After being interrogated for days, the most educated and trusted woman of the trio, Tibuta, confessed that the devil turned her into a witch. This put all three women in jail and planted the seed to the next reason of why the hysteria spread so far and fast through Salem.

Elizabeth Parris and Abagail Williams, the pastor’s daughter and niece respectively, were two of the six young ladies that Tituba watch over. In the beginning, Tituba would perform witchcraft in an attempt to lure the girls into witchcraft but the girls rejected Tituba’s actions. Eventually, the girls would begin to act out and were proclaimed to have become bewitched. After Parris discovered that his girls’ actions were not of physical nor mental disease and of spiritual doings, an aunt of one of the afflicted girls used Tituba to experiment using a urine-cake (eventually this aunt would be scorned for practicing counter magic) to determine who bewitched the young girls. When the girls cried out that it was Tituba’s doing and made several accusations of her acts of witchcraft, Tituba rejected all allegations. In theory, Tituba made herself out as a witch. In the end of her trial, Tituba would confess to practicing witchcraft. She confessed that she had signed the Devil’s book along with eight other witches including Goody Osborne and Sarah Good, as well as seeing the Devil various times in the form of a tall man, a hog, cats, a great black dog, and wolves and birds. Sarah Good and Goody Osbourne worked in command of Tituba taking the Devil’s orders to terrorize the young women of the household by pinching, harming, and performing acts of levitation. Tituba being the first to

The Salem Witch Trials started in 1692 when two girls began to exhibit strange behaviors. Hysteria broke out and many believed they had been bewitched. Out of fear, many were accused of practicing witchcraft. One of the fist women to be accused along with Sarah Osburn and Sarah Good was Tituba, a slave to Reverend Samuel Parris. In the past there had been some loose accusations but Tituba’s confession made this time different. She was the first person to ever admit to being a witch. She went on to further explain that she was a witch for the devil and went into detail about her experiences practicing witchcraft. This caused a panic in Salem that led a full on witch-hunt. Around 200 people total were accused of being witches and 20 were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. (Foulds, D. E. p. 161, 168, 194)

The Salem Witch Trials were cases shown before the local judges or magistrates regarding witchcraft.(Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice) Witchcraft was better known as the devils magic in Salem back then.(A Brief History) A group of girls called the afflicted girls decided to play a fortune telling game that caused a hysteria when it was over. The “afflicted girls” were said to have all started to get sick and act strange shortly after the game was over. The symptoms would come and go randomly. The girls could be found hiding in odd spots doubled over in pain with

On February 25, 1692, the lives of two New England women and a household slave were turned upside down. On that day Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, along with a slave called Tituba were brought forth and accused of making a pact with the Devil and serving as his witches. Norton argues that out of those three women, it was the charges held against Tituba that were the most significant. Tituba’s race played an important part in her being alongside Good and Osborne as the first to be accused in Salem. Many historians believe Tituba to be an African slave. Norton points out that surviving records refer to her as, “…Tituba Indian,” “the Indyen woman,” “titibe the Indian Woman,” or the like, implying that Villagers viewed her ethnicity as an inseparable

In the book The Salem Witch Trials, 1692 it was said that Tituba, a slave and Barbados native, confessed to being a witch. She described four other witches but could not name them. Her confession included the statement that she had tried to kill the young girls while in her specter form. In her confession, Tituba described the devil as “...a tall man in a black suit who had a yellow bird, and he carried a book he urged Tituba to sign” (Findling 160). Findling wrote the devil promised Tituba nice rewards if she obeyed him. However, he also threatened to hurt her if she disobeyed him. On February twenty-sixth of the same year, Mary Sibley asked Tituba to make a witch cake. Mary Sibley was the aunt of Mary Walcott who was one of the young girls suffering from hysteria. The cake that Tituba baked was made from children’s urine, baked in a fire, and fed to the dog of the Parris family. The family’s dog was claimed to be a familiar, a messenger to a witch from the devil. Suddenly, the young girls were able to name two other witches, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. The cake was supposedly the reason for the clarification of the witches identities (Findling 160-161). Unlike Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne both denied the claims against them stating that they were witches (Jones n. pag.). All three women were arrested on account of practicing witchcraft (Findling 161). They were

The Salem Witch Trials were the ultimate denouement of 300 years and 50,000 deaths resonating from witch hunting that began in England. Over this time period these witch hunts grew exponentially, ultimately climaxing in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. During this time, the Puritans who lived in Salem were ruled by a theocracy which took its governing laws and rules by beliefs and scriptures from their holy book. The theocratic government paired with the misogyny of the time period was cause for scores of women to be tried for being a witch. Pleading guilty or not, and confessing or not, those accused of witchcraft were tortured to death by various methods.

The investigation took place in the Salem Village Meetinghouse. During the trials, when the three women were being asked questions, the girls would cry out and tumble to the floor. Even though Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne maintained their innocence throughout all of this, Tituba had decided to confess to practicing witchcraft. After the investigation, Hawthorne and Corwin decided that the three women were all guilty of witchcraft. They were all taken to a Boston jail, where Sarah Osborne would later die from natural causes. Even after the three women were taken to jail, the accusations still continued in the village.

It all started when Betty Parris, the daughter of Puritan minister, Samuel Parris, and his niece, Abigail Williams, experimented with magic and witchcraft (Salem Witch, n.p.). They began twitching, screaming, and not speaking, so a doctor diagnosed the girls with being under the spell of a witch (Currie, 7-8). Samuel Parris pressured the girls to identify the perpetrator. They named Tituba, their slave, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn. The latter two, who were outcasts and did not attend church regularly, declared their innocence, but Good accused Osborn. Tituba originally pleaded innocent, but eventually told the officials of her dealings with the devil (Britannica School Salem witch, n.p.).

The Salem Witch Trials began when three girls were accused of witchcraft. In Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, many people had much fear of the devil, and always thought that the devil was trying to find ways to tear apart their community and their friends along with their family members. Salem was a strongly religious community. Tituba, one of the girls who was accused of being witch, confessed that she and the other three girls were witches, said that she, along with the others worked for the

These stories were most likely to be voodoo tales, and the girls also got involved in fortunetelling. Soon after these girls started to show symptoms of clinical hysteria, at the time diagnosed as satanic possession. Indeed, the girls “raved and fell into convulsions; one of them ran around on all fours and barked”. The people of the village thought the girls were tormented by witches, and the girls soon pointed out the first three witches to be convicted : Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. The Salem witch trials themselves happened between June and September 1692, and only by December 1692 the governor of Massachusetts “ruled out the use of spectral evidence, making it virtually impossible to convict any more of the

The slave - Tituba - confessed to the crimes and claimed there were other witches working alongside her in service of the devil, but this action was most likely to save herself from execution by acting as an informant. Good and Osborn denied their guilt and tried to claim innocence but this of course didn’t do any good - the people around them were paranoid and terrified, and they needed someone to blame. A number of others were soon accused of participating in witchcraft, including two women who were before seen as upstanding members of the community and the church. The four year old daughter of Sarah Good was also accused, she was the youngest person to be questioned and jailed for the trials.