Colonial America: The Salem Witch Trials | 5-Minute Videos

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 remain one of the most infamous—and misunderstood—episodes in American history. What caused the panic? Why did so many go along with it? And how did this dark chapter shape America’s future? Thomas Kidd, author of American History Volumes 1 and 2, explains.

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Transcript:
Colonial America: The Salem Witch Trials
Presented by Thomas Kidd

No episode in early American history is more infamous or misunderstood than the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Before they were over, nineteen people, five men and fourteen women, were convicted of engaging in witchcraft and were subsequently executed by hanging. One other was pressed to death with heavy stones, still more died in prison awaiting trial, and many more would have died if cooler heads had not finally prevailed.

From a contemporary perspective, it’s hard to understand why the trials happened at all. But for the people living in Salem at the end of the 17th century, there was no such mystery.

Puritan New England was a profoundly Bible-based society. So, when the Old Testament denounced witchcraft and sorcery, they took it seriously. Massachusetts law mandated that “If any man or woman be a witch… they shall be put to death.”

But why did witch trials happen in Salem when they did? What was the precipitating cause? After all, the Massachusetts colony had existed for sixty-two years without similar upheaval.

Why now?

Many theories have been offered, and none are fully satisfying. All we know for sure was that it was a period of deep instability — socially, economically and religiously.

First, there was uncertainty as to where the colony stood with England, the Mother Country. In 1684, in a move to assert the Crown’s authority, and thereby curtail Massachusetts’ ability to rule itself, King Charles II revoked the colony’s founding charter.

That itself was traumatic.

Then, in 1690, things got much worse. In response to French and Indian raids, Massachusetts authorities ordered an attack against French forces at Quebec.

It was a complete rout.

This devastating loss to French Catholics led the Puritans to wonder why, in the words of one of their leaders, God had “spit in our face.”

All this turmoil made Massachusetts ripe for a panic.

That panic ignited when a group of teenage girls began to suffer from inexplicable fits and convulsions. The young women claimed they had been afflicted by demons. They accused a slave named Tituba, who was owned by one of Salem’s ministers, of being a witch.

Under duress, Tituba offered a confession. She went on to suggest that there were other witches operating in and around the town.

Soon, the accusations began to multiply into the dozens, then hundreds. Most of those accused were older women, often widows and social outcasts. They appeared, so it was charged, as “specters,” or spirits, who urged their “victims” to sign a covenant with the devil. This “spectral evidence” was all the hastily convened special court needed to pronounce a guilty verdict.

In the calculus of the moment, anyone who confessed was spared execution. Only those who maintained their innocence were punished without mercy.

Before long, the accused included prominent figures in Massachusetts society, and the trials became increasingly problematic. The judges and pastors started to have second thoughts.

The influential Boston minister Increase Mather saw something more sinister. Not only had the judges gotten it wrong, he asserted, they had been led to their perverse conclusion by Satan himself: “The Devil is in it,” he wrote. “All Superstition is from him. And when secret things… are discovered by Superstitious practices, some Compact and Communion with the Devil is the Cause of it…”

Mather highlighted the consequences of such thinking in what became the most famous quote of the whole shameful affair: “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.”

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