10 : The Witch Trial Shall Start.
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10 : The Witch Trial Shall Start.
This law, modeled on the English Witchcraft Act of 1604, mandated the death penalty for severe acts and repeat offenders, and imprisonment for lesser acts. A new Superior Court of Judicature was created to serve as the highest court in Massachusetts, and in January 1693 it began to hear the remaining witch trials. More importantly, the governor instructed the judges not to accept spectral evidence as proof of guilt. Therefore, most of the remaining witch trials resulted in acquittal. The governor pardoned the rest. The time of witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts was over.
The Salem Witch trials started in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and ended in 1693. According to Smithsonian Magazine there were more than 200 people accused of witchcraft and 20 of those people were executed.
Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, regretted the role he had played in the witchcraft trials and wondered whether the subsequent misfortunes of his own family, and of all New England, might be divine punishment for shedding innocent blood. In January 1697, he stood bare headed in church in Boston while the minister read the following apology:
When Mather and Phips arrived in Boston, events in Salem Villagehad already begun to swirl beyond the confines of that smallcommunity. The jails were beginning to fill with the accusedwitches, and interim Governor Bradstreet had kept courts fromsitting in trial. The new Governor, empowered by a new charter,looked to clear the judicial backlog and established the specialCourt of Oyer and Terminer to "hear and determine" the witchcraftcases. On May 27, 1692 the Court was established, and BridgetBishop was the first to be executed on Gallows Hill in Salemexactly two weeks later on June 10.
As June stretched into July, the pace of arrests, examinations,and imprisonments only quickened leading to the execution of fivewomen on July 19. On July 31, Increase delivered a sermon at SimonWillard's Third Church in Boston in which he posed the question tothe congregation: "O what makes the difference between the devilsin hell and the angels of heaven" Mather answered that the qualityof holiness distinguished an angel in heaven from the devils below,and in doing so he "focused responsibility on the people of NewEngland at large, and yet looked to individuals for the means tosolve the problem. It encouraged the individual believer to attendto the state of his or her own soul regardless of what might behappening in the world." (Peterson, 93). The impact of such wordsfrom a Boston pulpit on views of the witchcraft problem isindirect, but clear nonetheless. Mather advised the congregationthat they should focus their attention on their own shortcomingsand not those that they saw in their neighbors and friends. Still,this was not a clear message to halt the trials, and they continuedunabated in Salem.
By late September 1692, the witchcraft trials had truly reachedan hysterical pitch. Nineteen had been hanged, and Giles Cory hadbeen tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea. Scores ofpeople languished in the jails awaiting trial on the chargesagainst them.
In Cases of Conscience Increase Mather forcefully relatedhis distrust of spectral evidence to convict witches. He arguedthat it would be better that ten witches go free than the blood ofa single innocent be shed. One Mather biographer wrote that, "Nozeal to stamp out crimes ever drove him from his belief that,whatever the fate of the guilty, the innocent must never be inperil." His strong words of disapproval for spectral evidence soprominently used by the Court of Oyer and Terminer ended the trialsafter the directive from Governor Phips at the end of October,recently returned from his expedition in Maine.
Cases of Conscience, however, is not without its flaws,the chief one being Mather's attempt to absolve the judges of Salemof any wrongdoing and to praise them for their work. BernardRosenthal writes that, "Indeed, when the witch trials
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