The Salem Witch Trial

On a cold winter day in Salem Village, a wicked plan was being created. This was a plan that would later kill 37 people and leave hundreds of broken hearts. What was this plan? The year was 1692, a year in which Salem Village, a town in Massachusetts, was facing many problems. There were many people who didn't know what to do, especially when a sickness fell. This sickness was torture. It caused the victims to contort in pain, dive under furniture, and complain of fever. The cause of their symptoms may have been some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis, but there was another theory, witchcraft. According to the Puritans of the Salem Witch Trials, the deaths of 37 people were acts of the devil but there is a more reasonable cause. The trials may have been an act of hatred among villagers. No matter what the cause was, the Salem Witch Trials will never be forgotten.

Many different things could have caused the Salem Witch Trials, but there are a few that stand out. One of those causes is Salem politics. Salem Village was split into two groups. On one side were the people of Salem that wanted to remain in Salem and they lived on the eastern side of the Village. The people that wanted to leave typically lived on the western side. Many of the Salem Village farming families believed that Salem Town's wealthy market made it too selfish. This independence was in resistance to the public nature that Puritanism mandated. There fore, they were out of touch with the rest of Salem Village. This was probably the real cause of the Salem Witch Trials, but not one person would have been executed without the influence of one family, the Putnam Family.

The Putnam family had many friends and family, but they also had many enemies. The Putnam family definitely played a huge role in the Salem Witch Trials. The Putnams were the leaders of the separatist group primarily because they owned the most farmland in Salem Village. They hoped to unite a separation from Salem Town by establishing a community unique from it. So in 1689, a community was formed under the Reverand Samuel Parris, and they began worshipping in the Salem Village Meetinghouse. However, the community only represented a select group since over half of its members were Putnams. If this action did not further strain already weakened relations between the two parties, the events concerning Parris' contract did. The Putnam's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials can easily be seen after a look at the accusers and the accused. Most of the accusers were either family or friends of the Putnam's. Two of the main accusers were Ann Putnam, Jr. and Abigail Williams. Ann Putnam Jr. was the eldest child of Thomas and Ann Putnam. She was born in 1680. Ann was intelligent, well educated, and had a quick wit. At the time of the outbreak of witchcraft accusations, Ann was 12 years old. Ann claimed to have been afflicted by sixty-two people. She testified against several in court and offered many testimonies. She was a close friend of several of the other afflicted girls. One of her friends was also a leading accuser of the Salem Witch Trials and her name was Abigail Williams. Abigail Williams was the niece of Reverend Samuel Parris. After Betty Parris, the daughter of Samuel Parris, was sent away, Ann and Abigail became the most active and the youngest the accusers during the Salem Witch Trials. The father of the Putnam Family, Thomas Putnam, had many social problems. He was probably the one who had the idea of accusing the people he had problems with of witchcraft. Thomas Putnam was the chief filer of complaints in the village and maintained complete control over the actions of the two afflicted girls living in his house. Mercy Lewis, who was a servant of the Putnam family, also played a big part in falsely accusing witches. There were also many different people that were related to or were friends of the Putnam family, but they weren't as important the others. Some of the accusers even confessed that their accusations were "a great delusion of Satan"

John Proctor was a victim of the trials. He thought that the Salem Witch Trials were just a scam from the beginning. He was accused when he tried to defend his wife but failed. Mary Warren, the twenty-year-old maid servant in the Proctor house, who would later be named as a witch, accused Proctor of practicing witchcraft. Proctor was tried on August 5 and hanged on the 19th(Sutter). Proctor pleaded at his execution for a little relief of time. He claimed he was not fit to die. His plea was, of course, unsuccessful. This was another death without a reason. The Putnams definitely played an important role in the Witch Trials, but from where did the idea of witchcraft come?

In January 1692 when the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill and when her condition failed to improve, the village doctor, William Griggs, was called in, and he diagnosed that the two children were bewitched. This is partly because he didn't know what the real problem was and he was too proud to admit his ignorance, but it was mostly because a majority of the 600 people that lived in Salem Village at the time had a very religious lifestyle. Many of the people that lived in Salem believed in the devil and it is because of this that they believed in witchcraft. There was also Tituba, the Putnam family's slave, who told stories to children. The stories were about witchcraft and the devil, and these stories had an influence on the children. The children were never the same afterwards.

Diagnosing bewitchment started a battle between rivaling families. More children now suddenly exhibited the same symptoms that the first two did. People were doing anything to find out who were the witches that were doing this to the children. One of these things was baking a witch cake. A witch cake is composed of rye meal mixed with urine from the afflicted. It is then fed to a dog. The person is then considered bewitched if the dog displays similar symptoms as the afflicted (Sutter). They also asked the "afflicted" girls. The girls felt pressured when asked and blurted out a name, the first being Tituba's. Tituba was the one who started the idea, which William Griggs used to diagnose the two Parris childen, of witchcraft in the first place. It all began when Ann Putnam and six other young girls were listening to Tituba tell tales of voodoo and other supernatural events that had occurred in her native Barbados. During one fortune telling episode, Ann reported seeing a specter in the likeness of a coffin. After this incident, Ann, Betty Parris, and Abigail Williams began to display strange symptoms. They complained of pain, would speak in gibberish, became contorted into strange positions, and would crawl under chairs and tables. These girls were used as