Stephen Clark

John married Ruth Haskell on 17 Nov 1718 in Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA. Ruth was born on 28 Dec 1693 in Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA; died in Jul 1776 in Hampton, Windham, Connecticut, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Joseph married Hannah Elizabeth Davis on 27 Mar 1682 in Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA. Hannah (daughter of Capt George C Davis and Sarah Clark) was born on 31 May 1648 in Reading, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA; died on 3 Dec 1719 in Reading, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

George Davis 1616-1667
George Davis was born in Kent England came to New England as a young man. His name first appears in Salem, Mass reports in 1641 but he probably had been living there for several years before that. He married Sarah Clarke 1642 and their first 2 children were born in Salem. By 1664 he was living in Reading where he was a proprietor and was admitted a freeman 26 May 1647. He was a selectman for Reading and was a man of property and influence. George was a weaver by trade and later in addition became a ship owner. In 1652 the town of Reading ordered lots to be laid out and George drew 11 lots; also drew additional lots in the "Division of the Great Swamp." Son Benjamin was chosen Clerk of the Market. Reading Vital Records show the birth of his 3rd daughter Sarah and 5 more siblings. George died at Cape Fear 14 July 1667 while on a voyage. He had written his will 7 Dec 1664 and it was proved 30 Sept 1667. In this will he named wife and son Benjamin as executors; bequeathed his looms and the contents of his ship to son Joseph; and mentions 5 daughters under age. George and Sarah Clarke Davis had 8 children - 7 are listed here: Benjamin - resided in Lynn Joseph - 1643-1676 Hannah - b.3 May 1648 Married 1669 John Boutwell Sarah - b.1 Oct 1651 Elizabeth - b.16 Jan 1654 Married 1678 Timothy Wiley Mary - b.16 Jan 1657-8 John - b.20 July 1660 d. 4 Nov 1660 Susanna b.11 May 1662 (Interesting side note that is not sourced: After death of George, Sarah Clarke Davis married Nicholes Rist who bailed her out by petition after she was arrested for witchcraft.) This is a summary of info located in the following sources: Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical...Worcester Co Mass Vol2 by Ellery Bickwell Crane, Published 1907 Lewis Publishing Co pg 387. Genealogy History of the town of Reading Mass by Lillery Eaton, published 1874 A.Mudge & Sons

Died:
Died at sea on voyage to Cape Fear.

Capt married Sarah Clark on 27 Oct 1642 in Lynn, Essex, Massachusetts, USA. Sarah (daughter of William Edward Clarke and Katherine Beville) was born in 1620 in Lynn, Essex, Massachusetts, USA; died on 3 May 1698 in Reading, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Sarah Clark was born in 1620 in England. Her father emigrated to “Virginia” in 1624 and I presume Sarah came along with him. She seems to have led a normal life until at 72 years of age we find her up to her neck in the Salem Witchcraft trials.

Sarah married George Davis when she was 22 and had 10 children with him, one of whom was named Joseph. George died in 1667 when Sarah was 57 years old. 4 or 5 years later she married Nicholas Rist. They appear to have had one son, also named Joseph, born in 1680, when she would have been 60 years old. . . Having a child at 60 years old also named Joseph all seems a bit unlikely . . . So while it’s not completely clear, she seems to have had at least 10 children and two marriages.

And then, if 10 children wasn’t enough, in 1692, at the age of 72, she got into real trouble. She was charged with witchcraft and arrested on May 26 and spent 5 months in jail waiting for trial.

The Salem witchcraft trials concluded with the final hanging of accused witches on September 22, 1692. She was, thankfully, not either tried or hanged and her husband Nicholas bailed her out of jail in late October. She died about 5 years later and left a will. We have some small details of that will.

The story about Sarah’s involvement in the Salem witchcraft trials, taken from original documents, follows:

Sarah (nee Clark) Rist Accused of Witchcraft
Sarah married Nicholas Rist after the death of her husband, George Davis. On May 26, 1692, Sarah was accused of witchcraft by Mary Marshall, Mary Wolcott, and Ann Putnam. Mary Marshall was her step-niece. On May 28th, an arrest warrant was issued for Sarah, and she was arrested on May 31, 1692.

On October 19, 1692 her then husband, Nicholas Rist made a petition to the court for her release. In the petition, he indicates that she has been held at Boston “goal” since her arrest for witchcraft and that in all that time, nothing has appeared for which she deserved imprisonment or death, and that he has never had reason to accuse of her of any impiety or witchcraft, but to the contrary she lived with him as a good faithful dutiful wife and always had respect for the ordinances of God while her strength remained, and he is concerned for her health stating that “it is deplorable that in old age the poor decrepit woman should lie under confinement for so long in a “stinching goal” when her circumstances require that a nurse attend her.” She died not long after her release.

From the notes of Donald Erlenkotter:
“Sarah (Clark) Davis Rist (or Rice), was accused, arrested, and imprisoned in the famous Salem witchcraft delusion of 1692 [Eat]. The following warrant for her arrest was issued on 28 May 1692 [Witch]:

Warrant v. Sarah Rice.
To the Constables in Reding.
You are in theire Majesties names hereby required to apprehend and bring before us, Sarah Rist the wife of Nicholas Rist of Reding on Tuesday next being the 31st day of this Instant moneth at the house of Lt. Nathan’l Ingersalls at Salem Village aboute ten of the Clock in the forenoon, who stand charged with having Committed sundry acts of witchcraft on ye Bodys of Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams & others to theire great hurte &c, in order to her Examination Relateing to ye premises abovesaid faile not. Dated Salem May 28th 1692.

P vs. J. Hathorne } Assists.

Jonathan Corwin}

In obediance to this warant I have brought the Body of Sarah Rist the wife of Nicholas Rist of Redding to the house of Leut. Nathanial Ingersons in Salem Viledg the 31 of this instant: May 1692:

Attest John Parker Constable fo Redding.

Abigail Williams, age 11, along with the slave Tituba, lived at Salem Village (now Danvers) in the household of her uncle, Rev. Samuel Parris. The accuser, Mary Walcott, was 16 years old. Lt. Nathaniel Ingersoll was a deacon in the church at Salem Village and keeper of the town’s ordinary. John Hathorne, ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jonathan Corwin were members of the General Court and magistrates at Salem Town who conducted hearings in the witchcraft cases [Devil].

Sarah was immediately dispatched from Salem to prison in Boston, according to the following order [Witch]:

To Mr. John Arnold, Keeper of the Prison in Boston, in the County of Suffolk.

Whereas Captain John Aldin (Alden) of Boston, Marriner, and Sarah Rice, Wife of Nicholas Rist of Reding, Husbandman, have been this day brought before us, Joh Hathorn and Jonathan Curwin, Esquires; being accused and suspected of perpetrating divers acts of Witchcraft, contrary to the form of the Statute, in that Case made and provided: These are therefore in Their Majesties, King William and Quen Marys Names, to Will and require you, to take into your Custody, the bodies of the said John Alden, and Sarah Rist, and them safely keep, until they shall thence be delivered by due course of Law; Given under our hands at Salem Village, the 31st of May, in the Fourth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord and Lady, William and Mary, now King and Quen over England, etc., Anno Dom. 1692.

John Hathorn, } Assistants.

Jonathan Curwin, }

Captain John Alden, Jr., was the son of John Alden of the Mayflower. He escaped after having been imprisoned for fifteen weeks, and then was returned and cleared by proclamation in the Superior Court of Boston on the last Tuesday in April 1693.

The final hanging of accused witches took place on 22 Sep 1692. After accusation against his wife, Gov. Phips forbade further commitments on the grounds of witchcraft. By 12 Oct 1692 petitions were being received for the release of those who had been accused but not tried [Devil]. Sarah’s husband, Nicholas Rist (or Rice), submitted the following petition to the General Court for her release [Eat]:

The humble petition of of Nicholas Rist of Reading she weth, that whereas Sarah Rist, wife of the petitioner, was taken into custody, the first day of June last, and hath since lain in Boston Jail for witchcraft, though in all that time nothing has been made to appear, for which she deserved imprisonment or death. The petitioner has been a husband to the said woman above twenty years, in all which time, he had never reason to accuse her of any impietie or witchcraft; but the contrary, she lived with him as a good, faithful, dutiful wife, and always had respect to the ordinances of God, while her strength remained; and the petitioner on that consideration, is obliged in conscience and justice to use all lawful means for the support and preservation of her life; and it is deplorable, that in old age, the poor decrepid woman should lye under confinement in a stinking jail, when her circumstances rather require a Nurse to attend her. May it therefore please your Honors to take this matter into your present consideration, and direct some speedy method, whereby this ancient and decrepid person may not forever lye in such misery, wherein her life is made more afflictive to her than death. And the petitioner shall, as in duty bound, ever pray.

Nicholas Rice
Reading, Oct. 19, 1692

Soon after, Sarah was discharged from prison. Probably she was charged for the costs of her imprisonment, since this was the practice at the time even for those found to be innocent or or pardoned. She died at Reading on 3 May 1698. In her will, dated 20 Sep 1697 and proved in the court at Charlestown on 16 May 1698, Sarah Rist of Reading mentioned husband Nicholas Rist and referred to bequests given to her by former husband George Davis and son Benjamin Davis. She left five shillings to daughter Hannah Boutell [Clark; Middlesex County Probate Vol. 9, pp 398-399].”

Famous Trials By Professor Douglas O. Linder
The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: An Account

O Christian Martyr Who for Truth could die

When all about thee Owned the hideous lie!
The world, redeemed from superstition's sway,
Is breathing freer for thy sake today.

--Words written by John Greenleaf Whittier and inscribed on a monument marking the grave of Rebecca Nurse, one of the condemned "witches" of Salem.

From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.

Rev. Samuel Parris
In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village, invited Samuel Parris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in Barbados, to preach in the Village church. A year later, after negotiations over salary, inflation adjustments, and free firewood, Parris accepted the job as Village minister. He moved to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, his six-year-old daughter Betty, niece Abigail Williams, and his Indian slave Tituba, acquired by Parris in Barbados.

The Salem that became the new home of Parris was in the midst of change: a mercantile elite was beginning to develop, prominent people were becoming less willing to assume positions as town leaders, two clans (the Putnams and the Porters) were competing for control of the village and its pulpit, and a debate was raging over how independent Salem Village, tied more to the interior agricultural regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea trade.

Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young Betty Parris became strangely ill. She dashed about, dove under furniture, contorted in pain, and complained of fever. The cause of her symptoms may have been some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis. The symptoms also could have been caused, as Linda Caporael argued in a 1976 article in Science magazine, by a disease called "convulsive ergotism" brought on by ingesting rye--eaten as a cereal and as a common ingredient of bread--infected with ergot. (Ergot is caused by a fungus which invades developing kernels of rye grain, especially under warm and damp conditions such as existed at the time of the previous rye harvest in Salem. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and--most interestingly--hallucinations. The hallucinogenic drug LSD is a derivative of ergot.) Many of the symptoms or convulsive ergotism seem to match those attributed to Betty Parris, but there is no way of knowing with any certainty if she in fact suffered from the disease--and the theory would not explain the afflictions suffered by others in Salem later in the year.

Cotton Mather
At the time, however, there was another theory to explain the girls' symptoms. Cotton Mather had recently published a popular book, "Memorable Providences," describing the suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's behavior in some ways mirrored that of the afflicted person described in Mather's widely read and discussed book. It was easy to believe in 1692 in Salem, with an Indian war raging less than seventy miles away (and many refugees from the war in the area) that the devil was close at hand. Sudden and violent death occupied minds.

Talk of witchcraft increased when other playmates of Betty, including eleven-year-old Ann Putnam, seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott, began to exhibit similar unusual behavior. When his own nostrums failed to effect a cure, William Griggs, a doctor called to examine the girls, suggested that the girls' problems might have a supernatural origin. The widespread belief that witches targeted children made the doctor's diagnosis seem increasingly likely.

A neighbor, Mary Sibley, proposed a form of counter magic. She told Tituba to bake a rye cake with the urine of the afflicted victim and feed the cake to a dog. (Dogs were believed to be used by witches as agents to carry out their devilish commands.) By this time, suspicion had already begun to focus on Tituba, who had been known to tell the girls tales of omens, voodoo, and witchcraft from her native folklore. Her participation in the urine cake episode made her an even more obvious scapegoat for the inexplicable.

Meanwhile, the number of girls afflicted continued to grow, rising to seven with the addition of Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, and Mary Warren. According to historian Peter Hoffer, the girls "turned themselves from a circle of friends into a gang of juvenile delinquents." (Many people of the period complained that young people lacked the piety and sense of purpose of the founders' generation.) The girls contorted into grotesque poses, fell down into frozen postures, and complained of biting and pinching sensations. In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession.

Sometime after February 25, when Tituba baked the witch cake, and February 29, when arrest warrants were issued against Tituba and two other women, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams named their afflictors and the witch hunt began. The consistency of the two girls' accusations suggests strongly that the girls worked out their stories together. Soon Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis were also reporting seeing "witches flying through the winter mist." The prominent Putnam family supported the girls' accusations, putting considerable impetus behind the prosecutions.

The first three to be accused of witchcraft were Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn. Tituba was an obvious choice. Good was a beggar and social misfit who lived wherever someone would house her, and Osborn was old, quarrelsome, and had not attended church for over a year. The Putnams brought their complaint against the three women to county magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, who scheduled examinations for the suspected witches for March 1, 1692 in Ingersoll's tavern. When hundreds showed up, the examinations were moved to the meeting house. At the examinations, the girls described attacks by the specters of the three women, and fell into their, by then, perfected pattern of contortions when in the presence of one of the suspects. Other villagers came forward to offer stories of cheese and butter mysteriously gone bad or animals born with deformities after visits by one of the suspects.The magistrates, in the common practice of the time, asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had they seen Satan? How, if they are were not witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates that the magistrates thought the women guilty.

"Examination of a Witch"
The matter might have ended with admonishments were it not for Tituba. After first adamantly denying any guilt, afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba claimed that she was approached by a tall man from Boston--obviously Satan--who sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work. Yes, Tituba declared, she was a witch, and moreover she and four other witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on their poles. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for counsel, she said, but the devil had blocked her path. Tituba's confession succeeded in transforming her from a possible scapegoat to a central figure in the expanding prosecutions. Her confession also served to silence most skeptics, and Parris and other local ministers began witch hunting with zeal.

Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began attacking the afflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary Easty were accused of witchcraft. During a March 20 church service, Ann Putnam suddenly shouted, "Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!" Soon Ann's mother, Ann Putnam, Sr., would join the accusers. Dorcas Good, four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, became the first child to be accused of witchcraft when three of the girls complained that they were bitten by the specter of Dorcas. (The four-year-old was arrested, kept in jail for eight months, watched her mother get carried off to the gallows, and would "cry her heart out, and go insane.") The girls' accusations and their ever more polished performances, including the new act of being struck dumb, played to large and believing audiences.

Arrest warrant for suspected witchcraft
Stuck in jail with the damning testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted, suspects began to see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance Hobbs became the second witch to confess, admitting to pinching three of the girls at the Devil's command and flying on a pole to attend a witches' Sabbath in an open field. Jails approached capacity and the colony "teetered on the brink of chaos" when Governor Phips returned from England. Fast action, he decided, was required.

Chief Judge William Stoughton
Phips created a new court, the "court of oyer and terminer," to hear the witchcraft cases. Five judges, including three close friends of Cotton Mather, were appointed to the court. Chief Justice, and most influential member of the court, was a gung-ho witch hunter named William Stoughton. Mather urged Stoughton and the other judges to credit confessions and admit "spectral evidence" (testimony by afflicted persons that they had been visited by a suspect's specter). Ministers were looked to for guidance by the judges, who were generally without legal training, on matters pertaining to witchcraft. Mather's advice was heeded. the judges also decided to allow the so-called "touching test" (defendants were asked to touch afflicted persons to see if their touch, as was generally assumed of the touch of witches, would stop their contortions) and examination of the bodies of accused for evidence of "witches' marks" (moles or the like upon which a witch's familiar might suck). Evidence that would be excluded from modern courtrooms-- hearsay, gossip, stories, unsupported assertions, surmises-- was also generally admitted. Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking in Salem: accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify under oath on their behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. Defendants could, however, speak for themselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers. The degree to which defendants in Salem were able to take advantage of their modest protections varied considerably, depending on their own acuteness and their influence in the community.

The first accused witch to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop. Almost sixty years old, owner of a tavern where patrons could drink cider ale and play shuffleboard (even on the Sabbath), critical of her neighbors, and reluctant to pay her bills, Bishop was a likely candidate for an accusation of witchcraft. The fact that Thomas Newton, special prosecutor, selected Bishop for his first prosecution suggests that he believed the stronger case could be made against her than any of the other suspect witches. At Bishop's trial on June 2, 1692, a field hand testified that he saw Bishop's image stealing eggs and then saw her transform herself into a cat. Deliverance Hobbs, by then probably insane, and Mary Warren, both confessed witches, testified that Bishop was one of them. A villager named Samuel Grey told the court that Bishop visited his bed at night and tormented him. A jury of matrons assigned to examine Bishop's body reported that they found an "excrescence of flesh." Several of the afflicted girls testified that Bishop's specter afflicted them. Numerous other villagers described why they thought Bishop was responsible for various bits of bad luck that had befallen them. There was even testimony that while being transported under guard past the Salem meeting house, she looked at the building and caused a part of it to fall to the ground. Bishop's jury returned a verdict of guilty. One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, aghast at the conduct of the trial, resigned from the court. Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death warrant, and on June 10, 1692, Bishop was carted to Gallows Hill and hanged.

The hanging of Bridget Bishop
As the summer of 1692 warmed, the pace of trials picked up. Not all defendants were as disreputable as Bridget Bishop. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected woman whose specter, according to Ann Putnam, Jr. and Abigail Williams, attacked them in mid March of 1692. Ann Putnam, Sr. added her complaint that Nurse demanded that she sign the Devil's book, then pinched her. Nurse was one of three Towne sisters, all identified as witches, who were members of a Topsfield family that had a long-standing quarrel with the Putnam family. Apart from the evidence of Putnam family members, the major piece of evidence against Nurse appeared to be testimony indicating that soon after Nurse lectured Benjamin Houlton for allowing his pig to root in her garden, Houlton died. The Nurse jury returned a verdict of not guilty, much to the displeasure of Chief Justice Stoughton, who told the jury to go back and consider again a statement of Nurse's that might be considered an admission of guilt (but more likely an indication of confusion about the question, as Nurse was old and nearly deaf). The jury reconvened, this time coming back with a verdict of guilty (LINK TO NURSE TRIAL). On July 19, 1692, Nurse rode with four other convicted witches to Gallows Hill.

The trial of Rebecca Nurse
Persons who scoffed at accusations of witchcraft risked becoming targets of accusations themselves. One man who was openly critical of the trials paid for his skepticism with his life. John Proctor, a central figure in Arthur Miller's fictionalized account of the Salem witch hunt, The Crucible, was an opinionated tavern owner who openly denounced the witch hunt. Testifying against Proctor were Ann Putnam, Abigail Williams, Indian John (a slave of Samuel Parris who worked in a competing tavern), and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Booth, who testified that ghosts had come to her and accused Proctor of serial murder. Proctor fought back, accusing confessed witches of lying, complaining of torture, and demanding that his trial be moved to Boston. The efforts proved futile. Proctor was hanged. His wife Elizabeth, who was also convicted of witchcraft, was spared execution because of her pregnancy (reprieved "for the belly").

No execution caused more unease in Salem than that of the village's ex-minister, George Burroughs. Burroughs, who was living in Maine in 1692, was identified by several of his accusers as the ringleader of the witches. Ann Putnam claimed that Burroughs bewitched soldiers during a failed military campaign against Wabanakis in 1688-89, the first of a string of military disasters that could be blamed on an Indian-Devil alliance. In her interesting book, In the Devil's Snare, historian Mary Beth Norton argues that the large number of accusations against Burroughs, and his linkage to the frontier war, is the key to understanding the Salem trials. Norton contends that the enthusiasm of the Salem court in prosecuting the witchcraft cases owed in no small measure to the judges' desire to shift the "blame for their own inadequate defense of the frontier." Many of the judges, Norton points out, played lead roles in a war effort that had been markedly unsuccessful.

Among the thirty accusers of Burroughs was nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, a refugee of the frontier wars. Lewis, the most imaginative and forceful of the young accusers, offered unusually vivid testimony against Burroughs. Lewis told the court that Burroughs flew her to the top of a mountain and, pointing toward the surrounding land, promised her all the kingdoms if only she would sign in his book (a story very similar to that found in Matthew 4:8). Lewis said, "I would not writ if he had throwed me down on one hundred pitchforks." At an execution, a defendant in the Puritan colonies was expected to confess, and thus to save his soul. When Burroughs on Gallows Hill continued to insist on his innocence and then recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly (something witches were thought incapable of doing), the crowd reportedly was "greatly moved." The agitation of the crowd caused Cotton Mather to intervene and remind the crowd that Burroughs had had his day in court and lost.

The hanging of George Burroughs
One victim of the Salem witch hunt was not hanged, but rather pressed under heavy stones until his death. Such was the fate of octogenarian Giles Corey who, after spending five months in chains in a Salem jail with his also accused wife, had nothing but contempt for the proceedings. Seeing the futility of a trial and hoping that by avoiding a conviction his farm, that would otherwise go the state, might go to his two sons-in-law, Corey refused to stand for trial. The penalty for such a refusal was peine et fort, or pressing. Three days after Corey's death, on September 22, 1692, eight more convicted witches, including Giles' wife Martha, were hanged. They were the last victims of the witch hunt.

By early autumn of 1692, Salem's lust for blood was ebbing. Doubts were developing as to how so many respectable people could be guilty. Reverend John Hale said, " It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil's lap at once." The educated elite of the colony began efforts to end the witch-hunting hysteria that had enveloped Salem. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, published what has been called "America's first tract on evidence," a work entitled Cases of Conscience, which argued that it "were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned." Increase Mather urged the court to exclude spectral evidence. Samuel Willard, a highly regarded Boston minister, circulated Some Miscellany Observations, which suggested that the Devil might create the specter of an innocent person. Mather's and Willard's works were given to Governor Phips. The writings most likely influenced the decision of Phips to order the court to exclude spectral evidence and touching tests and to require proof of guilt by clear and convincing evidence. With spectral evidence not admitted, twenty-eight of the last thirty-three witchcraft trials ended in acquittals. The three convicted witches were later pardoned. In May of 1693, Phips released from prison all remaining accused or convicted witches.

Governor William Phips
By the time the witch hunt ended, nineteen convicted witches were executed, at least four accused witches had died in prison, and one man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death. About one to two hundred other persons were arrested and imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Two dogs were executed as suspected accomplices of witches.

Scholars have noted potentially telling differences between the accused and the accusers in Salem. Most of the accused lived to the south of, and were generally better off financially, than most of the accusers. In a number of cases, accusing families stood to gain property from the convictions of accused witches. Also, the accused and the accusers generally took opposite sides in a congregational schism that had split the Salem community before the outbreak of hysteria. While many of the accused witches supported former minister George Burroughs, the families that included the accusers had--for the most part--played leading roles in forcing Burroughs to leave Salem. The conclusion that many scholars draw from these patterns is that property disputes and congregational feuds played a major role in determining who lived, and who died, in 1692.

The repentence of Samuel Sewall
A period of atonement began in the colony following the release of the surviving accused witches. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, issued a public confession of guilt and an apology. Several jurors came forward to say that they were "sadly deluded and mistaken" in their judgments. Reverend Samuel Parris conceded errors of judgment, but mostly shifted blame to others. Parris was replaced as minister of Salem village by Thomas Green, who devoted his career to putting his torn congregation back together. Governor Phips blamed the entire affair on William Stoughton. Stoughton, clearly more to blame than anyone for the tragic episode, refused to apologize or explain himself. He criticized Phips for interfering just when he was about to "clear the land" of witches. Stoughton became the next governor of Massachusetts.

The witches disappeared, but witch hunting in America did not. Each generation must learn the lessons of history or risk repeating its mistakes. Salem should warn us to think hard about how to best safeguard and improve our system of justice.

Other Resources
The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: An Account
Chronology of Events Relating To The Salem Witchcraft Trials
Warrant For The Arrest Of Elizabeth Proctor And Sarah Cloyce
Biographies of Key Figures in the Salem Witchcraft Trials
Images Of The Salem Witchcraft Trials
Map of Salem Village in 1692 ( W. P. Upham)
Petitions of Two Convicted Witches Awaiting Execution
Examinations of Some of The Accused Witches In Salem,1692
The Dead
Two Letters of Gov. William Phips (1692-1693)
Petitions For Compensation And Decision Concerning Compensation
The Man Of Iron: Giles Corey
Procedure Used In The Salem Witchcraft Trials
The Crucible (1952)
You're Accused!
The Salem Witchcraft Trials: Bibliography & Links
Deodat Lawson's Report on Witchcraft in Salem
Powered by UMKC School of Law
Copyright © 1995 - 2017 Professor Douglas O. Linder

Other Events and Attributes:

• Arrival: 1634, , , Massachusetts, USA

Nicholas married Sarah locke in 1610 in , Kent, England. Sarah was born in 1587 in London, London, England; died on 24 May 1643 in Woburn, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

William married Katherine Beville in 1619 in Manchester, Lancashire, England. Katherine was born on 17 Apr 1601 in Chesterton, Huntingdonshire, England; died on 12 Feb 1638 in , Huntingdonshire, England. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Ichabod married Suzanna Suzy Dolor Dollard in 1592 in Benefield, Northamptonshire, England. Suzanna was born in 1573 in , Northamptonshire, England; died on 2 Jun 1673 in Barnstable, Barnstable, Massachusetts, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]