Witchcraft in Colonial America

The belief in witchcraft in Colonial America was prevalent in the British colonies since the first settlers arrived in the early seventeenth century. The fear of witchcraft was an extension of what was happening in Europe at the time, as thousands of accused witches had been put to death across the continent over the course of several centuries. The earliest-known allegations of witchcraft in the British colonies were levied in Virginia in 1626. The first recorded execution was carried out in Connecticut in 1647. However, the most famous example of colonial witch trials occurred near Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693. Almost two hundred people were accused of being witches and put on trial; twenty were executed before colonial officials halted the proceedings. By the eighteenth century, colonial governments had declared such trials to be unlawful. However, the belief in witches persisted in some circles, with the last recorded US witch trial taking place in 1878.

Background

The term witch comes from the Old English words wicce, meaning “female magician or sorceress,” and wicca, “male wizard or sorcerer.” However, the idea of an evil magic wielder is far older and can be found in the myths of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. For example, the Mesopotamians believed that certain illnesses could be caused by witchcraft, and that the “cures” for such illnesses were also spells and rituals performed to protect individuals. The concept of sorcerers and sorceresses changed many times over the centuries, and by the later Middle Ages, witches were seen by Christian-dominated Europe as tools of Satan and his demons who granted them the ability to perform magic.

In the thirteenth century, Pope Alexander IV decreed that those who practiced magic or communicated with demons were guilty of heresy, a crime punishable by being burned at the stake. Church leaders used the biblical passage Exodus 22:18—“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”—as justification for making witchcraft a capital crime. However, according to the translation from the original Hebrew text, the meaning of the passage remains unclear. The Hebrew word translated by medieval scholars as “witch” could have referred to someone who works with poisonous herbs and not magic.

Regardless, by the fourteenth century, a centuries-long fear of witchcraft began to descend across Europe. In 1317, a German bishop was arrested and executed in France for allegedly trying to use sorcery to assassinate Pope John XXII. By mid-century, the plague outbreak known as the Black Death killed tens of millions of people and stoked fears that witchcraft was behind the illness. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII gave two German monks the power to investigate cases of suspected witchcraft, with those found guilty subjected to execution. Three years later, another German monk, Heinrich Kramer, is credited with writing the book Malleus Maleficarum, “The Hammer of Witches,” which justified fighting witchcraft. The book laid out ways to identify witches, convict them of the crime, and execute them. Among the book’s claims was that witchcraft was most often practiced by women.

The European hysteria concerning witchcraft reached its peak during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Scotland’s King James VI was so obsessed with witchcraft that he wrote an influential 1597 book on the subject called Daemonologie. His argument that witches needed to be prosecuted led to a series of witch hunts across the nation that resulted in the execution of more than 2,500 people by the 1660s. In 1603, James also became king of England, taking the title James I. England had previous laws in place against witchcraft, but under James’s rule, Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made the crime of witchcraft a felony with a second conviction punishable by death. Under English law, witches were hanged for their crimes as burning at the stake was a punishment reserved for heretics under Church law.

Modern experts have found documented evidence that more than twelve thousand people were tried and executed as witches in Europe from 1484 to the 1780s. However, it is almost certain that the number is many times greater. Some estimates place the toll between fifty and sixty thousand. About half the executions took place in Germany.

Overview

The first permanent British settlement in North America was Jamestown, which was established in Virginia in 1607. The Jamestown settlers were followed in 1620 by a group of religious refugees from England who founded the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Another group of settlers arrived in 1629 and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Connecticut Colony was founded in about 1635, and the Providence Plantations, the precursor to the colony of Rhode Island, was founded in 1636.

Virginia and Connecticut

These first settlers in North America would have been intimately familiar with British law and its position toward witchcraft. Many communities, including the settlers in Jamestown, based their laws upon British statutes, including the Witchcraft Act of 1604. At first, the Jamestown settlers viewed the unfamiliar customs and appearances of the local Native Americans as a sign that they were devils, or at least in league with Satan. Written descriptions from the time claim that the Native Americans made noises that sounded like “wolves or devils,” and compared them to the witches of England. The Virginia Colony was more secular than the colonies in New England, and to them, witchcraft was more an element of folklore than a religious threat.

Few records survive from the early days of the Virginia Colony, but the oldest-known charges of witchcraft levied against a British settler in North America date to 1626. A woman named Joan Wright was tried on charges of witchcraft after neighbors said that she used her magic to kill an infant, destroy crops, and predict several deaths. The records state that Wright admitted to practicing witchcraft but was still acquitted. This was not unusual in Virginia, as its courts required irrefutable evidence before convicting someone of witchcraft. No documented evidence exists that anyone was ever executed for witchcraft in the colony.

Most of the cases concerning witchcraft in Virginia were not accusations but rather lawsuits claiming the defendant was falsely accused of being a witch. In response, the colony passed a 1655 law spelling out the punishment for false accusations of witchcraft, which included a fine of one thousand pounds of tobacco.

In the Connecticut Colony, laws passed in 1642 made witchcraft one of twelve crimes punishable by death. In 1647, a woman named Alse Young from Windsor, Connecticut, became the first person known to have been executed for witchcraft in the British colonies. Little is known of the details of her case except that she was hanged in Meeting House Square in Hartford.

In 1662, Hartford was gripped by the first-known witchcraft panic and witch hunt in the colonies following the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly. The girl’s parents claimed that before she died, Elizabeth cried out that a woman named Goody Ayres was tormenting her. Soon after, another young girl, Ann Cole, began exhibiting “strange fits” and “blasphemous” speech. Cole claimed that her condition was the result of witchcraft performed by her neighbor, Rebecca Greensmith.

Soon, neighbors began trying to remove suspicion from their own actions by levying accusations of witchcraft against one another. During testimony, Greensmith reportedly admitted that she practiced witchcraft and claimed that she, Goody Ayres, and six other women routinely met in the forest to perform unholy rituals. Two of the suspected witches were submitted to the water test, in which a person is tied and thrown into a body of water. If the person sinks, they are innocent, as the water is seen as not “rejecting” their body. If they float, they are considered guilty of being a witch.

A Connecticut court eventually found Rebecca Greensmith and her husband Nathaniel guilty of witchcraft and both were executed by hanging. Two other accused witches—Mary Sanford and Mary Barnes—were also executed. Ayres and her husband fled Hartford. In total, eleven people were executed in Connecticut from Young’s death in 1647 to the executions of Sanford, Barnes, and the Greensmiths around 1662.

Salem Witch Trials

In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted the first legal code in the British New England Colonies. The code included a provision making witchcraft a capital offense. From 1648 to 1688, five people were hanged as witches in the colony.

However, the most notorious witch trials in American history began in 1692 in the town of Salem Village, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Parris and her cousin, Abigail Williams, suddenly began acting strangely—experiencing fits of anger, violently twitching, and making strange sounds. Elizabeth’s father was Reverend Samuel Parris, the first ordained minister in Salem Village. Soon, another young girl began displaying the same symptoms. When the girls were brought into court, they accused three people of bewitching them—a homeless woman named Sarah Good, an elderly woman named Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an enslaved Caribbean woman who worked for Samuel Parris.

Good and Osborne maintained their innocence, but Tituba admitted to being a witch and described taking part in detailed Satanic rituals and claimed that other witches were plotting to destroy the community. In the months that followed, accusations of witchcraft were levied against hundreds of people, with many being arrested. The situation caused such an uproar in the colony that its governor, William Phipps, established two special courts, one to hear the accusations and the other to render a verdict. The first person to be tried and executed for witchcraft in Salem was Bridget Bishop, an elderly woman who was hanged on June 10, 1692.

Many of those on trial were accused based on the concept of spectral evidence, testimony claiming that the accused’s spirit or spectral body attacked or threatened another person in a dream or vision. Ironically, respected Boston minister Cotton Mather, who was a firm believer in witchcraft, wrote a letter to the courts asking them to exclude spectral evidence from their deliberations. The courts declined his request, but Mather’s son, Increase Mather, then the president of Harvard University, appealed to Governor Phipps who dissolved the two courts in October 1692 and set up a single court that disallowed spectral evidence.

The move seemed to bring some sanity to the proceedings, as only three of fifty-six defendants were found guilty after that point. Phipps also banned any further arrests and eventually pardoned all those still imprisoned by May 1693. From 1692 into 1693, almost two hundred people were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village and the surrounding area. Nineteen were executed by hanging—including Sarah Good—and one elderly man was crushed to death by stones. Sarah Osborne was one of several suspects who died in prison. Tituba faced her own trial in May 1693, but the jury did not indict her. She left Massachusetts and disappeared from history.

During the next few years, many of those involved in the trials expressed regret for their participation. In 1702, the colony declared that witch trials unlawful and restored the full rights of those accused in 1711. The colony also paid reparations to the survivors or their heirs.

After Salem

The Salem Witch trials marked the last legally sanctioned execution for witchcraft in the colonies. In the 1690s, a Connecticut woman named Winifred King Benham and her daughter were tried and found innocent of witchcraft but were still forced to flee to the New York Colony. In Virginia, Grace Sherwood was accused of witchcraft in 1698 for allegedly “bewitching” their neighbor’s pigs to death and destroying their cotton crop. In a well-documented case, a neighbor also accused Sherwood of entering her home, riding her like a horse, and exiting through the keyhole. Sherwood and her husband, Nathaniel, brought defamation lawsuits against their accusers but lost both cases. In 1706, Grace Sherwood stood trial in Virginia court. She was subjected to the water test and floated, supposedly confirming her “guilt.” She spent several years in prison before being released in 1714.

The belief in witchcraft began to wane in the American colonies during the eighteenth century, putting an end to official witchcraft accusations and trials. The last recorded witch trial in the nation occurred more than a century after the British colonies won their independence and became the United States. It occurred, of all places, near Salem, Massachusetts, when an elderly disabled woman named Lucretia Brown began to suffer from declining health. Brown was a follower of religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, who accused Brown’s neighbor, Daniel Spofford, of using witchcraft to harm Brown. Eddy filed an official complaint in Brown’s name, charging Spofford with witchcraft. The case was heard in a Salem court, but the judge dismissed it.

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