The Shame Of Salem

The Shame Of Salem

It became a literal witch-hunt.

IT ALL BEGAN in 1692 when the young daughter of Samuel Parris, the pastor of the Salem, Massachusetts, church, exhibited strange, psychotic symptoms. She experienced violent convulsions, hallucinations, and trancelike states. Shortly thereafter her cousin appeared to be similarly afflicted, and soon the hysteria spread to several other teenage girls within their social sphere. Parris’s own slave, Tituba, had entertained these impressionable children with spellbinding tales of the occult recalled from her childhood in the West Indies.

Parris was at first ashamed and then alarmed by these manifestations in his daughter and her friends. When pressed, the girls blamed witches for their torment. In a sermon Parris told his parishioners that witches were everywhere, including in their church. He warned ominously, “God knows how many devils there are.”

The ensuing witch-hunt was organized in a meeting held at the Parris home. Eventually approximately 150 suspected witches were imprisoned and 19 were hanged. Most of the victims were either social outcasts or members of families who had opposed the ministry of Samuel Parris. Many were middle-aged women with no male relatives to defend them, making them particularly vulnerable. Parris’s own slave, Tituba, was one of the first to be accused. In the midst of the hysteria, neighbor accused neighbor of witchcraft over the slightest pretext, such as the death of a cow or the failure of bread to rise.

The final executions occurred on the morning of September 22, 1692, on Witches Hill in Salem. Eight middle-aged New Englanders, seven women and one man, were hanged.

Gathered at the foot of the scaffold were people representing every age group. Eighty-nine-year-old Simon Bradstreet, recently governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and other original Puritans still alive, had left England over a half century earlier to create a Christian commonwealth in the new world. They viewed their own children as unfaithful to their Puritan upbringing and felt their utopia was being judged because of their wayward progeny. In their minds, by purging the witches they hoped to put an end to these tribulations and bring God’s blessing on them once again.

Also present at the gallows was sixty-one-year-old William Stoughton, the judge at the witch trials. His generation watched the execution with resignation. The condemned as well as the magistrates were all of their age. Stoughton’s contemporaries didn’t share the passion of their parents, having been repeatedly told by them that theirs was a lost and unconverted generation.

Representative of the younger generation was twenty-nine-year-old Cotton Mather, a brilliant young clergyman. Mather himself had been one of those who had examined the witches. Mather and his fellows considered the accused witches threats to their future and sought to get rid of them. Mather, a hardened witch-baiter in his youth, was to become a leading minister and theologian of his day. He was one of the founders of Yale College, organized to prepare ministers of the gospel.

The young girls who had been the accusers of the witches were also present. Their shrieking and twitching reminded everyone what the witches had done.

From the last of the original Puritans who had helped create Massachusetts as God’s “City on a Hill” to the youngest children who would someday be citizens of the future United States of America, this crowd at the final witch hanging witnessed a unique moment in American history.

After the executions the neighboring ministers took action to end the witch trials. A year later Samuel Parris, by then realizing his own responsibility for these shameful events, described his remorse for the executions in a sermon. He acknowledged that the wounds of their victims “accuseth us as the vile actors.”

Reflection

Do you feel guilt over the darkest deeds of your life, even though they may have occurred long ago? Christ will forgive the most heinous of sins if we truly repent, confessing our sins and trusting him as the one who paid the penalty for all our sins on the cross. King David committed adultery and murder, but because he truly repented, God forgave him, and he is referred to as “a man after [God’s] own heart” (Acts 13:22).

If we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong.

1 John 1:9