Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials
According to Douglas Linder, "from June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallous Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging" (Linder). This heinous crime is now known as the Salem Witch Trials. Among the judges, who sentenced these people to death, was a man named Samuel Sewall. Up until the late nineteenth century, "Samuel Sewell was chiefly known as a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials-the ardent Puritan, who in the words of the poet Whittier, spoke the word that gave the witch's neck to the cord' " (McMichael 137).
Samuel Sewall was from England and he came to Massachusetts with his parents in 1661. He attended Harvard where he received his Bachelor degree. He was appointed to run the printing press by the General Council. Although Sewall lacked formal training, he was elected as a judge in 1683. He eventually became Chief Justice of one of the highest courts in the Colony, and "in 1692 he served as one of the seven magistrates selected to conduct the Salem witch trials, which sent nineteen victims to their deaths" (McMichael 137).
In 1688, John Putnam, an influential elder of Salem Village, asked a man by the name of Samuel Parris to preach in the Village church. Parris and his family were from Barbados. Parris accepted the job, and he and his family moved to Salem Village. Samuel Parris was accompanied to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, daughter Betty, niece Abigail Williams, and Indian slave Tituba. In the cold winter of 1692 Parris' daughter, Betty, became strangely ill. Not long after Betty became ill, her friends Ann Putnam, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott began to exhibit similar unusual behavior. A man by the name of Cotton Mather, a Boston minister, wrote a book in 1689 titled Memorable Providences, which described witchcraft that had occurred in Boston the year before. The belief of witches and...
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