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The Spark That Condemned a Colony: Salem's First Accusations
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In the winter of 1692, two girls' fits in a minister's house triggered a legal machine that would hang nineteen people and imprison hundreds. This is how Salem's witch hunt began — and why it couldn't stop itself.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nineteen people hanged. One man pressed to death under stones.
The question of who had done it was almost immediate. Within weeks, under pressure from adults, the girls named three women.
The afflictions spread through the winter and spring. More girls in the village reported symptoms.
The first to hang was Bridget Bishop, on June tenth, sixteen ninety-two. She was an innkeeper who'd been accused of witchcraft before, decades earlier, and she had a reputation the community found unsettling.
September brought what many historians see as the moment public sentiment began to fracture. Giles Corey was an eighty-year-old farmer.
The ministers had been uncomfortable from nearly the beginning. Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather were the most prominent religious voices in Massachusetts, and both had published arguments questioning spectral evidence.
The apologies came slowly and unevenly. Samuel Sewall, one of the trial judges, made a public confession of guilt in sixteen ninety-seven, standing in church while a statement was read aloud on his behalf, asking forgiveness.
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