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In the year 1692, an event occurred that is remembered to this day among the great calamities of American History. In the small hamlet of Salem village, (now Danvers, MA) in the household of the local minister Samuel Parris, a young girl was observed acting strangely. It was not long before the strange behavior was pronounced the result of witchcraft. Soon, the mysterious behavior spread to other young girls in the village, and eventually to huge areas of the Bay Colony. The Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692 had begun. The ensuing witch trials affected people throughout not only Essex county, (where Salem village was located) but also Middlesex and Suffolk counties, and even frontier areas of the Bay Colony in what is today the state of Maine. It was by far the largest witchcraft hysteria in the history of the English colonies in North America.
The effects of the Salem Village witch trials were devastating: 141 people imprisoned, 19 people executed, and two more died from other causes directly related to the investigations.1 The Salem witch trials would account for a quarter of all people executed for the crime of witchcraft in the history of New England,2 and would furthermore prove to be the very last time anyone was ever legally accused of witchcraft in New England as well as the last time in the history of the English colonies that a suspected witch was convicted and executed.3 In addition, the Salem trials proved distinctive in that they implicated people from many walks of life not typically named in witchcraft trials. Church members, merchants, and even clergymen were both tried and executed as witches in 1692. And all of the executions relied heavily on standards of evidence and trial procedures that were controversial even at the time. The unique nature and gravity (at least by colonial American standards) of the Salem witch trials led many of our colonial forefathers to seek lessons from the sad events of 1692. As we shall see, all thought that the Salem trials were a grave miscarriage of justice - even those most in sympathy with the trials declined to defend them entirely. But what is most interesting is not even that those most sympathetic to the trials should still...