"A Visible Decay of Godliness"

The Salem Witch Trials have begun, and no one in the community is safe. Today, we'll delve into New England's troubled circumstances, and how this strife amplified fears of malevolent magic.

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The Salem Witch Trials, Joseph E. Baker ca. 1892. A dramatized illustration of the trials created during the Victorian period. Via the World History Encyclopedia.

If you are accused of witchcraft in 17th-century New England, how do you escape with your life?

Protesting the charges or stating your innocence will surely end in execution. But if you give the bloodhounds their meal—if you confess to the charge of witchcraft, mold yourself into an expert witness, and claim that you were compelled by other witches living in your community—you can make yourself indispensable to the mob.

This is precisely what Tituba did after becoming the first person accused in the Salem Witch Trials. Can one blame her? Tituba and her husband were Native Americans who were enslaved in the West Indies and later sold to Reverend Parris’s family. These strange Englishmen saw the world as teeming with devils, and if they hungered for blood, then Tituba needed to ensure it was not hers that they spilled.

Her allegation that there were nine witches in total transformed the trials into a proper manhunt. Ann Putnam Jr., one of the afflicted girls, supplied the next few names: she accused Martha Cory, a member of Reverend Parris’s church in Salem Village, and Rebecca Nurse, a well-respected member of Salem Town’s church. Mary Warren, a servant of John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth, added her voice to the fray and claimed to be tormented by Cory’s specter.¹

Accusations flourished. The original accusers were teenage girls, but middle-aged women now grew afflicted by the witches’ specters: Ann Putnam Sr., Sarah Bibber, and the Quaker Bathsheba Pope (who was an aunt of Benjamin Franklin) were now claiming to have been bewitched. John Proctor was a vocal critic of the trials, and his commentary would soon land him and his wife in the courtroom among the accused.

Soon, witches were being “discovered” throughout Massachusetts Bay. With stories of the witch craze spreading throughout the colonies, officials from Boston came to oversee the trials, including the Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, who would work alongside Salem officials Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne. (Hathorne is the ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, which was inspired by his family’s connection to the Salem Witch Trials. Hawthorne was so embarrassed by his ancestor that he added the letter “w” to his last name.)