Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. Moreover, Putnams ability to write or record these documents proved the power of his pen: his depositions were unusually successful.40. He rebuked Sibley and forced her to confess before the church. Thomas Maule, a Quaker, was the first to challenge the official proscription, with Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695. He arrives in Salem to oversee the trials of the accused witches with a serene sense of his own ability to judge fairly. The next accused included Dorothy Good, Sarahs four-year-old daughter; Martha Cory, a member of Samuel Parriss church; and Rebecca Nurse, a widely respected matriarch, member of the nearby Salem Town church, and godly grandmother in the community. Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not requiredassuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? Procedure of Stop and Frisk. For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. Salem Witch Trials: Cotton Mather - University of Virginia Lay people did not necessarily associate magic with the devil, but approached it more pragmatically: if it healed it was good, and if it harmed it was bad. In a special issue of William and Mary Quarterly devoted to a reassessment of Salem Possessed, Benjamin Ray contests the geography of their map, and Richard Latner challenges the economic divisions of the afflicted and the accused. Adoption of Exclusionary Rule - Constitution Annotated On June 2, 1962, the Court of Oyer and Terminer (to hear and decide) was established to handle the large number of people in jail for witchcraft. Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. See her chap. More important, the relationship of state to church seemed to change. The arguments of Boyer and Nissenbaum have been strongly challenged. Yet although The Return of Several Ministers urged caution in this regard, it did not overtly condemn the proceedings or the judges and ended by encouraging a vigorous prosecution. It was all the court wanted to hear. This was certainly the case with John Neals novel Rachel Dyer (1828) and, in more nuanced ways, it continued with Hawthornes The House of the Seven Gables. Mapping the houses of the afflicted against the houses of the accused, they found that most of the afflicted came from the western, more agricultural areas of Salem Village, while the accused tended to come from the eastern, more merchant-oriented society of Salem Town. Yet the tales live on. See Ray, The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village, William and Mary Quarterly 65.3 (2008): 449478; Latner, Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salems Witch-Hunters Modernizations Failures? William and Mary Quarterly 65.3 (2008): 423448. Young girls and others had fallen into fits and afflictions before; in fact, almost simultaneously with Salem, the same kinds of fits with the same sorts of accusations were beginning among a small group of girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Rev. The backstory: If you think . United States (1895) and Taylor v. Kentucky (1978), later established the presumption of innocence as one of the basic requirements for a fair trialsomething none of the accused witches of Salem. Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflictedseveral of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorderSalem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause.12. Each generation has written its own account of Salem, though that writing proliferated in the wake of expanding education requirements and the new schoolbooks written to meet demand beginning in the early 1800s. See Baker, Storm of Witchcraft, 161170. For more on Parris as central to the outbreak, see Ray, Satan and Salem, chap. Ray points out that the phrase most grievously appears 172 times in his descriptions of the suffering of the afflicted, while the phrases grievously tortured and grievously tormented appear forty-five times.41 Was the use of such phrases responsible for Putnams strong results, and what does that tell us about the power of narrative or the expectations of audience during the Salem witch trials? Nonetheless, all agree that something changed, or that the tragedy came about because of deep shifts in the culture and control of Puritan New England. In June, the newly appointed governor, William Phips, arrived from England with a new charter, heard about the crisis in Salem, and immediately established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (to hear and determine). Now, finally, he could lay the blame elsewhere. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. In popular histories, the Puritans usually appear as stock figures of backward superstitionhateful, unenlightened religious bigots who saw witches in every shadow and enjoyed nothing so much as a good hanging.35 As Gretchen Adams has shown, such accounts of Salem emerged most prominently in the nations first schoolbooks, when American historians praised their country for its moral progress.36 Yet many have demonstrated that such an assessment fails to fit the evidence: after all, many of those involved at Salem welcomed the new sciences emerging in Europe. Popular history is important, but it often thrives on caricature. The fits began in January 1692. In 1689, no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. The Salem Witch Trials: When a Legal System Fails - Connor See . Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters.11, Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. According to Michael Colacurcio, the link between the two tales told at Salem Gallows Hill in Alice Doanes Appeal is that both concern the Puritan problem of specter evidence, in each case pointing readers to perceive the truth of specter evidence as guilty projection: that is, in both cases the charges of diabolical evil probably reveals more about the accuser than the accused, and such tendencies continue beyond a superstitious past.44 The same concern with spectral evidence frames Young Goodman Brown, but here the question has changed to take up an issue from the trials themselves: if the devil can take any shape, and if those shapes were being used to identify the accused, then could the devil be trusted? He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England. Scientists may have found the secret to invisibility - Freethink In Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne essentially claims that Salem revealed the fundamental flaw in Puritanism: the inability to discover the invisible through the visible, to judge the status of anothers soul through visible practice or deed. Abstract. Spectral Evidence Law and Legal Definition. The minister John Hale, for example, who was first an advocate and later a skeptic at Salem, explained, Such was the darkness of the day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents [i.e., precedents], that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.32 Apologies eventually appeared from many involved, including the jury foreman, the afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr., and the judge Samuel Sewall, who desired to take the blame and shame of it.33 Yet most of these apologies came in Hales variety; they were, for the most part, apologies of the confused. In that case, the Court upheld Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under Congress's Commerce Clause powers. Samuel Parris had completed three years at Harvard before leaving to take over his fathers plantation in Barbados, which quickly failed. On the stories flowed, writes David Hall, stories mainly rooted in the suffering of bewildered people who watched children or their spouses die or suffer agonizing fits; David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 191. 36. Researchers have developed a unique light wave that, when beamed through an object, makes the object appear invisible to cameras and even the human eye. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as 2011 in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem.17 The afflictions at Salem may have begun as genuine symptoms of anxiety or PTSD; at court, these fits might have continued as fraud, especially when the magistrates required repeat performances of affliction to convict the accused.18. Spectral evidence is a form of evidence based on dreams and visions. As Chadwick Hansen showed long ago, Longfellows play Giles Cory of Salem Farms, written in the wake of the Civil War, was the first account to transform Tituba into a half-black slave.48 After Longfellow, others metamorphosed Tituba fully into an African American and finally into an African who was kidnapped as a child, even though nothing in the existing records lends support to such a claim and most scholars reject it. Spectral evidence - Wikiwand 8. See Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987), xii. For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in 1692. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original New England Way, and many lamented what they had lost. 45. Much at Salem turned on the heart. The Court recited evidence of racial discrimination by hotels and motels . For many years now, literary scholars have asked how to read and understand the texts produced at the meeting of two cultures.
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