Tituba Essay

In 1692, the people in Salem, Massachusetts went on a hunt accusing people of being witches. This was a hysterical time in history known as the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem Witch Trials led to many distraught people and false accusations. The famous trials started with two sick children and then led to discrimination manly towards women of a lesser class. The accused people were tortured and eventually killed.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693 were among the most surprising and violent episodes in the history of America. It wasn’t violent due to a lot of people dying, in fact, only 19 people were killed due to this event. However, hundreds had their lives changed forever. Some, without any hope of it ever going back to how it was prior to the Trials. No, it was violent due to the fact that it was neighbor turning on neighbor. People that were once viewed as friends were turning on each other. One of the noblest families in Salem was torn down from their decadence and thrown into the mud, many of them being accused of witchcraft, never to return to their former glory. What sparked this horrific scene in America’s history? Why did it happen? Why did it take so long for it to stop? And most importantly, were the trials a mistake? Or were there actually witches in Salem?

The Salem Witch Trials was a series of false accusations of witchcraft taking place in Salem, which during the seventeenth century, was apart of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The trials began in February of 1692, when the first three victims, Sarah Good, Sarah Osbourne, and a slave girl named Tituba, were sentenced to their hangings (Brooks). They were caught in the winter of 1691, playing a fortune telling game with a makeshift ball (Boyer). Tituba, owned by Reverend Samuel Paris, confessed to be a witch working with the devil to tear apart the village (Campbell). Her confession

In 1692, the hysteria of what is now known as the Salem witch trials begun. It all started within the minister’s household when his daughter and niece started to act outlandishly. Witchcraft was blamed for their behavior and actions, which resulted in the madness of accusing almost every woman in the village of Salem. About 20 were eventually executed (Blumberg 1). This delirium ended when minister Cotton Mather and his son pleaded to cease the use of spectral evidence, the “testimony about dreams and visions” (Blumberg 2). This plea was eventually taken into consideration and the witch-hunt ended. All in all, the event of the trials and executions still transpired, and the tragedy of the Salem witch trials is still known to us today.

The belief of witchcraft can be traced back centuries to as early as the 1300’s. The Salem Witch Trials occurred during 1690’s in which many members of Puritan communities were accused and convicted of witchcraft. These “witch trials” were most famously noted in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. Many believe this town to be the starting point for the mass hysteria which spread to many other areas of New England. Bridget Bishop, a resident of Salem, was the first person to be tried as a witch. Surprisingly, Bishop was accused of witch craft by the highest number of witneses. After Bishop, more than two hundred people were tried of practicing witchcraft and twenty were executed. Many of these accusations arose from jealous, lower class members of society, especially towards women who had come into a great deal of land or wealth. Three young children by the names of Elizabeth, Abigail, and Ann were the first three people to be “harmed” by the witches. They claimed that spectral beings in the form of Tituba, a slave, Sarah Good, a beggar, and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who suffered financially, assaulted them. These girls were put under pressure by the magistrates

Doctor William Griggs declared all those afflicted bewitched and the village agreed with this statement. Indian slave couple Tituba and John were accused in the making of the witch-cake which all those afflicted had had. Tituba was reverend Parris slave, caretaker of Abigail and Betty. February 25 and 28 Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good also accused as the tormentors. The first three women to be accused witches were not originally born in Salem and Tituba was also linked towards the Indian war. A similar pattern throughout the crisis was seen. All those accused where not born in Salem even if they had lived there all their life or were Indians (linking them to the American Indian war in 1622-1624) or those who were previously accused of witchcraft. Also mentions the afflicted girls and fortune telling how they all got scared when a coffin appeared in one of their

In the years prior, the town of Salem had seen its fair share of hardships. One major hardship included the revoking of the town’s charter by King Charles II in 1684. The charter was very important because it was a document that allowed the citizens to colonize the area. Without the charter the people would not have the rights to their own land. The king of England believed that the citizens of Salem had neglected several provisions of the original document. After King Charles death in the year 1692, King James II later took over and merged the Massachusetts Bay Colony into what is known as the Dominion of New England. The main reason King James II merged the colonies was because he wanted to tighten his control over what went on in the New England colonies. Later in the year 1691, the new royal family, King William and Queen Mary issued a charter that had a lot of anti-religious aspects. Instead of giving Salem the original and much simpler charter, King William and Queen Mary decide to combine Salem with the many of the surrounding colonies. The new charter by King William and Queen Mary wasn’t much different from the earlier charter created by King James II. All these events are significant to the witch trials because they caused a lot of discontent in the colony. The Puritans,who left England to

In Salem, Massachusetts there were Witch Trials held during the summer months of 1692. Throughout the seventeenth century in New England, witchcraft was said to be a crime punishable by death. Puritans came to New England in the early 1600’s to practice their Christianity in the purest form possible. They believed every word in the bible and that the words of God were to be followed down to the last sentence there was. Havoc started occurring around the town and 19 women along with men were hanged for witchcraft. Over 100 individuals were suspected to be witches in result to weird behavior before a disaster happens.

According to Blumberg, the Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft- the Devil’s magic- and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later.

After reviewing many different accounts of life during the trails, how the actual trials went about and historians research and evidence that was found about the actuality of the trials all point to the Salem Witch Trials being a way to keep women under control. The Puritans found many useful reasons for the witch hunts to take place both psychologically, sociologically, and within criminology. Witch hunts have often spewed from the need for deviance, social control. Witch hunts throughout history have similarly had common theme of being instances in history where extreme behavior where an “evil is constructed, identified, and persecuted”. Most importantly, the witch hunts were often carried out by formal authorities within and the society. In Salem the conditions of the Puritan society were ideal for and gave way to witch hunts; the society contained disease, hardship, and distal war threats. Many historians refer to the time period of the Salem Witch Trials as the “perfect storm”

In 1692, as the puritans of Salem Massachusetts over-turn on each other, they started scapegoating many of their villagers with witchcraft. During this time many were murdered unfairly. The Salem Witch Trials was a reformation of the government. People believed that this was an era where the devil gave certain humans powers to harm others in joining them into their beliefs. It was certain to happen, because many had personal envy which caused many of the accusations,trials, and the implementations. Many were trying to care more about the money and wealth than their puritan values.

In the seventeenth century, the belief in witchcraft was spread among Europe and the colonies. According to the textbook, America a Narrative History, “Prior to the dramatic episode in Salem, almost 300 New Englanders had been accused of practicing witchcraft, and more than 30 had been hanged.” This outbreak of witches ruined Massachusetts Puritan utopia. This paper will discuss the settlers of Massachusetts prior to this calamity, what happened during, and the outcome.

After a local doctor, William Griggs, announced bewitchment, other young girls in the community, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren began to display similar symptoms. In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with Sarah Good, the homeless beggar, Sarah Osborn, the poor elderly. The girls had accused them of bewitching. (Unknown, SALEM WITCH TRIALS,

In the spring of 1692, the lives of the people who lived in Salem began changing. It is an event that can never be erased from history; lives were changed, and lives were lost. The Salem Witch trials began in a time where people felt vulnerability and fear to anything that they may not understand. In Salem, Massachusetts, the lives of many residents were at the mercy of a few young girls. The town was ruled by religion which opened many opportunities for residents to fear anything that they believed as against them, their religion, or just simply immoral. The people who lived there called themselves Puritans. The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who believed that they must purify the church of England from its catholic practices. In Salem, the residents were ruled by religious leaders who oversaw the town’s court. Even with a judicial system set in place, people were hanged, stoned without any evidence of guilt.

The Salem Witch trials started in 1688. However witch trials started many years before. There were forty- to fifty-thousand people killed because of witchcraft, in a matter of 300 years. The main punishment for witchcraft was being hanged, others died in jail, or rocks were stacked on them till their chests collapsed. The Salem community consisted of five hundred individuals who were very pious. Witchcraft was considered a capital offense.