The Salem Witch Trials: Nineteen Hanged, One Judge Recanted

Between February and October of sixteen ninety-two, the magistrates of Salem Village and Salem Town presided over one of the most catastrophic miscarriages of justice in American history. Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill. One man, a farmer named Giles Corey, was pressed to death beneath heavy stones when he refused to enter a plea. More than one hundred and fifty people were jailed; several died in custody. The panic lasted eight months.

Historians have debated its causes for three centuries. The most supported explanations involve a combination of factors: genuine religious anxiety in a Puritan community that understood misfortune as divine judgment, land-use disputes between neighboring families that predated the accusations, adolescent girls whose social power derived entirely from being believed, and possibly ergot, a fungal contamination of rye grain that can produce hallucinations and convulsions. This last theory, proposed in the nineteen seventy-six work of biologist Linnda Caporael, remains contested among historians. The social and legal mechanisms that allowed accusation to become execution require no ergot to explain.

What is less taught is what happened after. When the governor's wife was accused in October of sixteen ninety-two, the colonial authorities abruptly ended the proceedings. The special court was dissolved. The remaining accused were released. No one who had prosecuted or convicted the executed was ever punished.

One man recanted. Samuel Sewall, who had served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer that sentenced the condemned to hang, stood in his pew at South Church in Boston in January of sixteen ninety-seven while a minister read his written statement aloud to the congregation. Sewall acknowledged his guilt, asked forgiveness from God and from the families of those executed, and took full personal blame. He stood in silence while the congregation heard it. For the rest of his life, Sewall observed a private day of fasting each year in acknowledgment of what the court he had served had done. He never stopped.

It is one of the earliest documented acts of individual institutional accountability in American history. Sewall was not obligated to do it. He did it because he believed it was required of him. The memorial on Liberty Street in Salem, completed in nineteen ninety-two, three hundred years after the trials, lists the names of the twenty people who died in stone. Most of them had no one powerful enough to defend them.