City of Clearwater, Florida Aging Well Center, 28 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Salem, 1692 - Presented by the Clearwater Aging Well Center

Description

Everyone has heard about the witchcraft trials that happened in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, but what really happened? This presentation by Karen Fortin will include an overview of the events that took place that fateful year and examines some of the reasons why they occurred. Presented by the Clearwater Aging Well Center.

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Hello, everyone and welcome to this presentation of salem 1692 sponsored by the clearwater aging well center.

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Before we talk about the events of that year, let's look at where they actually occurred. This is an early map of massachusetts, bay, colony and the location of these events was up in the northeastern part of that colony.

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If I enlarge that section, you can see this more clearly down. Here is the city of boston and up along the coast, was the port city of salem.

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Although today we talked about in relation to the salem that we know today, there were actually two locations with the name salem.

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There was the port town, that's the modern city, but there was also another community, salem village, which was to the west of salem town and, primarily, a farm community.

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This is actually where the events all started in salem village. What is today modern town of danvers massachusetts.

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So what exactly happened in the middle of january in 1692 during a bitterly cold winter, in the household of the salem village, pastor, reverend paris, two girls living in the household started to exhibit very odd and unusual behavior betty was the pastor's daughter and abigail was his orphan niece.

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They were the only ones in the household that began to act in this strange way. They started to bark like dogs, scream for unknown reasons and convulse in what appeared to be seizures.

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The family and the neighbors prayed that the girls would improve, because that was the only thing they knew to do to try and help them, but the events continued day after day a little over a month later, they were finally able to bring a doctor in.

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He examined the two girls, but he couldn't see any physical reason for their behavior, so he determined that they must be victims of witchcraft.

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Once a diagnosis was made, the girls started to accuse people in the nearby village of being the witches who were afflicting them and attacking them through supernatural means once were got out that there must be witches in this village.

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Others started to exhibit strange behavior, especially friends of abigail and betty, and they started to name even more people in the village on february 29th, the first three to be named by the girls were arrested.

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This was sarah good. Sarah osborne and tituba tituba was an african or west indian slave owned by reverend paris.

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On march 1st, one by one, each of these three women were brought before a judge for interrogation.

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The first was sarah goode. She claimed that she was innocent and was not a witch and had not been harming the girls.

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The judge declared that she had lied and ordered that she be taken to prison to await trial.

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Sarah osborne was brought before the judge. She claimed that she was innocent and not a witch and had not harmed the girls.

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Once again, the judge declared that she must be lying and ordered her to be taken to prison to await trial. Next was tituba. She saw what had happened to sarah goode and sarah osborne and decided to take a different tact to see if she might be able to save herself.

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Instead of claiming that she was innocent, she confessed to the witchcraft, but she blamed sarah goode and sarah osborne for forcing her to participate and claimed that not only those two women but that other people in the village were also witches once it was declared that there must be other witches things quickly escalated even further between march and may, more and more people claimed to be afflicted and started, accusing others it quickly spread to nearby towns such as andover massachusetts and even into salem town as it did, the people being accused were higher and higher on the social ladder and more and more people in an effort to save themselves began to confess once they were accused and provided names of yet more people.

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The first trial took place on june, 2nd the governor had called a court of lawyer interminer. This was to hear and determine the first to be brought for. Trial was bridget bishop, although she declared that she was innocent.

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The judges declared that she was guilty and sentenced her to hang, which they did on june 10th throughout the summer, and early fall more and more were accused in all 189 had been thrown into prison.

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This included young and old men and women such as elderly and respected, rebecca nurse. The former salem village, pastor, reverend george burrows and even a four-year-old girl named dorothy or dork, is good.

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19 of these were hanged and five died of other causes, while in prison.

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One of the most talked about is a man named giles corey.

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He had refused to participate in the proceedings, even though he was accused of witchcraft according to english law, which was in effect at the time in the colonies.

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You had to declare whether you were innocent or guilty before you could be taken to trial.

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Giles corey refused to enter a plea, so they began to torture him by means of pressing.

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They laid him between two wooden boards and started to pile boulders on top torturing him and telling him he must enter a plea of innocent or guilty giles. Corey still refused to participate.

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Legend says that his only words were more weight, so they continued to pile more boulders on top of them. Until eventually he was crushed to death, but he never entered a plea.

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By october 12th, the governor could see that things had gotten completely out of control. There was seemed to be no end in sight, and it was to the point where even his own wife had been accused.

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So, finally, the governor called a halt and dismissed the court of foyer interminer and refused to allow any more to be imprisoned in january and february. He instead called a new superior court and their mission was only to handle the backlog of prisoners and allowed no new accusations.

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Eventually, all those who were in prison, the charges were dismissed or those who had been accused were reprieved without execution.

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So how could something like this happen? In colonial new england, there had been other witchcraft trials.

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However, in most cases there was just one or two women accused and brought to trial. They were usually poor women who had little support from family or their community, and in most cases it did not come to execution.

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However, a few times given enough pressure and just the right set of circumstances, it could create a kind of perfect storm that once touched off, would set off a large-scale witch hunt or what is also called an outbreak.

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At this time, massachusetts bay colony was experiencing tremendous pressures. There were political, religious, social and economic tensions spreading throughout the colony, and there were also significant military tensions.

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The people in the colony had just survived two very significant wars with the native americans that were on their borders and the threat of war warfare was ever present.

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Not only were there colony-wide pressures, there were additional pressures and tensions within salem village itself.

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Many of the people who lived in the village resented the control that salem town had over them and they wanted to gain their independence and so far had failed.

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There were also a number of border disputes which caused unrest among neighbors and neighboring towns.

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All of these tensions came to be focused on the church in salem village and who had control over it and whether it should be the pastor, reverend paris, the town split between two factions, those who supported reverend paris and those who wanted him gone.

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These two factions revolved around the two most influential families in the village, the putnams and the porters.

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So it's not exactly a coincidence, as as the events of 1692 unfolded, those who were among the strongest accusers were the putnam family and their supporters, and those who were among the accused were the members of the porter family and their supporters.

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But what about these strange afflictions and behaviors?

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The most likely scenario is that at least initially, they were due to psychological stress.

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Again, it's probably not a coincidence that the first events took place in the household of reverend paris, which was such a focal point of all of the tensions in salem village. The girls in the household must have been more susceptible than some of the others and started to exhibit behavioral problems.

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Due to this stress, then, once work got out that there must be witches actively working in the village hysteria started to account for some of the other people who are claiming to be afflicted and exhibiting the strange behavior, but as the events unfolded.

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Undoubtedly some of the people who were making accusations did so because they saw this as an opportunity to get back at their enemies or anybody who had slighted them in the past.

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In addition, many of them probably were also claiming to be afflicted as a way to deflect any possible accusations against themselves.

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You have to put this in the context of the new england world at the time and what their beliefs and mindset were at this time. New england was predominantly puritan and they believed in the literal words of the bible in exodus, 22 18, it states, thou shalt, not suffer a witch to live.

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If the bible says that there are witches, it must be true. Puritans believe that the devil was very real and that he played an active role in the world around them.

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Witches were people who had made deals with the devil in order to gain power and torment. Others, new england, ministers of the time, regularly preached about the dangers of temptation caused by the devil and the very real presence of witches among them.

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Books about the various trials that were occurring throughout new england were widely distributed. So information about these cases would have been commonly known and believed to be true.

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In the end, it all comes down to the age-old question of. Why do bad things happen to good people in the world of colonial new england puritans, there were only two possible answers.

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One was that they must be bad people and they had done something to cause god to punish them. But of course, who wants to believe that that could possibly be true about them, so the other answer must be the case. That answer was witchcraft.

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On behalf of myself and the clearwater agent wealth center, thank you so much for joining me today for this presentation.