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发帖数: 38403 | 1 The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people
accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and
May 1693. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the
preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the
province: Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town.
The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in
1692 in Salem Town. One contemporary writer summed the results of the
trials thus:
And now Nineteen persons having been hang'd, and one prest to death, and
Eight more condemned, in all Twenty and Eight, of which above a third part
were Members of some of the Churches of N. England, and more than half of
them of a good Conversation in general, and not one clear'd; about Fifty
having confest themselves to be Witches, of which not one Executed; above an
Hundred and Fifty in Prison, and Two Hundred more acccused; the Special
Commision of Oyer and Terminer comes to a period.
—Robert Calef
At least five more of the accused died in prison.
When I put an end to the Court there ware at least fifty persons in prision
in great misery by reason of the extream cold and their poverty, most of
them having only spectre evidence against them and their mittimusses being
defective, I caused some of them to be lettout upon bayle and put the Judges
upon consideration of a way to reliefe others and to prevent them from
perishing in prision, upon which some of them were convinced and
acknowledged that their former proceedings were too violent and not grounded
upon a right foundation ... The stop put to the first method of proceedings
hath dissipated the blak cloud that threatened this Province with
destruccion.
— Governor William Phips, February 21st, 1693
The episode is one of the nation's most notorious cases of mass hysteria,
and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid
cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism,
false accusations and lapses in due process.[3] It was not unique, being an
American example of the much larger phenomenon of witch trials in the Early
Modern period, but many have considered the lasting impressions from the
trials to have been highly influential in subsequent American history.
More than once it has been said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock
on which the theocracy shattered.
— George Lincoln Burr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials |
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