Abigail Williams's Tragedy

Abigail William is Responsible for the Tragedy is Salem Twenty people died in Salem, Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In this day in age witchcraft was forbidden. If anybody was accused of witchcraft and the court decided they were guilty they were instantly executed. The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecution of people accused of witchcraft. Fourteen women, the rest men, died all by hanging, expect one. A group of young girls in the town claimed the devil tried to possess them. They then accused local women and men in the town of Salem of witchcraft. Abigail, the leader of the girls accusing the men and women of witchcraft is to blame for the tragedy. Abigail Williams is responsible for the tragedy

The girls were all visiting Betty and talking together. Mary Warren tells Abigail that they must tell everybody what they did because the entire town is claiming that they conjured up spirits. When Abigail says frantically, “Oh, we’ll be whipped!” (Miller 143) Abigail says this to scare the girls so they all don’t get into trouble. The girls don’t want to be whipped. Mary tells Abigail that she never had done any of it. She only looked. All of a sudden Betty sits up and starts screaming. Abigail tells betty that she had told her father everything her the girls had done. Betty tells Abigail that she drank blood and she knows Abigail didn’t tell her father that. Abigail responds to Betty slapping her across the face madly, “Betty, you will never say that again! You will never- Shut it! Now shut it!”(Miller 144) Abigail smacked Betty across her face scaring her and making her afraid that she might get hit again. Right after Abigail smacked and yelled at Betty, Abigail looks at the girls with a mean look on her face and talks fiercely, “Now look you. All of you. We danced. And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam’s dead sister’s. And that is all. And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you.

When everybody is at the courthouse Mary turned on Abigail and was trying to tell the court it was all fake. Mary is close by Abigail when Abigail starts claiming that Mary is pushing her spirit onto her. She says that envy is a sin talking to Mary. She asks Mary to please don’t come down. Then she screams to the court yelling loudly, “Mary don’t hurt me!”(Miller, 191) Abigail does this so the court thinks that Mary is a witch and is hurting Abigail through Mary’s spirit. Soon after Danforth asks Mary if she has compacted with the devil and Mary told him never. Then Abigail and the girls copy what Mary said saying, “Never, never!”(Miller, 192) Abigail and the girls are copying Mary to make Judge Danforth and the court that Mary’s spirit is still harming them. Abigail manipulated Danforth into thinking Mary is compacted with the devil. She also made him believe that Mary was harming her and the other girls through her spirit locking them down to make them copy everything she was saying. Abigail Manipulated the court into believing anything her and the girls had to say by acting and lying about what was really going