Essay On The Puritans In Salem

Almost every Sunday morning you could find most of the population of Salem village in church. By 1692 denominations such as Presbyterians, Baptist, Quakers, Huguenots, and Anglicans had come to Massachusetts, but most of the people in Salem attended a Congregational service and called themselves Puritans. The Puritans, also known as Nonconformists, held a service each Sunday and were very traditional and set in their ways. The meeting house was set up with a pulpit at the front where the minister gave a sermon to the congregation each Sunday. The ministers of these churches were expected to be well educated and were paid with tax money in most of the cities in Massachusetts. The pews were set up with two sections that were divided by a middle

Parris was never very successful in London, so he moved to Barbados where he was a plantation owner. While he lived in Barbados, Parris purchased two slaves named John and Tituba, and in 1680, when he moved to Salem, he took them with him. By 1689, Parris had become a minister and was married. The Parris’ had a daughter called Betty who started showing signs of being bewitched when she was 9; His niece Abigail, who was only 12, was showing similar behaviors. The girls “twitched, cried, made odd noises, and huddled in corners” and soon started making accusations about who had bewitched them. One of the first accused was Samuel Parris’ own slave, Tituba. It was unheard of for a Reverend to have witchcraft practiced under his own roof, and Parris could not afford to lose his reputation. Samuel stood by his children in court as they testified against the accused, and he even helped them by testifying against Rebecca Nurse. People thought for certain that if the Reverend was standing with the girls against the so called “evil witches” that there must be a real problem. Parris even made a statement that the witches were plotting against Christianity, which made sense if the witches were indeed working for the Devil. However, Parris never knew how standing up against the Devil would affect his