Tituba Trial

The First Witch of Salem In January 1692, strange things started to happen in Salem, Massachusetts and it all started with a couple of young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. These girls were nine and eleven years old and one day they began to have these fits where their bodies would move violently. They would also have tourette like outbursts and stay in a state of trance for a long period of time. Their families could not figure out why they were acting this way, so they called the town doctor to take a look at them. When he could not find anything wrong with the girls, he came to the conclusion that it was “the work of Satan and the girls were bewitched”. This eventually led to the first confirmed imprisonment of a person due to

She was born in an Arawak village in South America in 1674. At a young age, she was taken from her home and moved to Barbados where she was sold into slavery. She was then sold to Samuel Parris, the Puritan minister of Salem, but he didn’t just take her. He also bought her husband, John Indian. So they worked in the Parris household, where Betty and Abigail played, where Tituba would show the girls her voodoo tricks and tell them tales. So when the girls began to have their fits it was easy for them to use Tituba as their scapegoat. Which was surprising at the time, because others accused New England witches to be “outliers, deviants, cantankerous scolds and chloric foot-stompers, also usually not people of color.” When Tituba had her trial on March 1st, 1692, she at first denied all accusations about her, but soon after confessed to using witchcraft. She then proceeded to name two other girls whom she said practiced with her. It is believed that she confessed because of her status in the community, if she said she was not guilty, they would not have believed her anyways. It is also believed that Samuel Parris beat her into confessing, but her confession ending up helping her in the long run. Since she confessed she was not executed like the others, but she was imprisoned and Samuel Parris did not bail her out because he refused to pay her jail fees. So

These events sent the town in to a crazy witch-hunt, accusing numerous amounts of innocent people of things they did not do, even some children were being accused. Three months after Tituba’s trial, on June 8th, 1692 the general court decided to reintroduce an old law, making witch craft a capital offense. A couple days later was when they had the first execution of the Salem witch trials. When someone was accused of practicing witchcraft they would be put through a test to see if the certain individual was a witch or not. There a few different types of tests the judges used to test this theory. The first was the swimming test. The magistrates would tie a large rock to the feet of the accused. Then they would throw the accused into a body of water and if they were able to float, they were proclaimed as being a witch; if the accused individual drowned they were considered to be innocent. It was said that a witch would not be able to sink because the water rejected their body. Second was the prayer test, this test was where they were forced to pray aloud without making any mistakes. The slightest mistake while reciting a prayer would prove to the magistrates that the person must be taken over by Satan. Another test that was used was the witch marks test. They would have them strip down in