January 5-11, 2026
Week 2 complete! This week explored the fractures that made Salem Village uniquely vulnerable to witch panic. We’re still building the context and examining the factors that will lead to the first arrests in February. You learned why this particular community, at this particular moment, became ground zero for America’s most notorious witch hunt.
This Week’s Content
Daily Videos (Salem Witch Trials Daily YouTube Playlist)
- January 5: Salem Town, Salem Farms, and Salem Village
- January 6: Rev. Samuel Parris in Salem Village
- January 7: Religion in Massachusetts
- January 8: Myths
- January 9: Witches and the Diabolical Pact
- January 10: Warfare
- January 11: Massachusetts Economy
Recommended Podcast Episode
The Thing About Tituba: Explore Tituba’s story, the witch cake incident, and debunking myths
Three Salems: Geography as Destiny
Salem was more than one community in 1692. It was three distinct worlds existing in tension. Salem Town sat on the peninsula as a prosperous port where merchants grew wealthy from Atlantic trade. To the west stretched Salem Farms, agricultural land originally granted to colonial elites like Governor John Endicott. Further west lay Salem Village, where families struggled and desperately wanted independence.
Those elite landholders didn’t stay to work the soil. They leased or sold their property, often in parcels. The families who moved in became the players in 1692. John Putnam’s son, Sergeant Thomas Putnam, settled there. Daniel Rea, Richard Hutchinson, and Bray Wilkins also settled there. John Proctor leased Emmanuel Downing’s land in 1666. Francis and Rebecca Nurse rented part of the Endicott farm in 1678. These families were building Salem Village, not knowing it would tear itself apart.
As early as 1666, Salem Farms residents petitioned for their own minister. Salem Town refused. They also asked for exemption from night watch duties, and that request was also rejected. When Beverly successfully split off in 1668, it encouraged Salem Villagers to push harder. In 1669, when Salem Town raised taxes for a new meetinghouse, 28 farmers refused to pay for a building they would never use.
The General Court finally allowed Salem Village to hire a minister in October 1672. But they could only form a parish, not a church. All sacraments still had to be performed in Salem Town. This half measure created lasting resentment.
Joseph Hutchinson donated land for a meetinghouse, built in spring 1673. This structure would later host the witch examinations. What followed was twenty years of ministerial chaos. James Bayley served until 1679 when Bray Wilkins and Nathaniel Putnam forced him out. George Burroughs lasted from 1680 to 1683 before the committee stopped paying him. Deodat Lawson sparked such controversy that Joseph Hutchinson fenced in the meetinghouse in protest. Lawson left in 1688.
Samuel Parris and the Breaking Point
Samuel Parris, a failed Boston merchant formerly a plantation owner in Barbados, was invited to preach a sermon in November 1688. After months of negotiations over his aggressive salary demands, he began preaching in July 1689. That October, at a meeting possibly organized by Putnams, villagers voted to give Parris the ownership of the parsonage and two acres. Only one objection was recorded, suggesting not all villagers knew about the meeting. This land transfer was disputed.
On November 16, 1689, twenty-seven people joined Parris’s church. Twelve were Putnams. Four more were their allies. The factional nature was immediate.
Then came the silent revolt. From March 30, 1690 to July 23, 1693, not a single man in Salem Village joined Parris’s church. In a Puritan society where male church membership was central, this collective refusal sent an unmistakable message. By December 1689, 38 families had not paid his salary. By early 1692, only 61 members had joined, 35 of them women. In a village of 500 people, about 400 had never been baptized or joined any church.
In October 1691, Joseph Porter, Joseph Hutchinson, Daniel Andrew, Joseph Putnam, and Francis Nurse were all elected to the committee. They voted not to collect Parris’s salary. By November, Parris was out of firewood. Church members sued the committee. The committee planned to air grievances: his contract was illegal, he should not have the parsonage. This was Salem Village as 1692 began.
Religion in Massachusetts
When we think about religion in colonial Massachusetts, we think Puritans. While they did represent the majority, they were hardly the only Christian denomination in New England. If one looked hard enough, one could find Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and Anglicans.
Puritanism was born in England in the late 1500s. Puritans were Calvinists who wanted to remove all traces of Roman Catholicism from the Church of England. The term “Puritan” was a pejorative term used to deride the drive to purify the church. As Calvinists, Puritans believed in predestination, that God had predetermined who would go to heaven. Massachusetts Puritans were congregationalists. They believed local churches should make decisions about how to handle their own affairs, rather than having matters decided for them by a bishop or the Pope.
Massachusetts was technically not a theocracy, as ministers were prohibited from holding civil offices. However, the Puritan ministers certainly had the ear of the government and were highly influential in legislative affairs.
Early on, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was quick to banish, jail, or even execute non-Puritans or Puritans who were not sufficiently orthodox in their beliefs and practices. In 1635, Massachusetts banished Salem minister Roger Williams for unorthodox beliefs. In 1660, Massachusetts hanged four Quakers for promoting their faith. Mary Dyer was one of the unfortunate victims of this atrocity.
In 1684, King Chalres II revoked the 1629 charter, which had given Puritan Massachusetts the license to be a mostly self-governed colony. Toleration came with the Dominion of New England in December 1686. Anglicans, Baptists, and even Quakers were allowed to worship freely in a move that threatened to lure good Puritans to heretical faiths.
In 1691, King William granted a new charter to Massachusetts. This charter forced toleration to continue and removed the 1629 charter requirement that freemen be Puritans. Quakers, once banned from public life, could now vote for their own representatives to the Massachusetts legislature.
By 1692, preachers like Cotton Mather feared backsliding by the third generation. They revered the founding generation, the ones who arrived in the 1620s and 1630s to establish the colony. They worried the newer generations did not have the faith of the founders.
One thing that contributed to the fears of some ministers happened back in 1657, when an assembly of ministers from both Connecticut and Massachusetts met to talk about church membership. They recommended the Half-Way Covenant, which was slowly adopted by many Puritan congregations over the next several decades. When it was adopted by a church, the Half-Way Covenant allowed children whose parents had been baptized to themselves be baptized, whether or not their parents were full church members. By 1692, this measure had been adopted in Salem Town, but not in Samuel Parris’s Salem Village Church.
Salem Village lagged behind in church membership. As we noted, when the witch panic began, only 61 residents had joined Reverend Parris at the Village Church. Some had retained their membership in churches of neighboring towns like Salem, Topsfield, and Beverly. But Dr. Emerson Baker estimates about 400 residents of the village of about 500 people had never been baptized or joined a church.
Witch trials were not a uniquely Puritan project, and the Puritans were no more likely than other religious groups to execute people for witchcraft at this point in time. Virtually all Christians believed in witches and various Christian denominations led witch hunts in Europe. During the trials, the judges, some of whom occasionally preached, looked to the ministers for advice on how to proceed. Minister Cotton Mather counseled the judges to proceed with caution and be leery of spectral evidence, but to prosecute evildoers at a vigorous pace. On the other hand, Reverend Samuel Willard opposed the trials, published a tract against them in secret, and may have helped some of the accused escape. Ultimately, Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather, may have had the most ministerial influence on ending the trials, having published Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, which criticized the use of spectral evidence, in October 1692.
Myths and Misconceptions
Every possible explanation has been invented for the true cause of the Salem Witch Trials, overlooking the obvious one. This is just what witch hunts look like, and not like the myths and folklore that have been developed about the witchcraft panic.
The accused were not witches. They were innocent, and they had not signed a contract with the devil. So far it has been 334 years since these witch trials and nobody has come up with the devil’s book that they talked about all the time. Another thing about the so-called witches is that they were not all old hags. That is a stereotype about what witches were, when in reality all ages of girls and women and boys and men were arrested.
Using the word hysteria doesn’t describe what was happening and using that label minimizes the real human behavioral factors and decision making involved. They called it a delusion of Satan. Now we blame their minds, saying that they were all hysterical, that there was a mass hysteria. Really, they were just like us. They were simply people who were afraid, afraid for their safety and their children’s safety.
There is no single magic bullet theory to explain the Salem Witch Trials. There were many factors.
There were no neighbor land grabs. No accusers got the land of the people they were accusing. The afflicted people were not afflicted by ergot fungus or anything like LSD. They had a mysterious affliction that may have been psychological. It is most important to understand what was causing the behavior of the adults that were making the decisions to pursue these cases and hang people.
In the colonial period, there was a believed distinction between demon possession and bewitchment. The words were not at all interchangeable. Bewitchment involved the belief that a human was attacking other people with diabolical witchcraft, and therefore that human had to be dealt with to stop the problem.
The accused were hanged, not burned, because it was a felony, not heresy. Another thing about the accusations is that this was Puritans making accusations against other Puritans. This is mostly people who went to the meetinghouse together to worship services and turned on each other.
Tituba was an enslaved woman in Samuel Parris’s household. She is not known to have practiced any magic, except the documented time she helped bake a witch cake under the instructions from an English neighbor, Mary Sibley. She did not even know how to do this She never taught kids magic. There was not a circle of girls that met in the woods.
The Crucible is an important piece of literature because it introduces people to the witch trials. Unfortunately, it has a few factual errors. It was not intended to be a statement of fact.Abigail Williams was not a teenager as she is in the movie. She was actually 11 years old and she was not a maid for John Proctor. She lived in the Samuel Parris household. John Proctor was not a 30-something man. He was actually in his sixties, There is no evidence at all of any kind of inappropriate relationship between 60-something John Proctor and 11-year-old Abigail Williams.
Witches and the Diabolical Pact
What was a witch to 17th century Massachusetts residents? A witch was a person who made a pact with the devil and received the ability to do harmful magic, witchcraft. They were believed to harm their neighbors and community with the help from the devil. In reality, no one accused of witchcraft had made a devil pact or done any harmful magic. They were all 100% innocent.
It was believed that chaining witches would keep them from doing any harm, and people accused of witchcraft were actually charged fees for their own shackles. They even chained up 4-year-old Dorothy Good, making small shackles for her little wrists. But often the stories of spectral attacks from accused witches continued even after people were chained up in jail.
The devil was mentioned right from the very start and all the way through the saga. They believed the devil was among them and witches were his servants, and the community viewed the alleged witches as traitors against God’s church. The satanic pact was mentioned at the beginning of the first court procedure of the witch hunt, the examination of Sarah Good. The first question was, “what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” The second question was, “have you made no contract with the devil?” The devil pact had originated centuries before in Europe, and by the 17th century, was widely believed by ministers across the continent and in the European colonies.
The devil supposedly branded a new witch with a witch mark or teat from which a familiar would suckle. New witches went on to recruit more witches, and it was said in the records that there were 700 witches in New England.
The Devil’s book was also featured throughout the Salem Witch trials. It was first mentioned in Tituba’s second examination, the day after the contract was first brought up in Sarah Good’s examination. These encounters were described differently depending who was being questioned. Sometimes it seemed like they believed the book was physical, and other times it seemed to be a spectral event. A spectral witch would come and bring a spectral book that would be signed magically. Some people confessed to signing the book and having a friendly relationship with the devil, saying that they could even talk to him as easily as anybody else.
According to testimony, many witches were baptized by Satan. Mary Lacey Sr. testified to witnessing the devil baptize six witches at Falls River, and other confessors claimed to have been baptized in the Shawshin River or at Newbury Falls. Some were even baptized in accused witch Martha Carrier’s well.
During the Salem Witch trials, several accusers and confessors claimed to have witnessed or participated in witch meetings. These were sabbats, and they were described as mocking Christian worship services. They involved witches meeting with the devil and receiving a wicked communion of red bread and blood wine. The meetings were usually called to order by men, often Christian ministers like alleged witch George Burroughs, and they even had deacons to pass out the sacrament.
There are several devil descriptions in the historical record, including calling him a man, referring to him as a black man, meaning a man with a dark countenance or dark hair. Sometimes, he was referred to as a tawny man, referring to Native Americans. He was also a horse, a dog, a hog, or another animal.
Reverend Samuel Parris, in his very infamous sermon on March 27th, 1692, said, “our Lord Jesus Christ knows how many devils there are in his church and who they are. There are devils as well as saints in Christ’s church.” Of course, he was alluding to the people who had been accused of witchcraft, including people like Rebecca Nurse. Her sister, Sarah Cloyce, stormed out of the meetinghouse that day.
Warfare and Economic Collapse
One of the key factors that shaped the Salem Witch Trials was warfare, both in America and back in England. A vacuum created by lack of central leadership during the English Civil War enabled Matthew Hopkins to conduct witch trials in East Anglia. Hopkins, historically known as the Witchfinder General, a title he gave himself, operated primarily in Eastern England during the English Civil War, from 1645 to 1647. Along with his associate, John Stearne, Hopkins led a massive series of trials across seven counties that resulted in between 200 and 300 suspects being accused and possibly as many as 200 executions.
This period serves as a direct historical mirror to the Salem Witch trials, as both events were fueled by a breakdown in central government and legal authority. Just as the Civil War disrupted English courts, Salem operated in a legal limbo following the revocation of the Massachusetts charter. Both societies were gripped by siege mentality caused by warfare and economic devastation. In these destabilized environments, communities turned on themselves, viewing neighbors as the enemy within, allied with the Devil. In both instances, the fervor eventually waned as the human and financial costs became too high to sustain.
King Philip’s War was a conflict fought in New England between 1675 and 1678, pitting the English settlers against Native Americans. According to Professor Emerson Baker, “King Philip’s war ended the dream of collaboration between English settlers and Native Americans.” During this war, some 1,000 colonists died. However, the Native Americans were utterly decimated, losing an estimated 3,000 lives. In economic terms, this was New England’s costliest colonial war. Many towns had been completely destroyed, so the Massachusetts economy did not fully recover to pre-war levels until the 19th century.
In 1692, another war was being waged in New England. Started in 1688, King William’s war was the North American front of a major European conflict called the Nine Years War. In New England and New France, the Wabanaki Confederacy sided with the French versus the English. This combined force was large and powerful, so it made for a difficult fight for Massachusetts. In this war, most of northern New England’s frontier settlements were destroyed, driving refugees south to Massachusetts. As the northernmost county in Massachusetts, the bulk of the refugee load was borne by Essex County, where Salem was, contributing to social tensions.
Several of the afflicted people of the witch trials were refugees and had seen grisly violence, sometimes watching their own parents or other kin be killed before their very eyes. People’s connections to the colonial wars sometimes led to accusations during the Salem Witch trials. Individuals like Capt. John Alden were targeted because of rumors that they betrayed Massachusetts.
Conclusion
Week 2 reveals Salem Village as a community under siege from every direction. Geographic isolation bred resentment against Salem Town. Twenty years of ministerial turnover culminated in Samuel Parris, whose land grab split the village into warring factions. Wars devastated the economy and brought traumatized refugees south. Religious anxiety about the third generation’s faith collided with a mere 12% church membership rate. Meanwhile, 17th-century beliefs about the devil’s book, spectral witches, and satanic baptisms provided the theological framework to interpret coming events.
These weren’t myths causing the trials. They were real people making real decisions under extraordinary pressure. The powder keg was packed. In mid-January, the fuse would be lit.
Where We Are
Week 2 of ~75 weeks | ~3% Complete | January 2026 – May 2027
January 5 through 11, 1692. The village is divided, the economy is collapsing, wars rage, and the minister is hated. Next week: mid-January when afflictions intensify.
Week 2 workbooks
Salem Witch Trials Daily Week 2 Jan 5-11 Standard Workbook Download
Salem Witch Trials Daily Week 2 Jan 5-11 Youth Workbook Download
Key People This Week
Samuel Parris was the controversial minister whose land grab and unpopularity created division
Joseph Hutchinson led the opposition and fenced the meetinghouse in protest
Thomas & Nathaniel Putnam were pro-Parris faction leaders
Matthew Hopkins was the English “Witchfinder General” during the 1640s
Increase Mather published Cases of Conscience, criticizing spectral evidence
Key Terms
Parish vs. Church means Salem Village could have a minister but not perform sacraments
Parsonage was the minister’s house, illegally given to Parris
Halfway Covenant was a policy allowing baptism for grandchildren of members
Spectral Evidence was testimony about what a person’s spirit allegedly did
Witch’s Mark or Teat was a mark supposedly left by the devil on a witch’s body
Sabbat was a witch meeting mocking Christian worship
Sources & Further Reading
Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction
Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience
Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub
Week 1 Course Work
People Accused of Witchcraft in 1692
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