The Salem Witch Trials are one of the most written about historical episodes ever. Books abound on the topic, which supplies an endless amount of ideas to writers. Right from the beginning of the witch panic in 1692, accounts were published, and people continued to write about the witch trials despite a colony-wide ban later put on publication by Governor William Phips. This week we are examining some of the many early writings about the Salem Witch Trials: those published during the event and those printed in the first decade after. These contemporary accounts of the Salem Witch Trials give us an unprecedented window into how people understood, debated, and eventually condemned one of America’s darkest chapters.
The First Salem Witch Trials Book: Deodat Lawson’s Eyewitness Account
So who wrote the first book about the Salem Witch Trials? Two months before the trials even began, former Salem Village minister Deodat Lawson documented a trip he made to the village in the spring of 1692, and both his account and a sermon he gave there were published within two weeks of his visit. This makes Deodat Lawson the first person to publish an account of the Salem Witch Trials, capturing the panic as it was still unfolding.
Had there been a newspaper, the press would have been going around the clock printing Salem Witch Trials news.
Lawson had served as minister in Salem Village from 1684 to 1688, and he was invited up from Boston to give a lecture on Thursday, March 24, 1692. According to his firsthand account, he arrived in the village on Saturday the 19th and remained until at least March 24, documenting everything he witnessed during those pivotal days when the crisis was escalating from local concern to full-blown panic.
What Did Deodat Lawson See During the Salem Witch Trials?
Lawson’s narrative is crucial because he gives us the “ground zero” perspective, arriving in Salem Village in March 1692 right when things were heating up and chronicling exactly what he saw between March 19 and April 5. The details are visceral and terrifying, describing Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams in violent fits with visible teeth prints on their arms from invisible biters. The psychological pressure in the meeting house was immense, with the afflicted interrupting worship services and yelling out at respected community members. He specifically mentions Abigail Williams screaming at the minister and claiming to see Goodwife Corey suckling a “Yellow bird” on her fingers.
Imagine the chaos of that moment. What made Lawson’s Salem Witch Trials account so influential was how he validated the “sympathetic magic” that became so deadly in court, noting that during examinations, if the accused bit their lip or clenched their hand, the afflicted accusers would instantly cry out in pain. He even documents the tragedy of Sarah Good’s four-year-old child, who was jailed after confessing her mother gave her a snake to suckle.
Lawson’s account of the Salem Witch Trials ends with the conclusion that this was a Satanic attempt to mimic and divide Christ’s Kingdom, essentially telling the colony: “This is real. The war is on.” The printer added a telling note to readers, signed by Benjamin Harris, promising that this narrative was “only as a Taste, of more that may follow in Gods Time,” revealing just how much the publishing world anticipated the unfolding drama would captivate readers.
Early Opposition to the Salem Witch Trials: Samuel Willard Questions the Evidence
But almost immediately, there was pushback against the Salem Witch Trials, quiet at first but there nonetheless. We see it in a document by Minister Samuel Willard from later in 1692, known as “Some Miscellany Observations On Our Present Debates,” presented as a dialogue between two characters: “S,” representing the Salem prosecution, and “B,” representing the skeptical view.
This document is fascinating because of its logical precision, with both parties agreeing that witches exist but fundamentally disagreeing about what constitutes proof in Salem Witch Trials cases. “S” argues that “strong presumption” is enough to catch a witch because it’s a hidden crime, but “B” argues that you need “Humane evidence,” facts you can see and hear with natural senses rather than supernatural guesses. “B” specifically attacks the “Touch Test” used in the Salem Witch Trials, the idea that a witch’s touch cures the victim’s fit, asking the devastating question: if the Devil is doing the tormenting, why are we trusting him to tell us who the witch is?
That logic became the wedge that eventually cracked the Salem Witch Trials open, exposing the fundamental flaw in the entire prosecutorial approach.
October 1692: Three Major Writers Respond to the Salem Witch Trials
Before the Salem Witch Trials ended, three heavyweights entered the ring in October 1692: Thomas Brattle, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, each representing radically different views of the crisis and its proper resolution. These three writers shaped how people understood the Salem Witch Trials both during and after the events.
Thomas Brattle’s Letter: A Scathing Critique of the Salem Witch Trials
What did Thomas Brattle say about the Salem Witch Trials? Brattle’s letter doesn’t hold back, condemning the “Touch Test” as nothing more than “sorcery” and “Salem superstition” while mocking the judges for thinking they can catch a witch by “pistolling the shadow,” meaning convicting someone based on what their “spectre” does rather than their actual physical actions. He shines a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the court, noting that “distributive Justice” failed because people connected to the judges, were accused but never arrested, while others with no such connections were dragged to prison and ultimately the gallows.
Brattle exposes the torture used during the Salem Witch Trials, detailing the “violent, distracting, and draggooning” methods used to force confessions from terrified prisoners who would say anything to make the pain stop. His letter offers a devastating critique of the Salem witchcraft proceedings, arguing that the Justices employed superstitious and illegal methods to convict the accused while abandoning the very principles of English justice they claimed to uphold.
Cotton Mather Defends the Salem Witch Trials
While Brattle was shouting “Stop,” Cotton Mather was shouting “Go.” His book, “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” was commissioned by the Governor to defend the Salem Witch Trials and present them not as a miscarriage of justice but as a righteous battle against genuine supernatural evil.
What was Cotton Mather’s role in the Salem Witch Trials? Mather paints a picture of a spiritual siege, arguing the Devil has come down with “Great Wrath” because he knows his time is short, and he details the physical evidence from the Salem Witch Trials with prosecutorial zeal: the teeth marks, the “poppets” found in Bridget Bishop’s walls with headless pins in them, the preternatural strength of George Burroughs. To Cotton Mather, the Salem Witch Trials were battles won in a holy war against Satan’s attempt to establish his kingdom in New England. He lists the confession of Martha Carrier’s children and presents case after case as proof that the executions were justified, necessary, and divinely sanctioned.
Increase Mather’s “Cases of Conscience” Ends the Salem Witch Trials
But Cotton Mather’s defense of the Salem Witch Trials couldn’t stand against his own father’s logic, and Increase Mather’s “Cases of Conscience,” written at the same time, is really the document that stops the machinery of death. It comes down to one crucial theological point: Can the Devil frame an innocent person? Increase Mather said yes, asserting that Satan can transform into an “Angel of Light” and therefore seeing a ghost of your neighbor doing harm isn’t proof that your neighbor is guilty of witchcraft.
How did the Salem Witch Trials end? Increase Mather famously wrote that it is better for ten suspected witches to escape than for one innocent person to be condemned, demanding that evidence for witchcraft be just as clear as evidence for murder with no more “touch tests.” Once Increase Mather addressed the standard of evidence, the Salem Witch Trials effectively collapsed because the entire prosecutorial structure had been built on precisely the kind of spectral evidence he now declared inadmissible.
After the Salem Witch Trials: Books of Regret and Anger
But the story of Salem Witch Trials books doesn’t end with the trials’ collapse, because then came the regret and the anger, the slow painful process of a community trying to understand what it had done and who was to blame.
John Hale’s Apology for the Salem Witch Trials (1697)
Five years after the Salem Witch Trials, in 1697, Reverend John Hale wrote “A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft,” and the title itself signals the change in tone from the confident assertions of the trial period. Hale had been there from the start and had supported the Salem Witch Trials, but now, looking back, he admits they were the product of “misguided zeal,” a humble admission that carries real weight coming from someone who had been part of the machinery of prosecution.
He says they walked in “clouds and darkness” during the Salem Witch Trials, systematically dismantling the very evidence he once accepted: the witch marks, the touch tests, the confessions extracted under psychological torture. He admits those were likely “delusions of Satan” intended to ensnare the innocent, and his careful theological analysis reveals a man genuinely trying to understand how so many intelligent, pious people could have gotten it so catastrophically wrong.
Robert Calef’s Attack on Cotton Mather and the Salem Witch Trials (1700)
If Hale was the apology, Robert Calef was the indictment, and in 1700 his book “More Wonders of the Invisible World” went directly after Cotton Mather with barely concealed fury. What did Robert Calef write about the Salem Witch Trials? Calef attacked the theology that gave the Devil so much power, arguing that claiming the Devil can perform miracles or independent harm is blasphemous because those powers belong to God alone, and the entire theological framework of the Salem Witch Trials therefore rested on heretical assumptions.
But Calef also documented the recantations of the confessors who admitted they lied to save their lives and published the apology of the jurors who admitted they were under a “strong and general delusion.” He made sure the “heathenish” methods of the court were recorded for history, creating a contemporary account that would make it impossible for future generations to forget what had been done in the name of justice and godliness.
Thomas Maule’s Radical View of the Salem Witch Trials (1695)
Thomas Maule published “Truth Held Forth and Maintained” in 1695 with a completely different take on why the Salem Witch Trials happened. Maule was a Quaker, and he didn’t see the trials as a Satanic plot against the church but rather as Divine Judgment against New England for the “sin of Blood,” specifically the persecution and execution of Quakers in the decades before Salem.
What was Thomas Maule’s perspective on the Salem Witch Trials? That is such a powerful twist, arguing that the “persecuting Priests and Rulers” were the real witches because they were in rebellion against God, using the state’s power to commit murder under the guise of religious purity. He pointed out the cynicism of the Salem Witch Trials court with devastating clarity, noting how the arrests stopped only when the “Spectre” started accusing “eminent” persons instead of the poor, the marginalized, the unpopular. Maule’s conclusion is perhaps the most modern of all these early Salem Witch Trials writers: “better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.”
What We Learn from Early Salem Witch Trials Books
From Lawson, seeing teeth marks and terrifying beasts, to Maule and Calef, seeing a government that lost its way and shed innocent blood, these documents are the Salem Witch Trials in all their complexity. They are the evidence of how fear can shape a system, how intelligent people can convince themselves that cruelty is justified, and how difficult but necessary it is to walk that back and admit error.
These early writers on the Salem Witch Trials gave us more than historical records; they gave us a roadmap of the events of 1692 and 1693. From Deodat Lawson’s terrified observations in March 1692 to Robert Calef’s righteous anger in 1700, we can trace the arc of a community grappling with one of history’s greatest injustices, watching in real time as people moved from certainty to doubt to horror at what they had done.
The question remains: how much ink was used, how many trees were cut down for paper to write about the Salem Witch Trials? The answer is countless, because we’re still writing about Salem Witch Trials today, still learning from them, still warning against its dangers.
