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By Root 639 0

a group of ministers led by a cleric and alchemist. The committee rejected the evidentiary deviation that permitted one person to testify that he saw an act of witchcraft, and instead, they made convictions hinge on the presence of two witnesses, the standard in other criminal cases. They thereby struck an important blow against the idea of witchcraft as crimen exceptum. Second, the ministers’ committee grappled with the problem that the Devil might assume the appearance of an innocent person and thus encourage witnesses to provide false evidence. The ministers suggested that God would not permit such deceit by the Devil before multiple witnesses—although it was presumably still possible that God might allow such deceit before a single witness. Fortunately, the ministers had provided for this exigency in their first recommendation. Finally, the ministers weighed in on the kinds of practices that were truly diabolical. For example, was fortune telling necessarily proof of a pact with the Devil? Perhaps, the ministers said, but there were human ways of knowing the future, including divine revelation, reason, and news. The skepticism of the Connecticut court, then, was embedded in a very particular culture: one that was concerned about legal practices and the use of evidence but that also based its conclusions on assumptions about what God or Satan would—or could—do.

Similar concerns about evidence brought the trials at Salem to a close (see document 25). By the fall of 1692, after nineteen witches at Salem had been hanged on Gallows Hill, and after one unfortunate man was pressed to death in a cruel procedure designed to extract a plea, Increase Mather and Samuel Willard, both Boston ministers, raised questions about the evidence being used in the courts. These were not men who necessarily disbelieved in witchcraft. Willard, for example, is the same man who provided the account of Elizabeth Knapp’s possession (see document 17), and he carefully explained in this account why he believed that Knapp was possessed. But how one proved witchcraft—that was a more complicated matter. Willard and Mather objected to two kinds of evidence. First, they worried about the use of spectral evidence—the apparitions of “witches” who appeared to the possessed accusers and led the accusers to name the apparition’s embodied self as a witch. Was it not possible, they wondered, just as the Connecticut jurists had thirty years earlier, that the Devil might take the form of innocent people? Massachusetts officials had already sought expert opinion on such matters in mid-June, but at that time their conclusion was that God would not allow an innocent person to be used in such a way. Second, they worried about the touch tests used by the Andover courts in September 1692. “Touch tests” acted on the logic that a witch could alleviate the suffering of her victims (see document 20). “We were blindfolded,” remembered six accused women who endured this trial, “and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said. Some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that we were guilty of afflicting them; whereupon we were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the justice of the peace and forthwith carried to Salem.”230

These skeptical voices were not the sole cause for the demise of witch trials in North America. Instead, it was shifts in legal practice that ultimately terminated prosecutions. Trials required the cooperation of courts of law; the most significant changes came in the application of conventional rules of evidence and the elimination of witchcraft as crimen exceptum. Without special circumstances—relaxed rules of evidence, occasional torture, stress positions such as those endured by the Carrier sons at Salem (document 22), who were “tyed . . . Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses,” and medieval ordeals like the water trial to determine innocence or guilt—witchcraft could not be