invisible or spectral evidence was upheld in court because

Crying out against specters might be playing right into the devils hands. 4. 39. Even before Mary Beth Norton highlighted the wars of the northern frontier, Richard Godbeer noted them and combined them with several additional factors that served as a series of external forces assault[ing] the colonists, imperiling not only their integrity as a political and spiritual community but even their very survival. This common trauma, he noted, was often described in the language of invasion and external threat.14 In Satan and Salem, Benjamin Ray similarly argues that far from being precipitated by a single key person or circumstance, the Salem crisis was the result of a perfect storm of factors.15 That storm of factors, he explains, shared a common language of Satans attack. The decision, issued by a two-judge panel in Boston, upheld a district court ruling last year that found Harvard's admission practices do not discriminate against Asian American applicants and comply with prior Supreme Court rulings. As Chadwick Hansen showed long ago, Longfellows play Giles Cory of Salem Farms, written in the wake of the Civil War, was the first account to transform Tituba into a half-black slave.48 After Longfellow, others metamorphosed Tituba fully into an African American and finally into an African who was kidnapped as a child, even though nothing in the existing records lends support to such a claim and most scholars reject it. The Salem Witch Trials - Bill of Rights Institute It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers. Still, something seemed to change at Salemor rather, Salem seemed to demonstrate that something drastic had already shifted. As scholars have also highlighted, Putnam particularly loved to involve the heart. A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials - Smithsonian Magazine At Salem, that requirement was dropped. 46. Such evidence appears through a close tracking of language about sympathy, dry eyes, and the heart. See Abram Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199210. The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoningthe intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on commandsuggests the possibility of fraud. Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Spectral evidence is a form of evidence based upon dreams and visions. Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflictedseveral of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorderSalem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause.12. However Salem is approached or remembered, it is clear that scholars and the general public will keep grappling with what happened there in 1692. The fits suggested that Satan could make his way even into the pastors house, possessing or demonizing beyond the ministers ability to protect or defend. Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. The significance of Salem lies in the meaning and perception of that change, along with all the possible explanations for why and how it occurred. Yet the rising cry of protest did finally have an effect, bringing the noise of opposition and resistance to those who held the most power in the colony. It has always been known that the prosecution wrote most of the records that survive, but only recently have we learned just how much they were composed by particular individuals, such as Thomas Putnam Jr. With that understanding, we can now ask in new ways how to read what he and others produced. As a state Supreme Court justice in New Hampshire noted in a 1982 case in which the justice detected a suggestion of spectral evidence the admission of Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters.11, Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be 100 percent.23 No one who came to trial would be acquitted. For example, Thomas Putnam has been noted for his use of stock phrases. The court upheld the search saying "the evidence establishe[d] the existence of an emergency justifying the warrantless entry and limited search of [the] residence." The court also noted that the officers did no more, "than conduct a quite limited search of the premises to ascertain whether additional injured persons were present." And suffering extended elsewhere as well, to the forfeiture of property and constrained conditions for surviving children, and to the prisons, which were wretched, unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be . For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. The new charter, which arrived in the midst of the Salem panic, mixed features of the first and second governments. In popular histories, the Puritans usually appear as stock figures of backward superstitionhateful, unenlightened religious bigots who saw witches in every shadow and enjoyed nothing so much as a good hanging.35 As Gretchen Adams has shown, such accounts of Salem emerged most prominently in the nations first schoolbooks, when American historians praised their country for its moral progress.36 Yet many have demonstrated that such an assessment fails to fit the evidence: after all, many of those involved at Salem welcomed the new sciences emerging in Europe. Demos goes on to say that scholarship has long confirmed the first of these themes, but that the second seems as yet underappreciated, but remains (to my way of thinking) an absolutely fundamental piecein effect, the energy-source for each and every episode of witch-hunting., 10. 7. Most scholars agree on the basic narrative of the Salem witch trials.8 Why it happened, however, is far from clear. As The Crucible continues being regularly performed, joined by ever fresher retellings and reimaginings, the cultural memory and function of Salem seems rich for even further exploration. Spectral Evidence and the Salem Witch Trials - ThoughtCo Mather is haunted in history by the account given in Robert Calef's book More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700) of his conduct at the hanging of former Salem minister George Burroughs. Petitions continued to grow during the trials, with more and more brave persons signing documents attempting to save the lives of their neighbors. In The Crucible, what does the court accept as evidence that someone is In particular, a methodology inflected by the concept of the borderlands offers ways of reading against the grain, helping, for instance, to locate Native American actors and Native American voices in texts written almost exclusively by Europeans. 1. John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (updated ed. Spectral Evidence Law and Legal Definition | USLegal, Inc. 37. For an account of the laws at work in the Salem witch trials, see Richard Trask, Legal Procedures Used during the Salem Witch Trials and a Brief History of the Published Version of the Records, in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, edited by Bernard Rosenthal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4463. inevitable discovery rule | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft. Instead, they turned to countermagic for protection where the courts had failed. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England. This idea of a perfect storm emphasizes the coming together of multiple factors. This was called white magic, or countermagic, and it was long used and widely practiced in Puritan New England. Who supported the trials, who opposed them, and why? What explains the bewitched? For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage. 45. 34. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of 26.2 percent.20 For many years, Puritan magistrates and ministers had prevented the conviction and killing of supposed witches, in part because they had a different understanding of witchcraft than did most commoners. Danforth is clearly an intelligent man, highly respected and successful. Yet although The Return of Several Ministers urged caution in this regard, it did not overtly condemn the proceedings or the judges and ended by encouraging a vigorous prosecution. It was all the court wanted to hear. The court . Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud.16, At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear. 27. A "belief in the power of the accused to use their invisible shapes Either because of his embarrassment or because he genuinely repented, Parris did not suspect witches for many weeks. Literary analysis could yield fresh results about how to read the records of the Salem witch trials. Here again, the primary problem was one of evidence: What counts as a clear indication of either patriotism or subversion, a good soul or a soul bent against the common good? According to Michael Colacurcio, the link between the two tales told at Salem Gallows Hill in Alice Doanes Appeal is that both concern the Puritan problem of specter evidence, in each case pointing readers to perceive the truth of specter evidence as guilty projection: that is, in both cases the charges of diabolical evil probably reveals more about the accuser than the accused, and such tendencies continue beyond a superstitious past.44 The same concern with spectral evidence frames Young Goodman Brown, but here the question has changed to take up an issue from the trials themselves: if the devil can take any shape, and if those shapes were being used to identify the accused, then could the devil be trusted? Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literaturein poems, plays, and novelshas attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying specter of Salem..

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