Agents of the devil? The Crucible/20th Century Studios

On the surface, there was nothing extraordinary about the lives of John and Joan Carrington. He was a carpenter in his late forties with a small estate, mostly eaten up by debts, in the town of Wethersfield in Connecticut. She was his wife and mother to their daughter, Rebecca, and son, John junior, from a previous marriage. But in February 1651, the couple was charged with “familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind”, with whose power they had performed “works above the course of nature”. Both were found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged at Hartford.
Today, a stone’s throw away from the site of their execution, the General Assembly of Connecticut is debating a resolution to exonerate 11 women and men convicted of witchcraft in Connecticut between 1647 and 1663. So far, 17 members of the Assembly have backed the resolution, but the bill must yet pass through both chambers. And this is far from certain: there has been more resistance here than in neighbouring Massachusetts, where in 2001 all the Salem “witches” were exonerated by the House of Representatives. The fear in Connecticut, as Republican senator John Kissel put it, is that a precedent would be set; that we would “have to go and redress every perceived wrong in our history”. Similar concerns have been expressed elsewhere. A journalist writing in the Scottish newspaper The Herald worried that pardons vilify accusers and that “we should not judge people for living in the past”.
In some ways, this precedent has already been set. In 2006, Grace Sherwood, a Virginian planter’s wife, was pardoned for allegedly bewitching livestock and crops, and there have been similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland and Catalonia. In March 2022, Scotland’s then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, apologised for the persecution of 4,000 people as witches, describing it as “injustice on a colossal scale”. For their part, Scottish campaigners for exonerating witches cited their parliament’s Historical Sexual Offences Act, which in 2018 retrospectively decriminalised sodomy. And the Connecticut campaigners have indicated how inspired they’ve been by developments in Scotland.
Yet, it remains reasonable to ask: how can we exonerate a crime that modern society no longer believes exists? This is a question not just of history, but of jurisprudential ethics. An empirically supported understanding of “the great witch-craze” should inform questions of whether we need to act, and if so what to do. Are we quashing what now seem like unsafe convictions of witchcraft or offering modern pardons for contemporaneously just ones?
If a crime is to be pardoned, we surely need to define the crime. The Connecticut resolution says only that the “witches” were “falsely accused” — but doesn’t say what exactly they were falsely accused of. In Scotland, Sturgeon’s apology stated that so-called witches were “killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women”. Accused witches often fitted that profile, it’s true, but that wasn’t why they were accused. It’s hard to comprehend this fully but the reason was usually that people believed them to be dangerous agents of the devil. When the people of Wethersfield accused the Carringtons of using satanic power to perform “works above the course of nature”, we should probably assume that they meant it. Nor were the accused exempt from suspecting others of witchcraft: some, even without duress, believed they had become witches, deliberately or simply because witchery was in their blood. After all, the concept was firmly established in law, theology and custom, and then in specific cases impelled by furious emotions, given that these alleged deeds were not just unnatural but prejudicial to the lives and livelihoods of struggling communities.
If we are to exonerate convicted witches, we must ensure that the process is historically rigorous. It undermines the enterprise if, say, we set out to pardon five million people tried for witchcraft when, in fact, we have evidence for only around 100,000. We should know that our ancestors were surprisingly sceptical and wary about pointing the finger, and that across continental Europe about half of trials resulted in acquittal. In England and Connecticut, it was more like 75%, owing to the caution of judges and juries about passing guilty verdicts where the proof for this most secretive crime amounted to little more than hearsay.
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