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Joseph Prezioso

In spring 1692, a handful of women in the New England town of Salem Village had been arrested on “suspicion of acts of witchcraft” when authorities<a href="https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/archives/ecca/large/ecca1061r.jpg" target=_blank> issued a warrant</a> for Dorothy Good, age 4.

Dorothy’s pregnant mother, Sarah, was already in prison, having been<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/march-01/" target=_blank> arrested on similar charges two months earlier.</a> Sarah Good spent roughly four months in prison before she was hanged on Gallows Hill. Her baby was born in prison and soon died too, according records from the <a href="https://dh.library.virginia.edu/project/salem-witch-trials-documentary-archive-and-transcription-project" target=_blank>Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project </a>housed at the University of Virginia.

Dorothy remained jailed for more than seven months (“chained in a dungeon so hardly used” her father later wrote in a <a href="https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n173.html#n173.21" target=_blank>court petition</a>). She was released after the deaths of her mother and baby sister, with her father observing that the ordeal had driven the child to insanity.

More than 300 years later, a group of advocates is pressing for recognition of victims like Dorothy, who have been left out of previous efforts to clear the names of those convicted or executed during the witch hunt hysteria of the Puritan era. Pardons and exonerations have largely focused on those executed in Salem, which leaves nearly 200 others unaccounted for, including those who were accused, imprisoned, indicted or lived elsewhere in the commonwealth.

“We’re looking at anyone in Massachusetts who wasn’t covered in the Salem exonerations and the Boston Witch Trials and looking to get an apology to all victims,” said Joshua Hutchinson, who leads <a href="https://massachusettswitchtrials.org/" target=_blank>the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project. </a>

The effort isn’t just to right a historical wrong but to bring the lessons of the Massachusetts witch trials into the modern era, Hutchinson said, arguing that witch hunts and witch-hunt-like behaviors are still pervasive.

“We see scapegoating still going on — especially in moments of fear — and we want to teach the lessons of the witch hunts,” said Hutchinson, who co-founded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and co-hosts “Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.”

He cited the extremist movement QAnon as one of the sources behind the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americas-satanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon" target=_blank>revival of “satanic panic,” </a>as well <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2023/07/24/groomer-lgbtq-germany-children/" target=_blank>rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment</a> that has led to trans and other queer people being baselessly blamed for indoctrinating or otherwise preying on children. Hutchinson said migrants to the United States are another group that has faced backlash due to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/10/13/why-fear-of-immigrants-puts-democracy-at-risk/" target=_blank>fears</a> around job and border security.

“You see a lot of heavy-handed reactions around issues like that,” Hutchinson said. “We don’t tend to take the measured approach that is required.”

Hutchinson added that while hunting and executing people suspected of being witches is a grim historic relic in the United States, it remains an active concern in other parts of the world, including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/world/asia/india-witch-hunting.html" target=_blank>India</a>, Nepal, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea. As with the smallpox epidemic in Colonial New England during the Salem witch trial days, killings of suspected witches in Africa — particularly of people with albinism — rose during the covid-19 pandemic, <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096692" target=_blank>according</a> to the United Nations.

Alexina Jones

The same fears that fuel today’s moral panics existed in the mid-17th century when the witch hunts began, said Hutchinson. Prolonged war with the French and their Native American allies, a smallpox epidemic and influx of war refugees from Maine and New Hampshire coming to Salem fueled conditions that between 1638 and 1693 led to more than 200 people being accused of witchcraft in what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

And there was religious strife — even within the religious community.

“There wasn’t always agreement, and everything was looked at as either orthodox or heresy,” Hutchinson said. “We saw tensions building up and pushing in on communities when there’s conflict among neighbors already.”

When Dorothy (sometimes called Dorcas in historical records) Good was arrested, she was accused of biting children and causing her alleged victims to grow “tormented” if she so much as looked at them. “Spectral evidence” such as visions and dreams was allowed into the courtroom, which helped lead to hundreds of charges of witchcraft, mostly against widows, indigent women and girls.

Among the more than 200 charged, only 31 — those executed or convicted without execution — have had their names formally cleared.

While Salem is the most infamous setting, witch hunts and trials existed throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony and parts of what would later become Connecticut and Maine.

Some pardons and restitution in Massachusetts and Virginia came as early as 1711, but it would take until 1957 for Massachusetts to issue something of a <a href="https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/bitstream/handle/2452/823298/1957resolves0145.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" target=_blank>formal apology</a> for the witch trials. In 2007, then-Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D)<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2006/07/12/after-toil-and-trouble-witch-is-cleared-span-classbankheadva-residents-quest-leads-to-pardon-for-woman-convicted-in-1706-span/9d6f51b0-5dcc-401f-86a6-d30c019a7ef9/" target=_blank> granted a ceremonial pardon </a>to Grace Sherwood, a woman whose trial in 1706 saw her thrown into a river with her thumbs tied to her feet to see if she floated.

Last year, Massachusetts exonerated 22-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr. — 329 years after she had been convicted in Salem — thanks to the lobbying and research efforts of an eighth-grade history class in North Andover, Mass.

“Some might wonder how exonerating a woman who lived three centuries ago has anything to do with today. But I was taught that we study history to understand our past mistakes,” student Sarina E. Miller <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/last-salem-witch-exonerated-middle-school/" target=_blank>wrote in a 2022 Washington Post opinion piece.</a>

Earlier this year, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project — which includes members from the Massachusetts group — helped secure the formal exoneration of those executed for witchcraft during the state’s Colonial past.

Hutchinson and his fellow authors, historians and decedents working with the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project have <a href="https://www.change.org/p/exonerate-massachusetts-witch-hunt-victims?recruiter=1311923707&recruited_by_id=ba66df70-1d4f-11ee-9a42-7d6d0f4f9d3e&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_37688618_en-US%3Acv_457725" target=_blank>circulated a petition</a> in hopes of finally closing an ugly chapter in the Commonwealth’s history.

“We support exoneration because correcting injustice is always the right thing to do,” it reads. If people learn from the past, the petition argues, they can avoid repeating its mistakes.

Valparaiso University, BA

Kim Bellware covers national and breaking news for The Washington Post. 

Kim Bellware

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