Few Americans today are familiar with a woman named Alice Young, who was born in 1615, but she is an important part of the history of early America. In 1647, Young was the first person believed to be executed for witchcraft in any British colony. A resident of Windsor, Connecticut, since 1630, she was among 12 people, mostly women, convicted in witch trials in the colony in the 1600s. Eleven of the 12 were hanged.
Nearly four centuries later, these wrongfully accused people have been exonerated. In May, the Connecticut legislature voted overwhelmingly to clear their names, calling the witch trials a “miscarriage of justice.” The exoneration was an emotional victory for the CT Witch Trial Exoneration Project, which was founded by the women’s descendants in 2005 with the aim of lobbying politicians to acknowledge this past wrong.
Historians are still somewhat uncertain as to why a witch-belief craze overtook Europe and colonial America from the mid-1550s until the late 1600s. Belief in witchcraft was nothing new. But in a climate of social and political disorder, a legal structure was created to indict, try and punish people accused of using demonic powers to cause suffering or chaos. Historians are also not entirely clear as to why the witch craze quickly died down in the decades before the Enlightenment began to take hold. An estimated 50,000 people were executed. About another 150,000 accused witches were acquitted.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Kate Carté discusses the climate of disorder and paranoia that led neighbors to accuse one another of witchcraft. The witch craze cannot be easily dismissed as the work of ignorant, pre-modern people who grasped for explanations for disease epidemics or crop failures.
“Every culture ever, including our own today, believes in the capacity of individuals to do things to influence events in a supernatural way. Any athlete who has a lucky pair of socks, anyone who worries what’ll happen to their black cat if it gets out on Halloween, these superstitions are with us,” said Ms. Carté, a historian of early America at Southern Methodist University.
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Superstitions concerning witchcraft (and Satan’s role in it) combined with the turmoil of the Reformation and the climate catastrophes of the Little Ice Age to create fertile soil for witch-hysteria, Ms. Carté said.
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