Margaret Jones is executed in Massachusetts for witchcraft
New England’s witch-hunting mania claims its first victim
“At this court,” begins the 15 June 1648 entry in the journal of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, “one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown, was indicted and found guilty of witchcraft, and hanged for it.”
According to Winthrop, Jones was a midwife whose “malignant touch” had caused “deafness, or vomiting, or other violent pains or sickness” in her patients. She had the gift of foresight; her body had rogue “teats”, one fresh, one withered. Worse, when she was arrested, a strange child appeared in her arms, ran into another room and disappeared.
All of this seemed pretty conclusive and, despite her angry protestations, the court duly found her guilty. “The same day and hour she was executed,” wrote Winthrop ominously, “there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many trees.”
Puritan minister John Hale, who was 12 at the time, later told a different story. Jones was accused, Hale thought, “partly because after some angry words passing between her and her neighbours, some mischief befell such neighbours” and their livestock. On the day of Jones’s execution, Hale accompanied a group of people who urged her to confess. Not surprisingly, she refused. In the past, she admitted, she had been guilty of theft. “But it was long since, and she had repented of it… but as for witchcraft she was wholly free from it, and so she said unto her death.”
Jones’s death marked the beginning of a witch-hunt craze that would claim the lives of around 80 New England colonists over the next century.