How America’s witch trials began in Connecticut
The Connecticut Colony earned its reputation as the fiercest witch prosecutor in New England nearly a halfcentury before the infamous Salem witch trials.
For decades in the 1600s, an accusation of witchcraft in Connecticut was akin to a death sentence. It was Connecticut that held New England’s first witch execution, launching the first large-scale witch trials in the American colonies.
“Whenever we think about witches, we of course think about Salem and the witch trials of 1692 but what most people don’t know too much about is the long history of witch hunting in Connecticut and the very interesting twists and turns that happened there,” Walter Woodward, the state historian, said at “New England’s Other Witch Hunt,” a recent lecture at the Darien Library.
Alse Young of Windsor was executed for witchcraft on May 26, 1647, making her not only the first person to be executed for the alleged crime in Connecticut, but most likely in the American colonies.
Woodward said the data shows there were really two waves of “intense witch killings.” The first spanning from 1647 into the late 1660s. The other just before and through the Salem witch trials.
Between 1647 and 1692, 57 people were brought to trial in New England for witchcraft resulting in 16 convictions and 14 to 16 executions, data show.
Salem was a more grandiose persecution, with 156 people accused of witchcraft from 1692 to 1693, resulting in 30 convictions and 19 executions. For contrast, between 1647 and 1654, Massachusetts acquitted half of the people it brought
to trial for witchcraft, while Connecticut convicted and hanged all seven charged during that time.
“During this early period of witch hunting in New England, Connecticut proved to be much, much harsher in its treatment of suspected witches than Massachusetts,” he said.
Among the Connecticut convicted was Goody Knapp of Fairfield, who was accused and then hanged in 1653 in Black Rock. Two of Knapp’s judges were prominent residents: Roger Ludlow, a deputy governor and one of the state’s founders, and the Rev. John Davenport, a founder of New Haven, according to Black Rock 375th Anniversary Committee.
Knapp refused to name other alleged witches in Fairfield, although suspicion clung to her friends. Records show that Mary Staples, who was also later accused of witchcraft but acquitted, cried over
Knapp’s body in frustration following the hanging.
Woodward said it’s hard to understand the rationale for the killings from a modern perspective, where it’s easy to see that misogyny and an effort to suppress women’s power underpinned many of the witchcraft accusations.
In the 1600s, though, people believed witches possessed very real and — with the devil’s help — “a battery of magical powers that could be applied in a range of harmful, sometimes fatal ways,” from spoiling food to changing the weather to inflicting illness on people and animals, he said.
Magic, religion and science were so interwoven that, Woodward said, you couldn’t believe in one without the others.
In fact, one of the people most influential in stopping the witch killings in Connecticut was noted alchemist John Winthrop Jr., who
served as governor from 1657 to 1676. He was also one of the colony’s most respected physicians and scientists and came from a prominent Puritan family.
Magistrates would turn to him for help to determine if the witchcraft accusations were justified even before he was governor. Under his advice — he validated the accuser’s concerns but never found any evidence to convict — no one suspected of witchcraft between 1655 and 1661 was convicted, Woodward said.
When Winthrop was sent to England to secure a royal charter for Connecticut in 1661, however, convictions returned — with a vengeance.
That summer, Elizabeth Kelly, an 8-year old girl in Hartford, awoke in the middle of the night screaming in pain and saying Goody Ayers was choking her. She maintained the accusations until her death two weeks later and in Win
throp’s absence the witch hunts raged again.
“All hell broke loose in Hartford,” Woodward said. “Kelly’s death unleashed a torrent of witchcraft executions.”
Eight trials in as many months followed. In two cases, bound people were thrown into the nearby river to see if they were witches based on the theory that as witches had rejected the baptismal waters when they made a pact with the devil, waters would in turn reject them and they would float.
Woodward said the other trials were excruciating. Humiliating and antagonizing public questioning — or physical searches — was so severe that records at the time allegedly showed victims confessed to make the trial stop.
Winthrop returned in 1663 to find four people had been executed for witchcraft in his absence; several others who had been accused fled the colony, leaving behind all of their possessions and, in one case,
children.
Woodward described how Winthrop set to work to aid those on trial, successfully helping accused witch Elizabeth Seager. Seager, however, continued to antagonize her neighbors and was accused a third time and convicted. Winthrop eventually used his new sentencing powers as governor to set her free.
Magistrates throughout the state followed Winthrop’s cautious lead in other trials, but many of the residents still felt their communities were under attack, feelings that came to a head in the Katherine Harrison case in 1669, Woodward said.
Harrison was an outspoken medical practitioner and widow in Whethersfield who rose from a servant to a person of means.
It was in this case that Winthrop and his protege, Gersham Bulkely, introduced the requirement to have two eye witnesses — and essentially limited future witchcraft convictions until Salem.
“It was a psychological crime that usually began in (the accuser’s) heads, usually in the dark and usually when they were alone,” Woodward said, adding the accusations in general dwindled as science began to explain a lot of the instances previously connected with witchcraft.