Reasons For Salem Witch Trials Accusations

Reasons for Salem Witch Trial Accusations The Salem witch trials will go down in history as one of the most intriguing, yet calamitous events in history. Taking the lives of twenty individuals, out of the more than two hundred that were accused in the town of Massachusetts. The trials caused chaos and panic amongst the people, and town. Everyone being scared of the accused, and whether or not you could do something just a little bit out of the ordinary to become an accused. This caused a lot of problems making the citizens very paranoid about the people, and things that happened around them. Making them point fingers consistently. There is a wide variety of reasons that could have been crucial to the justification of the accusations. In the …show more content…
Notice already in simply the definition of this time, religion is tied into their definition of what witchcraft was. One of the major reasons you could be accused, was simply if you were the female gender. Things that supported this was if the wives were to start gaining more freedom from their husbands, seeing as they are not complying with their spouses as they might have been a week ago. Another huge ordeal, was sleeping with other individuals outside of the marriage. Infidelity was a very common thing of the era, and if this was to happen, they would think that it was the hands of the devil to commit these sins. If you look at the records as well, only five out of the twenty that were executed during the trials were men. Another thing that can be inferred with why women were more susceptible targets than men, is because there was usually less fight by citizens of the town if any agreed. Since women didn’t hold high roles in society, they were seen as less important, and a necessity …show more content…
William Phips” both can address where the accused stood in societys class levels, and perhaps the conditions were used towards revenge. One case to point out would be George Burroughs, who once held a high place in the community as the villages minister. With him being a high social class in society, and him taking a downfall when he no longer was the minister, let him soon become a victim of the accusers. Ranging from him “bewitching soldiers”, and flying girls to top of mountains to sign them to the devil. The reasoning gets more a more ridiculous with every accusation that comes after another. Scholars have noticed one thing in particular as well relating to the class status of the accused and accusers. A majority of the accused lived to the south of, and were more better off financially than most of the accusers. The jealously, and hunger for land, wealth, and power was so high, that even in some situations the accusing individuals or families main goal was gaining “property from the conditions of accused witches”. Another flame and fueled the fire also connects with the split community of Salem. This was because, “accused and the accusers generally took opposite sides in a congressional schism. In the instance of