Summary Of The Trial Of Martha Carrier By Cotton Mather

As the summer passes and autumn arrives, the witch trials have now officially caused major restlessness in neighboring towns, and this makes Danforth grow nervous. Abigail decides to run away with all of Parris’s money with her. Reverend Hale has now completely lost his faith in the court, and begins begging the accused witches to confess falsely so that they can save their lives, however, they refuse in order to keep their honor. Judge Danforth comes up with an idea however, he asks Elizabeth to please talk to John and convince him to confess, and she agrees. John agrees to confess because of his desire to live, however he refuses to incriminate anyone else. The court insists that the confession be made public however, and John gets very angry …show more content…
This is simply the trial Martha Carrier went through when she was convicted of being a witch. This is a very notable work because of how in detail the court hearing is and it shows great examples of “witnesses” called to the stand. It shows multiple testimonies from multiple different “witnesses” of Martha Carrier conducting witchcraft. One “witness” claims that Martha Carrier’s son, Richard, pulled the “witness” down by the hair on his head. However, when he rose again to strike Richard, he simply “fell down flat on his back to the ground, and had not power to stir hand or foot, until he told Carrier he yielded; and then he saw the shape of Martha Carrier go off his breast.” As it is easy to see, this kind of situation is simply unaccountable in our eyes as proof of witchcraft. That being so though, it was actually believed as a legitimate testimony and as real proof of Martha Carrier being a witch. Much like The Crucible, this shows just how easily the judicial system was swayed into believing anything the townspeople wanted them to, as long as the townspeople had a vast number of people jumping on their bandwagon. Although Martha Carrier may have been a rude and awful lady who deserved her fate, the point still stands that she was clearly not a witch. So the question remains if the judicial system is flawed in this case by convicting a woman of witchcraft, who was innocent of witchcraft, regardless of her being an awful hag. This makes it hard to determine how wrong the jury was in this case, unlike The Crucible, where the audience can quite easily and clearly determine that the court was at great faults because of how many innocent townsfolk they convicted of