In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maryland, colonial authorities tried and convicted seven women of witchcraft. One was hanged in 1685. Now, Heather Bagnall, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, has introduced legislation to exonerate them. Some critics have disparaged Bagnall’s efforts, suggesting that the gesture is frivolous, in light of more pressing threats and the chaos facing the country right now. But Bagnall rejects this notion and insists that witchcraft accusations of long ago parallel more recent assaults on people’s status and rights, including those governing reproduction and healthcare, transgender identity, and racial equality.
As a scholar of early American witch trials, I agree with Bagnall about the benefits and necessity of exonerating these women. Critically examining our past and recognizing historic acts of injustice help us to identify misguided and reckless discrimination today. It can help us end the vilification and persecution of blameless others in our own contemporary world.
Though Bagnall centers Maryland’s witchcraft convictions, the most relentless pursuit of “witches” took place in Salem, Mass., in 1692. Backed by state power and driven by intense religious belief concerning sin, damnation, and the devil’s perceived presence, local communities embraced witch-hunting; their efforts escalated into a crisis. Puritans believed that a “witch” signed a pact with Satan, thereby enlisting in his army against the godly innocent. Witches tortured others, they thought, doing the devil’s evil work and recruiting people to Satan’s side. Ministers spoke of Satan’s proximity in their weekly sermons; they preached that unrepentant sinners—those who served the devil rather than God—would be doomed; and they peppered their sermons with images of hell’s dark abyss.
Puritan theology held that women and men were equally susceptible to God or, more darkly, to Satan. Yet the Salem trials suggest that the community commonly understood women to be more likely to fall into the devil’s lures than men. And indeed, women constituted 78 percent of the over 150 people accused in Salem. The concept of “witch” and the charge of witchcraft helped to set and police the boundaries of female normality and acceptability. Women who challenged cultural notions of appropriate conduct, whether intentionally or unintentionally—even women who wholeheartedly embraced social and religious norms—were vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft.
Apologizing for injustices inflicted in the past, even if merely symbolic, is still potent and critical.
It’s puzzling that, during the Salem episode, many women confessed to the crime of witchcraft. Fifty of the accused (forty women and ten men) admitted to signing the devil’s book and granting permission to use their shapes to afflict others. What are we to make of these confessions? Such dubious admissions need to be interpreted less as statements of guilt regarding the specific charge of witchcraft than as general affirmations of women’s perceived depravity as weaker vessels and sinners. Women, badgered into confessions, seem to have been admitting to more generic sinfulness, then easily construed, via a slippery slope, as the capital offense of witchcraft. Given these perceptions of women, women more often than men blurred the line between ordinary sin—an implicit covenant with Satan—and compacting with the devil—the explicit and damning commission of the crime of witchcraft. Women thus unwittingly submitted to their representation as witches.
Confessors confirmed gender expectations about sin and validated the court’s witch-hunting procedures. In confessing, these women succumbed to the unbearable pressure of their own and their community’s expectations of proper womanly behavior. A confession might lead to God’s grace and forgiveness. Those who denied such charges, on the other hand, had to prove themselves free from all sin, an impossible task for any Christian woman. Women who insisted on their innocence simply were not believed (who could say she had never sinned?), and those who did implicated themselves in the devil’s snare. At Salem, the lives of all the women who confessed were spared, while all of the deniers were killed.
Early American colonists thought they were doing the right thing by ridding their communities of “witches,” in part to maintain spiritual purity. But none of the accused women were guilty; none actually practiced the “dark arts”; none deserved to die or have their reputations and lives destroyed. In Massachusetts, prominent ministers felt remorse in the aftermath of the Salem crisis and encouraged congregants to think of the devil spiritually in hell rather than physically around every corner. Recognizing it had gone too far, Massachusetts began atoning as early as 1711, reversing some of its earlier judgments. In 1957, more women were vindicated, and as recently as 2022 the state exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last of those convicted in the Salem trials, a woman who had herself confessed.
Apologizing for injustices inflicted in the past, even if merely symbolic, is still potent and critical. Colonial Massachusetts lacked the civil liberties promised to all Americans in the wake of the American Revolution, but Maryland, well before the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, was justly famous for its Toleration Act of 1649, making its persecution of so-called witches reprehensible, not merely on our terms but on its own. The proposed official Maryland redress encourages us to see the dangerous consequences of misogyny and other forms of bigotry. Admitting wrongdoing might encourage Marylanders and all Americans to avoid scapegoating, and to condemn fearmongering and recrimination too often deployed in the name of religious ideology or even patriotism.