Last 'Witch,' Eliz. Johnson, Jr. Pardoned- Salem, Mass. Witch Trials 1693. 'Theocracy Shattered'
- '329 years later, last Salem "witch" Elizabeth Johnson Jr. is pardoned,' CBS News, May 28, 2022. -Ed.
- 20 people from Salem and neighboring towns were killed and hundreds of others accused during a frenzy of Puritan injustice that began in 1692, stoked by superstition, fear of disease and strangers, scapegoating and petty jealousies. 19 were hanged, and one man was crushed to death by rocks. -
It took more than three centuries, but the last Salem "witch" who wasn't has been officially pardoned. Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., clearing her name 329 years after she was convicted of witchcraft in 1693 and sentenced to death at the height of the Salem Witch Trials.
Johnson was never executed, but neither was she officially pardoned like others wrongly accused of witchcraft. Lawmakers agreed to reconsider her case last year after a curious eighth-grade civics class at North Andover Middle School took up her cause and researched the legislative steps needed to clear her name.
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Subsequent legislation introduced by state Sen. Diana DiZoglio, a Democrat from Methuen, was tacked onto a budget bill and approved. "We will never be able to change what happened to victims like Elizabeth but at the very least can set the record straight," DiZoglio said. In a statement, North Andover teacher Carrie LaPierre - whose students championed the legislation - praised the youngsters for taking on "the long-overlooked issue of justice for this wrongly convicted woman."...More, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salem-witch-elizabeth-johnson-jr-pardoned-329-years-later/
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- Actual Site of Salem Witch Hangings Discovered, CBS News, Boston, 2016.
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- The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (14 women and 5 men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least 5 people died in jail. Arrests were made in numerous towns beyond Salem & Salem Village (known today as Danvers), notably Andover & Topsfield. The grand juries and trials for this capital crime were conducted by a Court of Oyer & Terminer in 1692 and by a Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both held in Salem Town, where the hangings also took place.
It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America. Only 14 other women and 2 men had been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.
It was not unique, but a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place also in Europe. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent United States history. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered."...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
- Giles Corey was pressed to death during the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.
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