Jonathan Corwin - Salem Witch Trials

Salem Witch Trials

When reports of witchcraft began circulating in Essex County beginning on late 1691, Corwin was one of the magistrates called on to make preliminary inquiries into the reports. He and John Hathorne, another local magistrate, held hearings in early March 1692 in which testimony was gathered from Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, the first three women accused of being witches.

Due to the uncertain constitutionality of the Massachusetts government in 1692 (its charter was vacated in 1684, and it had reformed with the charter following the 1689 Boston revolt that ended Dominion rule of Sir Edmund Andros), there was a reluctance among colonial leaders to establish courts to hear the cases until Sir William Phips arrived in May 1692 with the charter that established the Province of Massachusetts Bay. By this time a significant number of people had been jailed on accusations of witchcraft in the Salem area. Phips, who was appointed governor of the province, as one of his early acts established a special court of Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear the accumulated cases. Corwin was not initially assigned to the court, but when Nathaniel Saltonstall resigned in protest over the first hanging, Phips assigned Corwin to the panel.

Corwin signed several arrest warrants and transcribed a few of the hearings but scarcity of records from the 1692 events makes it impossible to determine Corwin's overall role in the trials as well as his attitude toward the acceptance in court of spectral evidence, the idea that actions seen in visions could be an indicator of witchcraft. The special court convicted nineteen of witchcraft and sentenced them to the gallows before it was disbanded in October 1692. The provincial court system was set up in January 1693, with the Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court, hearing the remaining witchcraft cases.