Transcripts From The Salem Witch Trials, 1692.

The witch trials in Salem, MA in 1692 is dramatized in works like The Crucible, a 1953 play by the American playwright Arthur Miller. In it, Miller dramatizes the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692 as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.

Here are some actual quotes from that time.

“Yea, and in our Land, how many, what Multitudes, of Witches and Wizards has the Devil instigated with utmost violence to attempt the overthrow of Religion?”

-Samuel Parris.

“Why do you hurt these folks, I hurt no body.”

-Mary Black (Nathaniel Putnam's slave).

“Our good God is working of miracles. Five witches were lately executed, impudently demanding of God a miraculous vindication of their innocency. Immediately upon this, our God miraculously sent in five Andover witches, who made a most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies, and declared the five newly executed to have been of their company.”

-Cotton Mather.

“It is a shamefull thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.”

-Martha Carrier.

“You tax me for a wizard, you may as well tax me for a buzzard. I have done no harm.”

-George Jacobs Sr.

“I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused.”

-Ann Putnam.