Causes Of The Salem Witch Trials
According to the Europeans, “a witch was a person who committed a crime using harmful magic.” The Salem Witch Trials occurred in Salem Massachusetts from February 1692 to May 1693. The Witch Trials did not happen due to what some originally might think. There were more reasons for the brutality and carelessness of the trials than just witchcraft. When the colonists came over to the New World, they were unfamiliar with the terrain, weather, and soil. These factors made it so colonists were unable to harvest crops properly, which led to disease and ultimately death. The impact it had on their daily lives became especially evident during times when evil befell the colonists. Rather than search for a solution or answer to the problem, they tended
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The crop that they could farm easily in England, they soon found was not so easy to rise in the colonies. Adapting as necessary, they grew wheat, rye, and corn. As more and more people became sick, the urgency to figure out what the cause was and why it continued to grow increased. With no other possible options, they turned to the idea of witchcraft as a last resort. Witchcraft would often be associated with disease, “since one thing witches did was spread sickness” meaning “that evidence of witches’ activities was pervasive in the years during and after European encounters.” Another issue the colonists faced was their lack of knowledge about tending the new land they inhabited. For a source of heat they cut “down a great many trees to heat their houses, so many that some towns were running short by the mid-1630’s, and many more would do so by the 1640’s.” This caused many guidelines to be put into place to ensure they did not completely use up all the trees. Also, “another way of limiting the consequences of the land market was to regulate who sold to whom.” These stipulations negatively affected the economy, as it was land that brought people from other colonies to Massachusetts. Due to the high amount of regulations, there was a great decrease in new people moving in. Additionally hurting the economy was that the property taxes were raised to meet a quota for meetinghouses in town. If taxes were not bad enough, the ones that designated who paid how much acted, “out of self-interest, county leaders lightened their own valuations and shifted much of the burden to
The crop that they could farm easily in England, they soon found was not so easy to rise in the colonies. Adapting as necessary, they grew wheat, rye, and corn. As more and more people became sick, the urgency to figure out what the cause was and why it continued to grow increased. With no other possible options, they turned to the idea of witchcraft as a last resort. Witchcraft would often be associated with disease, “since one thing witches did was spread sickness” meaning “that evidence of witches’ activities was pervasive in the years during and after European encounters.” Another issue the colonists faced was their lack of knowledge about tending the new land they inhabited. For a source of heat they cut “down a great many trees to heat their houses, so many that some towns were running short by the mid-1630’s, and many more would do so by the 1640’s.” This caused many guidelines to be put into place to ensure they did not completely use up all the trees. Also, “another way of limiting the consequences of the land market was to regulate who sold to whom.” These stipulations negatively affected the economy, as it was land that brought people from other colonies to Massachusetts. Due to the high amount of regulations, there was a great decrease in new people moving in. Additionally hurting the economy was that the property taxes were raised to meet a quota for meetinghouses in town. If taxes were not bad enough, the ones that designated who paid how much acted, “out of self-interest, county leaders lightened their own valuations and shifted much of the burden to