Salem, 1692.
Nineteen people were hanged and one pressed to death on spectral evidence accepted by a court of Congregational magistrates advised by Congregational ministers. Five years later Samuel Sewall stood in Boston's Old South Meeting House while his confession of guilt was read out over him.
The Salem trials of 1692 ran from February to May of that year through a special Court of Oyer and Terminer; nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five died in jail. The decisive issue was spectral evidence — testimony that the accused's apparition had afflicted the witness — which Cotton Mather approved with cautions and which the ministers as a body eventually advised against, after which the trials collapsed. In 1697 Massachusetts held a day of fasting, and Judge Samuel Sewall stood in the Old South Meeting House while his statement of guilt and shame was read out by the minister. Sewall later wrote The Selling of Joseph, the first antislavery tract published in New England. The Congregational Library and Archives in Boston holds the church records of the period, and the tradition teaches Salem as its own, not as an aberration.
Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin.
Samuel Sewall's bill of confession, read at the Old South Meeting House, Boston, 14 January 1697 (rendered)Modernised from Sewall's diary. He stood in the pew while the minister read it aloud; he was the only judge to make a public confession.
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