conclusions10

Sarah Good, quite possibly the most well known “witch” in Salem, inherits an estate of over £500 from her dead father in 1672, twenty years before she is put on trial for being a witch. Her father drowned himself. After the death, Sarah’s mother quickly remarries and tries to take all the inheritance money for herself, and not distribute it to her children as her laid husband had planned. Sarah eventually gets less land then she was originally left. Sarah ends up being married twice. Her first husband dies, and his creditor sues her and her second husband, William. She has to sell off some of her land just to pay the court judgment of £9. Not long after, she looses her last bit of land to cover bear necessities. She then travels to Salem Village, where she meets Samuel Parris and asks for aid. Instead of showing her gratitude, Sarah simply stumbles off and mumbles. Shortly after, Sarah is accused by Parris’s daughter and niece of being a witch and sent to jail. She gets convicted and is hanged.[1]

The story I just told is a summary of one told by Boyer and Nissenbaum in their book Salem Possessed, which I used a lot in my research. Boyer and Nissenbaum use Sarah’s story as an example of how “economic mobility can take the toll on human personality”.[2] Economic mobility is the drastic change from one economic extreme to another, in Sarah’s case, from very wealthy to extremely poor. Again, I give reference to the quote on the main page of this site, which was written by Upham, another very influential writer of my report. What can such extreme cases of economic situations do to a person, or an entire town, especially when the economic change goes from one extreme to the other? How will people react? Will they go far enough to put people’s lives on the line, even if there appears to be no logical reasoning for their guilt? Will they lock a 4-year-old child in full chains in a prison cell with her mother? How dangerous can this child be? The child of Sarah Good is in the records as being the youngest “witch” in Salem, sucking her witch powers from her mother. This girl dies in prison before her mother is executed. And when all is said and done, in 1710, William Good sends a petition to get reimbursed monetarily for his losses.[3]

[1] Boyer, Salem Possessed, 203-206.

[2] Boyer, Salem Possessed, 205.

[3] Boyer, Paul S., Salem Village Witchcraft: a Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc. 1972), 16-17.