Essay about Acts of Injustice in The Crucible by Arthur Miller

In Scottsboro, the two young women at the center of the case, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, weren't the innocent young women that they were perceived as being. In reality, they were both racist prostitutes who were frequently drunk. There should have been serious doubts to the claims that these girls were making, especially with how severe they were. Similarly, the lead accuser during the Salem Witch Trials was Abigail Williams who, while the trials were taking place, stole money from her uncle, Reverend Parris, and disappeared. The evidence that the accused were witches was based on the testimony of the young girls of the town, mainly Abigail Williams. The testimonies that the young girls gave should have been more highly questioned given their

The Salem Witch Trials brought havoc among the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts starting in 1692. Many of the people within the town continued to have strong loyalties to their new Puritan religion and their old king back home. The church of England had moved away from the Catholic religion with the help of King Henry VIII and the Puritans were a new group of people who accepted the split from Catholicism but still believed that the church of England had a lot of aspects that remained with the Catholic religion. Despite this, loyalty to the king remained strong because the Puritans were not looking to break off from the Church of England instead they wanted to reform the religion and make it their own. These loyalties stretched to such an extent that any sin committed was also considered an act of treason and thus punished. The Salem community was constantly searching for evil within their town to prove their righteousness to God which lead to high rates of fear and paranoia in their daily lives. The strict Puritan religion soon became the root cause of the monstrous imagination that started to form within the community of Salem. Many people still feared the presence of Catholic ideas within their communities and in response were willing to go to any extent to irradiate these views. Some historians also account the beginning of the trials to divisions within the two towns of Salem that lead to tensions and turmoil between the townsmen. But without the increased belief in their new religion, women around town wouldn’t have been persecuted. The strict belief in the Puritan religion and culture was the root cause of fear and paranoia that led to the mass execution of many women and townspeople during the Salem Witch Trials.

He proceeds to question the girls with the undoubted assumption of the presence of witchcraft. Hale also believes Tituba, Abigail and the other girls when they accuse others of practicing witchcraft. Later in the play, his thoughts begin to change and he becomes convinced that John Proctor and Mary Warren are telling the truth, and not Abigail. He again makes his judgments based on his beliefs. At first Reverend Hale is sure about his belief that there are witches and feels that he is carrying out the desires of God himself. Yet as the play progresses Hale sees all these innocent people being sentenced and executed. He contemplates whether to listen to Danforth or listen to his own conscience and denounce these measures as unjust and wrong. Hale decides to help out all the people wrongly accused by encouraging them to confess and save themselves from these false proceedings. Finally he overcomes this problem by following the truth he knew in his heart.

The citizens of Salem were under high standards of law. Things like working on the Sabbath were illegal, everything was watched strictly by the Church (Dector2). The Church…... “Bridget Bishop, age 60. Bishop had a reputation for being loud and quarrelsome, and she had been punished publicly for fighting with her husband” (Brandt 5). No one was safe in Salem, neighbors were accusing each other if something was done out of line. “The hysteria escalated rapidly. The examinations by the magistrates started in March. Accused women were subject to a physical exam in which other women looked for teats, places on the body where some sort of excrescence perhaps a large mole, scar or growth, appeared”(Brandt 4). The desperation of figuring out who were witches led to the lack of privacy the community had, which is shown in how the women’s bodies had to be checked. The lack of privacy led to the biggest factor all,

Although some people say that Salem condoned genocide due to the hallucinogenic fungus on bread, the community was really more focused on the law of their religion, not how they denied people of their natural rights. In Salem, these Puritans had immigrated from New England so they could have more say over what happens in their presence. Although for quite some time the Church of England still controlled these Puritans. This control by the church made them obey their laws which included being denied their natural rights. This indicates why America wanted to separate from the Church of England. The past between Europe and the Puritans is similar to the“Witches” in Salem case. Salem denied these people the right to do practically anything which caused a small rebellion of sorts, such as the girls moving themselves up to the ‘law of the land’. Most accused weren’t guilty of witchcraft, but of using their natural rights. 8

The governor of Salem, William Phips, was fed up when rumours that his wife was a witch started to float up. “Determined at last to quell the madness, he suspended the special Court of Oyer and Terminer he had earlier established to hear witchcraft cases. He replaced it with a new Superior Court of Judicature—which disallowed spectral evidence. That court condemned only 3 of 56 defendants. Phips pardoned them along with five others awaiting execution.” (Winker, “Interactive: Salem Witch Trials”). Also, before and after the trials, there was a lot of tension between people in Salem. But, their beliefs held them to be nice to each other and to lead a godly life. “The time to heal fell under the gentle hand of the Reverend Joseph Green, who in 1697 succeeded Samuel Parris as minister in Salem Village. Green reshuffled his congregation’s traditional seating plan, placing foes beside one another.” (Winker, “Interactive: Salem Witch Trials”). People of the Puritan community were finally starting to realize the wrongness of their ways. The Puritans were too judgemental and strict. This caused people to break off from

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of accusations, trials, and executions based on the supposed outbreak of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. The trials began during the spring of 1692, and the last of them ended in 1693. It all started when two young girls, Abigail and Betty Parris, began experiencing violent convulsions and outbursts, which were thought to be brought about by witchcraft. Whether they were faking these symptoms, were afflicted with an actual sickness, or were experiencing them because of some sort of psychological reason is widely debated, though it is known that the sisters accused their maid, Tituba, of forcing them to participate in witchcraft with her. Some

After community members came to their senses, the trials came to an end after the realization of what was taking place occurred. “New Englanders believed in witchcraft both before and after 1692, yet in no other year was there such a severe persecution of witches” (Matossian 355-357.). After the trials were over, some of the people on the court admitted to mistakes being made about those that had been executed (Hoffer n.pag.). Because of this, evidence is a key part when accusing someone of something so that mistakes will not be made. “The result is an impoverished, … distorted, view of a germinal phase in our people’s history: Salem appears as a brief and dark chapter... “ (Demos 3.).

The law did not exploit the “innocent until proven guilty” principle, instead if someone made it to trial, the law assumed guilt (Louis-Jacques 3). So, the court quickly assumed someone guilty, contradicting with the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”, it became “guilty until proven innocent” which caused many innocent people to be jailed or executed. The Rev. Cotton Mather, writing on for several Boston ministers, suggested carefulness in deciding on such evidence but at the same time encouraged the court to undertake "the speedy and forceful prosecution" of anyone guilty of witchcraft. The first woman tried and executed in June was an almost sixty-year o and owner of a tavern, Bridget Bishop. The accusations continued and more and more people jailed and dead, however it soon began to spread outside of Salem into Boston, Cambridge, and Ipswich. The most-lively of the accusers lived in Salem Village, in which this town suffered the greatest from executions, people in Andover sustained the most amount of accusations (Ray

The court of Salem suppose whether a person goes to church on a regular basis as evidence of witchcraft just because it doesn’t adhere strictly to the expectations of the society which is unreasonable since the accused is charged with the crime of

In the fictional play, "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller, he writes about the time in which the Salem witch trials were taking place. The Play starts with the fear of witchcraft entering the town of Salem. Over time the problem of witchcraft grows fiercely in Salem and many were killed. Throughout the play Miller shows how the characters base a very serious crime on extremely minimal evidence. The entire play is based on the opinion of a group of teen girls without any actual evidence, which lead to many falsely accused people to be condemned to die.

:”Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, said by Martin Luther King, Jr. The Crucible written by Arthur Miller in 1953 introduces us a story of this kind that injustice brought by a character named Danforth brings the social malfunction of Salem accompanied by a breakdown of humanity and faith. In our modern society, the public requires the power and presence of laws and justice system to protect their rights. However, when the structures become shackles and the judges mute off their voice of the truth, it leads the tragedy and misery to the people.

Superstition and a constant mention of God’s antitheses created ignorance of easily explainable phenomenon. This affected the trials because they were solely going off of one side of unproven occurrences. Salem was divided into two distinct factions. Those from the village who were accused and those from the Town who did the accusing. The distinctive differences led to a deep distrust and jealousy. The people from the village were the farmers and compared to the town, much poorer. Life was a hardship for them because they relied on their harvests. As for the town, they had a more direct line to England. They were prosperous and had a diverse economy. In general there was more of a focus on government there as well as the Church. For all puritans,

In “The Crucible,” Salem was a town with strong religious values. However, their religion may have overshadowed their sense of morality. Every individual in the community cared very passionately about their reputations because they wanted to appear good to God. They were even willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of others for their own gain. Blaming others for crimes they didn’t commit became a common way of releasing sins, because people didn’t want to face the punishment that came from being a sinner in a theocracy. However, if they were willing to hurt others, then the people in Salem valued their own religious reputations so much that they had lost their sense of morality.

This source will help me answer my question because it is mentioned that Salem was a puritan society and that they believed in evil supernatural spirts. This also shows that die to the religious indoctrination it was easy for people to believe in things that they would not normally believe in. This source shows what the puritans believed in and what they feared during this time and to what impact it affected their decisions. It gives a