Popular lore surrounding the Salem witch trials summons images of wrongly accused White women and girls bound to stakes and perched atop flaming pyres. But an accurate portrayal of U.S. history would look extremely different — and provide an ugly but all-too-familiar confirmation of what we know about the power of historical erasure.
So let’s talk about a part of our history almost no one knows. Of the approximately 25 women and girls convicted of witchcraft in the 13 colonies between 1648 and 1692, none met their end strapped to a stake; they were all hanged. And while it’s true that women of this period were burned at the stake as a form of capital punishment, most of them were not White — they were Black.
It’s not easy to absorb these events. But we need to. To illuminate them is to shine a light not only on long-standing racial biases in American justice but also to show that bigotry has been present from the beginning.
In his diary entry on Sept. 22, 1681, Increase Mather — father of the legendary clergyman Cotton Mather and later a president of Harvard College — wrote of “a negro woman who burnt 2 houses at Roxbury July 12.” The woman, Maria, described as a servant — often a euphemism for an enslaved person at the time ― of Joshua Lambe, was convicted of arson for using a hot coal to set fire to the house of a local doctor and Lambe’s home.
As punishment, Mather wrote, “the negro woman was burned to death.” He went on to explain that she was the first woman to suffer this fate in New England.
Maria was also the first woman to receive such a sentence in the 13 colonies. And her brutal death would prove to be the start of a grim pattern in American justice.
Beginning with Maria’s execution and ending with the last known woman burned at the stake — which, according to the Espy File on U.S. executions from 1608 to 2002, was a Black woman in North Carolina in 1805 — the overwhelming majority of women to face the fatal fires of justice, 87 percent, were Black.
Convicted of either arson or murder, Black women faced harsher sentences than did White women accused of the same crimes. White women were usually spared from the searing flames; if these women did receive capital sentences, they met their deaths dangling from a noose.