329 years after her conviction in 1693 for witchcraft, Elizabeth Johnson has finally been pardoned by the justice of Massachusetts in the United States. Three centuries of waiting to finally obtain an official pardon and restore her integrity to this woman. Like a hundred others, she had been sentenced to death, but her name had been lost over time and had never been on the pardon lists. Her story, however, illustrates exactly the madness that gripped the city of Salem, when in 1692 began the greatest so-called witch hunt in North America.
Puritan obsession, religious fanaticism, in a few weeks hundreds of people, mostly women, are arrested and sentenced for witchcraft, divination or Satanism. Fourteen women were hanged, six men were stoned, and the hundred other convicts imprisoned while awaiting the execution of their sentence, as was the case of Elizabeth Johnson, 22, single living alone and without children, sentenced to hanging. A fate she narrowly escaped since after a few weeks, the royal governor of the state ended up intervening and suspending all convictions. Suspend, but not cancel.
Thus, since 1693, the requests of the families to wash the honor of the condemned succeeded one another. Recognition took centuries but it took place since it was thought that all the victims of the Salem tragedy had been pardoned. In any case, we thought so until last year, in 2021, when Carrie La Pierre, a civics teacher at a local college, asked her fourth-grade students to list Salem’s convicts. A small group work for which they have, in fact, taken a passion.
They returned the archives, found Elizabeth Johnson’s name and decided to ask for her pardon. To the great surprise of their professor, they wrote to their deputies, to the state judges, even drafted a bill, until being heard by a senator, who defended the case of Elizabeth Johnson and obtained a few days ago his rehabilitation by the general court of Massachusetts. A grace, 330 years later, which certainly erases neither pain nor death, but makes the truth triumph, and confirms that indeed for it to burst, it must be sought.