Samuel Parris

Did You Know?

• Parris beat Tituba until she confessed herself as a witch, and John Indian, her husband, began accusing others.
• During a 1692 sermon, Parris declared that 'as in our text John 6:10 there was one devil among the 12 disciples... so in our churches, God knows how many Devils there are'.
• In 1693, his parish brought charges against Parris for his part in the trials; he apologized in his essay Meditations for Peace in November 1694.
• Parris seized parsonage land to compensate himself for unpaid salary, but an Ipswich court in 1697 ordered the land returned.
• He remarried to Dorothy Noyes in Sudbury in 1699 after his wife Elizabeth died in 1696.

Life and career

Samuel Parris was born in London to Thomas Parris, a family that had some financial success but followed a nonconformist religious path. He moved to Boston in the early 1660s and, at his father’s urging, attended Harvard College. When his father died in 1673, Parris left Harvard to take over the family sugar plantation in Barbados. A hurricane struck Barbados in 1680, causing significant damage to his property. Parris sold off part of his land and returned to Boston, bringing with him Tituba, a woman he enslaved. He then married Elizabeth Eldridge, who was widely considered one of the most beautiful women in Salem Village. The couple had three children: Thomas, Elizabeth, and Susannah. Though the plantation funded his business dealings, Parris felt financially insecure and sought a career in the ministry. He served briefly as a minister in Stow, Massachusetts in 1685, and in July 1689 became the minister of Salem Village, now Danvers. This role gave him the authority to jail residents, which he exercised on rare occasions. Salem Village was a notoriously quarrelsome place, partly due to its scattered settlement pattern, which may have prevented a sense of shared purpose. Parris was the fourth minister in a string of failed attempts to keep a permanent one. James Bayley and George Burroughs each left after a few years when the congregation did not pay their full salaries. Deodat Lawson departed with less conflict. Tensions grew because Parris delayed accepting the position and could not settle disputes among parishioners. Arguments also arose over his pay. In October 1691, the town stopped paying his wages.

Fiction

Samuel Parris has appeared in several fictional works about the Salem witch trials. In Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, his daughter Elizabeth is the first person to fall ill from alleged witchcraft. The 1957 film adaptation cast Jean Debucourt as Parris, while Bruce Davison played him in the 1996 version. John Neal's 1828 novel Rachel Dyer, the first bound book on the trials, renames him Matthew Paris. There, he is a lonely man who accuses Tituba out of sexual jealousy after feeling threatened by her bond with John Indian. Ann Petry's 1964 novel Tituba of Salem Village and Maryse Condé's 1986 novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem also include him. In the novel Supernatural: One Year Gone, actual witches manipulate Parris into launching the trials, and he in turn pressures the girls to target his rivals. Once the truth comes out, he vows to stop the persecution of innocent women. Esther Barstow Hammand's 1940 book Road to Endor blends historical facts about Parris with fiction. As she notes in an author's statement, the story is invented, though she researched old records as best she could. The narrative starts with his birth and runs up to the infamous year of the trials.