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coast to visit the main frontier. He was gone until September two, when he returned to take a few meetings in Boston before heading up again on September for another eleven days. Then, I know what you're thinking. With Salem and the surrounding area consumed with accusations of witchcraft, accusations that were maturing into convictions and executions, what in the

world could have been more important land, specifically his land. Remember, before being knighted by the King of England for his treasure hunting expedition, and before moving to Boston to rub shoulders with the wealthy merchants, Phipps had been a shipbuilder from Maine. So while every single person in the colony had a bit of skin in the game when it came to the conflict with the Native Americans and their French allies to the north. All of those battles were

personal for Phipps. During part of his trip, he was up in Pemmaquad, near modern day Bristol, Maine, to oversee a huge shipment of masts to be sent back to England for the Royal Navy's shipwrights, but he used his time there to set his militia forces loose on the local Native Americans in retaliation for their recent raids on

colonial lands. He also oversaw the construction of Fort William Henry, a military base with stone walls measuring twenty nine feet high and six ft thick, with twenty eight gun ports facing the Atlantic Ocean. It was something that could have easily been built without his supervision, but it just happened to be located near his old home village, where friends

and relatives still struggled to keep a foothold in hostile territory. Phipps, always one to chase after self interest, was using his position as leader of the colony to secure his own property and increase his own fortunes. Back in Boston, though, he discovered a world that had gotten out of hand, endless examinations, an ongoing Oyer and Terminer trial, and more than a dozen executions. And as that storm continued to

swirl and captured debris, a pattern was forming. By connecting the dots, most people could predict who would be accused of witchcraft and who wouldn't. If you had a relative accused of being a witch, either a contemporary or in the past, you were a good candidate for accusations. If you had been in contact with the French and Native Americans, you were even more of a target. And if you defended someone who was already accused, you were likely to

draw the spotlight on yourself. So when Phipps returned home, it was to a personal emergency. Word had begun to spread about a woman who had ties to a former accused, which who kept a Native American slave in her house, and who helped at least one already jailed, which escaped to freedom. Under most circumstances, that would have meant that a warrant would be quickly drawn up and the woman would be arrested. But that's where it got tricky, because this new suspect hit a bit too close to home,

literally and figuratively for phipps own good. This suspect, you see, was his own wife. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Family troubles weren't the only challenges that Phipps was facing. In fact, one of the main reasons he might have been spending so much time away from Boston in the early days of his governorship is because the work was just too difficult, and that wasn't entirely his fault. Remember, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had their original charter taken away

from them by the new English king. In the decades that they had relied on that charter, a whole catalog of home grown laws had sprung up around it that were mostly unique to the colony. But when the Crown issued a new charter, it came with specific instructions to set up a brand new framework that aligned with English law.

I imagine that was fine for a lot of topics, but Phipps had a particular rock in his shoe from the start the witchcraft trials in Salem because they were touching on something very sensitive and at first blush incredibly boring. Forfeiture of property. So buckle up, We're about to get legal for a moment. Oh boy. Under English law, if you were convicted of a felony, say witchcraft, for example, the consequences had roots in the old feudal system of

land ownership. Your land and other personal property would be taken away and given to the Crown, who could then keep it for themselves or redistribute it to others. In Massachusetts in the years leading up to the beginning of the witch Craft trials, though, that practice had gone away until the new Charter. That is because if Phipps was going to realign the colonies laws with the Crowns laws,

that meant bringing back forfeiture. As you can imagine, some people were opposed to this, namely the people who stood to have their property taken away, and those who supported it, well, they were the ones who were about to benefit from it. Let me give you a couple of examples. Sheriff George Corwin was the man presiding over the executions, transporting the convicted witches to the gallows and carrying out their sentences.

But he was more than a hangman. He was an officer of the crown with a full authority of the government behind him, and apparently he was a bit greedy. The day after Giles Corey was pressed to death, it was George Corwin who went to the Corey household and seized his property. Now, some people look at the seizure as a way to earn back the money it costs to house and feed Giles and Martha in jail for all those months. It certainly makes sense, but George Corwin

did other things that cast doubt on that theory. For example, he and his deputies wrote out to the farms of John and Elizabeth Procter, the Wardwells, and the Jacob's family. At each stop he confiscated their goods and property and carted it off. He even did this to the sizeable estate of Mary and Philip English, one of the richest couples in the colony, at the Proctor's tavern. Corwin was ruthless. They hadn't even been connected yet before he arrived to

take everything away. He took their cattle, selling some at a discount to make a quick sale while butchering the rest. He dumped out their beer and soup supplies and carted off with the pots and barrels. He took everything. It didn't matter that John and Elizabeth's young children still lived there. As Robert Caliph wrote, they were left to the mercy of the wilderness. There's also a vidence that Sheriff Corwin

took money in exchange for leaving property alone. If you recall, Bridget Bishop was the first person to be formerly executed, and her stepson Edward, along with his wife Sarah, were also in jail. When Corwin wrote out to their tavern in Salem Town and began to load up his cart with everything he could find. Edward's son Samuel, showed up and offered to pay the sheriff ten pounds to leave

it all behind. It was the equivalent of thousands of dollars in modern American currency, and Sheriff Corwin should probably had handed it over to the crown and walked away. Instead, he wrote Samuel a receipt that simply read a valuable sum of money. If that wasn't the perfect set up for embezzlement, I'm not sure what is. The seizure of property didn't happen all the time, though, then that's because of how property laws worked In English law men could

own property, as could single women. But once a woman married a man, all of her assets became his property, not hers. Many of the women who were accused and convicted never experienced the loss of their property because it didn't legally belong to them, but there were a number of them that did. Here's Jane Kaminsky, professor of history

at Harvard University. Another scholar, Carol Carlson out of University of Michigan, found that a significant number of suspects in New England witchcraft cases were women who had unusually direct lines to property holding, either because they didn't have living husbands, or they didn't have sons, or they didn't have brothers. Some unusually direct relationship to property and land. When we do see it, it's because the husband was also convicted, or the woman was a widow who took possession of

her husband's assets after he passed away. And Sheriff Corwin knew these rules all too well. In fact, after George Jacobs had been arrested, Corwin paid his wife a visit and took her wedding ring, which by English law belonged to George and not her. This is a lot of legal stuff, I know, but it was an attack on the foundation of society inside the colony. There these people were second or third generation settlers whose ancestors had brought everything with them and then handed it down to support

the next generation in the new world. That's why the colony did away with the forfeiture laws in the first place. Now, though, that was all changing, and this was the mess that Phipps discovered when he returned from Maine. People were having their land and property ripped out of their hands seemingly left and right, and the community was beginning to rumble with discontent, and so word was spreading about it. So Phipps did something to stop it all. No, not the

seizure of property, but the spreading of the news. He declared an embargo on the public writing about the trials in their entirety, for bidding anyone from publishing news or information about what was happening. Phipps, the rough spoken gold digger who preferred victory lapse to actually doing work, declared the press to be illegitimate and shut it down. But as everyone knows, you can't stop the signal. Local news is a lot like water. You can seal your house,

but it's still going to find a way inside. Eventually, Phips might have placed a ban on writing about the events in Salem, but that didn't mean it was going to work. And ironically, one of the biggest works on the witchcraft trials was being written at that very moment

by his good friend Cotton Mother. Months earlier, in June, a bunch of the local clergy had gathered together to write a document that was meant to urge Stowton, Hawthorne and the other magistrates to exercise caution in the coming trials. They used Christie in scripture to build their case and then gave the actual writing over to cotton Mother because he was the popular favorite. When it was completed, they

titled the work The Return of Several Ministers. Stoughton misread it, though, Where the collection of ministers meant to offer the theology behind their warnings, Stoughton saw theology that backed up his own agenda, and of course it didn't help the Cotton Mather was a bit of a people pleaser, so it

was easy to misinterpret his soft, flowery language. The end result was that rather than feel scolded by the ministers, the judges all felt as if Mather was on their side, so as the Oyer and termin or trial and all of the fallout around it began to turn into a sort of pr nightmare. The judges decided to work with Mather on writing a book in their defense. On September twenty two, just one day after the most recent group of executions, Cotton Mather was invited over to the home

of Judge Samuel's Will to discuss the project. Also in attendance were Samuel's brother Stephen, who worked as the clerk of the court for the trial, as well as William Stowton, John Hawthorne, and senior Salem town minister John Higginson, whose son was now one of the judges. Their purpose to

defend themselves from accusations of mishandling the trials. They would provide Mather with all the court documents he would need to mount their defense, covering the challenges faced by the court, as well as the multitude of suspects and descriptions of the supernatural evidence that they had to sift through. Here's historian Maryland k Roach. He at this point still assumes that they had been proceeding correctly, and maybe he thinks he needs to make more excuses for how things had gone.

So it kind of supports the view that they had proceeded as best they could. It did nothing for his reputation thereafter, and it kind of ties him with that, even though he did say at the beginning, you shouldn't really use spectral evidence, and he had a lot of all the good things that he did, But that wasn't very unfortunate when all of the book is a good source of what people were saying in views of the trials, and there's some anecdotes and they aren't in the existing papers.

By early October, Cotton Mather was working furiously on the book. He began by grabbing the text from a series of sermons he had given over the summer on the topic of supernatural and spiritual matters. The most popular of them had been a sermon he called a Discourse of the Wonders of the Invisible World, so popular that he pulled the new book's title right from it. As he finished each chapter, he would rush it off to the printer

to be typeset, not wanting to waste any time. Interwoven within the republished sermons were arguments in support of the judges and their trial. He even used quotes from actual court records, words spoken by the judges and the accused is alike to support his arguments. Of course, he also skipped all the quotes that countered his points, but who among the common folk would know that right? It was

looking back an unapologetic work of propaganda. His main argument was essentially this, there was a military government within the forces of the Devil. He even compared their ranks to the French cavalry, and these military like forces desired to overrun the colony and the Church. Not one to shy away from dramatic language, Mather declared that the Devil in Great Wrath has made a prodigious descent on our poor New England. His biggest piece of evidence that this conflict

was taking place was the spectral evidence. You know, the stories of an accused which visiting one of the afflicted in their homes at night, hovering above their beds and tormenting them. Visions of Martha Corey demanding that someone signed the Devil's book, or tales of the spectral version of a witch physically attacking an innocent victim. Mather's argument was simple, how can we even note to go looking for other

pieces of evidence if we dismissed the spectral tales. These supernatural stories, according to Mather, help them to notice the people who deserve more investigation. In other words, the ends entirely justified the means, so please, let's not attack the means, however unusual and unfair they might appear. What's interesting to note, though, is that for as much as Cotton Mather had essentially become the pr director for the witch trials in Salem, he was out of step with the majority of clergy

in Massachusetts. Sure, he was a well respected religious leader working hard to make sure the Puritan mission was represented in the new government, but on this matter he was in the minority. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that he was opposed by other vocal ministers. While Cotton Mather was discussing the correct way to navigate spectral evidence within the court, other religious leaders were building a case to oppose him, and they were led by someone that

Cotton thought he could trust, his father, Increase Mather. We need to pause for a second and play catch up. Over the last ten episodes, I've told you about a lot of arrests and examinations, about the evidence presented and the trials that judged them. Each of them are slightly different from the last, and no two cases follow the same path. So I want to try and illustrate something for you. To convict a person on the charge of witchcraft in Salem, in just like our court system today,

you had to prove that the person was guilty. Obviously, someone had to begin the process by accusing someone else and calling them a witch. If the accusation was serious enough, they would be arrested and brought in for examination. And that's where things got tricky. We can look back after three twenty six years and understand why the magistrates were being asked to believe supernatural stories and take them as proof. So they administered tests, some of which we've covered already.

They might have the person's body searched for, which is marks those unnatural teats used to suckle the devil's minions. They might listen to the stories of the afflicted, who would describe being attacked by the person's spectral form. They would also rely on something called the touch test, where the accused, which would be brought into the same room as one of the afflicted girls during one of her

fits and instructed to touch her. If the touch of the accused stopped the seizure, then they were truly a witch. But I think you can see the problem with something like that. If the afflicted person had simply made up the stories to hurt another person, they can just as easily fake the seizure and then stop when the accused person touches them, And since it's all happening in a courtroom, the judges would accept it as perfectly legitimate evidence. After that,

the trial would go one of two ways. Either the accused which would deny all of the charges and put up a legal fight, or they would cave in, admit to being a witch and then name a bunch of other people in an effort to save themselves. Those new accused people would be arrested and the process would start all over again. So as Cotton Mather was publishing his book of justification for that broken system, his father was

working on something of his own. Increase. Mather was the man who traveled to England with Sir William Phipps to bring back the new Charter. He had the ear of the governor, decades of experience, and a lot more wisdom and patience than his son Cotton, and he used all of that to craft his own book. It was called Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, personating men, witchcrafts, infallible proofs of guilt in such as are accused with that crime.

That's a mouthful, I know, which is why most historians today just call it Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. And the book directly attacked the Court's view of spectral evidence and therefore his son's support of it. Increase Mather wrote about how the touch test was flawed. The afflicted person, the one having the seizure or the fit, should be blindfolded, so that the anonymous touch alone would be the test.

He cited an event in and Over on September seven where a group touched test was carried out, although in that one they blindfolded the accused, not the afflicted. It was, according to him, a flawed measure of guilt. Then there was the basic notion that the Court was literally accusing people of supernaw natural crimes by using supernatural tests to judge them. It was hypocritical and wrong and easily manipulated

by those in power. According to Increase Mather, these tests were invented by the devil so that innocent persons might be condemned and some notorious witches escape. His last attack on the views of the court was regarding confession. If an accused witch nodded her head and declared, yes, I am in fact a witch, and then named a dozen others to make herself valuable and ward off her execution, the court would go and arrest all of those new people.

Increase Mather, however, pointed out how ludicrous that notion was. If someone had given themselves up to the devil, the legendary father of lies, then how can we possibly trust a single word that came out of their mouth? If they identify a dozen other witches, why in the world should anyone believe them? It was, according to him, him insanity. On October three, a group of ministers gathered at Harvard

to read Increase Mather's new book out loud. Increase wasn't there, but his son Cotton was, and I can't help but imagine that it was just a little bit awkward for him. Another of the ministers there was Samuel Willard, who we've heard a lot about so far. Not only was he the minister of the church where Captain John Alden and Mary and Philip English attended, he had also increasingly become more and more opposed to the direction and methods of the trial. As a sign of support, Willard wrote an

introductory essay for increase Mather's book. All of the ministers there at Harvard that day signed their names to the essay to show their agreement. All of them, that is, except Cotton Mother. Increase Mather wasn't alone in his descent. Despite the muzzle that Governor Phipps tried to put on the press, more and more people began to speak out

about the trials. Yes, some people still believe the witchcraft was a disease threatening to destroy the Puritan mission, but there was a growing majority who felt that the real disease was actually the trial. Some of the more outspoken voices came from wealthy Boston businessmen. They circulated statements and letters in an attempt to sway public opinion, and chief among them was a young man named Thomas Brattle, a member of Samuel Willard's Third Church of Boston and part

of a well established Boston family. And this guy was smart. Four years prior to the Sale and witch trials, he and Judge Samuel Sewell had traveled together on a one year tour of England. They were marginal players in the process to restore the old Massachusetts Colony charter, but Brattle also had a deep interest in the scientific community that was growing back in London. Brattle had a passionate interest in a lot of areas of science, including mathematics, architecture,

and astronomy. While he and Sewell were in London, he dragged his friend to all sorts of enlightening events and locations. They attended concerts together, visited the Royal Navy rope yards to see the trade in action, and even went swimming in the Thames. And from everything I've read, Brattle would have been an avid Instagram user today. He absolutely loved to make detailed architectural surveys of the buildings he visited, spending hours measuring them and recording accurate drawings to share

with his friends back home. There's even a story of Brattle visiting Versailles in France on another trip and pouring over the palace there with such attention that one of the guards accused him of being a spy. Brattle and Sewell were in London in six eighty nine when King William's War was declared by the Crown. They were there when London received word of the coup that overthrew Massachusetts governor Androws. They were there as the efforts to restore

their colony to its old Puritan charter were derailed. But it was also productive for Brattle. By the time they sailed home in September of sixty nine, he had been awarded entrance to the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific community in England. Samuel Sewell wasn't just a quiet observer, though. He took things in and allowed it to change his mind.

In the weeks leading up to their trip in sixteen eighty nine, Sewell recorded in his journal that he watched an Irish washerwoman named Goody Glover be carded past him in Boston, followed by a crowd of marshals, constables, and even a judge. She was on her way to be executed for witchcraft, and he was intrigued by that. Brattle is important, though, because of what he represents. Remember we have this trial going on in sale and Town, and

it's spreading like a plague to the surrounding community. Is it's a religious movement with a legal framework. It's the moment where the rubber meets the road for a community of people who believe in the spiritual world, and it seems to fly in the face of hard, evidence based science. So when Brattle writes his letter regarding the trials, that's

the world view he brings to the table. He's a scientist and a passionate observer of verifiable evidence, so he can't view the trials in the same way as someone like Cotton Mather might. His letter was a plea for rationality over religion. He started it off by stating that he had no intent to cast dirt on authority, as he put it, but soon enough the text shifts into

a bloodthirsty analysis of the trials. He touches on many of the same ideas that Samuel Willard and increased Mother had, but he does it with surgical precision and an undercurrent of science. Brattle didn't mince words. Instead, he went for

the jugular. He blames Stoton for allowing justice to be perverted in the service of religion, and he named the prominent individuals who were staunchly opposed to the actions of the Court, including former Governor Simon Bradstreet, former Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, and Nathaniel salt Install, the judge who had quit the Oyer and Terminer out of disgust with the proceedings, and he begged the court to use common sense. How could the afflicted see the specters of witches if their

eyes were closed? How could they not see the difference between real, verifiable evidence and simple religious bias. When Sewell read his friend's letter, he paid Thomas Danforth a visit. Was it true, he asked him, and Danforth confirmed it yes. He told him I no longer support the court. Since his forced retirement in April, he had found himself with ample spare time to consider all of the strange events

in Salem and felt that the process was broken. If the Court wanted to continue moving forward, he felt they needed to consult the ministers and the people first. Thomas Brattle, though, had a less polite, yet more powerful way of putting it. If our officers and courts have apprehended, imprisoned, condemned, and executed our guiltless neighbors, he wrote, certainly, our error is great, and we shall rue it in the conclusion. In other words, if it turns out that you were wrong, you'll have

blood on your hands. If Thomas Brattle's mission to call the colony to common sense was a spark it quickly ignited the Boston area. In early October, two things happened that just one month prior would have seemed impossible. First, some of the afflicted girls in Andover pointed their fingers at a worthy gentleman of Boston as its it, and

accused him of being a witch. Rather than allow himself to be arrested or even flee to New York or some other sanctuary location, this man simply acquired a warrant to have the girls arrested for defamation with the promise of a thousand pound fine roughly one million dollars today, they dropped their claims. That same week, a different Boston businessman found himself so desperate to find healing for his sick daughter that he traveled north with her to Salem.

This particular man had either been ignoring Brattle's cry for logic and reason or had somehow missed the news, so he approached the afflicted girls of Salem and asked for help identifying the witch or witches that were tormenting his daughter. The girls identified two witches, but when he took their names, to the judges. They refused to give him a warrant for their arrest. The Boston man might have missed Brattle's message,

but the authorities in Salem certainly at it. When Increase Mather heard what this man had tried to do, he berated him, asking him why he preferred the devil in Salem to God in Boston. The first two weeks of October also saw some changes in how prisoners were being held. Eight men from Andover requested that the court release all of the accused miners into the custody of their families while they await trial. It was getting colder and the jails were less and less safe to be inside. The

court agreed, and a number of prisoners were released. But it wasn't just the children. Here's historian Stacy Schiff, most of the husbands will actually petition to get their wives back. Late in the fall, it's harvest season. It's really important that the wives be there to help, you know, can the preserves and and get the house in order. And I think most of most of those women are released.

In October November, the tide was turning. Minds were changing the public perception of the Salem Trials was no longer overwhelmingly in favor of pushing for word. With blind passion banks to the mounting death toll and the epidemic of property seizures, the people of Salem and the surrounding area had started to doubt they were on the right path, and all of that doubt was washing up on the shore at the feet of Governor William Phipps on October twelfth.

He found himself with some decisions to make, partly because of the rise and resistance to the trials, but also because the General Court sort of the state legislature for the colony had finally gathered together to put new laws on paper. The new Charter needed to be implemented, and that meant Phipps and the others had some work ahead of them. We know about what happened inside the government in October because Phipps wrote a series of four letters

back to the Crown in England. Now keep in mind they were written by him to make himself look better, but it's possible to pick through them and find the truth of the events around him. Here is Professor of American history Mary Beth Norton. Phipps is really good at covering his butt. Phipps is a master at not letting on that he knew all along it was going on. I mean, Phipps rice this letter saying to the people

in London, oh my god, I just got back. I went fighting Indians on the frontier all summer, and I came back and I found this horrible situation and I stopped it. That was so untrue. For example, he recorded that the property seizures had been an unauthorized decision by William Stowton, head of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, And maybe that's how he justified reinstating the old colony law that prevented forfeiture of property. But there was more.

Phipps had a decision to make about the very foundation of the entire trial spectral evidence. He was the person who had to make the call. If he decided that spectral evidence was not valid and admissible, then there was a whole list of people who had been arrested, convicted, and executed specifically because of that mistake. If, on the other hand, he declared it all to be legitimate, then he would have to give a reason why, and a good enough reason, even in late October still eluded him.

Phipps was that stereotypical cartoon character with a tiny angel on one shoulder and a tiny devil on the other. Except for him, it was men like Samuel Willard and Thomas Brattle whispering caution into one ear, while Cotton Mather and his few remaining supporters urged him to rush forward. Finally, he and the General Court proposed a temporary pause so they could institute a fast and call for an assembly of ministers to advise them. They wanted help seeking out

God's preferred road out of their current mess. When it went to a vote, it barely passed, with thirty three in favor and twenty nine against. The colony might have been ready for a change, but the men in charge weren't so sure. Half of them were ready to continue as before, but the other half were still on the fence. All that was left now was to wait for a sign. Governor Phipps seemed to be doing everything possible to not

make a decision. If he moved too quickly, he might be seen as meddling in the trial he had been largely absent from for months, never mind the fact that his own wife had been accused, which meant that rushing in to stop things now might appear like a personal mission to save his own skin and support a witch in the process. He and the General Court got a lot of work done, though they officially appointed Anthony Checkley as Attorney General. They set up new justice system and

superior court for the colony. They even settled on what crimes constituted capital crimes, but the Salem trials were hovering over all of them. There were people in jail who were waiting for their moment before the Oyer and Termine or judges. Some had been in jail for months and they were looking for a resolution, be it freedom or death. There was a new session scheduled for early November, but everyone was waiting on Phips to decide if it was

going to happen at all or not. While he was wavering back and forth, Thomas Brattle and a handful of ministers paid a visit to the Salem jail to talk with prisoners there. When they questioned some recently arrested women from and Over, many of them retracted their claims. They might have confessed to being witches and even named others in the process, but all of it had been a lie to save their own lives. Here's Mary Beth Norton once again. That was about three weeks after the last

set of executions. They take it back and they talk about how they were basically convinced to confess by magistrates, sometimes by their own relatives, who said, well, you may not realize you were a witch, but you clearly were because of X, and then cited some evidence to them.

I think that was also very meaningful in helping to convince Phips that he could not maintain the trials any longer, or at least the trials in the Court of or Iran terminal, and that the rules had to change and that spectral evidence could not be allowed when the trials continued in January under the regular courts. In other words,

confession wasn't infallible. Here we have people who had gone along with the system confessing and pointing their fingers at others in an effort to stay alive, and they were fully admitting that it was all make believe. If there was one last legitimate pillar holding up the witch trials,

confession was it, and now it too was crumbling. On October, Phips and his counselors gathered to discuss more business regarding the new charter and William Stoughton, eager to move forward with the trials and convict more witches, rode south to Boston to demand permission to do so. He rode through a torrential downpour that drove a high tide onto the road he was traveling. By the time he arrived in Boston, he was utterly soaked and needed a fresh change of clothes.

After his servant returned to Salem to retrieve that change of clothes, he finally made his appearance before the Governor and his counsel. He stood defiantly before them and demanded a decision. Did he have permission to continue forward? This was, he informed them, the last time he would ask. In an eerie echo of Giles Corey standing mute before Stoughton just weeks before, Phipps stared back at the judge with a great silence. You can almost see the battle in

their staring contest that ensued. Stoughton with his murderous zeal, Phipps with his crowd of differing voices screaming inside his head. I have to imagine that was the moment that it all clicked for Governor Phipps, looking into Stowton's face would have made it crystal clear that he was a man

who would not let go. If he was allowed to continue his trials, the only thing that would come out of it would be more people in jail and more people at the end of the hangman's noose, and one of those people would most certainly be phipps Own wife. Stowton went home that day without an answer, so when the council gathered again the next day, it was another of the members who brought it back up. James Russell

had seen firsthand what Stowton was capable of. He had been in Salem on April tenth, when Sarah Klois and Elizabeth Proctor had been examined. He knew it wasn't pretty, so he asked the governor the same question everyone else had that month, with a court of oyer and termine or presiding over the witchcraft plague in Salem, stand or fall. Phipps looked back at him with an expression that must have contained the weights of a thousand stones, and then, finally,

with a sigh, he replied, it must fall. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around. After this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week, next time on Unobscured. Finally word went out that the next trial would take place in January, not another Oyer and terminer like the past sessions, but

a new trial by the Massachusetts Superior Court. It offered hope to those still waiting for a decision and praying for their release from captivity, perhaps even an occasion to celebrate before the trial date could arrive. Though the Governor declared December twenty to be a day of fasting and

prayer across the colony. They were urged to consider the various and awful judgments of God continued upon the English nation and the dispersions thereof in their Majesty's several plantations, by permitting witchcrafts and evil ages to rage against His people.

Translation judgments was coming, so Pray for mercy. Unobscured was created and written by me Aaron Mankey and produced by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams in partnership with How Stuff Works, with research by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians further reading material, resource archive and links to our other shows at History Unobscured dot com Until next time, Thanks for listening.