S1 – INTERVIEW 2: Mary Beth Norton

and the Huntington Library. She is currently the president of the twelve thousand member American Historical Association. My producer is Matt Frederick and Alex Williams had a chance to sit down with Professor Norton this past summer, and I want to share that great conversation with you today. So without further delay, let's get on with the show. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey, I'm Mary Beth Norton. I'm a professor of American history

at Cornell University. I teach a bunch of courses on early America and women. I have written several books, um some of which are related to Salem Witchcraft, one of which in particular is called in the Devil's Snare subtitle the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of sixte two and very deliberately subtitled a crisis rather than trials, because the book is

much broader than the trials themselves. When you call it a crisis is because there are so many things occurring outside of this very specific instance of the witch tribals. Can you talk about a few of those contributing factor well, I think in my book I argue that the most important contributing factor is the um Indian War that's going on on the northern frontier. We don't really know much about this war. I certainly didn't know much about it until it popped up as I was working on my

my study of Salem Witchcraft. I did not intend to make the book what it turned out to be, which is a dual narrative of war and witchcraft. I did not understand the significance of the war until I kept coming across material relevant to the war in the stuff I was reading, and Uh, I went to look for histories of the war, and I didn't find any um And this was why I didn't anything about it. Was

because there have been no modern histories of it. The most recent history to this day, the most recent history of the war, which is known as King William's War on the North in Frontier, was written by Cotton Mather and published in the sixteen nineties. Was the only comprehensive history that I found, and still there has been not one. So I did not anticipate finding the war to be as important as it turned out to be. And before

there was Philip, yes, there was King Philip's War. And another problem with the literature on King Philip's War until my book was that it's always focused on King Philip's War in the south, that is, southern New England. King Philip's War is thought of as an Indian war in the old Plymouth Colony, uh in Rhode Island, and in parts of southern Massachusetts Bay. But I discovered that there was a northern part of it also, which has been given very short shrift in histories of King philips War.

There is one history of King Philip's War that gives a chapter to the northern part of the war, but the King Philip's War is started in the sixteen seventies and um the leader of the Indians was King Philip Um, a Wampanoag chief who was very concerned about English encroachments on his land and very concerned about missionizing activities of the Christians in his lands. Um and he led his warriors in raids, very devastating raids on New England communities.

But the war um leaked over, I think we can say, into the north. The Indians in the north, the Wabanakis did not particularly want to get involved in it, but they basically were forced to because of pressure from the Wampanoag's in the south and from the English settlers who didn't trust them because of what was happening in the South. And in fact, the English treated them extremely badly in King Philip's war, Um did all kinds of things that you can only call the furious um to them. And

so they did become involved. And so the Indian War then became in the sixteen seventies, became general. Um. It was finally came to an end in more or less with a truce in sixteen seventy eight. And UH they it was devastating to the English who had settled in Maine and New Hampshire. Uh, they had abandoned their communities in that period they moved back in um and then the Second War started in sixteen eighty eight and it all happened all over again. It was devastating. It was

devastating war. UM. We don't think of Maine as a very um well, we don't think of Maine is a frontier. We don't think of Maine as a prosperous area. But in fact, Maine in the sixteen seventies and sixteen nineties was really where the action was as far as um profit to be made in New England. In Boston, people had bought land, they had set up sawmills. Boston had a very vigorous ship building industry that the sawmills in Maine were providing the labor the time, the timber for

the um. The There was a big business of masts of the very well built, very well developed pines which were perfect for ships masts in in Maine. And so these people who owned this property in Maine were making money handover fest and they also were fishing off the coast uh and so there was a lot of money to be made in Maine. And basically the Indian Wars devastated the economy of Maine and Maine in a lot of ways never really recovered. Um. People didn't come back

until the seventeen twenties. And when they did, UM the um a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone. So it was really very bad. How did those same things in the economic wars that were occurring because of these wars, how did that affect the town sae Um? Well, what happened was, um all the people who had been settling in Maine had to go somewhere they if they weren't killed,

and so they filtered down into Massachusetts. They filtered down, especially into Essex County, which is the northernmost county of Massachusetts, the northeastern most county, and so a lot of the people came to live in marble Head, or came to live in Salem, or came indeed to live in Salem Village uh and Um in particular. One of the things

that I discovered. I didn't discover it, I learned it in other people's work, but that I've pursued to a greater extent than other people did was how many of the young female accusers were in fact refugees from the main frontier, where people whose families had been killed, even though they had survived, and they had come to um to Salem, or to the area of Salem, and we're living as servants or living with their families that were only shall we say partial families because people in the

family had been killed. So UM. I argue in the book that one of the reasons why these women were so um conflicted shall we say um, was that we could, in a modern sense say they say that they were suffering from PTSD, that they had suffered such trauma on the frontier as young people, that they acted out in in ways that helped to further, if not begin, the

Salem Crisis. I was very fortunate to be able to find very scattered records biographical information about the youthful experiences of three of the young women, very explicit information about what they've gone through as young children, and that was very helpful to my making my argument. Uh where I find it. I found it and actually was mostly published but in sort of obscure places, um, in compilations of documents that were done in the nineteenth century. Until I

wrote my book, nobody was focusing on it. Until I wrote my book, nobody really focused on the war it was listed. If you read most other books about Salem, there'll be a first chapter, and the first chapter will say sort of underlying factors behind um Salem witchcraft, and one of them will be problems of the governance of the colony, and then there'll be other issues, but one of them will also be UM the Indian War, and

it will get a few pages. UM. But the Indian War came to dominate my narrative because I think it dominated the lives of people then, and the way I said earlier, I I didn't um expect it um. But what happened was I decided to do something in my research that other people hadn't done, which was to look for letters written by anybody in the sixteen nineties, hoping that I would find comments about Salem witchcraft about which is. I was hoping I would find comments about what people

thought about which is. It turned out there's only one really good set of letters that talks about witches, and it's in't Dutch, so I had to rely on somebody else's translation of those. But what I did so I was very disappointed because I got these letters that would say things like five witches hanged yesterday, But then they wouldn't say anything about what they thought about that fact. But what happened was, Um, they were not telling me

about the witches. They were telling me about the Indian Wars. The letters that didn't tell me about witchcraft told me all this stuff about the Indian War. You know, my cousin tells me from Maine that thusn't such as happening, or I hear from New Hampshire that thusn't such as happened. And it's suddenly the penny dropped that that was what was really crucial, that was what was controlling people. So I um added a whole lot of stuff about the Indian War to what was my previous idea of thinking

about Salem witchcraft. Let's take it and boil it down into maybe an individual and try and just imagine what it would be like for a single human being living in one of these colonies. What kinds of horrors have

they or their their family? Right? Well, one of the people that I talk a lot about in the book is Mercy Lewis, who was a servant in Um the home of Thomas Putnam, which is a crucial family for the witchcraft crisis because his young daughter and Putnam Jr. Was one of the first children who accused people, and Mercy Lewis, I was able to discover, was from a family that had lived in what was then called Falmouth, Maine is now called Portland, UM for a number of

years um And I discovered that basically most of her family except for her parents were wiped out in the First Indian War in King Philip's War, and then the ones who weren't killed in the First Indian War were mostly killed in the Second Indian War. She and her sister alone were left. Her sister married someone in Salem Village, UM in the late sixteen eighties, as I remember correctly, and that seemed to me why Mercy Lewis eventually made

her way to that area. She also crucially was a servant for a while in the home of the Reverend George Burrows, who is a crucial figure in my book and who is someone who ties Salem Village together with um Ti, Salem Village together with um Uh the main Frontier, because he worked both places. He was both a minister in Salem Village and a minister on the main Frontier and um he um and she lived with him for a while and she became one of his key accusers, and so did Ann Putnam Jr. Become one of his

key accusers. So I like to say when I give talks about Salem witchcraft, that I have spectral a spectral vision of my own, and that my spectral vision is of um uh and Putnam Jr. As the daughter of this family, and Mercy Lewis as the servant sharing a bed in what we've been called the chamber, that is an upper room above the main and floor Uh And basically Mercy Lewis filling and Putnam Junior's head full of

stories of the Indian War. And we see in An Putnham juniors accusations in sixt details about things that happened in Maine and details about George Burrows that you don't see in, for example, the accusations of Abigail Williams, who is the niece of the Reverend William Paris, whether Samuel Paris in um in Salem village. That to me was very telling. It told me that Ann Putnam Jr. Had

information about Maine. The only person she could have gotten that information from was Mercy Lewis, who was a servant in the household So let's talk about power within the colonies and how it ended up being subverted throughout this crisis.

How about consolidated? I mean, what again, I'm fond of saying two people when I'm trying to explain what the power structure of the colony was like at the time of the Witchcraft crisis, I am fond of saying the following that making the following analogy that would be though in the US today the joint chiefs of Staff were also the president's cabinet and also the judges of the Supreme Court, because that's the power structure of Massachusetts at

the time. The same men were the judges in the trials and the chief advisers of the governor, and the men who led the local militia in the Indian War. So you talk about consolidation of power there, it is absolutely So We've got the power dynamics of the men who are there filling all these rules, the same guys. Right, Let's just go over the gender dynamics. So we have powerful are the women, Well, the women are of different status, is um. There are the women who are married to

those powerful men, and they are known as mistress. They have a title um, and so they have a certain status in the community. They don't play much of a role in the in the Salem crisis. We don't know much about them. We know about a few of them, Um asked Tad Baker about the wife of the governor, for example. Um. They we know about some of them. But mostly we have ordinary women who are known as good wives or goody and we have young women who

are children. In the case of the three beginning accusers, Abigail Williams and Um, Um, come on, I'm now I'm blanking um. Abigail Williams and um and Putnam Jr. And Paris's daughter. Those are the children, and they're always called the children, and they're always separ rated by as far as other people are concerned, from the somewhat older accusers. Then you have the group of accusers who are the teenagers and twenty somethings, many of whom are servants, but

not all of whom are servants. And then you have the older women, um, the good wives, the women of some stature in the community, mostly in their thirties. A couple who are older who play roles as accusers. And one of the arguments that I make in the book is that when it the children's accusations are not it's not that they're not taken seriously, it's that they don't lead to politically, they don't lead to judicial um uh, they don't lead to judicial activity until somewhat older women

and girls way in. There was a rule at the time in English law that it was more it was a common law rule. I don't think it was written down anywhere that if you're that the evidence of someone under fourteen would not be acceptable in a UM in a capital case, and so the because witchcraft, of course was a capital crime. And so I think that it that in the beginning, they the authorities in Massachusetts waited

in effect for older people to weigh in. And what seems to have been especially important was when women in their thirties also became accusers. When Um and Putnam Senior became an accuser, When Sarah Viber became an accuser, even though she was not a woman of particular standing in the community, my student discovered that she appeared in more prosecutions than anyone else UM, and so it was clear that a woman of that standing UM, who was seen as more mature, was more believable as far as the

judges were concerned. I might add that the young woman um Oh among the accusers Susannah Sheldon, who seemed to be the craziest and she seemed to give the weirdest um accusations. If you read her statements to the court, they're very strange. She is herself a refugee from the main frontier, living with her mother. Her father is dead um and her older brother seems to have been killed in the Indian War uh. And she is often cited as an important accuser, but if you look at the

legal records, she hardly ever appeared in a case. She doesn't They don't let her swear to the truth of something because I think they don't trust her. They only let people swear to the truth of something if they trust them, and I don't think they trust Susanna Sheldon. She is nuts and they seem to recognize that she's nuts. They don't say that anywhere. But so I think people who have not paid attention to the way these testimonies are used in court miss out on a number of

aspects of the trial. And I will say that of the trials, and I will say that the new addition of the papers done by the international team under the direction of Bernard Rosenthal has really helped us in this regard because they give us all the legal notations on the documents that in fact sometimes we're missing from the previous addition that we had to work with, which was based on w p A transcripts done in the nineteen thirties. So the recent edition has really helped us with understanding

the legal process and how it was pursued. But back to your question about the UM, the believability or about the roles of these younger women UM. One of the things I discovered from my previous book UM called Founding Mothers and Fathers, which is about UM seventeenth century society in general and compares what happens in New England to what happens in in the Chesapeake. One of the things I discovered from that was that young women tended to

be disbelieved when they spoken court. So to me, when I looked at the Salem records for the first time, one of the things I was particularly interested in figuring out was why were these young women believed, because the

young women in the past were usually not believed. And of course my answer was the Indian war because the consolidation of the power um by the in the hands of the judges UM and the who were also the leaders of the war, meant that they basically wanted an explanation for why they were losing the war, and they

were losing the war because of witchcraft. Qwi D. Let's get into how faith shades everything that occurred throughout this faith in what faith in witches, belief in witches everybody believes in witches greater or something a bit mystical, and how the Puritan faiths specifically shaped a lot of this well.

UM Actually, Um, a lot of people in Maine were not Puritans, and so we don't know that much about what the refugees thought, the people who came down into Salem in Salem Village, because Maine was settled not by Puritans, but for the most part by members of the Church of England, one of whom was my very own ancestor. But that's another story, and so UM, the it's really hard to know the Uh. Certainly Cotton Mother, who becomes a great defender of the trials, is one of the

leading young clerics of the colony. His father Increase is gone in England for the previous several years. He's in England negotiating for a new charter for the colony. Comes back with a new governor, arriving in May, by which point the witchcraft crisis is well underway. There's lots of accusations by then. So UM, certainly Samuel Parris uh is a believer in UM a very harsh version of Puritanism. He's known for his UM, very what we'd say today,

hard line sermons. Uh. He was having a big dispute with members of the congregation and members of this town in Salem Village. They were happy with him. They were withholding his salary, they were withholding firewood. He was not happy and uh, so he started giving UM more and more angry sermons. Everybody had to attend. It was part of the law. Everybody had to attend church services, where they were church members or not. So everybody was hearing

Samuel Paris rant and rave. And we're lucky that we have transcripts that have been published of many of those sermons, so we have an idea of what he was saying. So yeah, I mean Puritanism was important to all these people, UM, and they were the faith was significant, and that faith included a belief in the existence of witches. In England at the time there was beginning to be skepticism about

belief in witchcraft, but not in America, not really. Even when the witchcraft crisis came to an end, it wasn't because people did not believe in witchcraft. It was because they came to believe that you couldn't prove someone was a which in court legally, that was why they stopped.

And we have a letter that has survived from um a magistrate in northern Essex County who who wrote a letter to a judge who was a friend of his and basically laid out, shall we say, the Puritan case for why you can't convict a which on spectral testimony, And basically his argument was like follows went as follows, um, spectral testimony must come from the devil, because God would never tell us what's going to happen in the future.

When God does not speak to us this way, we all know that, so it has to come from the devil. And if you are convicting these people on spectral test on spectral evidence, you are convicting them on the testimony of the devil. And we all know, you can't trust the devil, and so that's really why they stopped the trials. That worked. That worked. It didn't stop the trials, I should say, I should stop that, because indeed they did continue the trials after the dissolution of the of the

special court. They did um get um. They did in fact have three further convictions of people who had confessed, but all those people were had their convictions in effect overturned um. And in the regular courts they did not allow spectral evidence. This is the trials that occurred in January of sixte and UM. So there were no executions after late September of six and those were the last executions that were based on spectral evidence. In part I

hastened to add there was always other evidence too. There was no one he was convicted solely on spectral evidence. Uh. There were the what we would call the usual kinds of evidence of witchcraft, which is neighbors accusing someone of doing um witchcraft against him from from the proceedings that had happened prior to that. The only thing that's different about an oyer in terminal court is it's a special court, as a court established by the governor for a special reason.

There had been a previous oyer and terminal court in New York to try the people who had been involved in a revolt in New York. It was basically the same model. There was nothing different. Particularly, Um, nobody, I should say it was a lawyer. Um, there were no lawyers involved in this except for the first prosecutor. He was a trained English lawyer. Everybody else was not a lawyer. Um. They but they were experienced magistrates. They had served as

justice as the piece for years. They had heard many small cases. They had even sometimes sat in capital cases previously. There were some pirates who were convicted and hanged previously in New England. So basically, um uh, it's not as though these are not experienced people in judicial procedures. But none of them were trained lawyers. They did have law books. We know that there was a bookstore in Boston that had law books that they bought and that they read.

So we know they were self educated. Shall we say about how they should handle things? Um, But a lot of things about the trials we don't know. For example, we know there were nine judges. We know they were supposed to be five at any one trial, and that at least two of those five had to be particular people, but we don't know about anything else. We don't know how many of those people actually sat in the in

the trials. We don't know who sat in particular trials, except we're sure that the chief judge, William Stowton, who was the Lieutenant governor of the colony, we know he was there pretty much all the time. We're sure he was there all the time. Other than that, we don't know. We don't know who was on the jury. We on the juries. We don't know if there were more than well, we think there was more than one jury, but we don't know how many people actually served. We don't know

if there were different juries for different trials. We do know that George Burrows challenged jurors in his trial and so new jurors had to be seated, but that's it. We don't know if the people who were the jurors before in the trials before Burrows were all the same guys. Was it the same people again? And again we don't know that. Um. We know that there was a second grand jury impaneled later in the system, because we've seen

the the call for the new grand jury. But again we don't know was the first grand did the first grand jury sit throughout the entire early period of the trials. We have no idea. Those records are all gone. So even though we have a lot of records that survived,

there's many procedural things we don't know. And probably the best procedural infidence we have is the notations on some of the documents by the court color Um and he Um he made uh notations about whether something was sworn before the grand jury, whether it was sworn in court itself, And so sometimes you get documents where they say sworn in before the grand jury and nothing else, And then there's other documents that say sworn in court and nothing else.

And sometimes you get things that are said sworn and we were the grand jury and sworn in court, But you don't know what the missing evidence means. And sometimes he even wrote a note on something which said, sometimes people just gave their testimony orally, and I didn't write it down. So we have one note that says that,

So who knows? Um Actually, sort of ironically, the best evidence we have about the conduct of the trials comes from Cotton Mathers account of five of the trials, written to defend the trials themselves written to defend the verdicts in his book, and he wonders of the invisible world, and he gives us kind of blow by blow descriptions

of what happened in the various trials. And so we can see in some of those cases that we have the evidence of the testimony that he talks about, but in other cases we don't have the evidence of the

testimony that he talks about. I think I and everybody else sort of assumes that he's telling the truth when he tells you that this is the testimony that's given in those cases, because there were too many people who were there and who could have said, no, no, you're a liar cotton mother if you're telling telling us things that didn't actually happen in the court room. And so we think that he did, in fact work off of

records that are now lost. He got those records from the court clerk, from Steven Sewell, who was the court clerk. And you know, we know that because he thanks Steven Sewell for he asked Steven Sewell for those records, and he thanks Steven so for those records. So um, there we can pretty much believe them, because in fact, when we do have the written testimony that he describes, it's accurate. I mean, he describes it accurately, So we just sort

of have to make certain assumptions. But he doesn't tell us how many judges were there or or things like that. So um, but he does tell us that the accusers came in. He does tell us that confessors came in and so forth, so we do have that information from him. Now Here there are so many ideas of what a which could be, but in there is an idea of what a which is. Essentially that's commonly shared with a

lot of people. Can you describe what in or before there were basically which was basically believed to be someone who had some kind of access to a cult information and powers and that. But there were a disagreement about that because there were some people who thought that that had to mean that they were in touch with the devil. There were other people who thought, no, no, there were what you might call today a white witch or a useful witch who could for example, tell your fortune. Um,

that was someone who had some mystical power. Um. The the ministers would say that that meant the person had to be in touch with the devil, because that God would never tell you what's the future, was that the devil might. And so any fortune teller, as far as the ministers were concerned, was a witch as far as local people were concerned. That isn't true. Uh, Well, a witch who could tell the future or a fortune teller,

it was not necessarily an evil person. Was someone who could just help you or could give you a potion. If you were in love with someone who wasn't in love with you, you could get a spell to help you, um, make that person fall in love with you. Or if you wanted to know what had happened to your husband who was had been at sea for years, was he going to come home? The which or the fortune teller

could tell you that sort of thing. In fact, there's one of the women who's accused of witchcraft in s who seems to have specialized in telling women that their husbands were never going to come home, that they were widows. Um. She seems to have liked to have given them bad news. So um, there's that kind of witchcraft. And then there's the kind of witchcraft where a witch is seen as being evil and uh seeking to do bad things to people. She doesn't like. It's almost always a woman, not entirely.

It can be a man, and the as far as the local people are concerned, as a woman, as far as the ministers are concerned, it could be a man. I should add that. And that would be if you get in trouble with somebody and they have and and let's say you have an argument with your neighbor. Um. Your neighbor's cows got into your cornfield. You're really mad. You go and have a conversation. More than a conversation.

You yell at your neighbor. And it's an older woman, and she says, I'll get you, because you know it was the problem was the fence around your corn It wasn't my cows. If you'd had a better fence, this wouldn't have happened. And so some kind of disagreement occurs um within the neighborhood um. And that's where a lot

of witchcraft accusations come from. There's actually a very excellent book about witchcraft, mostly in Europe to a certain extent in America called Witches and Neighbors, and it's about the by guy named Robin Briggs, who's a British historian and he makes a very strong case that a lot of these witchcraft cases involve disputes among neighbors. Kind of standard

common disputes among neighbors. But let's say, Um, that dispute about the cows in the cornfield happened, and then three days later, UM, you who have been cursed out by the supposed witch, that is, by your neighbor, you start to have some other kind of a problem, like one of your cows breaks its leg and you have to kill it or um, or your beer goes sour, or the milk won't churn properly into butter, or something like that.

And then you begin to think to yourself, I wonder if that neighbor bewitched my cow, or bewitched me, or bewitched my my child, if my child is sick, or something like that. So that's the kind of thing that happens. And I might say that witchcraft is very much becomes a default explanation for things that are inexplicable otherwise, UM, for sudden illnesses. UM. Human beings always like to have causes for things. It's why I think we have so

many conspiracy theories these days. There has to be something important that happened, happens to cause something important, and so there has to be a conspiracy. Well, that's the same kind of thing about witchcraft. You have to have some reason for something bad happening, and so you attribute it to a witch. And that's basically the seventeenth century exploit

nation for things. That makes so much sense to me than why the doctor ends up being a person who goes in and we'll say, oh, there's some witchcraft reckring here because it's outside of his understanding. Yeah, the doctor who well, he wasn't a trained doctor. He was just a local guy who seemed to know something about medicine, Doctor Briggs, Dr Griggs. Rather, doctor Griggs seemed to know something about medicine. And in fact he's really not a

very lettered guy. I discovered that he signed an important legal document with an X. I mean, it's not even clear the guy's literate. Um, but he is the local doctor. He is the equivalent of the local doctor in Salem village, and so um, Yes, when he can't diagnose the little girls as to what's wrong with them, he the default is it's it's witchcraft. But of course they don't immediately

turn to the legal process. And I think that's something we don't understand today, because there was a legal there was a process for dealing religiously with which after accusations and basically the first thing that happens is that Samuel Paris calls in neighboring ministers to pray and fast over these girls, and that's supposed to solve the problem, and

they go. That goes on for some weeks. We don't know for sure how long, but it seems to be about a month that um, that this happens before and before they decide they're not going to deal with it religiously, they're going to have to deal with it legally. Market care of your son's were tortured? Yes, how was torture used in these That's the only time we know that there was any evidence or any statement about physical torture being used. We know that, um, eventually sleeplessness was used

and um, harsh words shall we say. But the only time that torture is a edged is with the sons of Martha Carrier, and they were tied neck and heels, as it was said, which was in fact a punishment. It wasn't necessarily thought of as torture at the time. So um, the question of why people confessed has always

been something that people have been wondering about. But when it became clear, as it became clear later in the trials that if you confessed you would be kept alive so you could testify against other people, is when more and more people started to confess. Um. And one of the things I noticed was that when adults confessed late in the sequence of the trials, they accused only people who were already dead, who had already been hanged, or they accused people who had been accused by other people.

They did not name new people. It seemed clear to me that it was very strategic when they confessed. They did not want to hurt anyone who wasn't already um hanged or already had been accused of others. However, children didn't do that, and a lot of their later confessors were children or very young teenagers. And they're the ones who just seems to have thrown names around with great abandoned and they're the ones who led to many of the later accusations was confessions by children. And this, of

course was in and over. That's where people were confessing was in andover. It's very interesting. Um, it's a completely different pattern in Andover than you get in Salem Village. Salem Village, people accused their enemies. In and Over people accused their friends and their relatives. Um, there's this one family where five sisters and the mother all confessed and basically accuse each other and say they're all working together. Um. So it's just it's Um, it's a very different pattern.

And I know there's someone now working on and Over, and I hope that that person can explain the pattern in and Over, because I certainly had no particularly good explanation for it. Did the differences in the patterns in and Over effect how the rest of the trials went in Salem? Did lead to changes in how the trials were conducted. Most of the Andover confessions came very late in the day. Um. They the Andover confessions didn't start until the fifte July, and at that point there were

only the August and September trial sessions left. So UM, it didn't have that much of an effect. I mean, the confessors did come in, it wasn't. The confessors were important in the lay her phases of the trials, but not all of them were from Andover So Um, not all the confessors who came in were from Andover, So I don't I wouldn't say that there was any big difference made by it. I guess the Andover face is Later there was a thought that perhaps witchcraft were in

in the family in a way or was passed down. Uh. Pregnancy was an excuse in England. It was. It was in English law. Um. It was called pleading your belly. When a woman was accused of a with a woman was convicted of a capital offense, she could, as they said, plead her belly and if she was pregnant, if the midwives confirmed that she was pregnant, then she wasn't hanged

until after she gave birth. And in this case, Um Elizabeth Procter, the fact that she was pregnant saved her because by the time she gave birth the executions had ended, so it'd saved her. Um a fortuitous pregnancy. But that was um. That was the standard English practice was you could plead your belly. Um. There were female pirates who pleaded their bellies and were not executed as a result,

at least not until after they gave birth. So it was it was nothing unusual but you're right that it was thought that witchcraft could run in the family, and it wasn't just um blood. It could also be someone in the same household. So someone who's um a servant whose mistress was accused of being a witch might necessarily might come under suspicion or vice versa. If a servant was accused of being a witch or thought to be

a witch, was the mistress come under suspicion? That seemed to have happened with one of the three um enslaved Africans who's accused in Salem, That the mistress came under suspicion because the servant was accused, and so um or friends women who were close friends. If a woman was a close friend with someone who was thought to be a witch, that also was a suspicious circumstance and might lead one to at least come under some cloud of suspicion.

Let's talk about Brows and Carrier being called the King and Queen of Hell. Well, what's really interesting is that Martha Carrier is first called the Queen of Hell by a confessor. Burrows becomes the figured as the leader of the witches thanks to the confessors um but also because of the original accusations by and Putnam during Junior and Mercy Lewis. Um Burrows is the right person to be the leader of the Witches because he's a minister, and

because he's a kind of a weird minister. That is, he's never been ordained, um, he's been educated at Harvard, and because there's all kinds of us about him, which I explore in my book. He's he has a very peculiar relationship with his wives. It's hard to know a lot about the details, but he seems to have been quite brutal and quite an aggressive husband. Uh. He at least is accused of um beating them UM or at

least being very controlling of them. Uh. He wants them to quote keep his secrets, and so the question becomes, what are those secrets he wants them to keep. Um. There are all kinds of rumors that swirl around him. At his trial. There's testimony that he has unusual strength, which is based on his own boasting about his strength. So it comes back to haunt him. Uh. He is someone who is very mysterious, and I would have loved

to have found out more about him. I did everything I could to find out what I could, But um, he is a mysterious guy. Um he's said to have prominent relatives in England. I never tracked that down, so I don't know. But he is someone who aroused a lot of comment. Um, who had a parlous relationship with Salem Village when he was the minister in Salem Village. He seems to have been much more popular when he was a minister in Falmouth, Maine. That is, um he

was there before King Phillips floor. He then left and they wanted him to come back, which he did so he um he did. He was treated better in Maine. He certainly was more highly regarded in Maine than he was in Salem Village. Perhaps it was because he was educated. There weren't a lot of educated people in the main frontier, and they may have like the fact that he was a Harvard graduate, even if he wasn't an ordained minister.

There does seem to have been some kind of a a debate about where he would be, whether he would be in Falmouth or maybe in black Point. There was some attempt to attract him someplace else to black Point as a minister. So um he had a different standing on the frontier than he had in Salem village. Was it significant that he was able to recite the Lord's prayer? It was believed that a witch could not accurately recite

the Lord's prayer. And indeed that was a test that was tried on some other people and who could not do it some of the accused. Um, I was tried on John Willard and he couldn't do it. So when George Burrows at the gallows recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly,

the account says. The eyewitness account says that he that there was a murmur in the crowd and that they thought that he could not be a witch until Cotton Mother came up on horseback and said, no, no, a witch can do what he did, So then they hanged him. Um that's one time at which Cotton Mother is said Jof had a real definite impact on the trials himself, as opposed to just writing about it. That's one of the most well known events that occurs. Another one is

the pressing death of Giles Corey Right. How unusual was that act within the context of the rest of the civilization to that point, Um, it was extremely unusual in the context of New England. Never was done at anybody else that we know of. And um, we don't even know why they did it. Um. It was a traditional medieval English punishment to force someone to enter a plea. But you have to understand, although we say it was because Giles Corey didn't ender a plea, he did actually

say he was not guilty. He did say that we would say that was entering a plea. But he had to answer a second ritual question. And the second ritual question was and how will you be tried? And he was supposed to say, by God in my country, and he refused to say that. And that's why they decided

to um use this traditional English punishment. How they came up with that is not known, um, And who basically decided it is not known, but probably was William Stowton, who was a very hardline guy, uh, who was the chief Justice and the Lieutenant governor. But Giles Corey was not a nice man. I mean he has this in in um. He becomes kind of a hero in um um Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, But um, he had beaten a servant to death a few some years earlier.

He was not a nice guy. And so it thought he was just being his old, irascible, nasty self when he refused to cooperate with the court. How significant was Increased either in the ending of this trinals Well, it's really hard to know. We don't have a lot of infant evidence about how all the trials ended. We have very sparse efidence. In fact, we have Samuel Sewell's diary that tells us about certain things that very briefly, that were said in um meetings of the council, um said

by the Governor, by William Phipps, um. And we have some pamphlets, and it's certainly true that Increase Mather wrote a pamphlet that raised some questions. But Increase Mather also explicitly said that he agreed with his son Cotton, and Cotton wrote this this not just a pamphlet, a book wanders of the invisible world, defending the trials. And even though Increased Mather says um in his in his it's more than a pamphlet. It's it's not but it's not

a book. I don't know how to describe it. Even though he says in his treatise that you have to be very careful about these trials. He still says he would have convicted George Burrows, so it's not as though he's a complete opponent of the trials, nor is god Samuel Willard, who also writes about the trials at the time, and who's whose publication when it appears, is said to have

have been published in Philadelphia when it clearly wasn't. It was published in Boston, who had fake publication information on the title page, because Phipps had basically said no publications about about the trials to try to keep the debate down. So it's it's just really hard to know exactly what happened,

except we do know. We can't say that public opinion did seem to turn against the trials, and they did seem to turn against the trials after the second set of accusations, after the accusation, after the sorry, after the second set of trials and executions, and the executions on the two September UM opinion seems to have turned pretty

strongly against the trials after that. And I would speculate that it's because those people were hanged with a lot less evidence than people had been hanged with before those trials were rushed um, and they did seem to be rushed to judgment and those trials, and so I think that's one of the things that led to deep concerns among people among what we say thinking people in Boston,

U and in Salem. That caused an uproar. And then in addition, in October, when Increase Mather goes to the prison in Salem to talk to a group of women who had confessed and they all take it back, and that too, I think was important, and that was about the middle of October's that was about three weeks after

the last set of executions. Um, when they take it back and they talk about how they were basically convinced, 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. So UM, 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 Your in terminal, that the rules had to change, and that spectral evidence could not be allowed. When the trials continued in January

under the regular courts. I might add that, of course, throughout this entire period, there was no regular court system until the Massachusett Its Assembly could meet in the fall under the new charter, and they could have passed a law to establish a court system, which then held the trials in January and in May um But the only court going was the Court of Orio and Terminer until

until the legislature met and adopted that law. Let's oh dear, that's way back well if since Samuel Parris rejected the Halfway Covenant, what it meant was that people who had been baptized as children but who could not satisfy the church with testimony that they had achieved saving faith, that they had experienced saving faith, that they were not allowed to be members of the church. They had to attend church services, but they were not allowed to be the

official members of the church. The Halfway Covenant allowed people who had been baptized as children but had not yet experienced saving faith two in effect, be members of the church, to be under the church's supervision and to have communion, and to have their babies baptized. Samuel Paris, by taking a hard line on the Halfway Covenant, meant that people in Salem village who had been baptized as children could

not be halfway members. And therefore, for example, when the church had communion, which they did once a month, they had to get up and leave. They could not stay and this really divided the congregation in dramatic ways. UM. And it meant that people could not have their babies baptized, which was a very important thing when there was heavy infant mortality. You want to have your baby baptized, um at a time when um of children died statistic before

the age of one. Can we talk about captivity narratives, well, captivity narratives were published accounts by people of their captivities by Indians, and of course the best known one was that of Mary Rowlinson from King Philip's War, and she was in fact a captive of Weetamu, who was an associate of King Philip. That was published at the time.

Many of the things we now call captivity narratives are published later, So it's not so much narratives are captivity narratives as it is the experience of the captives themselves and how that's those stories would have spread through the community. So it's not so much the publications except for Mary Rowlinson, as it is the actual experience of captivity and how

people would have talked about it. Um. And one of the things I talked about in my book is the accounts that were well known of people who had been captured in the in in King Philip's War UM and had experienced various um trials and tribulations shall we say, and indeed atrocities what we would call atrocities um committed by the native people on them, especially if they tried to escape um so um and how that seems to have been in the minds of people in in Essex County,

in visions of someone being roasted over a fire for example, or um uh visions or accounts of people who tried to escape from their Indian captors as they were trekking north to Canada after captivity, being being tomahawked in the head something like that. Um. So we know those stories were spread around, that they were published or not. It was definitely definitely in people's minds. And one of the things that struck me as I was reading the material

was how present the Indian War was in people's minds. Um. One of the accused people UM Sarah Osborne talks about having nightmares of Indians and one of the women who confessed, Mary toothacre Um talks about Um how she confessed because Um the devil came to her in the shape of an Indian and told her that he would save that if she became a witch, he would save her from the Indians. And since he came to her in the shape of an Indian, she believed him and so she confessed,

and she actually never took it back. What's interesting is that she Um was in jay all she was from bill Rica and she was in jail in Salem when the Indians attacked her neighborhood in bill Rica and killed her closest neighbor. She was in jail confessing to being a witch at the instigation of the devil in the shape of an Indian, and she never took it back. She literally never took it back. Her wife was saved

by being by confessing to be a witch. She would have been killed if she had been in bell Rica that weekend, and instead she was in Salem in jail. But then she was killed several years later in another Indian raid. And bill Rick is only twenty miles from Salem. And that just shows you how close the war was to what was going on. That's the big question. How widespread is the war? Well, as I said, it's about

twenty bill Rick is only twenty miles away. Now, that was the closest attack that I know of to Salem. But remember all these people had relatives in Maine and New Hampshire, and people in Maine and New Hampshire were constantly under threat, UM. Even in the WHOA in the most southern parts of Maine and New Hampshire. In UM what's now Portsmouth which was then called Strawberry Bank, what was wells Main, there were attacks nearby UM all the time, UM,

and they were UM. People felt under constant threat, shall we say. UM. So the attack in bill Rico was the closest, but eventually later in the war, actually after, there was a big attack on ian over UM. So it's not as though the war wasn't right there. And of course remember these are the men, are militiamen, and they're going out to fight. So all the above, So

how was military service treated at that time? UM. Military service was an obligation of UM all men between the ages of sixteen and fifty and Uh, they were supposed to keep muskets at the ready and have ammunition. Everybody supposed to have their own gun and their own ammunition, and they were to be there to be called on

when they were needed. And so um. A lot of times the men were indeed called up in both King Philip's War and King William's War to go up to the frontier, to go north to the frontier and to fight. And there are some um, very detailed accounts that have survived to us of some of the battles that occurred,

especially around Black Point in southern Maine. So there's there's a pretty definite fear that exists in the colonies at the time of the indigenous neighbors that not far How were they written about within the community, they're written about you, and it varies because, of course, for years they had had relatively peaceful relationships with them. It wasn't as though this was a constant warfare. I mean until the sixteen seventies, there was a lot of trading going on, a lot

of back and forth, um um travel and so forth. Um. They're written about very matter of fact. We actually they're not written about is as um like savage as we don't understand because they didn't know they knew each other. Um. One of the best accounts we have is from the initial attack on Falmouth in UM six in the sixty five and basically, UM, a Wabanaki who is known in the neighborhood comes in and and comes to a farm and says, UM, I know you're missing a cow. I

know who took that cow. I will help you find it. So this is, you know, not a big deal. Then of course what he does is he leads the other people to attack the farm. But that's another matter. UM. But we can see that there's a you know, the arrival of a an Indian on your doorstep is not necessarily um, a frightening event or um. One of the incidents that I talked about in great detail in the book happens in New Hampshire where a group of Indians comes to trade at a trading post, as we say,

they're doing, and then UM, it's a cold night. The women say can we sleep inside the The traders say sure, the women, women sleep inside, But when everybody's asleep, they opened the doors and the men come in and attack. The trader and his men, who are known for years for having for having cheated the Indian. So it's a chance for them to get back at the at the at the traders. So it's um. But you see this sort of pattern of what you might call standard interaction

that has been broken by these wars accused. They escape from jail. Yes, how did that come about? Well, if you pay attention to where they are. Remember, there are a lot of people in jail. Um, they're not just in Salem. The jail in Salem is too small to hold them all. The jail in Salem Town, as we're talking about, there's too small to hold them all. So they've been scattered around other places. And it happens that a lot of the leading people who are used of

being which is are sent to Boston. And I am convinced that the Boston jailer had his hand out for bribes and that it was from the Boston jail that a lot of these people escaped. So um, it's not written down anywhere, but he basically took money to let

people go. I think there's no question, um, in my mind, there's no question my mind that he was He was bribable and probably earned a pretty penny from letting all these wealthy people go, one of them being my very own ancestor, Mary Bradberry, who was held and suddenly managed to escape. Guess what, she had a wealthy husband. So is there any particular reason why they fled over a lot of them to refuge in New York. Well, New

York was seen as a more open society. It was more diverse, There were lots of people are from different places. It wasn't controlled by Puritans. Remember Anne Hutchinson fled to New York too when she was fleeing from the um from the Puritan authorities in first Massachusetts Bay and then ultimately Rhode Island. When she thought they were going to come after her in Rhode Island, she doo fled to New York. So it's not that surprising that they went

to New York. It's the closest place that seems to offer them some kind of refuge. And by the way, these are not the only people who are accused of which is in the seventeenth century who go to New York. There are other recorded cases of similar people. Um. I might add that I went to New York. I went to look at correspondence from the period, and I went looking I was hoping I would find a letter from somebody saying guests who I met at dinner last night,

But I didn't find any such letter. I was hoping I would see some evidence of somebody who had fled from Boston while they were or fled from Boston or Salem or whatever while they were in New York. But I couldn't find a trace of it. Too bad, one of the many things I couldn't find. There were many things I looked for that I couldn't find. Well, we have fips, yes, and he writes his report in October. How does he position himself with regards to the trial.

Phipps is really good at covering his butt. Phipps is a master at not letting on that he knew the 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 been 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. He was true that he was just back from the frontier, but he'd only been on the frontier for two weeks

at that time. And so, and I show in my book that he was meeting with members of the Council who were also the judges, who were also the military leaders regularly throughout the summer. Those minutes are available in the records in England and they show that Phipps was talking to them regularly. So don't tell me they never said anything about the witchcraft trials because that was the biggest thing going on. It's not written down that they

had those conversations, but of course they did. And of course he wanted to get out from under and he did. I mean he he didn't actually because he was recalled and they were going to challenge him. He was he was under a lot of pressure to be challenged in England, and then he died before he could be called before the Privy Council. So it's not as though he completely escaped, but he did. That letter was such a stunning letter to me when I founded, where he basically said, oh

I knew nothing about what was happening. I was gone. It was not true. He knew absolutely is happening. It's a great political move. And Tad Baker to tell you more about that, since he's a biographer of Phipps asked him as well. Okay, so Stonton is seeing that there's a lot of dissent for the especially execution, right, why is he so set on? Stouton is a real hard line guy. I mean, that's all we know. We don't

know a lot about Stoton. Like many other people who were involved in the trials, his papers have not survived and or his personal papers have not survived. What we basically have from Stoughton is some sermons, and recently, by the way, some new and sermons of his have been discovered. But basically we just don't know much about him. Um, he was a bachelor, he never married. Um, he was back and forth to England. He was an ordained minister as well as a judge, and he was a man

of considerable standing in Massachusetts Bake Colony. But um, he we just don't know a lot about him. He did not if he kept personal records, they have not survived, So we just don't know. He's he's a mysterious figure because he is so hardline. He is so hardline. I mean, I know what happened to the papers of the judge Wait Winthrop. I'm convinced I do, because wait Winthrop's papers were purged. I mean, I don't think wait Winthrop purged them, but I think a descendant of his purged them before

he gave them to the Massachusetts Historical Society. We have extensive correspondence from wait Winthrop Um, who was a judge, It was a militia officer, was a member of the council Um. We have extensive evidence of letters from him to his brother fitz John Winthrop in the late sixteen eighties. In sixteen ninety one. There are no surviving letters for sixteen. There are no surviving letters for sixteen, and there are lots of letters for sixteen ninet war, and there are

there thereafter. And so I know, probably not Winthrop himself, but probably the descendant who gave the papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society said m I don't want these letters to survive, and so he threw them in the fire, so we don't have them. It will be lovely to know what way threw. Witrop wrote to his brother about what it was like to be a judge in the witchcraft trials, which is what I was looking for when I went to look at the papers, and I didn't

find them. The only record I ever found from someone who was a judge in a witchcraft trial talking about his reaction to the to an accuser came from Connecticut, not from Massachusetts. Well, and my answer is the Indian the Indian War. I mean, it's the with the fears of the Indian War, because I think the trigger um to making it explode the way it did is the confession of Abigail Hobbs. And Abigail Fobbs was from the Main Frontier. She was a refugee from the Main Frontier.

She was a teenager. She was the third person to confess to being a witch, after Tichiba and Dorcas Dorothy Good, and she um basically said that the devil had recruited her in the woods outside her home in Falmouth, Maine, four years earlier. And she's the one who made the connection to the Main Frontier. She's the one who made the connection to the witches. And as I show in my book, the number of accusations just absolutely exploded after

Abigail Hobbs's confession. So I think that's what made the difference, and that's what convinced me that the Indian War was the crucial thing. Because she was the one who introduced the Indian War into the narrative, and then everything blew up. There have been so many explanations over the years about how and white these illness, these afflictions could. Today people tend to want medical explanations for the kinds of afflictions that we see. Therefore, some people have said epileptic fits.

There's no evidence that there's any epilepsy involved here. Um. Some people have said ergot poisoning. Well, ergot poisoning is maybe possible, but not as possible as people think. And even if it was, it doesn't explain anything of significance because what is significant is not the fact that people had hallucinations. It's what they saw in those hallucinations and how they described what was happening to them. That is that they were being attacked by the specters of witches.

And you can have a hallucination without having that kind of a vision. So I don't see or good. Even if it's possible, um, which I don't, which I think is very unlikely, is a real explain nation. Um. The I researched for my book cases in England and America before sixto, in which young children began to have what were described as fits that were then attributed to witchcraft. And I discovered that it was a not unusual pattern. It was it wasn't as though it was common, but

it was known. It was a known pattern, and it was a pattern when um children were in intensely, intensely religious households, as indeed they were in the household of Samuel Paris. So it does seem to be a kind of a conversion um experience UM after over you know event. And indeed, in the eighteenth century, during the Great Awakening, these kinds of quote fits were interpreted as conversion ext experiences.

In the nineteenth century they were can they were they were um interpreted as hysterical fits on the part of women. In the twentieth century and the twenty one century they're they're um interpreted as medical things, as things that have to do with medicine. I mean, these behaviors are known. They just have different interpretations at different times. And in

the seventeenth century they were the interpretation was witchcraft. UM. It's not as though these are these are totally unknown um events, totally unknown reactions of young women, mostly to different circumstances. So I I think that's what was going on. I mean, why, as I said, I think that the that the the a lot of the basis of the main refugees accusations can be attributed to pts d Um. It seems to me that a couple, at least one of the accusers in Salem Village is faking it. And

that's Sarah vibber Um, the thirtysomething housewife. We could call her the goody vibber who if you look at her, everything she says is sort of me too. She never is the initial accuser of anybody, but when somebody comes forward with an accusation, she'll say, oh, yeah, that happened to me too, that happened to me also, And then she is regarded as a crucial witness by the judges because she is older. Um, we just don't We don't know enough about her background. Um. It would be wonderful

if we could know more about her. We know that she's married to her second husband, but we don't know who her first husband was, and we don't know who her husband's first wife was. It's just really really hard to find out about her. So, but she seems to me to be someone who whose testimony is dubious even in the seventeenth century. Think about today in this country, right now, in the world, right now, we aren't different, but we had the same fears, we had the same anxiety, sure,

I mean right now. I mean, well, if you look in the fifties, there's a fear of communists. I mean, that's what Arthur Miller built the Crucible around, that kind of fear that developed the UM McCarthyite UM atmosphere that he was writing about UM and making the analogy. Today, UM, we see a lot of UM comments about fears of UM, Muslims, Sharia law, and so forth, even though there's no actual evidence that anyone is ever trying to impose Sharia law in the United States. There's UM, a lot of UM.

There are some people out there who believe it, or who least say they believe it. So it's not as though UM, especially in the wake of nine eleven, that we are free from fears of the mysterious unknown. And in the and in the I would say, in the eighties there was the fear of There was the fear of the Satanic rituals in child child care facilities, which in retrospects seems really weird and strange, but led to

the arrest and conviction of a number of people. So uh, and that's been written about in the context of witchcraft. So um scholarship about witchcraft. John Demos did that. So what don't ask you enough about? Oh, dear, I would say that what people don't ask me enough about is actually a topic we've talked to fair amount about, which is about the power structure and about the role of

the judges and the guilt of the judges. Really, I mean, if you people today tend when they think about sale and witchcraft and they think about who's responsible, they blame the young accusers, especially the young quote hysterical female accusers. I don't blame them. I blame the judges who should have been, by modern parlance, the adults in the room. They should have stopped it, and they could have stopped it.

And in Connecticut in the early sixteen sixties, the then governor John Winthrop Jr. Did stop it when there was a movement towards a potential witchcraft crisis where there were ten or twelve accusations and there was the possibility of more. And he basically he was a scientifically minded guy, and he basically put a stop to it. So the judges could have put a stop to this, but they didn't.

And so one of the things I wanted to do with my book was to play the blame where I think it belonged, because it doesn't belong with the quote hysterical girls, which is the way it's usually presented in popular culture, because it didn't have to go the way it went. It didn't have to happen, and the the man who could have stopped it didn't because it was to their benefit not to stop it. Um. So that's

that's I would say what people don't know enough about. Um. The myth that it was the responsibility of the girls really starts right after, right in the wake of the Witchcraft crisis, right in the very first critiques. People who are criticizing the Witchcraft trials do not criticize the judges. They explicitly don't criticize the judges. Increase Mather does not criticize the judges. The other critics, early critics of the trials do not criticize the judges. They criticize the accusers.

And so in sort of in American mythology, it's the US quote hysterical females who are responsible. But that's not right. It's the judges who are responsible. This episode of Unobscured was executive produced by me mav Frederick and Alex Williams, with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams. The Unobscured website has everything you need to get the

most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts, and links to Salem document archives online, as well as a suggested reading list and a page with all of our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show. If you love it, head over to Apple podcasts dot com slash Unobscured and leave a written review and a star rating. It makes a huge difference for the show's growth, and as always, thanks for listening.