December 5, 2018 • 41 mins
Between the examinations and the hangings, it was easy to see the witch trials as a battle fought inside the courtroom. But outside, word was spreading about the injustice of it all, and so the fight was taken to a brand new arena—one that would do far more to change minds than any hanging or spectral testimony.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
When Governor William Phipps arrived in Boston Harbor on September,
he discovered a fire. Not a real fire, mind you,
but a metaphorical one that threatened to burn his colony
to the ground. Nonetheless, yes he knew that there had
been sparks, and yes he knew that there was plenty
of kindling, but somehow I doubt he expected it to
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burn as hot and deadly as it had. He had
left Massachusetts in early August for a trip up the
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
(00:53):
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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was his own wife. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(04:32):
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
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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.
(05:14):
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
(05:34):
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
(35:56):
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
(39:16):
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
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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
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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
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
dot com Until next time, Thanks for listening.
When Governor William Phipps arrived in Boston Harbor on September,
he discovered a fire. Not a real fire, mind you,
but a metaphorical one that threatened to burn his colony
to the ground. Nonetheless, yes he knew that there had
been sparks, and yes he knew that there was plenty
of kindling, but somehow I doubt he expected it to
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burn as hot and deadly as it had. He had
left Massachusetts in early August for a trip up the
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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was his own wife. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(04:32):
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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
(20:09):
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
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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,
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
(24:25):
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
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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
(25:09):
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
(25:31):
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
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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
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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
(26:39):
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
(27:01):
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
(27:24):
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.
(27:45):
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,
(28:07):
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,
(28:28):
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,
(28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:22):
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
(30:44):
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
(31:04):
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
(31:26):
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
(31:47):
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
(32:13):
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
(32:36):
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
(33:00):
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.
(33:26):
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
(33:49):
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
(34:10):
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
(34:31):
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
(34:53):
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
(35:15):
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
(35:35):
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
(35:56):
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
(36:19):
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
(36:39):
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
(37:03):
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.
(37:24):
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
(37:47):
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
(38:10):
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
(38:32):
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
(38:52):
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
(39:16):
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
(39:37):
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
(39:59):
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
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
dot com Until next time, Thanks for listening.
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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