October 10, 2018 • 41 mins
Even though Salem had been without an official charter from England for almost a decade, there was no question that witchcraft was still a crime. The only question left was how to handle them, and the answer would involve pitting a group of outsiders against a few powerful insiders.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
It was hard to nail down one specific reason why
no one could get along. But looking back, it seems
like they were divided along lines that sound eerily familiar
to us today. Conservative and liberal views on religion had
fractured the people, but so had socio economic differences. The wealthier,
(00:34):
more liberal coastal elites of Salem Town, with its busy
ports and growing businesses, sat in direct opposition to the
inland conservatives, who wanted independence and a much more strict
church life. That's an oversimplification of the climate, I know,
but it's still a fair summary of the key differences
(00:55):
according to most historians. And yet, well, if we were
standing in Salem village in we would have been able
to see the true breadth of the differences with our
own eyes. In fact, those differences literally rode into the
village on March one. You see, there was a law
(01:15):
on the books in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that was
known as the Sumptuary Laws. Think of the word sumptuous,
which means splendid or expensive looking, and you'll get the idea.
These were laws that dictated what you could wear depending
on your social status. They acted as a sort of
outward sign of a person's place in a larger society.
(01:38):
Most people were farmers working the land as either indentured
servants or low income settlers. They were allowed to wear
some of the basic colors, such as muted reds and
greens and blues. They wiped their noses on their sleeves
rather than on the handkerchiefs that the wealthy used, and
their clothing was much more functional than formal. So when
(02:00):
John Hawthorne rode into Salem Village that day, even from
a distance, it was clear that he was someone important.
The black clothing, the silver lace and gold buttons on
his coat, the fancy jewelry and beautiful boots, all of
it spoke of a person of privilege and power, to
words that accurately described John Hawthorne. With him was another
(02:25):
well dressed man, Jonathan Corwin. They were making their way
through the village toward a very special destination, the home
of Nathaniel Ingersol. It was a building that served double
duty as the local tavern, what they called an ordinary
back then, and Ingersoll's Ordinary was about to play host
the opening pitch of a very long, very deadly game.
(02:47):
Because Hawthorne and Corwin weren't just two rich visitors out
on a jaunt through the countryside. They were the law
keepers of Salem. The magistrates had arrived. The trials we're
about to begin. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Let's
(03:39):
begin with systems. We talk a lot today about systems
that are breaking down, or how we've stepped outside of
the norm and are experiencing a very unusual kind of life.
It's a common way of seeing the world. When things
feel like they've veered off the typical, well worn path,
we notice it, and as we continue to explore sale them,
(04:00):
we're going to talk more and more about that sort
of thing. But to understand what those deviations meant for
the people of Salem over three d years ago, we
have to understand what was expected and normal. You can't
talk about how the system was breaking down without talking
about the system. It's a lot less sexy than descriptions
(04:20):
of witchcraft or even general criminal activity. But you can't
build a fancy house without a foundation. So here we go.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in the
New World by a royal charter by England's King James,
the first a charter was a powerful piece of paper
because it established significant institutions like universities, organizations, and of course, communities.
(04:47):
They typically served double duty to setting up the colony
in an official capacity while also providing the laws and
rules for governing it. The Royal Charter for the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was shoot in sixteen that's almost sixty five
years before the events in Salem. That means three generations
of people learned to understand, follow, and enforce the laws
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of this new land, and the charter informed all of that.
Even those sumptuary laws I mentioned earlier, the ones that
dictated what clothing people were allowed to wear, came from
that charter. Six years after the charter was established, a
man named William Hawthorne arrived in the New World, first
settling in the area known as Dorchester, which is now
(05:33):
part of Boston's South Side. A year later he was
elected town deputy, but sometime after that he moved his
family north to Salem. By sixteen forty four, he had
ascended to the colonial equivalent of the Massachusetts Speaker of
the House, was the military leader of Salem and served
as magistrate over the people there. He was the man
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responsible for giving land to newcomers in Salem for settling
disputes and levying to x is one other thing about
William Hawthorne, though, despite the fact that his second wife's
mother was a Quaker, he spent a good number of
years persecuting them all over the colony. Here's Salem State
University professor of history Emerson Baker. You see that long
(06:16):
history of Salem, of the quite literally tortured relationship with Quakers.
If you're not one of us, if you're not a Puritan,
then you're against us, and more to the point, that
means you are stopping really the the creation of this
godly community of the city upon the hill. Hawthorne and
his first wife had eight children, four boys and four girls.
(06:36):
His youngest daughter, by the way, would go on to
marry Israel Porter, the man who would later preside over
the execution of Thomas Putnam's estate and award most of
that fortune to the one Putnam who wanted Salem Village
to remain part of Salem Town. His fifth child, born
in sixty one, was John, the man now making his
way toward Nathaniel Ingersoll's ordinary. He had inherited father's love
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of the legal foundations of the colony and After making
a fortune in a merchant business co owned by his father,
he began working his way up the same ladder as
his father had decades before. By two John was fifty,
he was one of Salem's magistrates and a Justice of
the Peace, along with sitting on a number of important committees,
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committees like the one tasked with finding a minister for
the Salem Village Congregation. Thanks to his father's legacy, John
was respected and admired. I think that's equally true of
the other judges as well. Most of them, again are
very experienced and long standing. Most of the members of
the second generation. Again that's Emerson Baker. You also have
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Bartholomew Gidney. He's a second generation merchant. He's a physician.
He's the colonel in charge and command of the Essex
County Militia. You have Jonathan Corwin, who again Haythorns and
Corwin's for for two generations. The fathers served in the
legislature together. They've been family traditions of militia officers. They
had helped make Salem what it was as this bustling,
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shiny seaport. But here's where things go off. The rails
that Royal Charter that was issued in sixteen lasted for
over six decades. But during that time a lot had
happened back home in England. The Civil War had torn
the country apart. King Charles the First was executed in
sixteen forty nine and the monarchy was abolished. Then in
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sixteen sixty it was all restored and Charles the Second
took the throne. It was a time of constant, dramatic upheaval,
and in the midst of all of it was the
fate of England's New World colonies. Many of them weren't
in favor of giving the king ultimate authority over their
own communities, and Massachusetts was the most vocal about that,
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So in sixty four England annulled their charter. So when
I say that context matters, that we have to understand
how things are supposed to work in order to bed
or understand just how broken they were. This is the
stuff I'm talking about. Accusations of witchcraft would have been
handled differently if the charter had still been in place,
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but it wasn't. Salem was an untethered boat in a
stormy sea, which meant that these new rumors of witchcraft
were the worst possible test of their tenuous position. Uncertain
of what to do, the community turned to the only
people they could trust, and the well respected John Hawthorne
was one of them. Salem might have been in political chaos,
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but there was still hope. The magistrates were taking charge.
The process was already off the rails, so to speak,
in the days before the charter had been taken away
from the colony. The process was fairly strict and weighty.
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If you suspected someone of witchcraft, you were accusing them
of a capital crime across I'm punishable by death. Because
of that, the law made sure everyone had serious skin
in the game. Here's Emerson Baker again. Normally you would
have to postpond if you were charging someone with a
felony like that, basically what today would call a nuisance suit,
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or to essentially maybe charge persons for political purposes or
a way to get back at them if the case
wasn't proven, you'd forfeit your bond. That would have been
a substantial inducement to not accuse someone flippantly of a
high crime, right. But when Thomas Putnam Jr. And his
three friends walked to Salem Town the day after the
snowstorm and stood before Hawthorne and Corwin. They did no
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such thing. Sure, they named names and made accusations, but
none of them paid the bond. Despite that, the magistrates
still issued the warrants for three individuals it was unheard of.
Their next steps were simple enough. The three women would
be arrested and then questioned. The judges would conduct the
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examinations one by one to determine if the charges were true,
and they would do all of this publicly. The morning
that Hawthorne and Corwin were traveling to Ingersoll's Ordinary in
Salem Village, they had two constables doing their dirty work.
Think of them as police officers with very limited power
who had been assigned a very specific task gather the
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three women at the center of the accusations and bring
them to Ingersoll's for examination. One of the constables, a
man named George Locker, only really had one person to
bring in that morning, but Sarah Good was a handful
and probably needed all of his energy and attention. I'll
get into more about why that is in a bit,
(11:42):
but what's important to know right now is that Locker
found her and took her into custody. When he did,
though Sarah's husband, William Good, followed along The other Constable,
Joseph Herrick, had more on his list. He needed to
locate two suspects, not one, Sarah Osburne and Tituba, the
(12:03):
slave who lived at the Paris home. He managed to
collect both of them that morning, but as he did so,
he also conducted brief inspections of their homes. He even
recorded the deed on the back of the warrant. Made
diligent search for images and such, he wrote, but can
find none. He also had two other jobs that morning. First,
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he'd been asked to gather the four girls who had
started all of the accusations, Betsy Paris, her cousin, Abigail Williams,
and neighbor girls Annie Putnam and Elizabeth Hubbard. Then, as
if that weren't enough, the magistrates had also asked him
to bring, in their own words, any other person that
can give evidence. Naturally, a crowd was forming by the
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time Locker and Herrick arrived at Ingersoll's Ordinary with their
three suspects. They had a massive entourage and tow Some
had come as part of the official proceedings that were
about to place, but all of them were there to watch.
It was a spectacle unlike anything they had ever seen.
The trouble was Ingersolls was nothing more than a house
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like building, not a stadium. There was no way all
of these people were going to fit inside that humble structure.
Three suspects, two husbands, four accusers, two constables and two magistrates.
That was thirteen people without any other witnesses. So Hawthorne
and Corwin put their heads together and they made a
decision they needed to go elsewhere. Just down the road
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was the new Salem Village meeting House, and while it
wasn't enormous, it was built to hold larger crowds, so
they would have to do inside. It was a wide
open space, roughly thirty four feet by twenty eight ft.
It's no longer standing today. A few buildings from that
era are, to be honest, but it was described as
a barn like structure that was modeled after traditional buildings
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of similar purpose. I made the mistake early on of
thinking of the meeting house purely as a church. And yes,
that's where Samuel Paris preached every Sunday in front of
his congregation, but the building served civic duties as well.
It was exactly what they called it a meeting house.
It was literally a place for meetings, so moving the
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examinations of the three suspects under that roof made a
lot of sense. Speaking of which, not all of the
suspects were brought over at once. In fact, when Hawthorne
and Corwin made the brief trek back out into the
snow and trudged down the road to the larger space,
only Sarah Good followed behind them, watched over by Constable
George Locker. When the meeting began moments later, Sarah Good
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found herself standing alone before the two magistrates as a
packed house watched on. A few people in the room
cared for Sarah Good, including the judges. If she was
expecting to throw herself on the mercy of the court,
she was about to be very to pointed, there would
be no mercy to be found. Sarah Good was the
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very definition of an outsider. Life didn't start out that
way for her. Though her father had been a prosperous
pub owner when she was born in sixteen fifty three.
Trouble began nineteen years later when he passed away and
none of that wealth was bequeathed to her. She was
left completely on her own. Her first husband had been
a farmer, but life was hard for them, and they
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took on more debts than either of them could manage.
When he died a few years later, Sarah was left
to carry the entire burden herself. Her current husband, William Good,
thought he could help, but both of them had become
buried under the weight of it all. By sixte two,
the couple had a four year old daughter named Dorothy
and three month old infants, but not much else. Sarah
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and William had been forced to hand a portion of
their tiny property to debtors, and then had to sell
the rest so that they could support themselves, which meant
that by March of two they were homeless, sleeping in
neighbors barns, and begging for food. Think about it from
Sarah's point of view. She had been born into a
comfortable life, but then all of that had been taken
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away from her, sending her into a downward spiral of
defeat and hopelessness. It's no wonder others in the community
viewed her as bitter and sullen when she walked around town,
grumbling under her breath and generally being mean to everyone else.
She was piste off, and honestly, I can't blame her
after all of that, here she was standing before the
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magistrates in a crowded meeting house on a cold March morning,
and you can't help but wonder if she would have
been there at all, if she had been a little
bit more likable, a little more well off, and a
little more religious. Sarah Good, as far as I can tell,
was thought of as guilty before she stepped through the door,
simply because she didn't fit in Sarah Good, John Hawthorne began,
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what evil spirit have you familiarity with? None, she replied.
The written records can't convey the tone of her voice.
But knowing everything else we do about her and positive,
her answer was dripping with annoyance. Have you made no
contract with the devil? He continued, No, Then, pointing toward
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the four girls who had begun the entire ordeal, Hawthorne continued,
why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them,
she replied. In response, Hawthorne asked the girls to look
at Sarah Good and say whether or not she was
the person who had been tormenting them. They replied that
Good was one of the people responsible. Yes, a moment later,
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all four of them began to convulse and cry out
in pain. For the first time, all of the torment
and despair that had been kept behind the closed doors
of the Paris home was on full display, laid bare
to the eyes of everyone in the galleries. If their
accusations of witchcraft had begun as a private matter, left
to the realms of whispers and rumor, this was the
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moment it transformed. A cat as black and evil as
it was, was finally out of the bag. After the
noise died down, Sarah Good's examination continued. Hawthorne used the
outburst as evidence of witchcraft and asked Sarah Good to
tell the truth, why do you torment these poor children?
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When she shook her head, Hawthorne replied, who was it
then that tormented the children? When she answered, the words
stunned the crowd. It was Sarah Osburne. Sarah Good had
named names. She had taken the net of accusation and
tossed it wider, snagging another woman in it. But before
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the court moved on to speak with Osbourne, who was
waiting for them back at Ingersoll's Ordinary, they brought witness
up to the front of the room to speak to
Sarah Good's character. It was her own husband, William Good.
Here's Jane Kaminsky, a professor of history at Harvard University.
In a place like Massachusetts, where it's an inquisitorial system,
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not an advocacy system, a goal of parent religion and
a goal of jurisprudence is to get to the truth,
not to defend one side against the other. Those are
instances where the charges at hand and the testimony of
neighbors had made people question the behavior of those they
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lived with intimately, and it would have been expected in
the community that they would come forward with their doubts.
There's a unity of husband and wife as a political person,
as an economic person. He had recently told someone else
in town that Sarah and I quote, either was a
witch or would be one very quickly, and they asked
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him to explain what that meant. At first, he tried
to back out of it, claiming that she had treated
him poorly and he was just lashing out at her
for it, but the magistrates continued to press him on it. Eventually,
with tears in his eyes, he turned to them and
explained that his wife was and I quote an enemy
of all Good. That was all the magistrates needed to hear.
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With a gesture from Hawthorne, Constable George Locker moved in
from the side of the room and took Sarah Good's arm.
He guided her toward the door and then out into
the cold. As he did, the next suspect was led in.
Sarah Good had deflected the blame, and now it was
Sarah Osburne's turn to defend herself. But her battle wouldn't
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be any easier. Sarah Osburne had no idea what had
transpired inside the meeting house during her long wait back
at Ingersoll's, But when one of the constables came to
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lead her out of the tavern and down the snow
covered road to the official gathering, his face probably told
her everything she needed to know. At the end of
that short cold walk was a dangerous display of Puritan law. Now,
before we dive into her examination, it would be helpful
to take a small tour of exactly how that law
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functioned there in the colony. The Massachusetts law that had
been on the book since sixty eight was sort of
a hybrid of the typical laws of the time mixed
with Puritan biblical rules. In fact, John Hawthorne's father William,
most likely helped put all of that law on paper.
Today we live in a world where there's a strong
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distinction between civic law and religious customs, though there was
no such thing. All of the laws drew heavily on
biblical ideas and love old punishment at anyone who broke them.
Whipping and branding were common, but the authorities also engaged
in ear cropping and nose slitting, which were as painful
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and horrific as they sound. There's a bit of nuance there.
According to historian maryland Roach, not every sin as a crime,
but all crimes involves some kind of sin. Drunkenness would
be sinful, But if a guy is drunk but he
doesn't waste the family substance, beat the wife and the children,
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then it's not a crime, but it's sinful. The important
thing to remember here is that the Puritans of Massachusetts
in didn't see a distinction between the church and the state.
You could be charged with showing contempt of the ministry
or even just bad habits. Your only hope was to
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be a law abiding, churchgoing Puritan devotee. Outside of that
narrow umbrella, you were at risk. Sarah Osburne sat outside
that narrow umbrella, and she knew it. That's why she
was worried about her examination, not because she was actually
a witch. You see, Sarah Osborne had been stuck in
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bed for over a year due to illness, which had
prevented her from doing a lot of things, including attending church,
and the community had noticed. It didn't help that her
past was less than ideal in their eyes. After marrying
into a distant branch of the Putnam family and raising
two sons, her husband died and placed their land in
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the hands of John and Thomas Putnam, and they weren't
the sharing type. It also didn't help that shortly after
her husband died, she began a relationship with a young,
indentured servant named Alexander Osborne. The scandal was practically overwhelming,
and the village buzzed with rumors. Folks wondered if she
and her lover conspired to kill her husband. They mocked
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the age difference between the two of them. They found
it indecent that Era freed him from his indenture herself
to pave the way for their marriage. It was all
far too unconscionable for their small community. When Sarah Good
was led into the meeting house that day, it was
like being shoved into the lions den. She had been
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absent from church for long enough to give the impression
she had rejected God. She was the longtime enemy of
the Putnam family thanks to her property dispute with them,
So when she laid eyes on Annie Putnam, one of
the four girls making the accusations, she knew the odds
were stacked against her. All four of the girls began
to convulse and shriek at the sight of her. The
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packed room fell silent as everyone held their breath in
utter horror. Right there before their eyes, a which was
tormenting her victims. It was abhorrence and evil to the core.
The first questions were the same ones Sarah Good had
to answer. What evil spirit have you familiar charity with?
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Why do you hurt these children? Have you made no
contract with the devil? That was to be expected. But
then the magistrates brought up Sarah Good and asked how
often the two women saw each other. I have not
seen her these two years, Osbourne replied. Frustrated, Hawthorne turned
his questions towards her work as a witch. Osbourne shook
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her head and protested, I'm more likely to be bewitched
than to be one myself, was her response. But rather
than settle the matter, that statement gave Hawthorne a bit
of new flesh to claw at. Why do you say that?
He asked. In response, Osborne told Hawthorne about a dream
she had years ago. She had opened her eyes to
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find the dark figure of a Native American standing at
the foot of her bed. After some struggle, this home
invader had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her
to the door of her house. At the same time,
she claimed she heard a voice that told her she
and I quote should go no more to meeting. Noting
her clear absence from church in the time since that dream,
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Hawthorne dug in, why did you yield thus far to
the devil? Then? But that wasn't the reason. She stayed
home in bed each day. She was sick, and she
told him so. Even her own husband spoke up and
confirmed the dates. One year and two months, he said,
which didn't really seem to help Sarah Osborne had painted
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herself into a corner while trying to prove that she
wasn't a witch. She had put forth a story that
was meant to cast her in the light of a victim.
She was nothing more than an innocent woman who had
been cursed. But the magistrates hadn't heard the message she
was trying to get across. They heard an admission of guilt.
She had received orders from the devil himself, they said,
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and then she had followed them. Right there, on the
first day of examinations, a suspect had revealed her true colors.
And yet the day was far from over. One more
woman had yet to take the stand. When she did, though,
she would pull on the thread that would unravel the
entire community. Everything they believed was about to be confronted,
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and they would never be the same. If Sarah Good
and Sarah Osburne were outsiders, Tituba was an alien in
a foreign land by sixteen ninety two. It was the
second time in her life that she had felt that way.
She was, of course a slave, but she was also
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referred to as an Indian in all of the surviving
documents from the Salem Trials. Now, for most of the
settlers living in New England, and Indian was anyone from
one of the many Native American tribes in the area,
the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Wabanaki being some of the most common.
But Tituba was not from the northeast or even from
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North America. Uh she had been, like so many others
during the four centuries of transatlantic slave trade, kidnapped from
her home and taken far away. We can infer a
few details of her past from her name and where
she began her life of slavery. Barbados, where the Paris
family had lived in the late seventeenth century, placed a
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high value on slaves from South America, particularly in the
area of modern day Venezuela. The women from the Arawak
tribes were gifted at skills their slavers needed, like weaving cloth,
which was highly valued in Puritan society. One of the
clan names within the Arawak people is Tetabitana, which some
scholars think was reduced down to Tituba. It's highly likely
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that she was kidnapped into slavery around the age of
ten and taken straight to Barbados to serve there among
the white landowners who needed domestic servants. It's all a guess,
but based on a lot of strong clues. What we're
a lot more sure about is that when Samuel Paris
sold off his plantation in Barbados and then headed north
to Salem, he brought Tituba along with her husband John
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with him. So when she finally arrived in Massachusetts, in sight,
it was the second time she had been removed from
a place she was familiar with and thrown into a
strange new land. And while her life in Barbados might
have been different from South America, it was only when
she moved to Puritan Massachusetts that the culture shock really
hit her. It was cold and strict and very unfriendly.
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Don't assume she was brought in as an equal, though,
despite the efforts to christianize anyone who wasn't white, The
color of her skin placed her firmly outside the community
in every practical sense, from rights and freedoms to the
types of punishment they had to endure. If a white
settler broke a minor law, they would typically be fined.
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A slave, though would face physical punishment. Court documents show
us how slaves were referred to as it or that
instead of he, she, or even they. The dehumanize them,
and as history has shown us, when you dehumanize a
person or a people group, it's a lot easier to
rob them of even the most basic human rights. Slavery
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is New England's dirty little secret first off, and we
know that as early as the sixteen thirties that we
have the first sort of documented evidence of slaves coming
into Massachusetts. So not longer after the colony starts, slaves
come in as well. That's Emerson Baker. Once again, they're
not a large presence in the colony. We don't have
a plantation economy, but we do need people to work
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the docks in places like the lumber mills and working
the crops. They do become sort of a status symbol
for the wealthier merchants. I think one more thing about
Titsuba and her background. She didn't come to Massachusetts as
an empty vessel like each and every one of our
own ancestors. When she was transplanted from one part of
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the world to another, there she brought her beliefs and
traditions and folklore with her. Yes, the Paris family probably
did their best to teach their slaves the Christian faith,
but nothing was going to erase those older stories and lessons,
stories of devils in the woods that prowled in search
of those who stepped off the path, tales of evil
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spirits that could take the form of animals or even
take control of humans. They were stories of darkness and
fear and risk. Tituba's world was alive with danger. So
when she stood before the magistrates that cold March day
and told John Hawthorne that the devil had approached her
and asked her to serve him, it wasn't a notion
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she would have found unusual, But in a room full
of frightened Puritans living on the edge of the known world,
thousands of miles from their homeland, it was a bombshell.
But then she dove deeper into the hysteria. She told
Hawthorne that she had personally witnessed at least four women torment.
The girls, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne were two, but
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she couldn't remember the names of the others, but they
would command her to hurt them. And then there was
the tall man. The crowd was most likely forced into
a frightened silence. According to Tituba, there weren't just two
other witches the first two women examined that day, No,
there were five others beside her four women and one man.
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Tituba went on to apologize for hurting the girls and
claimed that it would never happen again. She was only
doing what she had been instructed to do by the others.
She was a slave, after all, not a person, just
a thing to order around. How could she be held
responsible for her actions? She was painting a frightening picture
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for the magistrates and the people in the galleries listening
to her. Things were much worse than they had feared.
When she was pressured to identify the man who worked
alongside the witches, Tituba shook her head. She didn't know
his name, but he took the form of a hog,
and sometimes a great black dog that spoke to her.
Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian.
(33:12):
We know so little about Titiba that it's very hard
to say where that comes from. It has been hinted at.
It's possible that she was fed some lines it. Indeed,
is she who mentions the She's got yellow bird, she's
got red cats, she's got a black hog. It's very
colorful stuff. And yes, the furry creature with the wings
and the long nose who sits by the fireplace. This
particular animal, according to Tichiba, was dragging her out of
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the Paris house where she had been instructed to torment
the girls under her care, and out into the wider village.
That's why Elizabeth Hubbard and Annie Putnam were pinched and
stabbed as well, because the man who took the shape
of a black dog forced her to do it. There
were more animals too. Sarah Good had a small yellow
bird that suckled at the skin between her fingers. A
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dark man had offered her a bird of her own,
but she refused, and one of the witches sent a
different animal to afflict Elizabeth Hubbard, a wolf. The entire
crowd probably inhaled at once. They had all heard the
story of the wolf following poor Elizabeth home just days before,
and this confession only seemed to make it more real
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and more frightening, and it forced everyone to wrestle with
a larger question, one that left all of them unsettled
and anxious. If the wolf was real, what else was
out there for them to fear? If the magistrates were
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looking for scary stories, Tituba was ready to deliver. As
I mentioned earlier, she was well equipped for this sort
of task. Born into a culture that believed in the
dangers of the supernatural word around her, this new world
of Christianity, with its demons and devils, monsters and magic,
was at once both new and familiar. Stacy Schiff once again,
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remember that she's the only woman of those three who's
a slave, and we probably lived in fear of reporting
back to Samuel Parris, in whose household she lives. She's
clearly been with the family for years. She clearly loves
the children. She lives in close quarters. She probably slept
in the same beds as they. She may have been
told a tale. She may also have been a tale teller.
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After revealing Sarah Good as the source of the wolf
that had pursued Elizabeth Hubbard, Titchuba moved on to describe
the creature that seemed to serve Sarah Osborne. It had
a head like a woman, she said, with two legs
and wings. At that very moment, Abigail Williams, the niece
of Samuel Paris and the first of the girls to
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show signs of this demonic torment, shouted out that she
had seen that very same creature with her own eyes,
and when she saw it. She had watched in horror
as it transformed back into the shape of Sarah Osburne.
But Tituba wasn't finished just yet. What else have you seen,
Hawthorne asked her, like a child asking his grandmother about
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all the places she'd visited in her lifetime. Another hairy thing,
she replied. It goes upright like a man and has
only two legs. This thing, she told them, had appeared
right inside the Minister's house the previous night, standing in
front of the fire as if to warm itself. It
was dressed in black clothing and stood very tall, and
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he sometimes brought a woman with him, one who wore
a black hood with a top knot on it. At
this final description, the four girls began to writhe and
cry out in their nearby seats. It began to act
as if something invisible were attacking them, striking them and
causing them pain. They appeared to be in agony. Do
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you see who it is is that torments these girls,
Hawthorne demanded, Yes, Tituba said, it is Sarah Good. She
hurts them in her own shape, and then it stopped.
It was almost as if naming the attacker was enough
to frighten her off. The girls all fell into a
hushed calm, and the people gathered around them did the same.
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But it wouldn't last. After a brief pause, the girls
began crying out in pain and convulsing all over again.
Who hurts them now, Hawthorne demanded. In response, Tittiba moved
her head back and forth, almost as if she were
looking around the room, but her eyes were distant, almost blank.
She rolled her head backward and then forward again, and
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side to side, until finally she gave him an answer.
I am blind now, she said, I cannot see. Tituba
had led the village to the edge of a precipice
and then abandoned them there. She was certain that they
were all in danger, but she had nothing else to
tell them, whether her insider knowledge had just dried up
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or there were no more fresh fictions to weave into
her testimony. She was done, however much. The rest of
the crowd wanted her to keep going, but that was
a dangerous thing. If Tituba could no longer see the truth,
then they would have to go hunt it for themselves.
(38:28):
That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around
After this short sponsor break for a preview of what's
in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured. He
told me to sign my name in it, she said,
And did you do that? They asked, yes. One time
(38:50):
I made a mark in the book with a red ink,
red like blood. Did he take that red ink from
your own body? No? But he said, would get it
out of me the next time he visited. And then
the magistrates dug deeper. They believe that Titsuba had seen
the Devil's Book, his tool for recruiting humans into his
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evil mission among them. So he asked about that. Did
you see any other marks in this book? They asked, yes,
she said, a great many, some in red, some in yellow.
He held it wide open and showed me a great
many marks in it. What names were in the book?
They asked? Did he tell you Good and Osbourne? She answered,
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but there were more. I couldn't read. Hawthorne and Corwin
must have felt a chill run down their spines. More
names meant more witches. They had already found three, which
felt overwhelming as it was, But now they had learned
that there were more among them. They prayed it wasn't
an insurmountable number. Unobscured was created and written by me
(40:54):
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, a resource archive, and
links to our other shows at history unobscured dot com.
(41:15):
Until next time, thanks for listening.
It was hard to nail down one specific reason why
no one could get along. But looking back, it seems
like they were divided along lines that sound eerily familiar
to us today. Conservative and liberal views on religion had
fractured the people, but so had socio economic differences. The wealthier,
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more liberal coastal elites of Salem Town, with its busy
ports and growing businesses, sat in direct opposition to the
inland conservatives, who wanted independence and a much more strict
church life. That's an oversimplification of the climate, I know,
but it's still a fair summary of the key differences
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according to most historians. And yet, well, if we were
standing in Salem village in we would have been able
to see the true breadth of the differences with our
own eyes. In fact, those differences literally rode into the
village on March one. You see, there was a law
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on the books in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that was
known as the Sumptuary Laws. Think of the word sumptuous,
which means splendid or expensive looking, and you'll get the idea.
These were laws that dictated what you could wear depending
on your social status. They acted as a sort of
outward sign of a person's place in a larger society.
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Most people were farmers working the land as either indentured
servants or low income settlers. They were allowed to wear
some of the basic colors, such as muted reds and
greens and blues. They wiped their noses on their sleeves
rather than on the handkerchiefs that the wealthy used, and
their clothing was much more functional than formal. So when
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John Hawthorne rode into Salem Village that day, even from
a distance, it was clear that he was someone important.
The black clothing, the silver lace and gold buttons on
his coat, the fancy jewelry and beautiful boots, all of
it spoke of a person of privilege and power, to
words that accurately described John Hawthorne. With him was another
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well dressed man, Jonathan Corwin. They were making their way
through the village toward a very special destination, the home
of Nathaniel Ingersol. It was a building that served double
duty as the local tavern, what they called an ordinary
back then, and Ingersoll's Ordinary was about to play host
the opening pitch of a very long, very deadly game.
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Because Hawthorne and Corwin weren't just two rich visitors out
on a jaunt through the countryside. They were the law
keepers of Salem. The magistrates had arrived. The trials we're
about to begin. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Let's
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begin with systems. We talk a lot today about systems
that are breaking down, or how we've stepped outside of
the norm and are experiencing a very unusual kind of life.
It's a common way of seeing the world. When things
feel like they've veered off the typical, well worn path,
we notice it, and as we continue to explore sale them,
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we're going to talk more and more about that sort
of thing. But to understand what those deviations meant for
the people of Salem over three d years ago, we
have to understand what was expected and normal. You can't
talk about how the system was breaking down without talking
about the system. It's a lot less sexy than descriptions
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of witchcraft or even general criminal activity. But you can't
build a fancy house without a foundation. So here we go.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in the
New World by a royal charter by England's King James,
the first a charter was a powerful piece of paper
because it established significant institutions like universities, organizations, and of course, communities.
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They typically served double duty to setting up the colony
in an official capacity while also providing the laws and
rules for governing it. The Royal Charter for the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was shoot in sixteen that's almost sixty five
years before the events in Salem. That means three generations
of people learned to understand, follow, and enforce the laws
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of this new land, and the charter informed all of that.
Even those sumptuary laws I mentioned earlier, the ones that
dictated what clothing people were allowed to wear, came from
that charter. Six years after the charter was established, a
man named William Hawthorne arrived in the New World, first
settling in the area known as Dorchester, which is now
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part of Boston's South Side. A year later he was
elected town deputy, but sometime after that he moved his
family north to Salem. By sixteen forty four, he had
ascended to the colonial equivalent of the Massachusetts Speaker of
the House, was the military leader of Salem and served
as magistrate over the people there. He was the man
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responsible for giving land to newcomers in Salem for settling
disputes and levying to x is one other thing about
William Hawthorne, though, despite the fact that his second wife's
mother was a Quaker, he spent a good number of
years persecuting them all over the colony. Here's Salem State
University professor of history Emerson Baker. You see that long
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history of Salem, of the quite literally tortured relationship with Quakers.
If you're not one of us, if you're not a Puritan,
then you're against us, and more to the point, that
means you are stopping really the the creation of this
godly community of the city upon the hill. Hawthorne and
his first wife had eight children, four boys and four girls.
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His youngest daughter, by the way, would go on to
marry Israel Porter, the man who would later preside over
the execution of Thomas Putnam's estate and award most of
that fortune to the one Putnam who wanted Salem Village
to remain part of Salem Town. His fifth child, born
in sixty one, was John, the man now making his
way toward Nathaniel Ingersoll's ordinary. He had inherited father's love
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of the legal foundations of the colony and After making
a fortune in a merchant business co owned by his father,
he began working his way up the same ladder as
his father had decades before. By two John was fifty,
he was one of Salem's magistrates and a Justice of
the Peace, along with sitting on a number of important committees,
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committees like the one tasked with finding a minister for
the Salem Village Congregation. Thanks to his father's legacy, John
was respected and admired. I think that's equally true of
the other judges as well. Most of them, again are
very experienced and long standing. Most of the members of
the second generation. Again that's Emerson Baker. You also have
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Bartholomew Gidney. He's a second generation merchant. He's a physician.
He's the colonel in charge and command of the Essex
County Militia. You have Jonathan Corwin, who again Haythorns and
Corwin's for for two generations. The fathers served in the
legislature together. They've been family traditions of militia officers. They
had helped make Salem what it was as this bustling,
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shiny seaport. But here's where things go off. The rails
that Royal Charter that was issued in sixteen lasted for
over six decades. But during that time a lot had
happened back home in England. The Civil War had torn
the country apart. King Charles the First was executed in
sixteen forty nine and the monarchy was abolished. Then in
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sixteen sixty it was all restored and Charles the Second
took the throne. It was a time of constant, dramatic upheaval,
and in the midst of all of it was the
fate of England's New World colonies. Many of them weren't
in favor of giving the king ultimate authority over their
own communities, and Massachusetts was the most vocal about that,
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So in sixty four England annulled their charter. So when
I say that context matters, that we have to understand
how things are supposed to work in order to bed
or understand just how broken they were. This is the
stuff I'm talking about. Accusations of witchcraft would have been
handled differently if the charter had still been in place,
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but it wasn't. Salem was an untethered boat in a
stormy sea, which meant that these new rumors of witchcraft
were the worst possible test of their tenuous position. Uncertain
of what to do, the community turned to the only
people they could trust, and the well respected John Hawthorne
was one of them. Salem might have been in political chaos,
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but there was still hope. The magistrates were taking charge.
The process was already off the rails, so to speak,
in the days before the charter had been taken away
from the colony. The process was fairly strict and weighty.
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If you suspected someone of witchcraft, you were accusing them
of a capital crime across I'm punishable by death. Because
of that, the law made sure everyone had serious skin
in the game. Here's Emerson Baker again. Normally you would
have to postpond if you were charging someone with a
felony like that, basically what today would call a nuisance suit,
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or to essentially maybe charge persons for political purposes or
a way to get back at them if the case
wasn't proven, you'd forfeit your bond. That would have been
a substantial inducement to not accuse someone flippantly of a
high crime, right. But when Thomas Putnam Jr. And his
three friends walked to Salem Town the day after the
snowstorm and stood before Hawthorne and Corwin. They did no
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such thing. Sure, they named names and made accusations, but
none of them paid the bond. Despite that, the magistrates
still issued the warrants for three individuals it was unheard of.
Their next steps were simple enough. The three women would
be arrested and then questioned. The judges would conduct the
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examinations one by one to determine if the charges were true,
and they would do all of this publicly. The morning
that Hawthorne and Corwin were traveling to Ingersoll's Ordinary in
Salem Village, they had two constables doing their dirty work.
Think of them as police officers with very limited power
who had been assigned a very specific task gather the
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three women at the center of the accusations and bring
them to Ingersoll's for examination. One of the constables, a
man named George Locker, only really had one person to
bring in that morning, but Sarah Good was a handful
and probably needed all of his energy and attention. I'll
get into more about why that is in a bit,
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but what's important to know right now is that Locker
found her and took her into custody. When he did,
though Sarah's husband, William Good, followed along The other Constable,
Joseph Herrick, had more on his list. He needed to
locate two suspects, not one, Sarah Osburne and Tituba, the
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slave who lived at the Paris home. He managed to
collect both of them that morning, but as he did so,
he also conducted brief inspections of their homes. He even
recorded the deed on the back of the warrant. Made
diligent search for images and such, he wrote, but can
find none. He also had two other jobs that morning. First,
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he'd been asked to gather the four girls who had
started all of the accusations, Betsy Paris, her cousin, Abigail Williams,
and neighbor girls Annie Putnam and Elizabeth Hubbard. Then, as
if that weren't enough, the magistrates had also asked him
to bring, in their own words, any other person that
can give evidence. Naturally, a crowd was forming by the
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time Locker and Herrick arrived at Ingersoll's Ordinary with their
three suspects. They had a massive entourage and tow Some
had come as part of the official proceedings that were
about to place, but all of them were there to watch.
It was a spectacle unlike anything they had ever seen.
The trouble was Ingersolls was nothing more than a house
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like building, not a stadium. There was no way all
of these people were going to fit inside that humble structure.
Three suspects, two husbands, four accusers, two constables and two magistrates.
That was thirteen people without any other witnesses. So Hawthorne
and Corwin put their heads together and they made a
decision they needed to go elsewhere. Just down the road
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was the new Salem Village meeting House, and while it
wasn't enormous, it was built to hold larger crowds, so
they would have to do inside. It was a wide
open space, roughly thirty four feet by twenty eight ft.
It's no longer standing today. A few buildings from that
era are, to be honest, but it was described as
a barn like structure that was modeled after traditional buildings
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of similar purpose. I made the mistake early on of
thinking of the meeting house purely as a church. And yes,
that's where Samuel Paris preached every Sunday in front of
his congregation, but the building served civic duties as well.
It was exactly what they called it a meeting house.
It was literally a place for meetings, so moving the
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examinations of the three suspects under that roof made a
lot of sense. Speaking of which, not all of the
suspects were brought over at once. In fact, when Hawthorne
and Corwin made the brief trek back out into the
snow and trudged down the road to the larger space,
only Sarah Good followed behind them, watched over by Constable
George Locker. When the meeting began moments later, Sarah Good
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found herself standing alone before the two magistrates as a
packed house watched on. A few people in the room
cared for Sarah Good, including the judges. If she was
expecting to throw herself on the mercy of the court,
she was about to be very to pointed, there would
be no mercy to be found. Sarah Good was the
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very definition of an outsider. Life didn't start out that
way for her. Though her father had been a prosperous
pub owner when she was born in sixteen fifty three.
Trouble began nineteen years later when he passed away and
none of that wealth was bequeathed to her. She was
left completely on her own. Her first husband had been
a farmer, but life was hard for them, and they
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took on more debts than either of them could manage.
When he died a few years later, Sarah was left
to carry the entire burden herself. Her current husband, William Good,
thought he could help, but both of them had become
buried under the weight of it all. By sixte two,
the couple had a four year old daughter named Dorothy
and three month old infants, but not much else. Sarah
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and William had been forced to hand a portion of
their tiny property to debtors, and then had to sell
the rest so that they could support themselves, which meant
that by March of two they were homeless, sleeping in
neighbors barns, and begging for food. Think about it from
Sarah's point of view. She had been born into a
comfortable life, but then all of that had been taken
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away from her, sending her into a downward spiral of
defeat and hopelessness. It's no wonder others in the community
viewed her as bitter and sullen when she walked around town,
grumbling under her breath and generally being mean to everyone else.
She was piste off, and honestly, I can't blame her
after all of that, here she was standing before the
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magistrates in a crowded meeting house on a cold March morning,
and you can't help but wonder if she would have
been there at all, if she had been a little
bit more likable, a little more well off, and a
little more religious. Sarah Good, as far as I can tell,
was thought of as guilty before she stepped through the door,
simply because she didn't fit in Sarah Good, John Hawthorne began,
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what evil spirit have you familiarity with? None, she replied.
The written records can't convey the tone of her voice.
But knowing everything else we do about her and positive,
her answer was dripping with annoyance. Have you made no
contract with the devil? He continued, No, Then, pointing toward
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the four girls who had begun the entire ordeal, Hawthorne continued,
why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them,
she replied. In response, Hawthorne asked the girls to look
at Sarah Good and say whether or not she was
the person who had been tormenting them. They replied that
Good was one of the people responsible. Yes, a moment later,
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all four of them began to convulse and cry out
in pain. For the first time, all of the torment
and despair that had been kept behind the closed doors
of the Paris home was on full display, laid bare
to the eyes of everyone in the galleries. If their
accusations of witchcraft had begun as a private matter, left
to the realms of whispers and rumor, this was the
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moment it transformed. A cat as black and evil as
it was, was finally out of the bag. After the
noise died down, Sarah Good's examination continued. Hawthorne used the
outburst as evidence of witchcraft and asked Sarah Good to
tell the truth, why do you torment these poor children?
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When she shook her head, Hawthorne replied, who was it
then that tormented the children? When she answered, the words
stunned the crowd. It was Sarah Osburne. Sarah Good had
named names. She had taken the net of accusation and
tossed it wider, snagging another woman in it. But before
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the court moved on to speak with Osbourne, who was
waiting for them back at Ingersoll's Ordinary, they brought witness
up to the front of the room to speak to
Sarah Good's character. It was her own husband, William Good.
Here's Jane Kaminsky, a professor of history at Harvard University.
In a place like Massachusetts, where it's an inquisitorial system,
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not an advocacy system, a goal of parent religion and
a goal of jurisprudence is to get to the truth,
not to defend one side against the other. Those are
instances where the charges at hand and the testimony of
neighbors had made people question the behavior of those they
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lived with intimately, and it would have been expected in
the community that they would come forward with their doubts.
There's a unity of husband and wife as a political person,
as an economic person. He had recently told someone else
in town that Sarah and I quote, either was a
witch or would be one very quickly, and they asked
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him to explain what that meant. At first, he tried
to back out of it, claiming that she had treated
him poorly and he was just lashing out at her
for it, but the magistrates continued to press him on it. Eventually,
with tears in his eyes, he turned to them and
explained that his wife was and I quote an enemy
of all Good. That was all the magistrates needed to hear.
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With a gesture from Hawthorne, Constable George Locker moved in
from the side of the room and took Sarah Good's arm.
He guided her toward the door and then out into
the cold. As he did, the next suspect was led in.
Sarah Good had deflected the blame, and now it was
Sarah Osburne's turn to defend herself. But her battle wouldn't
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be any easier. Sarah Osburne had no idea what had
transpired inside the meeting house during her long wait back
at Ingersoll's, But when one of the constables came to
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lead her out of the tavern and down the snow
covered road to the official gathering, his face probably told
her everything she needed to know. At the end of
that short cold walk was a dangerous display of Puritan law. Now,
before we dive into her examination, it would be helpful
to take a small tour of exactly how that law
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functioned there in the colony. The Massachusetts law that had
been on the book since sixty eight was sort of
a hybrid of the typical laws of the time mixed
with Puritan biblical rules. In fact, John Hawthorne's father William,
most likely helped put all of that law on paper.
Today we live in a world where there's a strong
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distinction between civic law and religious customs, though there was
no such thing. All of the laws drew heavily on
biblical ideas and love old punishment at anyone who broke them.
Whipping and branding were common, but the authorities also engaged
in ear cropping and nose slitting, which were as painful
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and horrific as they sound. There's a bit of nuance there.
According to historian maryland Roach, not every sin as a crime,
but all crimes involves some kind of sin. Drunkenness would
be sinful, But if a guy is drunk but he
doesn't waste the family substance, beat the wife and the children,
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then it's not a crime, but it's sinful. The important
thing to remember here is that the Puritans of Massachusetts
in didn't see a distinction between the church and the state.
You could be charged with showing contempt of the ministry
or even just bad habits. Your only hope was to
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be a law abiding, churchgoing Puritan devotee. Outside of that
narrow umbrella, you were at risk. Sarah Osburne sat outside
that narrow umbrella, and she knew it. That's why she
was worried about her examination, not because she was actually
a witch. You see, Sarah Osborne had been stuck in
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bed for over a year due to illness, which had
prevented her from doing a lot of things, including attending church,
and the community had noticed. It didn't help that her
past was less than ideal in their eyes. After marrying
into a distant branch of the Putnam family and raising
two sons, her husband died and placed their land in
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the hands of John and Thomas Putnam, and they weren't
the sharing type. It also didn't help that shortly after
her husband died, she began a relationship with a young,
indentured servant named Alexander Osborne. The scandal was practically overwhelming,
and the village buzzed with rumors. Folks wondered if she
and her lover conspired to kill her husband. They mocked
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the age difference between the two of them. They found
it indecent that Era freed him from his indenture herself
to pave the way for their marriage. It was all
far too unconscionable for their small community. When Sarah Good
was led into the meeting house that day, it was
like being shoved into the lions den. She had been
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absent from church for long enough to give the impression
she had rejected God. She was the longtime enemy of
the Putnam family thanks to her property dispute with them,
So when she laid eyes on Annie Putnam, one of
the four girls making the accusations, she knew the odds
were stacked against her. All four of the girls began
to convulse and shriek at the sight of her. The
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packed room fell silent as everyone held their breath in
utter horror. Right there before their eyes, a which was
tormenting her victims. It was abhorrence and evil to the core.
The first questions were the same ones Sarah Good had
to answer. What evil spirit have you familiar charity with?
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Why do you hurt these children? Have you made no
contract with the devil? That was to be expected. But
then the magistrates brought up Sarah Good and asked how
often the two women saw each other. I have not
seen her these two years, Osbourne replied. Frustrated, Hawthorne turned
his questions towards her work as a witch. Osbourne shook
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her head and protested, I'm more likely to be bewitched
than to be one myself, was her response. But rather
than settle the matter, that statement gave Hawthorne a bit
of new flesh to claw at. Why do you say that?
He asked. In response, Osborne told Hawthorne about a dream
she had years ago. She had opened her eyes to
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find the dark figure of a Native American standing at
the foot of her bed. After some struggle, this home
invader had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her
to the door of her house. At the same time,
she claimed she heard a voice that told her she
and I quote should go no more to meeting. Noting
her clear absence from church in the time since that dream,
(26:08):
Hawthorne dug in, why did you yield thus far to
the devil? Then? But that wasn't the reason. She stayed
home in bed each day. She was sick, and she
told him so. Even her own husband spoke up and
confirmed the dates. One year and two months, he said,
which didn't really seem to help Sarah Osborne had painted
(26:29):
herself into a corner while trying to prove that she
wasn't a witch. She had put forth a story that
was meant to cast her in the light of a victim.
She was nothing more than an innocent woman who had
been cursed. But the magistrates hadn't heard the message she
was trying to get across. They heard an admission of guilt.
She had received orders from the devil himself, they said,
(26:51):
and then she had followed them. Right there, on the
first day of examinations, a suspect had revealed her true colors.
And yet the day was far from over. One more
woman had yet to take the stand. When she did, though,
she would pull on the thread that would unravel the
entire community. Everything they believed was about to be confronted,
(27:15):
and they would never be the same. If Sarah Good
and Sarah Osburne were outsiders, Tituba was an alien in
a foreign land by sixteen ninety two. It was the
second time in her life that she had felt that way.
She was, of course a slave, but she was also
(27:38):
referred to as an Indian in all of the surviving
documents from the Salem Trials. Now, for most of the
settlers living in New England, and Indian was anyone from
one of the many Native American tribes in the area,
the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Wabanaki being some of the most common.
But Tituba was not from the northeast or even from
(27:59):
North America. Uh she had been, like so many others
during the four centuries of transatlantic slave trade, kidnapped from
her home and taken far away. We can infer a
few details of her past from her name and where
she began her life of slavery. Barbados, where the Paris
family had lived in the late seventeenth century, placed a
(28:20):
high value on slaves from South America, particularly in the
area of modern day Venezuela. The women from the Arawak
tribes were gifted at skills their slavers needed, like weaving cloth,
which was highly valued in Puritan society. One of the
clan names within the Arawak people is Tetabitana, which some
scholars think was reduced down to Tituba. It's highly likely
(28:43):
that she was kidnapped into slavery around the age of
ten and taken straight to Barbados to serve there among
the white landowners who needed domestic servants. It's all a guess,
but based on a lot of strong clues. What we're
a lot more sure about is that when Samuel Paris
sold off his plantation in Barbados and then headed north
to Salem, he brought Tituba along with her husband John
(29:07):
with him. So when she finally arrived in Massachusetts, in sight,
it was the second time she had been removed from
a place she was familiar with and thrown into a
strange new land. And while her life in Barbados might
have been different from South America, it was only when
she moved to Puritan Massachusetts that the culture shock really
hit her. It was cold and strict and very unfriendly.
(29:32):
Don't assume she was brought in as an equal, though,
despite the efforts to christianize anyone who wasn't white, The
color of her skin placed her firmly outside the community
in every practical sense, from rights and freedoms to the
types of punishment they had to endure. If a white
settler broke a minor law, they would typically be fined.
(29:52):
A slave, though would face physical punishment. Court documents show
us how slaves were referred to as it or that
instead of he, she, or even they. The dehumanize them,
and as history has shown us, when you dehumanize a
person or a people group, it's a lot easier to
rob them of even the most basic human rights. Slavery
(30:14):
is New England's dirty little secret first off, and we
know that as early as the sixteen thirties that we
have the first sort of documented evidence of slaves coming
into Massachusetts. So not longer after the colony starts, slaves
come in as well. That's Emerson Baker. Once again, they're
not a large presence in the colony. We don't have
a plantation economy, but we do need people to work
(30:37):
the docks in places like the lumber mills and working
the crops. They do become sort of a status symbol
for the wealthier merchants. I think one more thing about
Titsuba and her background. She didn't come to Massachusetts as
an empty vessel like each and every one of our
own ancestors. When she was transplanted from one part of
(30:59):
the world to another, there she brought her beliefs and
traditions and folklore with her. Yes, the Paris family probably
did their best to teach their slaves the Christian faith,
but nothing was going to erase those older stories and lessons,
stories of devils in the woods that prowled in search
of those who stepped off the path, tales of evil
(31:19):
spirits that could take the form of animals or even
take control of humans. They were stories of darkness and
fear and risk. Tituba's world was alive with danger. So
when she stood before the magistrates that cold March day
and told John Hawthorne that the devil had approached her
and asked her to serve him, it wasn't a notion
(31:42):
she would have found unusual, But in a room full
of frightened Puritans living on the edge of the known world,
thousands of miles from their homeland, it was a bombshell.
But then she dove deeper into the hysteria. She told
Hawthorne that she had personally witnessed at least four women torment.
The girls, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne were two, but
(32:04):
she couldn't remember the names of the others, but they
would command her to hurt them. And then there was
the tall man. The crowd was most likely forced into
a frightened silence. According to Tituba, there weren't just two
other witches the first two women examined that day, No,
there were five others beside her four women and one man.
(32:27):
Tituba went on to apologize for hurting the girls and
claimed that it would never happen again. She was only
doing what she had been instructed to do by the others.
She was a slave, after all, not a person, just
a thing to order around. How could she be held
responsible for her actions? She was painting a frightening picture
(32:48):
for the magistrates and the people in the galleries listening
to her. Things were much worse than they had feared.
When she was pressured to identify the man who worked
alongside the witches, Tituba shook her head. She didn't know
his name, but he took the form of a hog,
and sometimes a great black dog that spoke to her.
Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian.
(33:12):
We know so little about Titiba that it's very hard
to say where that comes from. It has been hinted at.
It's possible that she was fed some lines it. Indeed,
is she who mentions the She's got yellow bird, she's
got red cats, she's got a black hog. It's very
colorful stuff. And yes, the furry creature with the wings
and the long nose who sits by the fireplace. This
particular animal, according to Tichiba, was dragging her out of
(33:35):
the Paris house where she had been instructed to torment
the girls under her care, and out into the wider village.
That's why Elizabeth Hubbard and Annie Putnam were pinched and
stabbed as well, because the man who took the shape
of a black dog forced her to do it. There
were more animals too. Sarah Good had a small yellow
bird that suckled at the skin between her fingers. A
(33:58):
dark man had offered her a bird of her own,
but she refused, and one of the witches sent a
different animal to afflict Elizabeth Hubbard, a wolf. The entire
crowd probably inhaled at once. They had all heard the
story of the wolf following poor Elizabeth home just days before,
and this confession only seemed to make it more real
(34:20):
and more frightening, and it forced everyone to wrestle with
a larger question, one that left all of them unsettled
and anxious. If the wolf was real, what else was
out there for them to fear? If the magistrates were
(34:48):
looking for scary stories, Tituba was ready to deliver. As
I mentioned earlier, she was well equipped for this sort
of task. Born into a culture that believed in the
dangers of the supernatural word around her, this new world
of Christianity, with its demons and devils, monsters and magic,
was at once both new and familiar. Stacy Schiff once again,
(35:12):
remember that she's the only woman of those three who's
a slave, and we probably lived in fear of reporting
back to Samuel Parris, in whose household she lives. She's
clearly been with the family for years. She clearly loves
the children. She lives in close quarters. She probably slept
in the same beds as they. She may have been
told a tale. She may also have been a tale teller.
(35:32):
After revealing Sarah Good as the source of the wolf
that had pursued Elizabeth Hubbard, Titchuba moved on to describe
the creature that seemed to serve Sarah Osborne. It had
a head like a woman, she said, with two legs
and wings. At that very moment, Abigail Williams, the niece
of Samuel Paris and the first of the girls to
(35:53):
show signs of this demonic torment, shouted out that she
had seen that very same creature with her own eyes,
and when she saw it. She had watched in horror
as it transformed back into the shape of Sarah Osburne.
But Tituba wasn't finished just yet. What else have you seen,
Hawthorne asked her, like a child asking his grandmother about
(36:15):
all the places she'd visited in her lifetime. Another hairy thing,
she replied. It goes upright like a man and has
only two legs. This thing, she told them, had appeared
right inside the Minister's house the previous night, standing in
front of the fire as if to warm itself. It
was dressed in black clothing and stood very tall, and
(36:38):
he sometimes brought a woman with him, one who wore
a black hood with a top knot on it. At
this final description, the four girls began to writhe and
cry out in their nearby seats. It began to act
as if something invisible were attacking them, striking them and
causing them pain. They appeared to be in agony. Do
(36:59):
you see who it is is that torments these girls,
Hawthorne demanded, Yes, Tituba said, it is Sarah Good. She
hurts them in her own shape, and then it stopped.
It was almost as if naming the attacker was enough
to frighten her off. The girls all fell into a
hushed calm, and the people gathered around them did the same.
(37:20):
But it wouldn't last. After a brief pause, the girls
began crying out in pain and convulsing all over again.
Who hurts them now, Hawthorne demanded. In response, Tittiba moved
her head back and forth, almost as if she were
looking around the room, but her eyes were distant, almost blank.
She rolled her head backward and then forward again, and
(37:43):
side to side, until finally she gave him an answer.
I am blind now, she said, I cannot see. Tituba
had led the village to the edge of a precipice
and then abandoned them there. She was certain that they
were all in danger, but she had nothing else to
tell them, whether her insider knowledge had just dried up
(38:06):
or there were no more fresh fictions to weave into
her testimony. She was done, however much. The rest of
the crowd wanted her to keep going, but that was
a dangerous thing. If Tituba could no longer see the truth,
then they would have to go hunt it for themselves.
(38:28):
That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around
After this short sponsor break for a preview of what's
in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured. He
told me to sign my name in it, she said,
And did you do that? They asked, yes. One time
(38:50):
I made a mark in the book with a red ink,
red like blood. Did he take that red ink from
your own body? No? But he said, would get it
out of me the next time he visited. And then
the magistrates dug deeper. They believe that Titsuba had seen
the Devil's Book, his tool for recruiting humans into his
(39:11):
evil mission among them. So he asked about that. Did
you see any other marks in this book? They asked, yes,
she said, a great many, some in red, some in yellow.
He held it wide open and showed me a great
many marks in it. What names were in the book?
They asked? Did he tell you Good and Osbourne? She answered,
(39:37):
but there were more. I couldn't read. Hawthorne and Corwin
must have felt a chill run down their spines. More
names meant more witches. They had already found three, which
felt overwhelming as it was, But now they had learned
that there were more among them. They prayed it wasn't
an insurmountable number. Unobscured was created and written by me
(40:54):
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, a resource archive, and
links to our other shows at history unobscured dot com.
(41:15):
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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