October 31, 2018 • 39 mins
Some people saw the growing witch panic in Salem as a threat to their lives, and they tried to run and hide. Others saw an opportunity for profit and advancement. Through it all, though, the fire would continue to burn, and unlikely individuals would be caught up in the blaze.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
John Willard was making a name for himself. Unlike most
of the people in Salem Village, he hadn't been born there.
It was marriage that had brought him to the close
knit community there west of Salem Town, and that was
his first smart decision. He married into the Wilkins family,
one of the prominent families in the area. By no
(00:30):
means were the Wilkins on par with the Putnam's, but
just like them, they chose to live far from Salem
Town in the western bread basket of the community. Over
the years, the Wilkins had built a micro village on
a rise of land everyone called Will's Hill, and they
started to shrug off outsiders. But not John Willard. The
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leader of the clan was an old man named Bray Wilkins.
Maybe it was the loss of his timber business or
the government seizure of all his company assets. Whatever the
nudge was, Bray had become closed off to the outside
world over time. When young Margaret Wilkins married someone from
outside their community, she was the first to do so.
But John Willard wasn't going to let that be a hindrance.
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He had plans to win them over. He bought property
near the Wilkins Clan and started into a career in
land speculation by dividing it into smaller lots and selling
those off. He was trying to do right for his
wife and new family, to make them proud and keep
up with their ambitions. But not everything was storybook perfect.
(01:34):
In fact, it seems that John had developed a bit
of a reputation and it was catching up with him.
Looking back, I wonder if he regretted coming to Salem Village.
There were a lot of reasons why his marriage to
Margaret was a good thing, but it toppled the first
domino that set a whole series of events in motion.
And now on May ten, Willard found himself trying to
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escape at all. John Willard, Deputy Constable to Salem Village,
was on the run. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Minky,
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Like I said, John Willard had a bit of baggage. First,
one of John's relatives had been tried for witchcraft back
in his hometown of Lancaster in western Massachusetts, and that
sort of thing had a way of following people around.
As I've said before, the people of Puritan New England
believe that a person could inherit the spiritual disposition of
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their direct ancestors in the same way that people inherit
hair color or facial features. This wasn't a good thing
for John at home, though. There was more trouble. John
was known to beat his wife with a stick whenever
she crossed him, and during his time in the Wilkins community,
he had shown that same propensity toward abuse while watching
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over some of the Putnam children. All of those details
make up a really good list of reasons why John's
future might not be as bright as he hoped. But
the real turning point arrived on March eight. That was
the day he was selected to be a deputy constable
for Salem Village. The rumors of witchcraft had started just
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a month before, so perhaps he was part of an
effort to bolster the ranks of the village officials. We
know that John Putnam Jr. Was also sworn in that
same day, so that's probably the case. They knew they
were about to become very, very busy. John Willard's role
gave him a front row seat to the mess that
was unfolding in the village. His name isn't on any
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of the legal documents, but As a deputy constable, he
would have been responsible for helping Constables Herrick and Locker
arrest and transport the accused witches, dragging them from their
homes to the meeting house, and then from jail to
jail when they were removed from Salem to Boston and
back again. Maybe he was one of the men responsible
for hauling the six Sarah Osburne from place to place,
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or the elderly Rebecca Nurse. Maybe he was one of
the men who transported little Dorothy Good, imprisoned as a
witch at just four years old. No record remains of
exactly what touched John's heart, but something about it got
to him. There was something about jailing so many vulnerable women, children, elders,
and respected churchgoers that finally broke through his conscience. What
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he was doing was wrong, and everything about his position
was suddenly filling him with doubt. And one of the
things he felt the most doubt about was the truth
of the accusations Annie Putnam and her friends were making.
On April, he visited Putnam to confront her about the
accusation she was making. Maybe he thought he could talk
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some sense into her, or at least figure out what
the truth was in the middle of the chaos. Maybe
he knew something about the girls that the others didn't.
After all, he'd been a caretaker for the family, he
knew the girl well. His visit backfired, though. The next day,
Annie began to claim that she'd been attacked by his
spectral shape for days and days, but that she had
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stayed silent about it, hoping that he would stop. When
she begged him to leave her alone. Everyone seemed to
take notice of this and began to look into John's
behavior for proof of the accusations. It turns out John
had already stopped serving warrants against accused witches. After his
visit to Annie Putnam, those spurs of suspicion bloomed into
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full accusations. In the first week of May, girls all
over Sale and village were attacked by his spirit. When
he found out about the claims against him, John sped
to Bray Wilkins house. He was positive the family patriarch,
his wife's own grandfather, would know what to do. Bray
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later recalled that John came to my house greatly troubled,
desiring me with some other neighbors to pray for him.
But John caught Bray in the middle of trying to
leave for a trip, and the older man brushed him off.
A few days later, when the family was having dinner
together in Boston, John glared at Bray across the table,
perhaps fueled by what he perceived to be as betrayal,
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but Bray didn't notice. All he remembered from that night
was the pain that suddenly bloomed in his bladder. Later,
a doctor who examined him said that his affliction was preternatural,
reminding him of the newest rumors of John Willard. When
Bray had recovered enough to make the journey home to Salem,
he arrived to find one of his grandchildren, seventeen year
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old Daniel, laid low by a mysterious illness of his own.
That was enough evidence for the village. Hawthorne and Corwin
scribbled out another of their warrants, this time for John Willard.
No one had formally approached them to request it, but
the rumors were just too enticing, so they handed the
slip of paper to John Putnam Jr. Who had been
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selected alongside John Willard on March eight. When Putnam arrived
at John Willard's home the next day he found it empty.
He searched all over Will's Hill, asking from house to
house for anyone who might know where John had gone,
but no one had a clue. At the end of
his visit, Putnam left with a clear message from the
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Wilkins family, John Willard had fled Salem. I want to
switch is for a bit and talk about a place
that isn't Salem. We've covered the differences between Massachusetts and
Maine in the previous episode, but there's another colony that's
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going to come into play over the course of the trials,
New York. Today. We picture New York City as a
metropolis unlike any other. It's diverse and textured and full
of countless languages, cultures, and attitudes. It has a powerful
relationship with the waters that surround it, and the people
who live there have a more international mindset than most
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of their fellow Americans. In the late seventeenth century, though,
it was pretty similar to all of that, and all
of it seems to be the fault of the Dutch.
In the early sixteen hundreds, a lot of European powers
were trying to colonize the New World. Most European countries
tended toward authoritarian monarchies that persecuted religious outliers and expelled
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minority people groups, not the Dutch, though they were a
different sort of country. The Dutch had discovered that a
liberal government built around intellectual freedom and tolerance was much
more powerful. They prioritized commerce over religion and welcomed all
of those displaced minority groups into their own population, allowing
them to reap the benefit of their talents and resources.
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It was that sort of attitude that was woven into
the foundational elements of the New York Colony. Back then,
of course, it was known as New Amsterdam, but things
would begin to change in sixteen sixty seven. That was
the year the Dutch handed control of the colony over
to the English and renamed the territory in port after
the brother of the King, the Duke of York. Goodbye
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New Amsterdam, Hello New York. But the English ran things
very differently. Thanks to the English Civil War in the
sixteen forties, the Crown lacked the funds to embark on
proper royal colonies. Instead intended to give those opportunities to
private companies founded by merchants and wealthy aristocrats with royal
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over site. Of course, that's why the Puritans of Massachusetts
were able to do what they did. They received a
commercial charter from the English government prior to the Civil War,
and then all of the leaders of that company transplanted
themselves overseas to live right in the middle of their investment.
It was economic cover for a deeply religious experiment to
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live an unobstructed Puritan life far from the watchful eye
of the King. New York didn't have that purposeful beginning.
When the English took control in sixteen sixty seven, they
had to send troops into the city to help it
go smoothly. The Dutch had attracted a very diverse and
liberal community there, and they chafed under the English yoke.
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The early governors of the colony even refused English shipping
companies in favor of their old Dutch partners. It was
a mess, and England felt like it was losing control.
Massachusetts sent troops and supplies to help out in an
effort to seem like a team player, but their time
was running out. After the devastation of King Philip's War
and the related conflict up and down the main coast,
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England decided enough was enough. The old way of running
things was no longer working. In sixteen seventy nine, the
Crown took New Hampshire away from the Massachusetts colony and
issued them a new royal charter. Five years later, in
sixteen eighty four, Massachusetts saw their own charter revoked, leaving
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them in a lawless chaos. Less than a year after that,
King Charles the Second died before law and order could
be restored. To help calm the colonies, Edmund Andros was
sent to set up English military rule. Here's historian Emerson Baker.
He was an Anglican with a Church of England, and
Puritanism no longer was special. Massachusetts was no longer special.
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It was part of a super colony for stretch from
New Jersey to Maine. Andros wasn't a well loved governor.
He had previously been governor of New York and was
very outspoken against Puritans. He raised taxes, revoked Puritan laws,
and appointed his own judges and sheriffs. The worst blow, however,
came when Andros forced landowners to essentially re buy their
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land from the Crown. The result was deep organized resistance.
On April eighteenth of sixteen eighty nine, hundreds of armed
Puritans flooded into Boston and captured Andros and his cadre
of loyal officers. All of them were thrown into prison,
and a new provisional government was set up on the
foundation of the old Charter and Puritan law. It left
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Massachusetts defend for itself once again, and with the threat
of the Native American attacks on the northern border, it
wouldn't be an easy task. But there was a new
star rising in the Puritan sky. He was a son
of Maine, a Puritan sympathizer, and a man willing to
fight for a good cause. Folks, I'd like to introduce
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you to Sir William Phipps. William Phipps had the sort
of upbringing that any hard working American today might connect with.
We don't like the silver spoon elitists who don't have
to work hard for their rewards. We want the scrapper,
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the fighter, the one who was going to scramble to
the top of the pile. And William Phipps seems to
fit that bill, at least at first Blush He was
born on the coast of northern Maine around sixteen fifty
two frontier parents. His father used the family home as
a sort of hub for trading goods with the Native Americans,
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but passed away when William was just four. When his
mother remarried, it was to his father's business partner, which
consolidated what little wealth they had, and then life carried on.
There were a lot of factors that might have helped
Phipps become the man history knows him as being when
of fourteen children taught him to fight for himself, and
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working hard on the edge of the frontier taught him
that survival was much more important than social politeness. But
every character trait can become a flaw if you twist
it hard enough. At the age of eighteen, he quit
his job as a shepherd and became an apprentice to
a group of local shipbuilders. Shipbuilders who made frequent trips
to Boston, which allowed him to rub shoulders with the
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sort of wealthy people who ran merchant companies. It's also
how he met a Puritan minister named Increase Mather, a
man roughly a decade his senior. William married into a
successful merchant family and then proceeded to try his hand
running his own business as a shipbuilder. It turns out
he wasn't the best business man out there, and he
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never really achieved the level of success he aspired to.
In fact, he was better at achieving debts and failures,
much to the frustration of the people he dealt with.
It's important to stop for a moment and call attention
to one of his flaws. Phipps, it turns out, was
much more of a man of passion and a man
of learning. He wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination,
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but he also wasn't educated and that sort of rubbed
off in his business dealings. He was known as a
rough talker who used abusive language like a weapon to
demean and intimidate others, and he was a fortune seeker
in fact. In Sight three, he managed to raise enough
money in England to go on a literal treasure hunt
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in the Caribbean, which failed, but somehow the fact that
he survived the trip earned him enough attention to get
a second round of funding. That new, better equipped expedition
paid off, and he returned home with thirty tons of silver.
In return, he was given the honor of knighthood. When
he was ready to head back to Massachusetts, he expected
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that Governor Andros would welcome him with open arms as
some sort of hero and give him a lofty position
in the government, but instead Androws turned him away. Months later, though,
Andros was in a prison cell and the Puritans had
retaken control of the colony, so Phipps offered his help
in their efforts against the Native Americans to the north.
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The next two years were a bit of a blur.
Phipps led a small attack against French troops at Port
Royal Way up in modern day Nova Scotia. They found
the fourth there mostly unmanned and under extensive repairs, so
their victory was incredibly easy. Phipps returned to Boston as
a hero, and they rewarded him by sending him out
to do it again. There was a major attack going
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on at the English settlement of Falmouth up in Maine.
Everyone gathered in New York for a large multi colony
gathering and insisted that they pushed back and end the
struggle with New France for good, and they put Phips
in charge. It looked impressive. Phipps had gathered over thirty
ships and more than two thousand fighting men, but he
also took his time doing so, wasting the better part
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of two months. At one point he sent one of
his officers, Captain John Alden, over to marble Head, just
up the coast from Salem Town, to take their cannons
for use in the battle. But marble Head refused. Here's
Emerson Baker once again. This takes place, and they lead
in the fall of but for numerous reasons, a bad weather,
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poor planning, frankly the fortifications of Quebec. It fails disastrously.
They lose hundreds of men. They bring back smallpox with
him into the harbor. When they arrived, they talk about
frozen dead being stacked on the ships like cordwood, and
they lose hundreds of people. And of course, since Phipps
was the man in charge of the entire operation, he
was looked on as a failure to deal with it.
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He's skipped down. In fact, he was so embarrassed that
he sailed back across the Atlantic to London, where his
good friend Increase Mather was currently working to get the
old Massachusetts charter restored by the King. Phipps arrival, whether
or not it was born on the wings of failure,
gave Mather an idea. What if Phipps a man he
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considered to be a friend could be appointed governor by
the King. An ally he would be, so that's what
they pushed for. Mather ditched over two years of diplomatic
efforts to restore the old Puritan charter and instead seemed
to have made a new deal, a new charter that
was favorable to royal control, in exchange for Phipps in
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the governor's house. But of course that meant returning to Boston.
Bipps loved the idea of being governor, but hated the
thought of facing all of those angry colonists. He had
already disappointed them once before with the failed Quebec incidents.
Now he was bringing them a charter that was the
opposite of what they wanted. That's probably all he thought
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about on that long journey back. By the time his
ship was pulling into Boston Harbor on May fourteenth of
six he had a plan. It wasn't honest, and it
certainly wasn't legal, but he knew how he was going
to prevent the crowds from showing him the same hospitality
they extended to Edmund andros. He was going to lie
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to them. The arrival of increase Mather with a new
charter was seen as good news in Boston, but of
course they didn't know what that charter said yet. That
was a bitter pill that needed a lot of sugarcoating
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and lies to go down smoothly. So Phipps stood before
a massive crowd the night he returned and did just that.
This new charter, he told them, would restore the old
laws and freedoms that they had enjoyed under the first Charter.
It was what the crowd wanted to hear, and it
made him a hero for bringing that news to them.
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But I can't help but wonder if Phipps cast a
knowing glance at Mather, because both of them knew how
patently false that promise was. In fact, the new Charter
required new laws to be established that matched English laws
back home. It would take them a while to get
things set up, sure, but when he was done, the
Puritan experiment in New England would essentially be over. Massachusetts
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would become just one more royal colony. And Phipps needed
this to work. He had his own plans and goals
for his time in office, but that meant staying in
office to see them through. Here's Emerson Baker once again,
this is a guy that has no political experience whatsoever.
He's pretty good at commanding a ship, but he's one
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of these fortune seekers, and frankly, one off one of
his big personal goals would have been to make as
much money off the office as possible. He's all about
personal profit and advancement, and if you can cut a
side deal, he can. When he goes to make a
treaty with the Native Americans up at Pemaquid the end
of the war, he also manages to get the leading
stage him of Maine, Madakawando, to deed him several thousand
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acres of mainland as a part of the treaty. The
same evening that Phipps arrived in Boston, Mercy Lewis and
a companion visited Will's Hill, where Bray Wilkins still suffered
enormous pain in his bladder and where young Daniel had
fallen into paralysis without hesitation. Mercy identified the specter of
John Willard afflicting them both. Two days later, Daniel would
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suffocate to death in his own bed. Mercy Lewis and
Mary Walcott would report that they'd both seen John Willard
choke him, though of course no one else could see
anything but the dying boy, grasping for air until he
was finally still. Samuel Paris would record the boy's cause
of death in his church records as bewitched to death.
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The man hunt for Willard picked up steam after that.
Now he was a murderer as well as a witch.
A new warrant was issued that authorized anyone in or
out of Salem to bring the former constable into custody,
and with it word of his evil deeds spread far
and wide. John Willard's goal had been to escape to
the more liberal and irreligious New York, but he apparently
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took a detour along the way before heading south. He
headed west, making his way out to his family land
in Lancaster along the Nashua River. He apparently had the
bright idea to till the family land there and plant
the crops so that he could return when everything had
blown over and have a harvest waiting for him. So
the records about his capture have this head scratching detail
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written in Willard They say was captured while howeing his
field that was May sixt The constables who found him
put him on a horse and guided him back to
Salem that very night in anticipation of his examination the
following day, But when they arrived there were already too
many people listed for examinations on so Willard would have
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to wait in jail for another day. As part of
Willard's examination, a coroner's jury looked over the body of
Daniel Wilkins, including Nathaniel Ingersoll, Joseph Herrick, and a handful
of the Putnam clan. They reported finding a collection of
bruises on the boy's back, along with cuts and puncture
marks all over his body. In fact, it almost seemed
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as if someone had pierced Daniel with an all and
when they rolled the body onto its front, they noted
that blood flowed freely from the boy's mouth. This horrifying
condition compelled these men to declare that he'd been the
victim of violent and malicious witchcraft. Given what the Wilkins
family knew about John's violent tendencies against his own wife,
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it seemed all too clear that this could be his handiwork.
As a result, John was restrained with shackles to stop
him from attacking the afflicted girls in the room, who
screamed that his specter was torturing them. Oh, and when
the chains clanked onto John's legs, they say old Bray
Wilkins was suddenly relieved of the piercing pain in his abdomen.
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That you were fled from authority is an acknowledgement of guilt,
Hawthorne declared. In other words, John Willard had made his
confession through his actions. The previous afternoon in Boston was
devoted to other matters, though, Phipps and the Council devoted
their time to the ordering of the Massachusetts Militia and
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the naval fleet. They also ordered a public fast for
May twenty six so that everyone in the colony could
devote time to prayer for the new government. The next
few days after that were taken up with an emergency
as three French privateers rated up and down the coast.
Time was slipping away from Phipps and it was starting
to become clear that governing would be nothing more than
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handling one crisis after another. All the while, Hawthorne and
Corwin continued to examine multiple accused witches every day, and
the flow of prisoners to the Boston jail couldn't have
escaped Phipps notice. On May he finally gave his first
official orders regarding the trials, he instructed the prison keeper
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the buy more shackles. I don't know about you, but
that sort of response wouldn't have sat well with me. Finally,
on ma Phipps and the Council met with Hawthorne and Corwin,
who had traveled down to Boston for the occasion. Their
main goal was to discuss judicial appointments and the schedule
for when all of the governing bodies would start operating,
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but it looked like it was going to take a
few weeks. That was time they didn't have. After three
days of discussion, Phipps finally realized that the sale of
matter couldn't wait for the General Court to be set
up in operational so on, he declared that because they
had no official Massachusetts courts ready to go, he was
ordering a special court that would follow English laws in
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regards to the Salem troubles. Soon enough, the Oyer and
Terminal trials would begin. You're probably wondering at this point,
what in the world is an Oyer and Terminer trial.
I'll let historian Richard Trask explain that to you. By May,
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the new Governor, William Phipps, comes together with a lot
of the learned people in Massachusetts and establishes a court
of Oyer and Termina to hear and determine these cases,
because now the jails are being clogged by a number
of people who have been accused, and at the preliminary
hearing they've just been put in jail. So what they
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then do is have just the same legal system that's
done in Old England. You have a grand jury that
listens to the Attorney General of Massachusetts give the case.
You have a pool of jurors from among the towns
in Massachusetts who will be the jury. You have this
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eight or nine person special court court of Oyer and
Termina who will be the judges, and they are supposed
to have I think at least three or four of
these magistrates there. They can ask questions and can kind
of mole what they want to have happened. But it's
basically the Attorney General who gives the information. So then
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you have the trial, and trials are very fast, usually
within two days maybe three, All of the evidences in
the jury goes out, makes us determination, and in almost
every case the people have found guilty. So an Oyer
and Terminer is essentially an English high court. The name
literally means to hear and determine, and that's what they
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were calling into existence, an official, well staffed court that
could hear these cases in an official capacity and then
determined guilt or innocence. And for the nearly forty people
still waiting in jail on May four, that sounded like progress.
Of course, word got out that this new, more official
version of justice was about to be implemented. But the
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people from the area around Salem didn't sigh with relief
and let down their guard. No. Instead, in the two
weeks between the order to establish the court and the
date of the first session, new accusations flooded in. In fact,
that figure of thirty eight nearly doubled just because the
court had been announced. The new wave of accused came
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from Salem, as you might expect, but also from Topsfield,
ip Switch, marble Head, and even Boston. The names were
coming in so quickly that Hawthorne and Corwin couldn't keep
up with their warrant process. Of course, that didn't mean
the arrests were slowing down, and sometimes they put the
cart before the horse. A great example is the story
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of Captain John Alden. Today, he would be perfect in
the role of that sixty year old action hero. He
was strong, brave, and a career fighter. He was a
merchant who ran the dangerous route between the civilized Salem
area and the wild Maine frontier, but also served in
the militia for decades. In fact, when Phipps sailed up
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the coast to attack Quebec, Captain John Alden was right
there with him. In time between that failed military expedition
and the start of the Oyer and Terminer, Alden had
managed to get captured by the French along with his
entire ship, including his own son. Everyone had been taken
back to French territory in the North in September, but
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at some point they picked John Alden as their representative
to go to Salem and collect a ransom for the
ship and the sailors. So that's why. On May thirty one,
John Alden was in Salem village when a massive crowd
of people surrounded the little meeting house, filling the room
and spilling out into the grass surround it. John wandered
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over for a closer look. More people were being examined
ahead of the Oyer and Terminer, and I can't help
but assume that John was curious about who was inside
at the front of the room. That's when a hand
shot out of the crowd and grabbed him by the wrist.
It was one of the local constables, and he informed
Alden that he was up next for examination. It happened
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so quickly that his warrant was drafted after he was
inside the meeting house. Rushing to make everything as official
as possible, Alden was stunned as they dragged him into
the meeting house and held him at the edge of
the crowd. Hawthorn and Corwin were seated up front as usual,
joined that day by a new judge, bartholem you Gedney.
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The usual crowd of accusers were seated near the front
as well. When they were ready to begin, the judges
asked the girls to look at the crowd and identify
Captain John Alden, the man they had accused of sending
his spectral form to attack them. The girls failed to
point to the correct man, though much to John's delight.
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Rather than assumed that was because they really didn't know
what Alden looked like, the judges assumed it was because
the meeting house was so dimly lit, so they dragged
the girls and a group of the accused outside into
the daylight for a better look. Along the way, someone
must have coached one of them, because they were finally
able to point a finger at Alden. The actual examination
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didn't go any better for him. We might look on
Alden's capture by the French with pity and see his
release and plans to return to his son to be noble.
The magistrates, though, saw it as a sign that he
was in league with the nevill The French were Catholic,
and they had allied themselves with the Native Americans, two
groups of people viewed as tools of Satan by the Puritans.
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John Alden wasn't the only suspect to leave the meeting
house in shackles that day, though. One of them was
Martha Carrier from nearby and over. Accusations about her involvement
in witchcraft began after she refused to leave town after
her family contracted smallpox, which upset her neighbors, never mind
the fact that the outbreak was really the fault of
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Phipps and his failed military expedition. Everyone was carted off
to jail that afternoon, but unlike all the previous examinations
that had taken place, these suspects could at least see
the light at the end of the tunnel. With the
oyer and terminer announced, they knew their time in jail
wouldn't go on for months. Finally there was an end
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in sight, but that tunnel would be much more dark
and dangerous than any of them could have imagined. I
think it's interesting to point out just how upside down
these examinations were. In typical Puritan society, women and children
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had almost no voice, and yet here was a group
of young women who practically guided the entire debacle toward
its dark destination. And I'm not alone in noticing that hypocrisy.
Here's Jane Kaminsky, professor of American history at Harvard, with
more thoughts on the matter. That is, to me the
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great mystery of the Salem proceedings. How in a world
that devalues women's utterances and that tends to keep maybe
especially young women within their channels, this group of adolescent
that's anachronistic term, but women in their teens and early
twenties come to be this, this sort of star witness
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coterie is completely ineffable. I think there is pretty convincing
evidence that they are to a certain extent, coordinating with
each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. It's also interesting
to note just how frantic things became so early on,
and how that chaos provided another reason for why these
(33:38):
young women were able to take such control over the proceedings.
It seems like a moment where the normal sources of
authority holds so poorly, and the need for answers two
questions that seem profound feels so urgent, and that people
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begin listening to unexpected witnesses who say they have answers.
It's hard to be definitive about it, but looking back
on this phase of the Salem Trials, it really seems
like the magistrates were simply overwhelmed by it all. An
ever increasing flow of suspects and a nearly constant barrage
of new afflictions and unexplainable episodes combined to make it
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all just too much to handle logically. At some point
they had to have just given in. When they were
wrapping up the examination of Captain John Alden, they asked
him to stand on a chair with his arms limp
at his sides, and look toward the girls who had
accused him. The moment his eyes fell on them. The
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girls toppled over and began to writhe on the floor
in agony, just as they had done before in his
presence and in the presence of so many other accused individuals.
The newest judge at the front of the room ar
aleam you. Gedney motioned towards the girls and glared at
Alden as if to say, do you see what you
have done? But Alden stood his ground. He turned his
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gaze from the girls and aimed his eyes straight at Gedney.
After a brief pause to let this significant sink in,
Alden spoke up in his own defense. If his gaze
was so powerful as to afflict the girls over there,
he suggested, why did Gedney not also fall over in pain.
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The stumping of the judges enraged Salem's junior minister, Nicholas Noyes,
who launched into a tirade, fueling that Alden dared to
speak of God while bringing calamity to the colony. With
the minister on the side of the girls, the judges
ordered George Herrick to escort John Alden to jail. Neither
his standing in the community nor his wealth as a
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merchant would serve to render him free. Instead, like so
many others, he was sent to Boston to away justice.
Whether they believed God would finally step in and intervene,
or their faith was in the newly appointed Governor Phipps,
a higher power was about to take over the official
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trials we're about to begin. 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, Mercy Lewis and Annie Putnam both
(36:35):
had claimed to see Bridget spirit in their home. They
stated as if it were indisputable fact that she had
bewitched her second husband, Thomas to death. It was damning
evidence given the circumstances, but Bridget had also lied to
the magistrates, and that didn't help her case. When they
asked her if she was a witch, she denied it
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and claimed that she didn't even know what a witch was.
She also claimed she hadn't known anyone else confessed to
being agents of the devil, but that wasn't exactly true.
On the morning of her examination back in April, she
had been told that Abigail Hobbs and Mary Warren had confessed,
and if Bridget was willing to lie about that, what
else was she lying about? It was all word games.
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It was all a classic example of Bridget being considered
guilty even before she was examined on April nineteenth. Nothing
she could say would change the public perception of her.
All she could do was deny it, as each question
was fired at her, one by one. I am innocent.
I Am innocent. I Am innocent. Unobscured was created and
(38:35):
written by me Aaron Bankey 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
(38:56):
dot com. Until next time, thanks are listening.
John Willard was making a name for himself. Unlike most
of the people in Salem Village, he hadn't been born there.
It was marriage that had brought him to the close
knit community there west of Salem Town, and that was
his first smart decision. He married into the Wilkins family,
one of the prominent families in the area. By no
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means were the Wilkins on par with the Putnam's, but
just like them, they chose to live far from Salem
Town in the western bread basket of the community. Over
the years, the Wilkins had built a micro village on
a rise of land everyone called Will's Hill, and they
started to shrug off outsiders. But not John Willard. The
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leader of the clan was an old man named Bray Wilkins.
Maybe it was the loss of his timber business or
the government seizure of all his company assets. Whatever the
nudge was, Bray had become closed off to the outside
world over time. When young Margaret Wilkins married someone from
outside their community, she was the first to do so.
But John Willard wasn't going to let that be a hindrance.
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He had plans to win them over. He bought property
near the Wilkins Clan and started into a career in
land speculation by dividing it into smaller lots and selling
those off. He was trying to do right for his
wife and new family, to make them proud and keep
up with their ambitions. But not everything was storybook perfect.
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In fact, it seems that John had developed a bit
of a reputation and it was catching up with him.
Looking back, I wonder if he regretted coming to Salem Village.
There were a lot of reasons why his marriage to
Margaret was a good thing, but it toppled the first
domino that set a whole series of events in motion.
And now on May ten, Willard found himself trying to
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escape at all. John Willard, Deputy Constable to Salem Village,
was on the run. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Minky,
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Like I said, John Willard had a bit of baggage. First,
one of John's relatives had been tried for witchcraft back
in his hometown of Lancaster in western Massachusetts, and that
sort of thing had a way of following people around.
As I've said before, the people of Puritan New England
believe that a person could inherit the spiritual disposition of
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their direct ancestors in the same way that people inherit
hair color or facial features. This wasn't a good thing
for John at home, though. There was more trouble. John
was known to beat his wife with a stick whenever
she crossed him, and during his time in the Wilkins community,
he had shown that same propensity toward abuse while watching
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over some of the Putnam children. All of those details
make up a really good list of reasons why John's
future might not be as bright as he hoped. But
the real turning point arrived on March eight. That was
the day he was selected to be a deputy constable
for Salem Village. The rumors of witchcraft had started just
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a month before, so perhaps he was part of an
effort to bolster the ranks of the village officials. We
know that John Putnam Jr. Was also sworn in that
same day, so that's probably the case. They knew they
were about to become very, very busy. John Willard's role
gave him a front row seat to the mess that
was unfolding in the village. His name isn't on any
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of the legal documents, but As a deputy constable, he
would have been responsible for helping Constables Herrick and Locker
arrest and transport the accused witches, dragging them from their
homes to the meeting house, and then from jail to
jail when they were removed from Salem to Boston and
back again. Maybe he was one of the men responsible
for hauling the six Sarah Osburne from place to place,
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or the elderly Rebecca Nurse. Maybe he was one of
the men who transported little Dorothy Good, imprisoned as a
witch at just four years old. No record remains of
exactly what touched John's heart, but something about it got
to him. There was something about jailing so many vulnerable women, children, elders,
and respected churchgoers that finally broke through his conscience. What
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he was doing was wrong, and everything about his position
was suddenly filling him with doubt. And one of the
things he felt the most doubt about was the truth
of the accusations Annie Putnam and her friends were making.
On April, he visited Putnam to confront her about the
accusation she was making. Maybe he thought he could talk
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some sense into her, or at least figure out what
the truth was in the middle of the chaos. Maybe
he knew something about the girls that the others didn't.
After all, he'd been a caretaker for the family, he
knew the girl well. His visit backfired, though. The next day,
Annie began to claim that she'd been attacked by his
spectral shape for days and days, but that she had
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stayed silent about it, hoping that he would stop. When
she begged him to leave her alone. Everyone seemed to
take notice of this and began to look into John's
behavior for proof of the accusations. It turns out John
had already stopped serving warrants against accused witches. After his
visit to Annie Putnam, those spurs of suspicion bloomed into
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full accusations. In the first week of May, girls all
over Sale and village were attacked by his spirit. When
he found out about the claims against him, John sped
to Bray Wilkins house. He was positive the family patriarch,
his wife's own grandfather, would know what to do. Bray
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later recalled that John came to my house greatly troubled,
desiring me with some other neighbors to pray for him.
But John caught Bray in the middle of trying to
leave for a trip, and the older man brushed him off.
A few days later, when the family was having dinner
together in Boston, John glared at Bray across the table,
perhaps fueled by what he perceived to be as betrayal,
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but Bray didn't notice. All he remembered from that night
was the pain that suddenly bloomed in his bladder. Later,
a doctor who examined him said that his affliction was preternatural,
reminding him of the newest rumors of John Willard. When
Bray had recovered enough to make the journey home to Salem,
he arrived to find one of his grandchildren, seventeen year
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old Daniel, laid low by a mysterious illness of his own.
That was enough evidence for the village. Hawthorne and Corwin
scribbled out another of their warrants, this time for John Willard.
No one had formally approached them to request it, but
the rumors were just too enticing, so they handed the
slip of paper to John Putnam Jr. Who had been
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selected alongside John Willard on March eight. When Putnam arrived
at John Willard's home the next day he found it empty.
He searched all over Will's Hill, asking from house to
house for anyone who might know where John had gone,
but no one had a clue. At the end of
his visit, Putnam left with a clear message from the
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Wilkins family, John Willard had fled Salem. I want to
switch is for a bit and talk about a place
that isn't Salem. We've covered the differences between Massachusetts and
Maine in the previous episode, but there's another colony that's
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going to come into play over the course of the trials,
New York. Today. We picture New York City as a
metropolis unlike any other. It's diverse and textured and full
of countless languages, cultures, and attitudes. It has a powerful
relationship with the waters that surround it, and the people
who live there have a more international mindset than most
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of their fellow Americans. In the late seventeenth century, though,
it was pretty similar to all of that, and all
of it seems to be the fault of the Dutch.
In the early sixteen hundreds, a lot of European powers
were trying to colonize the New World. Most European countries
tended toward authoritarian monarchies that persecuted religious outliers and expelled
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minority people groups, not the Dutch, though they were a
different sort of country. The Dutch had discovered that a
liberal government built around intellectual freedom and tolerance was much
more powerful. They prioritized commerce over religion and welcomed all
of those displaced minority groups into their own population, allowing
them to reap the benefit of their talents and resources.
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It was that sort of attitude that was woven into
the foundational elements of the New York Colony. Back then,
of course, it was known as New Amsterdam, but things
would begin to change in sixteen sixty seven. That was
the year the Dutch handed control of the colony over
to the English and renamed the territory in port after
the brother of the King, the Duke of York. Goodbye
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New Amsterdam, Hello New York. But the English ran things
very differently. Thanks to the English Civil War in the
sixteen forties, the Crown lacked the funds to embark on
proper royal colonies. Instead intended to give those opportunities to
private companies founded by merchants and wealthy aristocrats with royal
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over site. Of course, that's why the Puritans of Massachusetts
were able to do what they did. They received a
commercial charter from the English government prior to the Civil War,
and then all of the leaders of that company transplanted
themselves overseas to live right in the middle of their investment.
It was economic cover for a deeply religious experiment to
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live an unobstructed Puritan life far from the watchful eye
of the King. New York didn't have that purposeful beginning.
When the English took control in sixteen sixty seven, they
had to send troops into the city to help it
go smoothly. The Dutch had attracted a very diverse and
liberal community there, and they chafed under the English yoke.
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The early governors of the colony even refused English shipping
companies in favor of their old Dutch partners. It was
a mess, and England felt like it was losing control.
Massachusetts sent troops and supplies to help out in an
effort to seem like a team player, but their time
was running out. After the devastation of King Philip's War
and the related conflict up and down the main coast,
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England decided enough was enough. The old way of running
things was no longer working. In sixteen seventy nine, the
Crown took New Hampshire away from the Massachusetts colony and
issued them a new royal charter. Five years later, in
sixteen eighty four, Massachusetts saw their own charter revoked, leaving
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them in a lawless chaos. Less than a year after that,
King Charles the Second died before law and order could
be restored. To help calm the colonies, Edmund Andros was
sent to set up English military rule. Here's historian Emerson Baker.
He was an Anglican with a Church of England, and
Puritanism no longer was special. Massachusetts was no longer special.
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It was part of a super colony for stretch from
New Jersey to Maine. Andros wasn't a well loved governor.
He had previously been governor of New York and was
very outspoken against Puritans. He raised taxes, revoked Puritan laws,
and appointed his own judges and sheriffs. The worst blow, however,
came when Andros forced landowners to essentially re buy their
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land from the Crown. The result was deep organized resistance.
On April eighteenth of sixteen eighty nine, hundreds of armed
Puritans flooded into Boston and captured Andros and his cadre
of loyal officers. All of them were thrown into prison,
and a new provisional government was set up on the
foundation of the old Charter and Puritan law. It left
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Massachusetts defend for itself once again, and with the threat
of the Native American attacks on the northern border, it
wouldn't be an easy task. But there was a new
star rising in the Puritan sky. He was a son
of Maine, a Puritan sympathizer, and a man willing to
fight for a good cause. Folks, I'd like to introduce
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you to Sir William Phipps. William Phipps had the sort
of upbringing that any hard working American today might connect with.
We don't like the silver spoon elitists who don't have
to work hard for their rewards. We want the scrapper,
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the fighter, the one who was going to scramble to
the top of the pile. And William Phipps seems to
fit that bill, at least at first Blush He was
born on the coast of northern Maine around sixteen fifty
two frontier parents. His father used the family home as
a sort of hub for trading goods with the Native Americans,
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but passed away when William was just four. When his
mother remarried, it was to his father's business partner, which
consolidated what little wealth they had, and then life carried on.
There were a lot of factors that might have helped
Phipps become the man history knows him as being when
of fourteen children taught him to fight for himself, and
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working hard on the edge of the frontier taught him
that survival was much more important than social politeness. But
every character trait can become a flaw if you twist
it hard enough. At the age of eighteen, he quit
his job as a shepherd and became an apprentice to
a group of local shipbuilders. Shipbuilders who made frequent trips
to Boston, which allowed him to rub shoulders with the
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sort of wealthy people who ran merchant companies. It's also
how he met a Puritan minister named Increase Mather, a
man roughly a decade his senior. William married into a
successful merchant family and then proceeded to try his hand
running his own business as a shipbuilder. It turns out
he wasn't the best business man out there, and he
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never really achieved the level of success he aspired to.
In fact, he was better at achieving debts and failures,
much to the frustration of the people he dealt with.
It's important to stop for a moment and call attention
to one of his flaws. Phipps, it turns out, was
much more of a man of passion and a man
of learning. He wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination,
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but he also wasn't educated and that sort of rubbed
off in his business dealings. He was known as a
rough talker who used abusive language like a weapon to
demean and intimidate others, and he was a fortune seeker
in fact. In Sight three, he managed to raise enough
money in England to go on a literal treasure hunt
(15:25):
in the Caribbean, which failed, but somehow the fact that
he survived the trip earned him enough attention to get
a second round of funding. That new, better equipped expedition
paid off, and he returned home with thirty tons of silver.
In return, he was given the honor of knighthood. When
he was ready to head back to Massachusetts, he expected
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that Governor Andros would welcome him with open arms as
some sort of hero and give him a lofty position
in the government, but instead Androws turned him away. Months later, though,
Andros was in a prison cell and the Puritans had
retaken control of the colony, so Phipps offered his help
in their efforts against the Native Americans to the north.
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The next two years were a bit of a blur.
Phipps led a small attack against French troops at Port
Royal Way up in modern day Nova Scotia. They found
the fourth there mostly unmanned and under extensive repairs, so
their victory was incredibly easy. Phipps returned to Boston as
a hero, and they rewarded him by sending him out
to do it again. There was a major attack going
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on at the English settlement of Falmouth up in Maine.
Everyone gathered in New York for a large multi colony
gathering and insisted that they pushed back and end the
struggle with New France for good, and they put Phips
in charge. It looked impressive. Phipps had gathered over thirty
ships and more than two thousand fighting men, but he
also took his time doing so, wasting the better part
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of two months. At one point he sent one of
his officers, Captain John Alden, over to marble Head, just
up the coast from Salem Town, to take their cannons
for use in the battle. But marble Head refused. Here's
Emerson Baker once again. This takes place, and they lead
in the fall of but for numerous reasons, a bad weather,
(17:12):
poor planning, frankly the fortifications of Quebec. It fails disastrously.
They lose hundreds of men. They bring back smallpox with
him into the harbor. When they arrived, they talk about
frozen dead being stacked on the ships like cordwood, and
they lose hundreds of people. And of course, since Phipps
was the man in charge of the entire operation, he
was looked on as a failure to deal with it.
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He's skipped down. In fact, he was so embarrassed that
he sailed back across the Atlantic to London, where his
good friend Increase Mather was currently working to get the
old Massachusetts charter restored by the King. Phipps arrival, whether
or not it was born on the wings of failure,
gave Mather an idea. What if Phipps a man he
(17:55):
considered to be a friend could be appointed governor by
the King. An ally he would be, so that's what
they pushed for. Mather ditched over two years of diplomatic
efforts to restore the old Puritan charter and instead seemed
to have made a new deal, a new charter that
was favorable to royal control, in exchange for Phipps in
(18:16):
the governor's house. But of course that meant returning to Boston.
Bipps loved the idea of being governor, but hated the
thought of facing all of those angry colonists. He had
already disappointed them once before with the failed Quebec incidents.
Now he was bringing them a charter that was the
opposite of what they wanted. That's probably all he thought
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about on that long journey back. By the time his
ship was pulling into Boston Harbor on May fourteenth of
six he had a plan. It wasn't honest, and it
certainly wasn't legal, but he knew how he was going
to prevent the crowds from showing him the same hospitality
they extended to Edmund andros. He was going to lie
(19:00):
to them. The arrival of increase Mather with a new
charter was seen as good news in Boston, but of
course they didn't know what that charter said yet. That
was a bitter pill that needed a lot of sugarcoating
(19:20):
and lies to go down smoothly. So Phipps stood before
a massive crowd the night he returned and did just that.
This new charter, he told them, would restore the old
laws and freedoms that they had enjoyed under the first Charter.
It was what the crowd wanted to hear, and it
made him a hero for bringing that news to them.
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But I can't help but wonder if Phipps cast a
knowing glance at Mather, because both of them knew how
patently false that promise was. In fact, the new Charter
required new laws to be established that matched English laws
back home. It would take them a while to get
things set up, sure, but when he was done, the
Puritan experiment in New England would essentially be over. Massachusetts
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would become just one more royal colony. And Phipps needed
this to work. He had his own plans and goals
for his time in office, but that meant staying in
office to see them through. Here's Emerson Baker once again,
this is a guy that has no political experience whatsoever.
He's pretty good at commanding a ship, but he's one
(20:24):
of these fortune seekers, and frankly, one off one of
his big personal goals would have been to make as
much money off the office as possible. He's all about
personal profit and advancement, and if you can cut a
side deal, he can. When he goes to make a
treaty with the Native Americans up at Pemaquid the end
of the war, he also manages to get the leading
stage him of Maine, Madakawando, to deed him several thousand
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acres of mainland as a part of the treaty. The
same evening that Phipps arrived in Boston, Mercy Lewis and
a companion visited Will's Hill, where Bray Wilkins still suffered
enormous pain in his bladder and where young Daniel had
fallen into paralysis without hesitation. Mercy identified the specter of
John Willard afflicting them both. Two days later, Daniel would
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suffocate to death in his own bed. Mercy Lewis and
Mary Walcott would report that they'd both seen John Willard
choke him, though of course no one else could see
anything but the dying boy, grasping for air until he
was finally still. Samuel Paris would record the boy's cause
of death in his church records as bewitched to death.
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The man hunt for Willard picked up steam after that.
Now he was a murderer as well as a witch.
A new warrant was issued that authorized anyone in or
out of Salem to bring the former constable into custody,
and with it word of his evil deeds spread far
and wide. John Willard's goal had been to escape to
the more liberal and irreligious New York, but he apparently
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took a detour along the way before heading south. He
headed west, making his way out to his family land
in Lancaster along the Nashua River. He apparently had the
bright idea to till the family land there and plant
the crops so that he could return when everything had
blown over and have a harvest waiting for him. So
the records about his capture have this head scratching detail
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written in Willard They say was captured while howeing his
field that was May sixt The constables who found him
put him on a horse and guided him back to
Salem that very night in anticipation of his examination the
following day, But when they arrived there were already too
many people listed for examinations on so Willard would have
(22:39):
to wait in jail for another day. As part of
Willard's examination, a coroner's jury looked over the body of
Daniel Wilkins, including Nathaniel Ingersoll, Joseph Herrick, and a handful
of the Putnam clan. They reported finding a collection of
bruises on the boy's back, along with cuts and puncture
marks all over his body. In fact, it almost seemed
(23:02):
as if someone had pierced Daniel with an all and
when they rolled the body onto its front, they noted
that blood flowed freely from the boy's mouth. This horrifying
condition compelled these men to declare that he'd been the
victim of violent and malicious witchcraft. Given what the Wilkins
family knew about John's violent tendencies against his own wife,
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it seemed all too clear that this could be his handiwork.
As a result, John was restrained with shackles to stop
him from attacking the afflicted girls in the room, who
screamed that his specter was torturing them. Oh, and when
the chains clanked onto John's legs, they say old Bray
Wilkins was suddenly relieved of the piercing pain in his abdomen.
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That you were fled from authority is an acknowledgement of guilt,
Hawthorne declared. In other words, John Willard had made his
confession through his actions. The previous afternoon in Boston was
devoted to other matters, though, Phipps and the Council devoted
their time to the ordering of the Massachusetts Militia and
(24:08):
the naval fleet. They also ordered a public fast for
May twenty six so that everyone in the colony could
devote time to prayer for the new government. The next
few days after that were taken up with an emergency
as three French privateers rated up and down the coast.
Time was slipping away from Phipps and it was starting
to become clear that governing would be nothing more than
(24:30):
handling one crisis after another. All the while, Hawthorne and
Corwin continued to examine multiple accused witches every day, and
the flow of prisoners to the Boston jail couldn't have
escaped Phipps notice. On May he finally gave his first
official orders regarding the trials, he instructed the prison keeper
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the buy more shackles. I don't know about you, but
that sort of response wouldn't have sat well with me. Finally,
on ma Phipps and the Council met with Hawthorne and Corwin,
who had traveled down to Boston for the occasion. Their
main goal was to discuss judicial appointments and the schedule
for when all of the governing bodies would start operating,
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but it looked like it was going to take a
few weeks. That was time they didn't have. After three
days of discussion, Phipps finally realized that the sale of
matter couldn't wait for the General Court to be set
up in operational so on, he declared that because they
had no official Massachusetts courts ready to go, he was
ordering a special court that would follow English laws in
(25:37):
regards to the Salem troubles. Soon enough, the Oyer and
Terminal trials would begin. You're probably wondering at this point,
what in the world is an Oyer and Terminer trial.
I'll let historian Richard Trask explain that to you. By May,
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the new Governor, William Phipps, comes together with a lot
of the learned people in Massachusetts and establishes a court
of Oyer and Termina to hear and determine these cases,
because now the jails are being clogged by a number
of people who have been accused, and at the preliminary
hearing they've just been put in jail. So what they
(26:23):
then do is have just the same legal system that's
done in Old England. You have a grand jury that
listens to the Attorney General of Massachusetts give the case.
You have a pool of jurors from among the towns
in Massachusetts who will be the jury. You have this
(26:45):
eight or nine person special court court of Oyer and
Termina who will be the judges, and they are supposed
to have I think at least three or four of
these magistrates there. They can ask questions and can kind
of mole what they want to have happened. But it's
basically the Attorney General who gives the information. So then
(27:05):
you have the trial, and trials are very fast, usually
within two days maybe three, All of the evidences in
the jury goes out, makes us determination, and in almost
every case the people have found guilty. So an Oyer
and Terminer is essentially an English high court. The name
literally means to hear and determine, and that's what they
(27:28):
were calling into existence, an official, well staffed court that
could hear these cases in an official capacity and then
determined guilt or innocence. And for the nearly forty people
still waiting in jail on May four, that sounded like progress.
Of course, word got out that this new, more official
version of justice was about to be implemented. But the
(27:51):
people from the area around Salem didn't sigh with relief
and let down their guard. No. Instead, in the two
weeks between the order to establish the court and the
date of the first session, new accusations flooded in. In fact,
that figure of thirty eight nearly doubled just because the
court had been announced. The new wave of accused came
(28:13):
from Salem, as you might expect, but also from Topsfield,
ip Switch, marble Head, and even Boston. The names were
coming in so quickly that Hawthorne and Corwin couldn't keep
up with their warrant process. Of course, that didn't mean
the arrests were slowing down, and sometimes they put the
cart before the horse. A great example is the story
(28:33):
of Captain John Alden. Today, he would be perfect in
the role of that sixty year old action hero. He
was strong, brave, and a career fighter. He was a
merchant who ran the dangerous route between the civilized Salem
area and the wild Maine frontier, but also served in
the militia for decades. In fact, when Phipps sailed up
(28:54):
the coast to attack Quebec, Captain John Alden was right
there with him. In time between that failed military expedition
and the start of the Oyer and Terminer, Alden had
managed to get captured by the French along with his
entire ship, including his own son. Everyone had been taken
back to French territory in the North in September, but
(29:16):
at some point they picked John Alden as their representative
to go to Salem and collect a ransom for the
ship and the sailors. So that's why. On May thirty one,
John Alden was in Salem village when a massive crowd
of people surrounded the little meeting house, filling the room
and spilling out into the grass surround it. John wandered
(29:37):
over for a closer look. More people were being examined
ahead of the Oyer and Terminer, and I can't help
but assume that John was curious about who was inside
at the front of the room. That's when a hand
shot out of the crowd and grabbed him by the wrist.
It was one of the local constables, and he informed
Alden that he was up next for examination. It happened
(29:58):
so quickly that his warrant was drafted after he was
inside the meeting house. Rushing to make everything as official
as possible, Alden was stunned as they dragged him into
the meeting house and held him at the edge of
the crowd. Hawthorn and Corwin were seated up front as usual,
joined that day by a new judge, bartholem you Gedney.
(30:19):
The usual crowd of accusers were seated near the front
as well. When they were ready to begin, the judges
asked the girls to look at the crowd and identify
Captain John Alden, the man they had accused of sending
his spectral form to attack them. The girls failed to
point to the correct man, though much to John's delight.
(30:39):
Rather than assumed that was because they really didn't know
what Alden looked like, the judges assumed it was because
the meeting house was so dimly lit, so they dragged
the girls and a group of the accused outside into
the daylight for a better look. Along the way, someone
must have coached one of them, because they were finally
able to point a finger at Alden. The actual examination
(31:01):
didn't go any better for him. We might look on
Alden's capture by the French with pity and see his
release and plans to return to his son to be noble.
The magistrates, though, saw it as a sign that he
was in league with the nevill The French were Catholic,
and they had allied themselves with the Native Americans, two
groups of people viewed as tools of Satan by the Puritans.
(31:24):
John Alden wasn't the only suspect to leave the meeting
house in shackles that day, though. One of them was
Martha Carrier from nearby and over. Accusations about her involvement
in witchcraft began after she refused to leave town after
her family contracted smallpox, which upset her neighbors, never mind
the fact that the outbreak was really the fault of
(31:45):
Phipps and his failed military expedition. Everyone was carted off
to jail that afternoon, but unlike all the previous examinations
that had taken place, these suspects could at least see
the light at the end of the tunnel. With the
oyer and terminer announced, they knew their time in jail
wouldn't go on for months. Finally there was an end
(32:08):
in sight, but that tunnel would be much more dark
and dangerous than any of them could have imagined. I
think it's interesting to point out just how upside down
these examinations were. In typical Puritan society, women and children
(32:32):
had almost no voice, and yet here was a group
of young women who practically guided the entire debacle toward
its dark destination. And I'm not alone in noticing that hypocrisy.
Here's Jane Kaminsky, professor of American history at Harvard, with
more thoughts on the matter. That is, to me the
(32:52):
great mystery of the Salem proceedings. How in a world
that devalues women's utterances and that tends to keep maybe
especially young women within their channels, this group of adolescent
that's anachronistic term, but women in their teens and early
twenties come to be this, this sort of star witness
(33:16):
coterie is completely ineffable. I think there is pretty convincing
evidence that they are to a certain extent, coordinating with
each other and engaging in deliberate fraud. It's also interesting
to note just how frantic things became so early on,
and how that chaos provided another reason for why these
(33:38):
young women were able to take such control over the proceedings.
It seems like a moment where the normal sources of
authority holds so poorly, and the need for answers two
questions that seem profound feels so urgent, and that people
(34:01):
begin listening to unexpected witnesses who say they have answers.
It's hard to be definitive about it, but looking back
on this phase of the Salem Trials, it really seems
like the magistrates were simply overwhelmed by it all. An
ever increasing flow of suspects and a nearly constant barrage
of new afflictions and unexplainable episodes combined to make it
(34:24):
all just too much to handle logically. At some point
they had to have just given in. When they were
wrapping up the examination of Captain John Alden, they asked
him to stand on a chair with his arms limp
at his sides, and look toward the girls who had
accused him. The moment his eyes fell on them. The
(34:46):
girls toppled over and began to writhe on the floor
in agony, just as they had done before in his
presence and in the presence of so many other accused individuals.
The newest judge at the front of the room ar
aleam you. Gedney motioned towards the girls and glared at
Alden as if to say, do you see what you
have done? But Alden stood his ground. He turned his
(35:10):
gaze from the girls and aimed his eyes straight at Gedney.
After a brief pause to let this significant sink in,
Alden spoke up in his own defense. If his gaze
was so powerful as to afflict the girls over there,
he suggested, why did Gedney not also fall over in pain.
(35:30):
The stumping of the judges enraged Salem's junior minister, Nicholas Noyes,
who launched into a tirade, fueling that Alden dared to
speak of God while bringing calamity to the colony. With
the minister on the side of the girls, the judges
ordered George Herrick to escort John Alden to jail. Neither
his standing in the community nor his wealth as a
(35:52):
merchant would serve to render him free. Instead, like so
many others, he was sent to Boston to away justice.
Whether they believed God would finally step in and intervene,
or their faith was in the newly appointed Governor Phipps,
a higher power was about to take over the official
(36:13):
trials we're about to begin. 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, Mercy Lewis and Annie Putnam both
(36:35):
had claimed to see Bridget spirit in their home. They
stated as if it were indisputable fact that she had
bewitched her second husband, Thomas to death. It was damning
evidence given the circumstances, but Bridget had also lied to
the magistrates, and that didn't help her case. When they
asked her if she was a witch, she denied it
(36:55):
and claimed that she didn't even know what a witch was.
She also claimed she hadn't known anyone else confessed to
being agents of the devil, but that wasn't exactly true.
On the morning of her examination back in April, she
had been told that Abigail Hobbs and Mary Warren had confessed,
and if Bridget was willing to lie about that, what
else was she lying about? It was all word games.
(37:18):
It was all a classic example of Bridget being considered
guilty even before she was examined on April nineteenth. Nothing
she could say would change the public perception of her.
All she could do was deny it, as each question
was fired at her, one by one. I am innocent.
I Am innocent. I Am innocent. Unobscured was created and
(38:35):
written by me Aaron Bankey 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
(38:56):
dot com. Until next time, thanks are listening.
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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