S1 – INTERVIEW 2: Mary Beth Norton

Our interview with Mary Beth Norton, professor of American history at Cornell University and author of In the Devil’s Snare.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Our guest today is historian Mary Beth Norton. She's a
professor of American History at Cornell University, where she's taught
since nineteen one. In two thousand five to two thousand six,
she was also the pit Professor of American History and
Institutions at the University of Cambridge. She has received four
honorary degrees and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim,

(00:24):
Melon and Star Foundations, as well as from Princeton University
and the Huntington Library. She is currently the president of
the twelve thousand member American Historical Association. My producer is
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams had a chance to sit
down with Professor Norton this past summer, and I want
to share that great conversation with you today. So without

(00:45):
further delay, let's get on with the show. This is
the Unobscured Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey,

(01:26):
I'm Mary Beth Norton. I'm a professor of American history
at Cornell University. I teach a bunch of courses on
early America and women. I have written several books, um
some of which are related to Salem Witchcraft, one of
which in particular is called in the Devil's Snare subtitle
the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of sixte two and very deliberately

(01:50):
subtitled a crisis rather than trials, because the book is
much broader than the trials themselves. When you call it
a crisis is because there are so many things occurring
outside of this very specific instance of the witch tribals.
Can you talk about a few of those contributing factor well,
I think in my book I argue that the most

(02:11):
important contributing factor is the um Indian War that's going
on on the northern frontier. We don't really know much
about this war. I certainly didn't know much about it
until it popped up as I was working on my
my study of Salem Witchcraft. I did not intend to
make the book what it turned out to be, which

(02:31):
is a dual narrative of war and witchcraft. I did
not understand the significance of the war until I kept
coming across material relevant to the war in the stuff
I was reading, and Uh, I went to look for
histories of the war, and I didn't find any um
And this was why I didn't anything about it. Was
because there have been no modern histories of it. The

(02:52):
most recent history to this day, the most recent history
of the war, which is known as King William's War
on the North in Frontier, was written by Cotton Mather
and published in the sixteen nineties. Was the only comprehensive
history that I found, and still there has been not one.
So I did not anticipate finding the war to be
as important as it turned out to be. And before

(03:17):
there was Philip, yes, there was King Philip's War. And
another problem with the literature on King Philip's War until
my book was that it's always focused on King Philip's
War in the south, that is, southern New England. King
Philip's War is thought of as an Indian war in
the old Plymouth Colony, uh in Rhode Island, and in

(03:42):
parts of southern Massachusetts Bay. But I discovered that there
was a northern part of it also, which has been
given very short shrift in histories of King philips War.
There is one history of King Philip's War that gives
a chapter to the northern part of the war, but
the King Philip's War is started in the sixteen seventies

(04:04):
and um the leader of the Indians was King Philip Um,
a Wampanoag chief who was very concerned about English encroachments
on his land and very concerned about missionizing activities of
the Christians in his lands. Um and he led his

(04:25):
warriors in raids, very devastating raids on New England communities.
But the war um leaked over, I think we can say,
into the north. The Indians in the north, the Wabanakis
did not particularly want to get involved in it, but
they basically were forced to because of pressure from the

(04:46):
Wampanoag's in the south and from the English settlers who
didn't trust them because of what was happening in the South.
And in fact, the English treated them extremely badly in
King Philip's war, Um did all kinds of things that
you can only call the furious um to them. And
so they did become involved. And so the Indian War

(05:09):
then became in the sixteen seventies, became general. Um. It
was finally came to an end in more or less
with a truce in sixteen seventy eight. And UH they
it was devastating to the English who had settled in
Maine and New Hampshire. Uh, they had abandoned their communities

(05:32):
in that period they moved back in um and then
the Second War started in sixteen eighty eight and it
all happened all over again. It was devastating. It was
devastating war. UM. We don't think of Maine as a
very um well, we don't think of Maine is a frontier.
We don't think of Maine as a prosperous area. But

(05:52):
in fact, Maine in the sixteen seventies and sixteen nineties
was really where the action was as far as um
profit to be made in New England. In Boston, people
had bought land, they had set up sawmills. Boston had
a very vigorous ship building industry that the sawmills in

(06:15):
Maine were providing the labor the time, the timber for
the um. The There was a big business of masts
of the very well built, very well developed pines which
were perfect for ships masts in in Maine. And so

(06:35):
these people who owned this property in Maine were making
money handover fest and they also were fishing off the
coast uh and so there was a lot of money
to be made in Maine. And basically the Indian Wars
devastated the economy of Maine and Maine in a lot
of ways never really recovered. Um. People didn't come back

(06:56):
until the seventeen twenties. And when they did, UM the
um a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone. So
it was really very bad. How did those same things
in the economic wars that were occurring because of these wars,
how did that affect the town sae Um? Well, what
happened was, um all the people who had been settling

(07:18):
in Maine had to go somewhere they if they weren't killed,
and so they filtered down into Massachusetts. They filtered down,
especially into Essex County, which is the northernmost county of Massachusetts,
the northeastern most county, and so a lot of the
people came to live in marble Head, or came to
live in Salem, or came indeed to live in Salem

(07:39):
Village uh and Um in particular. One of the things
that I discovered. I didn't discover it, I learned it
in other people's work, but that I've pursued to a
greater extent than other people did was how many of
the young female accusers were in fact refugees from the
main frontier, where people whose families had been killed, even

(08:03):
though they had survived, and they had come to um
to Salem, or to the area of Salem, and we're
living as servants or living with their families that were
only shall we say partial families because people in the
family had been killed. So UM. I argue in the

(08:23):
book that one of the reasons why these women were
so um conflicted shall we say um, was that we could,
in a modern sense say they say that they were
suffering from PTSD, that they had suffered such trauma on
the frontier as young people, that they acted out in

(08:47):
in ways that helped to further, if not begin, the
Salem Crisis. I was very fortunate to be able to
find very scattered records biographical information about the youthful experiences
of three of the young women, very explicit information about

(09:10):
what they've gone through as young children, and that was
very helpful to my making my argument. Uh where I
find it. I found it and actually was mostly published
but in sort of obscure places, um, in compilations of
documents that were done in the nineteenth century. Until I
wrote my book, nobody was focusing on it. Until I

(09:33):
wrote my book, nobody really focused on the war it
was listed. If you read most other books about Salem,
there'll be a first chapter, and the first chapter will
say sort of underlying factors behind um Salem witchcraft, and
one of them will be problems of the governance of
the colony, and then there'll be other issues, but one

(09:54):
of them will also be UM the Indian War, and
it will get a few pages. UM. But the Indian
War came to dominate my narrative because I think it
dominated the lives of people then, and the way I
said earlier, I I didn't um expect it um. But

(10:14):
what happened was I decided to do something in my
research that other people hadn't done, which was to look
for letters written by anybody in the sixteen nineties, hoping
that I would find comments about Salem witchcraft about which is.
I was hoping I would find comments about what people

(10:35):
thought about which is. It turned out there's only one
really good set of letters that talks about witches, and
it's in't Dutch, so I had to rely on somebody
else's translation of those. But what I did so I
was very disappointed because I got these letters that would
say things like five witches hanged yesterday, But then they

(10:55):
wouldn't say anything about what they thought about that fact.
But what happened was, Um, they were not telling me
about the witches. They were telling me about the Indian Wars.
The letters that didn't tell me about witchcraft told me
all this stuff about the Indian War. You know, my
cousin tells me from Maine that thusn't such as happening,
or I hear from New Hampshire that thusn't such as happened.

(11:17):
And it's suddenly the penny dropped that that was what
was really crucial, that was what was controlling people. So
I um added a whole lot of stuff about the
Indian War to what was my previous idea of thinking
about Salem witchcraft. Let's take it and boil it down
into maybe an individual and try and just imagine what

(11:38):
it would be like for a single human being living
in one of these colonies. What kinds of horrors have
they or their their family? Right? Well, one of the
people that I talk a lot about in the book
is Mercy Lewis, who was a servant in Um the
home of Thomas Putnam, which is a crucial family for

(12:01):
the witchcraft crisis because his young daughter and Putnam Jr.
Was one of the first children who accused people, and
Mercy Lewis, I was able to discover, was from a
family that had lived in what was then called Falmouth,
Maine is now called Portland, UM for a number of

(12:21):
years um And I discovered that basically most of her
family except for her parents were wiped out in the
First Indian War in King Philip's War, and then the
ones who weren't killed in the First Indian War were
mostly killed in the Second Indian War. She and her
sister alone were left. Her sister married someone in Salem Village,

(12:46):
UM in the late sixteen eighties, as I remember correctly,
and that seemed to me why Mercy Lewis eventually made
her way to that area. She also crucially was a
servant for a while in the home of the Reverend
George Burrows, who is a crucial figure in my book
and who is someone who ties Salem Village together with

(13:09):
um Ti, Salem Village together with um Uh the main Frontier,
because he worked both places. He was both a minister
in Salem Village and a minister on the main Frontier
and um he um and she lived with him for
a while and she became one of his key accusers,

(13:30):
and so did Ann Putnam Jr. Become one of his
key accusers. So I like to say when I give
talks about Salem witchcraft, that I have spectral a spectral
vision of my own, and that my spectral vision is
of um uh and Putnam Jr. As the daughter of
this family, and Mercy Lewis as the servant sharing a

(13:54):
bed in what we've been called the chamber, that is
an upper room above the main and floor Uh And
basically Mercy Lewis filling and Putnam Junior's head full of
stories of the Indian War. And we see in An
Putnham juniors accusations in sixt details about things that happened

(14:17):
in Maine and details about George Burrows that you don't
see in, for example, the accusations of Abigail Williams, who
is the niece of the Reverend William Paris, whether Samuel
Paris in um in Salem village. That to me was
very telling. It told me that Ann Putnam Jr. Had

(14:37):
information about Maine. The only person she could have gotten
that information from was Mercy Lewis, who was a servant
in the household So let's talk about power within the
colonies and how it ended up being subverted throughout this crisis.
How about consolidated? I mean, what again, I'm fond of

(14:59):
saying two people when I'm trying to explain what the
power structure of the colony was like at the time
of the Witchcraft crisis, I am fond of saying the
following that making the following analogy that would be though
in the US today the joint chiefs of Staff were
also the president's cabinet and also the judges of the

(15:19):
Supreme Court, because that's the power structure of Massachusetts at
the time. The same men were the judges in the
trials and the chief advisers of the governor, and the
men who led the local militia in the Indian War.
So you talk about consolidation of power there, it is

(15:41):
absolutely So We've got the power dynamics of the men
who are there filling all these rules, the same guys. Right,
Let's just go over the gender dynamics. So we have
powerful are the women, Well, the women are of different status,

(16:04):
is um. There are the women who are married to
those powerful men, and they are known as mistress. They
have a title um, and so they have a certain
status in the community. They don't play much of a
role in the in the Salem crisis. We don't know
much about them. We know about a few of them,
Um asked Tad Baker about the wife of the governor,

(16:25):
for example. Um. They we know about some of them.
But mostly we have ordinary women who are known as
good wives or goody and we have young women who
are children. In the case of the three beginning accusers,
Abigail Williams and Um, Um, come on, I'm now I'm

(16:46):
blanking um. Abigail Williams and um and Putnam Jr. And
Paris's daughter. Those are the children, and they're always called
the children, and they're always separ rated by as far
as other people are concerned, from the somewhat older accusers.
Then you have the group of accusers who are the

(17:09):
teenagers and twenty somethings, many of whom are servants, but
not all of whom are servants. And then you have
the older women, um, the good wives, the women of
some stature in the community, mostly in their thirties. A
couple who are older who play roles as accusers. And

(17:29):
one of the arguments that I make in the book
is that when it the children's accusations are not it's
not that they're not taken seriously, it's that they don't
lead to politically, they don't lead to judicial um uh,
they don't lead to judicial activity until somewhat older women

(17:54):
and girls way in. There was a rule at the
time in English law that it was more it was
a common law rule. I don't think it was written
down anywhere that if you're that the evidence of someone
under fourteen would not be acceptable in a UM in
a capital case, and so the because witchcraft, of course

(18:20):
was a capital crime. And so I think that it
that in the beginning, they the authorities in Massachusetts waited
in effect for older people to weigh in. And what
seems to have been especially important was when women in
their thirties also became accusers. When Um and Putnam Senior

(18:44):
became an accuser, When Sarah Viber became an accuser, even
though she was not a woman of particular standing in
the community, my student discovered that she appeared in more
prosecutions than anyone else UM, and so it was clear

(19:04):
that a woman of that standing UM, who was seen
as more mature, was more believable as far as the
judges were concerned. I might add that the young woman
um Oh among the accusers Susannah Sheldon, who seemed to
be the craziest and she seemed to give the weirdest

(19:28):
um accusations. If you read her statements to the court,
they're very strange. She is herself a refugee from the
main frontier, living with her mother. Her father is dead
um and her older brother seems to have been killed
in the Indian War uh. And she is often cited

(19:54):
as an important accuser, but if you look at the
legal records, she hardly ever appeared in a case. She
doesn't They don't let her swear to the truth of
something because I think they don't trust her. They only
let people swear to the truth of something if they
trust them, and I don't think they trust Susanna Sheldon.
She is nuts and they seem to recognize that she's nuts.
They don't say that anywhere. But so I think people

(20:16):
who have not paid attention to the way these testimonies
are used in court miss out on a number of
aspects of the trial. And I will say that of
the trials, and I will say that the new addition
of the papers done by the international team under the

(20:37):
direction of Bernard Rosenthal has really helped us in this
regard because they give us all the legal notations on
the documents that in fact sometimes we're missing from the
previous addition that we had to work with, which was
based on w p A transcripts done in the nineteen thirties.
So the recent edition has really helped us with understanding

(21:00):
the legal process and how it was pursued. But back
to your question about the UM, the believability or about
the roles of these younger women UM. One of the
things I discovered from my previous book UM called Founding
Mothers and Fathers, which is about UM seventeenth century society

(21:21):
in general and compares what happens in New England to
what happens in in the Chesapeake. One of the things
I discovered from that was that young women tended to
be disbelieved when they spoken court. So to me, when
I looked at the Salem records for the first time,
one of the things I was particularly interested in figuring
out was why were these young women believed, because the

(21:42):
young women in the past were usually not believed. And
of course my answer was the Indian war because the
consolidation of the power um by the in the hands
of the judges UM and the who were also the
leaders of the war, meant that they basically wanted an
explanation for why they were losing the war, and they
were losing the war because of witchcraft. Qwi D. Let's

(22:11):
get into how faith shades everything that occurred throughout this
faith in what faith in witches, belief in witches everybody
believes in witches greater or something a bit mystical, and
how the Puritan faiths specifically shaped a lot of this well.
UM Actually, Um, a lot of people in Maine were

(22:36):
not Puritans, and so we don't know that much about
what the refugees thought, the people who came down into
Salem in Salem Village, because Maine was settled not by Puritans,
but for the most part by members of the Church
of England, one of whom was my very own ancestor.

(22:57):
But that's another story, and so UM, the it's really
hard to know the Uh. Certainly Cotton Mother, who becomes
a great defender of the trials, is one of the
leading young clerics of the colony. His father Increase is

(23:17):
gone in England for the previous several years. He's in
England negotiating for a new charter for the colony. Comes
back with a new governor, arriving in May, by which
point the witchcraft crisis is well underway. There's lots of
accusations by then. So UM, certainly Samuel Parris uh is

(23:39):
a believer in UM a very harsh version of Puritanism.
He's known for his UM, very what we'd say today,
hard line sermons. Uh. He was having a big dispute
with members of the congregation and members of this town
in Salem Village. They were happy with him. They were

(24:01):
withholding his salary, they were withholding firewood. He was not
happy and uh, so he started giving UM more and
more angry sermons. Everybody had to attend. It was part
of the law. Everybody had to attend church services, where
they were church members or not. So everybody was hearing
Samuel Paris rant and rave. And we're lucky that we

(24:21):
have transcripts that have been published of many of those sermons,
so we have an idea of what he was saying.
So yeah, I mean Puritanism was important to all these people, UM,
and they were the faith was significant, and that faith
included a belief in the existence of witches. In England

(24:44):
at the time there was beginning to be skepticism about
belief in witchcraft, but not in America, not really. Even
when the witchcraft crisis came to an end, it wasn't
because people did not believe in witchcraft. It was because
they came to believe that you couldn't prove someone was
a which in court legally, that was why they stopped.

(25:04):
And we have a letter that has survived from um
a magistrate in northern Essex County who who wrote a
letter to a judge who was a friend of his
and basically laid out, shall we say, the Puritan case
for why you can't convict a which on spectral testimony,

(25:28):
And basically his argument was like follows went as follows, um,
spectral testimony must come from the devil, because God would
never tell us what's going to happen in the future.
When God does not speak to us this way, we
all know that, so it has to come from the devil.
And if you are convicting these people on spectral test

(25:49):
on spectral evidence, you are convicting them on the testimony
of the devil. And we all know, you can't trust
the devil, and so that's really why they stopped the trials.
That worked. That worked. It didn't stop the trials, I
should say, I should stop that, because indeed they did
continue the trials after the dissolution of the of the
special court. They did um get um. They did in

(26:13):
fact have three further convictions of people who had confessed,
but all those people were had their convictions in effect
overturned um. And in the regular courts they did not
allow spectral evidence. This is the trials that occurred in
January of sixte and UM. So there were no executions
after late September of six and those were the last

(26:37):
executions that were based on spectral evidence. In part I
hastened to add there was always other evidence too. There
was no one he was convicted solely on spectral evidence. Uh.
There were the what we would call the usual kinds
of evidence of witchcraft, which is neighbors accusing someone of
doing um witchcraft against him from from the proceedings that

(27:04):
had happened prior to that. The only thing that's different
about an oyer in terminal court is it's a special court,
as a court established by the governor for a special reason.
There had been a previous oyer and terminal court in
New York to try the people who had been involved
in a revolt in New York. It was basically the
same model. There was nothing different. Particularly, Um, nobody, I

(27:27):
should say it was a lawyer. Um, there were no
lawyers involved in this except for the first prosecutor. He
was a trained English lawyer. Everybody else was not a lawyer. Um.
They but they were experienced magistrates. They had served as
justice as the piece for years. They had heard many
small cases. They had even sometimes sat in capital cases previously.
There were some pirates who were convicted and hanged previously

(27:51):
in New England. So basically, um uh, it's not as
though these are not experienced people in judicial procedures. But
none of them were trained lawyers. They did have law books.
We know that there was a bookstore in Boston that
had law books that they bought and that they read.
So we know they were self educated. Shall we say

(28:13):
about how they should handle things? Um, But a lot
of things about the trials we don't know. For example,
we know there were nine judges. We know they were
supposed to be five at any one trial, and that
at least two of those five had to be particular people,
but we don't know about anything else. We don't know

(28:36):
how many of those people actually sat in the in
the trials. We don't know who sat in particular trials,
except we're sure that the chief judge, William Stowton, who
was the Lieutenant governor of the colony, we know he
was there pretty much all the time. We're sure he
was there all the time. Other than that, we don't know.
We don't know who was on the jury. We on

(28:58):
the juries. We don't know if there were more than well,
we think there was more than one jury, but we
don't know how many people actually served. We don't know
if there were different juries for different trials. We do
know that George Burrows challenged jurors in his trial and
so new jurors had to be seated, but that's it.
We don't know if the people who were the jurors

(29:20):
before in the trials before Burrows were all the same guys.
Was it the same people again? And again we don't
know that. Um. We know that there was a second
grand jury impaneled later in the system, because we've seen
the the call for the new grand jury. But again
we don't know was the first grand did the first
grand jury sit throughout the entire early period of the trials.

(29:43):
We have no idea. Those records are all gone. So
even though we have a lot of records that survived,
there's many procedural things we don't know. And probably the
best procedural infidence we have is the notations on some
of the documents by the court color Um and he

(30:03):
Um he made uh notations about whether something was sworn
before the grand jury, whether it was sworn in court itself,
And so sometimes you get documents where they say sworn
in before the grand jury and nothing else, And then
there's other documents that say sworn in court and nothing else.

(30:24):
And sometimes you get things that are said sworn and
we were the grand jury and sworn in court, But
you don't know what the missing evidence means. And sometimes
he even wrote a note on something which said, sometimes
people just gave their testimony orally, and I didn't write
it down. So we have one note that says that,
So who knows? Um Actually, sort of ironically, the best

(30:47):
evidence we have about the conduct of the trials comes
from Cotton Mathers account of five of the trials, written
to defend the trials themselves written to defend the verdicts
in his book, and he wonders of the invisible world,
and he gives us kind of blow by blow descriptions

(31:09):
of what happened in the various trials. And so we
can see in some of those cases that we have
the evidence of the testimony that he talks about, but
in other cases we don't have the evidence of the
testimony that he talks about. I think I and everybody
else sort of assumes that he's telling the truth when

(31:29):
he tells you that this is the testimony that's given
in those cases, because there were too many people who
were there and who could have said, no, no, you're
a liar cotton mother if you're telling telling us things
that didn't actually happen in the court room. And so
we think that he did, in fact work off of
records that are now lost. He got those records from

(31:51):
the court clerk, from Steven Sewell, who was the court clerk.
And you know, we know that because he thanks Steven
Sewell for he asked Steven Sewell for those records, and
he thanks Steven so for those records. So um, there
we can pretty much believe them, because in fact, when
we do have the written testimony that he describes, it's accurate.
I mean, he describes it accurately, So we just sort

(32:13):
of have to make certain assumptions. But he doesn't tell
us how many judges were there or or things like that.
So um, but he does tell us that the accusers
came in. He does tell us that confessors came in
and so forth, so we do have that information from him.
Now Here there are so many ideas of what a

(32:35):
which could be, but in there is an idea of
what a which is. Essentially that's commonly shared with a
lot of people. Can you describe what in or before
there were basically which was basically believed to be someone

(32:56):
who had some kind of access to a cult information
and powers and that. But there were a disagreement about
that because there were some people who thought that that
had to mean that they were in touch with the devil.
There were other people who thought, no, no, there were
what you might call today a white witch or a
useful witch who could for example, tell your fortune. Um,

(33:19):
that was someone who had some mystical power. Um. The
the ministers would say that that meant the person had
to be in touch with the devil, because that God
would never tell you what's the future, was that the
devil might. And so any fortune teller, as far as
the ministers were concerned, was a witch as far as
local people were concerned. That isn't true. Uh, Well, a

(33:41):
witch who could tell the future or a fortune teller,
it was not necessarily an evil person. Was someone who
could just help you or could give you a potion.
If you were in love with someone who wasn't in
love with you, you could get a spell to help you, um,
make that person fall in love with you. Or if
you wanted to know what had happened to your husband

(34:01):
who was had been at sea for years, was he
going to come home? The which or the fortune teller
could tell you that sort of thing. In fact, there's
one of the women who's accused of witchcraft in s
who seems to have specialized in telling women that their
husbands were never going to come home, that they were widows. Um.
She seems to have liked to have given them bad news.
So um, there's that kind of witchcraft. And then there's

(34:25):
the kind of witchcraft where a witch is seen as
being evil and uh seeking to do bad things to people.
She doesn't like. It's almost always a woman, not entirely.
It can be a man, and the as far as
the local people are concerned, as a woman, as far
as the ministers are concerned, it could be a man.
I should add that. And that would be if you

(34:46):
get in trouble with somebody and they have and and
let's say you have an argument with your neighbor. Um.
Your neighbor's cows got into your cornfield. You're really mad.
You go and have a conversation. More than a conversation.
You yell at your neighbor. And it's an older woman,
and she says, I'll get you, because you know it
was the problem was the fence around your corn It

(35:07):
wasn't my cows. If you'd had a better fence, this
wouldn't have happened. And so some kind of disagreement occurs
um within the neighborhood um. And that's where a lot
of witchcraft accusations come from. There's actually a very excellent
book about witchcraft, mostly in Europe to a certain extent
in America called Witches and Neighbors, and it's about the

(35:29):
by guy named Robin Briggs, who's a British historian and
he makes a very strong case that a lot of
these witchcraft cases involve disputes among neighbors. Kind of standard
common disputes among neighbors. But let's say, Um, that dispute
about the cows in the cornfield happened, and then three

(35:50):
days later, UM, you who have been cursed out by
the supposed witch, that is, by your neighbor, you start
to have some other kind of a problem, like one
of your cows breaks its leg and you have to
kill it or um, or your beer goes sour, or
the milk won't churn properly into butter, or something like that.
And then you begin to think to yourself, I wonder

(36:11):
if that neighbor bewitched my cow, or bewitched me, or
bewitched my my child, if my child is sick, or
something like that. So that's the kind of thing that happens.
And I might say that witchcraft is very much becomes
a default explanation for things that are inexplicable otherwise, UM,
for sudden illnesses. UM. Human beings always like to have

(36:36):
causes for things. It's why I think we have so
many conspiracy theories these days. There has to be something
important that happened, happens to cause something important, and so
there has to be a conspiracy. Well, that's the same
kind of thing about witchcraft. You have to have some
reason for something bad happening, and so you attribute it

(36:56):
to a witch. And that's basically the seventeenth century exploit
nation for things. That makes so much sense to me
than why the doctor ends up being a person who
goes in and we'll say, oh, there's some witchcraft reckring
here because it's outside of his understanding. Yeah, the doctor
who well, he wasn't a trained doctor. He was just

(37:17):
a local guy who seemed to know something about medicine,
Doctor Briggs, Dr Griggs. Rather, doctor Griggs seemed to know
something about medicine. And in fact he's really not a
very lettered guy. I discovered that he signed an important
legal document with an X. I mean, it's not even
clear the guy's literate. Um, but he is the local doctor.
He is the equivalent of the local doctor in Salem village,

(37:38):
and so um, Yes, when he can't diagnose the little
girls as to what's wrong with them, he the default
is it's it's witchcraft. But of course they don't immediately
turn to the legal process. And I think that's something
we don't understand today, because there was a legal there
was a process for dealing religiously with which after accusations

(38:01):
and basically the first thing that happens is that Samuel
Paris calls in neighboring ministers to pray and fast over
these girls, and that's supposed to solve the problem, and
they go. That goes on for some weeks. We don't
know for sure how long, but it seems to be
about a month that um, that this happens before and

(38:24):
before they decide they're not going to deal with it religiously,
they're going to have to deal with it legally. Market
care of your son's were tortured? Yes, how was torture
used in these That's the only time we know that
there was any evidence or any statement about physical torture

(38:44):
being used. We know that, um, eventually sleeplessness was used
and um, harsh words shall we say. But the only
time that torture is a edged is with the sons
of Martha Carrier, and they were tied neck and heels,

(39:06):
as it was said, which was in fact a punishment.
It wasn't necessarily thought of as torture at the time.
So um, the question of why people confessed has always
been something that people have been wondering about. But when
it became clear, as it became clear later in the

(39:29):
trials that if you confessed you would be kept alive
so you could testify against other people, is when more
and more people started to confess. Um. And one of
the things I noticed was that when adults confessed late
in the sequence of the trials, they accused only people

(39:56):
who were already dead, who had already been hanged, or
they accused people who had been accused by other people.
They did not name new people. It seemed clear to
me that it was very strategic when they confessed. They
did not want to hurt anyone who wasn't already um
hanged or already had been accused of others. However, children

(40:20):
didn't do that, and a lot of their later confessors
were children or very young teenagers. And they're the ones
who just seems to have thrown names around with great
abandoned and they're the ones who led to many of
the later accusations was confessions by children. And this, of
course was in and over. That's where people were confessing

(40:41):
was in andover. It's very interesting. Um, it's a completely
different pattern in Andover than you get in Salem Village.
Salem Village, people accused their enemies. In and Over people
accused their friends and their relatives. Um, there's this one
family where five sisters and the mother all confessed and
basically accuse each other and say they're all working together. Um.

(41:05):
So it's just it's Um, it's a very different pattern.
And I know there's someone now working on and Over,
and I hope that that person can explain the pattern
in and Over, because I certainly had no particularly good
explanation for it. Did the differences in the patterns in
and Over effect how the rest of the trials went

(41:26):
in Salem? Did lead to changes in how the trials
were conducted. Most of the Andover confessions came very late
in the day. Um. They the Andover confessions didn't start
until the fifte July, and at that point there were
only the August and September trial sessions left. So UM,

(41:52):
it didn't have that much of an effect. I mean,
the confessors did come in, it wasn't. The confessors were
important in the lay her phases of the trials, but
not all of them were from Andover So Um, not
all the confessors who came in were from Andover, So
I don't I wouldn't say that there was any big
difference made by it. I guess the Andover face is

(42:13):
Later there was a thought that perhaps witchcraft were in
in the family in a way or was passed down. Uh.
Pregnancy was an excuse in England. It was. It was
in English law. Um. It was called pleading your belly.
When a woman was accused of a with a woman
was convicted of a capital offense, she could, as they said,

(42:33):
plead her belly and if she was pregnant, if the
midwives confirmed that she was pregnant, then she wasn't hanged
until after she gave birth. And in this case, Um
Elizabeth Procter, the fact that she was pregnant saved her
because by the time she gave birth the executions had ended,
so it'd saved her. Um a fortuitous pregnancy. But that

(42:59):
was um. That was the standard English practice was you
could plead your belly. Um. There were female pirates who
pleaded their bellies and were not executed as a result,
at least not until after they gave birth. So it
was it was nothing unusual but you're right that it
was thought that witchcraft could run in the family, and
it wasn't just um blood. It could also be someone

(43:20):
in the same household. So someone who's um a servant
whose mistress was accused of being a witch might necessarily
might come under suspicion or vice versa. If a servant
was accused of being a witch or thought to be
a witch, was the mistress come under suspicion? That seemed
to have happened with one of the three um enslaved

(43:42):
Africans who's accused in Salem, That the mistress came under
suspicion because the servant was accused, and so um or
friends women who were close friends. If a woman was
a close friend with someone who was thought to be
a witch, that also was a suspicious circumstance and might

(44:05):
lead one to at least come under some cloud of suspicion.
Let's talk about Brows and Carrier being called the King
and Queen of Hell. Well, what's really interesting is that
Martha Carrier is first called the Queen of Hell by

(44:26):
a confessor. Burrows becomes the figured as the leader of
the witches thanks to the confessors um but also because
of the original accusations by and Putnam during Junior and
Mercy Lewis. Um Burrows is the right person to be

(44:48):
the leader of the Witches because he's a minister, and
because he's a kind of a weird minister. That is,
he's never been ordained, um, he's been educated at Harvard,
and because there's all kinds of us about him, which
I explore in my book. He's he has a very
peculiar relationship with his wives. It's hard to know a
lot about the details, but he seems to have been

(45:09):
quite brutal and quite an aggressive husband. Uh. He at
least is accused of um beating them UM or at
least being very controlling of them. Uh. He wants them
to quote keep his secrets, and so the question becomes,
what are those secrets he wants them to keep. Um.

(45:30):
There are all kinds of rumors that swirl around him.
At his trial. There's testimony that he has unusual strength,
which is based on his own boasting about his strength.
So it comes back to haunt him. Uh. He is
someone who is very mysterious, and I would have loved
to have found out more about him. I did everything
I could to find out what I could, But um,

(45:53):
he is a mysterious guy. Um he's said to have
prominent relatives in England. I never tracked that down, so
I don't know. But he is someone who aroused a
lot of comment. Um, who had a parlous relationship with
Salem Village when he was the minister in Salem Village.

(46:16):
He seems to have been much more popular when he
was a minister in Falmouth, Maine. That is, um he
was there before King Phillips floor. He then left and
they wanted him to come back, which he did so
he um he did. He was treated better in Maine.
He certainly was more highly regarded in Maine than he

(46:38):
was in Salem Village. Perhaps it was because he was educated.
There weren't a lot of educated people in the main frontier,
and they may have like the fact that he was
a Harvard graduate, even if he wasn't an ordained minister.
There does seem to have been some kind of a
a debate about where he would be, whether he would
be in Falmouth or maybe in black Point. There was
some attempt to attract him someplace else to black Point

(47:01):
as a minister. So um he had a different standing
on the frontier than he had in Salem village. Was
it significant that he was able to recite the Lord's prayer?
It was believed that a witch could not accurately recite
the Lord's prayer. And indeed that was a test that
was tried on some other people and who could not

(47:21):
do it some of the accused. Um, I was tried
on John Willard and he couldn't do it. So when
George Burrows at the gallows recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly,
the account says. The eyewitness account says that he that
there was a murmur in the crowd and that they

(47:43):
thought that he could not be a witch until Cotton
Mother came up on horseback and said, no, no, a
witch can do what he did, So then they hanged him.
Um that's one time at which Cotton Mother is said
Jof had a real definite impact on the trials himself,
as opposed to just writing about it. That's one of

(48:05):
the most well known events that occurs. Another one is
the pressing death of Giles Corey Right. How unusual was
that act within the context of the rest of the
civilization to that point, Um, it was extremely unusual in
the context of New England. Never was done at anybody
else that we know of. And um, we don't even

(48:31):
know why they did it. Um. It was a traditional
medieval English punishment to force someone to enter a plea.
But you have to understand, although we say it was
because Giles Corey didn't ender a plea, he did actually
say he was not guilty. He did say that we
would say that was entering a plea. But he had
to answer a second ritual question. And the second ritual

(48:53):
question was and how will you be tried? And he
was supposed to say, by God in my country, and
he refused to say that. And that's why they decided
to um use this traditional English punishment. How they came
up with that is not known, um, And who basically
decided it is not known, but probably was William Stowton,

(49:14):
who was a very hardline guy, uh, who was the
chief Justice and the Lieutenant governor. But Giles Corey was
not a nice man. I mean he has this in
in um. He becomes kind of a hero in um
um Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, But um, he had

(49:37):
beaten a servant to death a few some years earlier.
He was not a nice guy. And so it thought
he was just being his old, irascible, nasty self when
he refused to cooperate with the court. How significant was
Increased either in the ending of this trinals Well, it's
really hard to know. We don't have a lot of

(49:58):
infant evidence about how all the trials ended. We have
very sparse efidence. In fact, we have Samuel Sewell's diary
that tells us about certain things that very briefly, that
were said in um meetings of the council, um said

(50:19):
by the Governor, by William Phipps, um. And we have
some pamphlets, and it's certainly true that Increase Mather wrote
a pamphlet that raised some questions. But Increase Mather also
explicitly said that he agreed with his son Cotton, and
Cotton wrote this this not just a pamphlet, a book

(50:41):
wanders of the invisible world, defending the trials. And even
though Increased Mather says um in his in his it's
more than a pamphlet. It's it's not but it's not
a book. I don't know how to describe it. Even
though he says in his treatise that you have to
be very careful about these trials. He still says he

(51:05):
would have convicted George Burrows, so it's not as though
he's a complete opponent of the trials, nor is god
Samuel Willard, who also writes about the trials at the time,
and who's whose publication when it appears, is said to have

(51:28):
have been published in Philadelphia when it clearly wasn't. It
was published in Boston, who had fake publication information on
the title page, because Phipps had basically said no publications
about about the trials to try to keep the debate down.
So it's it's just really hard to know exactly what happened,

(51:49):
except we do know. We can't say that public opinion
did seem to turn against the trials, and they did
seem to turn against the trials after the second set
of accusations, after the accusation, after the sorry, after the
second set of trials and executions, and the executions on
the two September UM opinion seems to have turned pretty

(52:14):
strongly against the trials after that. And I would speculate
that it's because those people were hanged with a lot
less evidence than people had been hanged with before those
trials were rushed um, and they did seem to be
rushed to judgment and those trials, and so I think

(52:37):
that's one of the things that led to deep concerns
among people among what we say thinking people in Boston,
U and in Salem. That caused an uproar. And then
in addition, in October, when Increase Mather goes to the
prison in Salem to talk to a group of women

(53:00):
who had confessed and they all take it back, and
that too, I think was important, and that was about
the middle of October's that was about three weeks after
the last set of executions. Um, when they take it
back and they talk about how they were basically convinced,
convinced to confess by magistrates, sometimes by their own relatives,

(53:25):
who said, well, you may not realize you were a witch,
but you clearly were because of X, and then cited
some evidence to them. So UM, I think that was
also very meaningful in helping to convince Phips that he
could not maintain the trials any longer, or at least
the trials in the court of or Your in terminal,
that the rules had to change, and that spectral evidence

(53:47):
could not be allowed. When the trials continued in January
under the regular courts. I might add that, of course,
throughout this entire period, there was no regular court system
until the Massachusett Its Assembly could meet in the fall
under the new charter, and they could have passed a
law to establish a court system, which then held the

(54:09):
trials in January and in May um But the only
court going was the Court of Orio and Terminer until
until the legislature met and adopted that law. Let's oh dear,
that's way back well if since Samuel Parris rejected the

(54:29):
Halfway Covenant, what it meant was that people who had
been baptized as children but who could not satisfy the
church with testimony that they had achieved saving faith, that
they had experienced saving faith, that they were not allowed
to be members of the church. They had to attend

(54:51):
church services, but they were not allowed to be the
official members of the church. The Halfway Covenant allowed people
who had been baptized as children but had not yet
experienced saving faith two in effect, be members of the church,
to be under the church's supervision and to have communion,

(55:13):
and to have their babies baptized. Samuel Paris, by taking
a hard line on the Halfway Covenant, meant that people
in Salem village who had been baptized as children could
not be halfway members. And therefore, for example, when the
church had communion, which they did once a month, they

(55:34):
had to get up and leave. They could not stay
and this really divided the congregation in dramatic ways. UM.
And it meant that people could not have their babies baptized,
which was a very important thing when there was heavy
infant mortality. You want to have your baby baptized, um

(55:54):
at a time when um of children died statistic before
the age of one. Can we talk about captivity narratives, well,
captivity narratives were published accounts by people of their captivities
by Indians, and of course the best known one was

(56:16):
that of Mary Rowlinson from King Philip's War, and she
was in fact a captive of Weetamu, who was an
associate of King Philip. That was published at the time.
Many of the things we now call captivity narratives are
published later, So it's not so much narratives are captivity

(56:37):
narratives as it is the experience of the captives themselves
and how that's those stories would have spread through the community.
So it's not so much the publications except for Mary Rowlinson,
as it is the actual experience of captivity and how
people would have talked about it. Um. And one of
the things I talked about in my book is the

(56:59):
accounts that were well known of people who had been
captured in the in in King Philip's War UM and
had experienced various um trials and tribulations shall we say,
and indeed atrocities what we would call atrocities um committed

(57:20):
by the native people on them, especially if they tried
to escape um so um and how that seems to
have been in the minds of people in in Essex County,
in visions of someone being roasted over a fire for example,
or um uh visions or accounts of people who tried

(57:47):
to escape from their Indian captors as they were trekking
north to Canada after captivity, being being tomahawked in the
head something like that. Um. So we know those stories
were spread around, that they were published or not. It
was definitely definitely in people's minds. And one of the

(58:07):
things that struck me as I was reading the material
was how present the Indian War was in people's minds. Um.
One of the accused people UM Sarah Osborne talks about
having nightmares of Indians and one of the women who confessed,

(58:29):
Mary toothacre Um talks about Um how she confessed because
Um the devil came to her in the shape of
an Indian and told her that he would save that
if she became a witch, he would save her from
the Indians. And since he came to her in the

(58:49):
shape of an Indian, she believed him and so she confessed,
and she actually never took it back. What's interesting is
that she Um was in jay all she was from
bill Rica and she was in jail in Salem when
the Indians attacked her neighborhood in bill Rica and killed

(59:10):
her closest neighbor. She was in jail confessing to being
a witch at the instigation of the devil in the
shape of an Indian, and she never took it back.
She literally never took it back. Her wife was saved
by being by confessing to be a witch. She would
have been killed if she had been in bell Rica
that weekend, and instead she was in Salem in jail.

(59:33):
But then she was killed several years later in another
Indian raid. And bill Rick is only twenty miles from Salem.
And that just shows you how close the war was
to what was going on. That's the big question. How
widespread is the war? Well, as I said, it's about
twenty bill Rick is only twenty miles away. Now, that
was the closest attack that I know of to Salem.

(59:55):
But remember all these people had relatives in Maine and
New Hampshire, and people in Maine and New Hampshire were
constantly under threat, UM. Even in the WHOA in the
most southern parts of Maine and New Hampshire. In UM
what's now Portsmouth which was then called Strawberry Bank, what
was wells Main, there were attacks nearby UM all the time, UM,

(01:00:17):
and they were UM. People felt under constant threat, shall
we say. UM. So the attack in bill Rico was
the closest, but eventually later in the war, actually after,
there was a big attack on ian over UM. So
it's not as though the war wasn't right there. And
of course remember these are the men, are militiamen, and

(01:00:40):
they're going out to fight. So all the above, So
how was military service treated at that time? UM. Military
service was an obligation of UM all men between the
ages of sixteen and fifty and Uh, they were supposed
to keep muskets at the ready and have ammunition. Everybody
supposed to have their own gun and their own ammunition,
and they were to be there to be called on

(01:01:02):
when they were needed. And so um. A lot of
times the men were indeed called up in both King
Philip's War and King William's War to go up to
the frontier, to go north to the frontier and to fight.
And there are some um, very detailed accounts that have
survived to us of some of the battles that occurred,

(01:01:22):
especially around Black Point in southern Maine. So there's there's
a pretty definite fear that exists in the colonies at
the time of the indigenous neighbors that not far How
were they written about within the community, they're written about you,
and it varies because, of course, for years they had
had relatively peaceful relationships with them. It wasn't as though

(01:01:43):
this was a constant warfare. I mean until the sixteen seventies,
there was a lot of trading going on, a lot
of back and forth, um um travel and so forth. Um.
They're written about very matter of fact. We actually they're
not written about is as um like savage as we
don't understand because they didn't know they knew each other. Um.

(01:02:06):
One of the best accounts we have is from the
initial attack on Falmouth in UM six in the sixty
five and basically, UM, a Wabanaki who is known in
the neighborhood comes in and and comes to a farm
and says, UM, I know you're missing a cow. I
know who took that cow. I will help you find it.

(01:02:27):
So this is, you know, not a big deal. Then
of course what he does is he leads the other
people to attack the farm. But that's another matter. UM.
But we can see that there's a you know, the
arrival of a an Indian on your doorstep is not
necessarily um, a frightening event or um. One of the

(01:02:47):
incidents that I talked about in great detail in the
book happens in New Hampshire where a group of Indians
comes to trade at a trading post, as we say,
they're doing, and then UM, it's a cold night. The
women say can we sleep inside the The traders say sure,
the women, women sleep inside, But when everybody's asleep, they

(01:03:10):
opened the doors and the men come in and attack.
The trader and his men, who are known for years
for having for having cheated the Indian. So it's a
chance for them to get back at the at the
at the traders. So it's um. But you see this
sort of pattern of what you might call standard interaction

(01:03:31):
that has been broken by these wars accused. They escape
from jail. Yes, how did that come about? Well, if
you pay attention to where they are. Remember, there are
a lot of people in jail. Um, they're not just
in Salem. The jail in Salem is too small to
hold them all. The jail in Salem Town, as we're

(01:03:51):
talking about, there's too small to hold them all. So
they've been scattered around other places. And it happens that
a lot of the leading people who are used of
being which is are sent to Boston. And I am
convinced that the Boston jailer had his hand out for
bribes and that it was from the Boston jail that
a lot of these people escaped. So um, it's not

(01:04:15):
written down anywhere, but he basically took money to let
people go. I think there's no question, um, in my mind,
there's no question my mind that he was He was
bribable and probably earned a pretty penny from letting all
these wealthy people go, one of them being my very
own ancestor, Mary Bradberry, who was held and suddenly managed

(01:04:39):
to escape. Guess what, she had a wealthy husband. So
is there any particular reason why they fled over a
lot of them to refuge in New York. Well, New
York was seen as a more open society. It was
more diverse, There were lots of people are from different places.

(01:05:01):
It wasn't controlled by Puritans. Remember Anne Hutchinson fled to
New York too when she was fleeing from the um
from the Puritan authorities in first Massachusetts Bay and then
ultimately Rhode Island. When she thought they were going to
come after her in Rhode Island, she doo fled to
New York. So it's not that surprising that they went
to New York. It's the closest place that seems to

(01:05:22):
offer them some kind of refuge. And by the way,
these are not the only people who are accused of
which is in the seventeenth century who go to New York.
There are other recorded cases of similar people. Um. I
might add that I went to New York. I went
to look at correspondence from the period, and I went
looking I was hoping I would find a letter from

(01:05:44):
somebody saying guests who I met at dinner last night,
But I didn't find any such letter. I was hoping
I would see some evidence of somebody who had fled
from Boston while they were or fled from Boston or
Salem or whatever while they were in New York. But
I couldn't find a trace of it. Too bad, one
of the many things I couldn't find. There were many
things I looked for that I couldn't find. Well, we

(01:06:07):
have fips, yes, and he writes his report in October.
How does he position himself with regards to the trial.
Phipps is really good at covering his butt. Phipps is
a master at not letting on that he knew the

(01:06:29):
all along it was going on. I mean, Phipps rice
this letter saying to the people in London, oh my god,
I just got back. I been fighting Indians on the
frontier all summer, and I came back and I found
this horrible situation, and I stopped it. That was so untrue.
He was true that he was just back from the frontier,

(01:06:51):
but he'd only been on the frontier for two weeks
at that time. And so, and I show in my
book that he was meeting with members of the Council
who were also the judges, who were also the military
leaders regularly throughout the summer. Those minutes are available in
the records in England and they show that Phipps was

(01:07:13):
talking to them regularly. So don't tell me they never
said anything about the witchcraft trials because that was the
biggest thing going on. It's not written down that they
had those conversations, but of course they did. And of
course he wanted to get out from under and he did.
I mean he he didn't actually because he was recalled

(01:07:34):
and they were going to challenge him. He was he
was under a lot of pressure to be challenged in England,
and then he died before he could be called before
the Privy Council. So it's not as though he completely escaped,
but he did. That letter was such a stunning letter
to me when I founded, where he basically said, oh

(01:07:55):
I knew nothing about what was happening. I was gone.
It was not true. He knew absolutely is happening. It's
a great political move. And Tad Baker to tell you
more about that, since he's a biographer of Phipps asked
him as well. Okay, so Stonton is seeing that there's
a lot of dissent for the especially execution, right, why

(01:08:19):
is he so set on? Stouton is a real hard
line guy. I mean, that's all we know. We don't
know a lot about Stoton. Like many other people who
were involved in the trials, his papers have not survived
and or his personal papers have not survived. What we
basically have from Stoughton is some sermons, and recently, by

(01:08:39):
the way, some new and sermons of his have been discovered.
But basically we just don't know much about him. Um,
he was a bachelor, he never married. Um, he was
back and forth to England. He was an ordained minister
as well as a judge, and he was a man
of considerable standing in Massachusetts Bake Colony. But um, he

(01:09:03):
we just don't know a lot about him. He did
not if he kept personal records, they have not survived,
So we just don't know. He's he's a mysterious figure
because he is so hardline. He is so hardline. I mean,
I know what happened to the papers of the judge
Wait Winthrop. I'm convinced I do, because wait Winthrop's papers
were purged. I mean, I don't think wait Winthrop purged them,

(01:09:25):
but I think a descendant of his purged them before
he gave them to the Massachusetts Historical Society. We have
extensive correspondence from wait Winthrop Um, who was a judge,
It was a militia officer, was a member of the
council Um. We have extensive evidence of letters from him
to his brother fitz John Winthrop in the late sixteen eighties.

(01:09:51):
In sixteen ninety one. There are no surviving letters for sixteen.
There are no surviving letters for sixteen, and there are
lots of letters for sixteen ninet war, and there are
there thereafter. And so I know, probably not Winthrop himself,
but probably the descendant who gave the papers to the
Massachusetts Historical Society said m I don't want these letters
to survive, and so he threw them in the fire,

(01:10:14):
so we don't have them. It will be lovely to
know what way threw. Witrop wrote to his brother about
what it was like to be a judge in the
witchcraft trials, which is what I was looking for when
I went to look at the papers, and I didn't
find them. The only record I ever found from someone
who was a judge in a witchcraft trial talking about

(01:10:36):
his reaction to the to an accuser came from Connecticut,
not from Massachusetts. Well, and my answer is the Indian
the Indian War. I mean, it's the with the fears
of the Indian War, because I think the trigger um
to making it explode the way it did is the
confession of Abigail Hobbs. And Abigail Fobbs was from the

(01:11:00):
Main Frontier. She was a refugee from the Main Frontier.
She was a teenager. She was the third person to
confess to being a witch, after Tichiba and Dorcas Dorothy Good,
and she um basically said that the devil had recruited

(01:11:21):
her in the woods outside her home in Falmouth, Maine,
four years earlier. And she's the one who made the
connection to the Main Frontier. She's the one who made
the connection to the witches. And as I show in
my book, the number of accusations just absolutely exploded after
Abigail Hobbs's confession. So I think that's what made the difference,

(01:11:42):
and that's what convinced me that the Indian War was
the crucial thing. Because she was the one who introduced
the Indian War into the narrative, and then everything blew up.
There have been so many explanations over the years about
how and white these illness, these afflictions could. Today people

(01:12:02):
tend to want medical explanations for the kinds of afflictions
that we see. Therefore, some people have said epileptic fits.
There's no evidence that there's any epilepsy involved here. Um.
Some people have said ergot poisoning. Well, ergot poisoning is
maybe possible, but not as possible as people think. And

(01:12:26):
even if it was, it doesn't explain anything of significance
because what is significant is not the fact that people
had hallucinations. It's what they saw in those hallucinations and
how they described what was happening to them. That is
that they were being attacked by the specters of witches.

(01:12:46):
And you can have a hallucination without having that kind
of a vision. So I don't see or good. Even
if it's possible, um, which I don't, which I think
is very unlikely, is a real explain nation. Um. The
I researched for my book cases in England and America

(01:13:09):
before sixto, in which young children began to have what
were described as fits that were then attributed to witchcraft.
And I discovered that it was a not unusual pattern.
It was it wasn't as though it was common, but
it was known. It was a known pattern, and it
was a pattern when um children were in intensely, intensely

(01:13:33):
religious households, as indeed they were in the household of
Samuel Paris. So it does seem to be a kind
of a conversion um experience UM after over you know event.
And indeed, in the eighteenth century, during the Great Awakening,

(01:13:56):
these kinds of quote fits were interpreted as conversion ext experiences.
In the nineteenth century they were can they were they
were um interpreted as hysterical fits on the part of women.
In the twentieth century and the twenty one century they're
they're um interpreted as medical things, as things that have

(01:14:17):
to do with medicine. I mean, these behaviors are known.
They just have different interpretations at different times. And in
the seventeenth century they were the interpretation was witchcraft. UM.
It's not as though these are these are totally unknown
um events, totally unknown reactions of young women, mostly to

(01:14:42):
different circumstances. So I I think that's what was going on.
I mean, why, as I said, I think that the
that the the a lot of the basis of the
main refugees accusations can be attributed to pts d Um.
It seems to me that a couple, at least one

(01:15:07):
of the accusers in Salem Village is faking it. And
that's Sarah vibber Um, the thirtysomething housewife. We could call
her the goody vibber who if you look at her,
everything she says is sort of me too. She never
is the initial accuser of anybody, but when somebody comes

(01:15:29):
forward with an accusation, she'll say, oh, yeah, that happened
to me too, that happened to me also, And then
she is regarded as a crucial witness by the judges
because she is older. Um, we just don't We don't
know enough about her background. Um. It would be wonderful
if we could know more about her. We know that
she's married to her second husband, but we don't know

(01:15:50):
who her first husband was, and we don't know who
her husband's first wife was. It's just really really hard
to find out about her. So, but she seems to
me to be someone who whose testimony is dubious even
in the seventeenth century. Think about today in this country,

(01:16:10):
right now, in the world, right now, we aren't different,
but we had the same fears, we had the same anxiety, sure,
I mean right now. I mean, well, if you look
in the fifties, there's a fear of communists. I mean,
that's what Arthur Miller built the Crucible around, that kind
of fear that developed the UM McCarthyite UM atmosphere that

(01:16:31):
he was writing about UM and making the analogy. Today, UM,
we see a lot of UM comments about fears of UM, Muslims,
Sharia law, and so forth, even though there's no actual
evidence that anyone is ever trying to impose Sharia law
in the United States. There's UM, a lot of UM.

(01:16:55):
There are some people out there who believe it, or
who least say they believe it. So it's not as
though UM, especially in the wake of nine eleven, that
we are free from fears of the mysterious unknown. And
in the and in the I would say, in the
eighties there was the fear of There was the fear
of the Satanic rituals in child child care facilities, which

(01:17:21):
in retrospects seems really weird and strange, but led to
the arrest and conviction of a number of people. So uh,
and that's been written about in the context of witchcraft.
So um scholarship about witchcraft. John Demos did that. So
what don't ask you enough about? Oh, dear, I would

(01:17:43):
say that what people don't ask me enough about is
actually a topic we've talked to fair amount about, which
is about the power structure and about the role of
the judges and the guilt of the judges. Really, I mean,
if you people today tend when they think about sale
and witchcraft and they think about who's responsible, they blame

(01:18:07):
the young accusers, especially the young quote hysterical female accusers.
I don't blame them. I blame the judges who should
have been, by modern parlance, the adults in the room.
They should have stopped it, and they could have stopped it.
And in Connecticut in the early sixteen sixties, the then

(01:18:30):
governor John Winthrop Jr. Did stop it when there was
a movement towards a potential witchcraft crisis where there were
ten or twelve accusations and there was the possibility of more.
And he basically he was a scientifically minded guy, and
he basically put a stop to it. So the judges

(01:18:51):
could have put a stop to this, but they didn't.
And so one of the things I wanted to do
with my book was to play the blame where I
think it belonged, because it doesn't belong with the quote
hysterical girls, which is the way it's usually presented in
popular culture, because it didn't have to go the way

(01:19:11):
it went. It didn't have to happen, and the the
man who could have stopped it didn't because it was
to their benefit not to stop it. Um. So that's
that's I would say what people don't know enough about. Um.
The myth that it was the responsibility of the girls
really starts right after, right in the wake of the

(01:19:34):
Witchcraft crisis, right in the very first critiques. People who
are criticizing the Witchcraft trials do not criticize the judges.
They explicitly don't criticize the judges. Increase Mather does not
criticize the judges. The other critics, early critics of the
trials do not criticize the judges. They criticize the accusers.

(01:19:55):
And so in sort of in American mythology, it's the
US quote hysterical females who are responsible. But that's not right.
It's the judges who are responsible. This episode of Unobscured

(01:20:16):
was executive produced by me mav Frederick and Alex Williams,
with music by Chad Lawson and audio engineering by Alex Williams.
The Unobscured website has everything you need to get the
most out of the podcast. There's a resource library of maps, charts,
and links to Salem document archives online, as well as
a suggested reading list and a page with all of

(01:20:38):
our historian biographies. And as always, thanks for supporting this show.
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