September 27, 2022 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, early on, a hush descended over 1692-1693 Salem Witch Trials for generations. Then came playwright Arthur Miller, who made off with the story, or at least his version of it. Since 1953, The Crucible has become the culturally-accepted storyline that has come to define American Puritans (e.g., the Pilgrims) and the city of Salem itself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories and up next,
well the little piece of American history. Historical truths often
emerge with time. Early on, a hush descended over the
sixteen ninety two his sixteen ninety three Salem Witch Trials.
Then came playwright Arthur Miller, who made off with the story,
(00:30):
or at least his version of it. Since nineteen fifty three,
the Crucible has become the culturally accepted storyline that has
come to defined American Puritans. Doctor Stephen Nichols is President
of Reformation Bible College, chief Academic Officer of Ligonier Ministries,
and as the author of Jesus Made in America, a
(00:50):
Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ,
He's here to tell the story of the Puritans and
the Salem Witch Trials. Here's Stephen. Well. As we look
over American history, probably one of the groups that is
misunderstood the most is the New England Puritans. Most of
(01:14):
what Americans know about these New England Puritans we have
read in high school in two books. The first is
Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic text, The Scarlet Letter, and then there
is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Neither of these books
paint a very flattering portrait of the Puritans. The Scarlet
(01:37):
Letter portrays the Puritans as a bunch of hypocrites, as
self righteous, as mean spirited people who are just full
of gloom and doom. Oh you're show no modesty and
you're on a paddle. Get to have a chop still
trying to pen your things. Yes, the hero of the
(02:02):
story in Hawthorne's book is one who actually subverts the
community and subverts the sort of framed narrative that governed
that Puritan community. And then we find Miller's play The Crucible.
I want to open myself. I want the light of God.
(02:22):
I want the sweet love of Jesus. I danced for
the devil. I saw him, I wrote in his book.
I go back to Jesus, I kiss his hand. I
saw Sarah Good with the devil. I saw Goody Osborne
with the devil. I saw Bridget Bishop with the devil.
Glory to God. It is broken there free. Arthur Miller
(02:51):
wrote this in nineteen fifty three. It was a very gossamer,
veiled criticism of the car Theism and the purges and
the red scare of the nineteen fifties, and as people
were in that era speaking of the witch hunt that
was going on in McCarthyism, so Arthur Miller turned his
(03:14):
attention back to that original witch hunt back in Salem.
So the result of coming to know the Puritans through
the Crucible, through the Scarlet Letter is that the Puritans
have come to most Americans with a bad reputation. To
be Puritanical is certainly not a compliment. It was hl
(03:38):
Mancin back in the nineteen twenties who said that anyone
who thinks that somewhere someone might just be having a
good time, that's a Puritan. So what are we to
make of all this, and more importantly, what are we
to make of the New England Puritans? At first? Who
were they? The New England Puritans came from Old England.
(04:01):
The Puritans themselves were essentially legislated into existence. This was
under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and her Act of
Uniformity from fifteen fifty eight. It intended to bring conformity
to the religious culture of Great Britain. This was in
the wake of the Reformation. There was a great divide
(04:22):
between Catholicism and Protestantism, and England. Elizabeth needed a united
country to withstand Spain and Britain's enemies, and so she
enacted the Act of Uniformity. Well, there was a group
that dissented, and they were technically called nonconformists because they
(04:45):
would not conform to the Church of England. One of
the things they stressed was the nature of the church.
They believed that the church should consist of not simply
those who were baptized, but those who also believe the Gospel.
And they also believed in an idea that we call
visible saint hood, that is to say that the church
(05:07):
should be made up of professing Christians who well, who
act like Christians. And so immediately this group, these non conformists,
were criticized. They were given a name of derision, and
so they were called Puritans, not a name they gave themselves,
but a name that their enemies gave to them. They
(05:27):
were seen as holier than thou people. Well we fast
forward to King James the First and he did not
like the Puritans at all. It was King James who equipped,
I shall make them conform, or I will harry them
out of my land. Well, he couldn't make them conform,
and so eventually the Puritans left. The first group was
(05:52):
the Pilgrims. This is the group that landed sixteen twenty.
They came on the Mayflower and this group formed the
Plymouth Colony. The more properly Puritans came in sixteen thirty.
They set sail on the Arbella and when they landed
in the New World, they formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
(06:13):
It was really during that decade of the sixteen thirties
that there was a great migration of Puritans to the
New World. Almost each week a new boat would arrive
and would dock there, and it would bring in a
whole fresh group of Puritans. The Puritans in New England
formed a government, they carved a society in what, as
(06:36):
they called it, the Howling Wilderness of New England. And
even after just six years of being there, they founded
a college, the first college and the New World. Of course,
this is Harvard, And so we can take a look
at this first generation of Puritans and we can see
what they were truly about. One of the things that
(06:57):
we see is that they loved learning. Not only they
established Harvard, but they were very much for literacy for
their children, and they loved learning all learning. These Puritans
had a very substantial what we would call today a
classical education. The Puritans were very industrious people. They had
an incredibly impressive work ethic, and within that first generation
(07:21):
establishing towns and trade networks and establishing all sorts of
institutions and churches and schools and colleges there as they
carved out this community and this society for them in
New England. Well, this brings us, of course to that
(07:42):
subject of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, and that subject
is the Salem witch trials. These witch trials occurred from
sixteen ninety two to sixteen ninety three. Now to understand
these we need to sort of take a step back
and look at a broad or sort of European context,
and also look at the context of some of the
(08:05):
ideas that really were behind of the Puritans. So when
we go back to Europe, we see that which trials
go of course back into the Middle Ages. But in
the wake of the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church's
establishment of the Inquisition, there was an intense time of
which trials. This went from about the fifteen seventies or
(08:28):
fifteen eighties on into the sixteen thirties or sixteen forties,
as estimated by historians, that tens of thousands of which
trials occurred over these decades, and that many were executed.
The numbers range anywhere from lower end estimates to about
fifty thousand people to upper end estimates of one hundred
(08:52):
thousand were executed as witches. Across Europe. Pretty much every
single nation had a law on the books against witchcraft,
and it was also an offense that was a capital offense,
so one was found guilty, they were punishable by death.
So we have that context in Europe, and you've been
(09:15):
listening to doctor Stephen Nichols. When we come back more
on the Salem witch trials and the American Puritans here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(09:41):
and we just heard Stephen Nichols talk about the European
witch trials that executed and estimated fifty to one hundred
thousand people all over Europe. Let's return to doctor Nichols,
who will pick up the story from there. As you
come to the New England Puritans, the different colonies, the
Massachusetts colony also had laws on the books against witchcraft,
(10:06):
and as with their European counterparts, this was also considered
a capital offense, with a lot of that as context.
Now we can talk about the trials themselves. I think
the first thing we have to say is these were wrong.
The judges of the trial were wrong. The townsfolk who
accused these folks of witchcraft. This whole episode of the
(10:31):
Salem witch trials is not something we want to make
an excuse for, or certainly not something we want to
say is inconsequential. It was very consequential and it was wrong.
But having said that, I think it's always important for
us to actually take a look at what happened and
to try to do as much justice as we can
(10:55):
to the event itself. So we look now at the trials.
Everything seemed to start in the winter of sixteen ninety two,
and it was started with two young girls. One was
just nine years old and the other was eleven years old.
One was the daughter of the minister there and the
village of Salem, and now these days the village of
(11:18):
Salem is Danvers, Massachusetts. But the daughter of the minister
and a niece of the minister, and they had these
episodes of what you would just call severe offense convulsions,
they'd be writhing on the ground, they'd be making strange sounds.
They were examined by the medical doctor, and there seemed
(11:39):
to be no medical reason, or at least as they
could at that time discern a medical reason, and so
they looked for another explanation, and very quickly the fingers
all started pointing to a slave that was in the home.
This was a Caribbean slave from Barbados. Her name was Titchuba,
(11:59):
and these young girls accused her of witchcraft. And alongside
of Tichuba, there were two women in the town. One
was a widow and from what we can understand, was
essentially sort of a homeless beggar, and the other was
also sort of in that category. As one I think
one historian referred to these ladies named Sarah Good and
(12:23):
Sarah Osborne. He called them social misfits. But as they
looked at Tichiba and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they
said these were witches and they had put these girls
under a spell. Well, of course they were questioned. Tichiba
actually confessed that she was a witch, that the devil
had come to her, that the devil had seduced her,
(12:46):
and that she did practice, in fact, witchcraft, and now
we sort of see how things begin to spread within
this town. There were trials and the event a sort
of snowball called out of control. People if they would
question the testimony of these girls, they would then be
(13:07):
accused of witchcraft, and they would be arrested and brought
into trial, and then others just started turning on each
other and turning in each other. These trials went on
from sixteen ninety two through sixteen ninety three. Over the
course of these trials, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of
about two hundred people were at one time or another arrested.
(13:31):
And of those two hundred people, twenty of them were executed,
So all that twenty were released, but there were in
fact twenty that were killed. They were hanged all except
for the instance of one, and they were sort of
hanged at particular times that the first execution came in
(13:52):
July nineteen of sixteen ninety two, and then another group
was executed in August nineteenth, sixteen ninety two, and then
again on September twenty second. Of those that were killed,
there were fourteen women, but among them were in fact
six men and often What had happened in these trials
(14:14):
was that if someone actually confessed to being a witch
and would repent, well they would be released. And so
the ones who maintained their innocence because they weren't witches
and they cared about their reputation and their name, met
a great deal to them, so they would maintain their innocence.
It was those, in the case of the twenty of
(14:35):
them that were executed during these trials. Well, how did
all this come to an end? A key figure in
all of this was Increase Mather. Increase Mather is probably
of what we might call Puritan nobility. He's both of
the Mather family and of the Cotton family. He was,
(14:55):
in fact, and during the time of the witch trials,
who was president of Harvard. As the trials were beginning,
he was back in Old England petitioning the king to
get a new charter for the colony. And actually it
was during this time that Simon Bradstreet, that of course
is the husband of the poet and Bradstreet. Simon Bradstreet
(15:16):
was installed as a governor again in sixteen ninety two,
and as governor he actually put a stop to the trials.
He was not very pleased with what was going on,
was not aligned with it, and so he just sort
of hit the pause button on it to keep any
more trials from happening. Well, eventually, Increase Mather comes back
and new governor is put into place, and the tribunal
(15:39):
was set in. The trials commenced. From the very beginning,
Increase Mather and other ministers across Boston and across Massachusetts
cautioned Salem to be cautious as they looked at evidence,
as they made decisions, to not be rash in their judgment,
and to weigh the evidence as you would in any workcase.
(16:01):
And increasingly that was set aside, and the trials there
at Salem focused on what was called spectral evidence. So
maybe someone was testifying that, you know, they had seen
one of these persons that was accused go off into
the woods and practice witchcraft, and then all of a
sudden during the trial, they would just sort of point
(16:21):
to the person and say, look, there's a witch above
the person. Well, of course you can't verify that, right,
And so that's the spectral evidence. And it was on
a lot of those kinds of evidences that the judges,
nine of them in total, overseeing Salem would make their decisions. Well,
when Increase Mather heard about this, he just wanted to
(16:42):
put an end to this and stressed in no uncertain
terms that this was not biblical and that these folks,
these judges, needed to conduct themselves and carry about the
law in a way that was biblical and reject this
notion of spectral evidence. And so thankfully that brought these
(17:05):
Salem witch trials to an end. A really crucial story
here is the story of Samuel Sewell. Samuel soul was
one of the nine judges and he sat on the
court was part of the Salem witch trials, but later
he was convicted of this. He repented of what he
(17:26):
had done. In his own testimony to how he came
to this realization, he says that he was reading a
biblical text. He was reading Matthew chapter twelve, verse seven,
and that text tells us, if you know what this means,
I will have mercy and not sacrifice, you would not
have condemned the guiltless. And Samuel Sewell just felt the
(17:50):
weight of that verse and he realized that what he
had done back in sixteen ninety two and ninety three
was that he had condemned the guiltless, that there were
those that were executed, that we're not witches. And when
he realized that he had relied on bad evidence in
making that decision, well, he repented and he published a
(18:12):
book that he just simply called his apology and spread
it widely. Sewel then just committed himself to calling a
day for fasting for the entire colony of Massachusetts for
what had happened at Salem. He worked almost tirelessly for
reparations and for a restitution of the accused. It's also
(18:35):
fascinating that a few years after this, in seventeen oh three,
Samuel Sewell wrote a book against slavery and he called
for its abolition. So Sewel's one of those figures who
often just gets associated with the Salem witch Trials and
then he just sort of gets written off as one
of those bad guys in the pages of history. But
there's little doubt that the Salem witch Trials was a
(18:57):
difficult moment for Puritanism in New England, and you don't
see much recovery of Puritanism after that. And so here
we have this time period, you know, of sixty seventy
years of the New England Puritans. And it's easy for us,
you know, I think we read Hawthorne again, Scarlet Letter,
we read Miller The Crucible. It's easy for us to
(19:20):
sort of just look back on these folks and sort
of dismiss them and judge them, you know, for quite
frankly being wrong. But I think we also owe it
to them to look at the full context of the
Salem witch Trials. And when we do again, we just
see a fascinating bunch of folks who were very pivotal,
(19:40):
very integral to the founding of what would become America,
and very much a part of the American story, these
American Puritans. And a great job as always to Greg Hangler,
and a special thanks to doctor Stephen Nichols, who the
(20:00):
president of the Reformation Bible College and the chief academic
officer for Ligonier Ministries. The complicated and rich history of
America as always told here on Our American Story
And we continue with our American stories and up next,
well the little piece of American history. Historical truths often
emerge with time. Early on, a hush descended over the
sixteen ninety two his sixteen ninety three Salem Witch Trials.
Then came playwright Arthur Miller, who made off with the story,
(00:30):
or at least his version of it. Since nineteen fifty three,
the Crucible has become the culturally accepted storyline that has
come to defined American Puritans. Doctor Stephen Nichols is President
of Reformation Bible College, chief Academic Officer of Ligonier Ministries,
and as the author of Jesus Made in America, a
(00:50):
Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ,
He's here to tell the story of the Puritans and
the Salem Witch Trials. Here's Stephen. Well. As we look
over American history, probably one of the groups that is
misunderstood the most is the New England Puritans. Most of
(01:14):
what Americans know about these New England Puritans we have
read in high school in two books. The first is
Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic text, The Scarlet Letter, and then there
is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Neither of these books
paint a very flattering portrait of the Puritans. The Scarlet
(01:37):
Letter portrays the Puritans as a bunch of hypocrites, as
self righteous, as mean spirited people who are just full
of gloom and doom. Oh you're show no modesty and
you're on a paddle. Get to have a chop still
trying to pen your things. Yes, the hero of the
(02:02):
story in Hawthorne's book is one who actually subverts the
community and subverts the sort of framed narrative that governed
that Puritan community. And then we find Miller's play The Crucible.
I want to open myself. I want the light of God.
(02:22):
I want the sweet love of Jesus. I danced for
the devil. I saw him, I wrote in his book.
I go back to Jesus, I kiss his hand. I
saw Sarah Good with the devil. I saw Goody Osborne
with the devil. I saw Bridget Bishop with the devil.
Glory to God. It is broken there free. Arthur Miller
(02:51):
wrote this in nineteen fifty three. It was a very gossamer,
veiled criticism of the car Theism and the purges and
the red scare of the nineteen fifties, and as people
were in that era speaking of the witch hunt that
was going on in McCarthyism, so Arthur Miller turned his
(03:14):
attention back to that original witch hunt back in Salem.
So the result of coming to know the Puritans through
the Crucible, through the Scarlet Letter is that the Puritans
have come to most Americans with a bad reputation. To
be Puritanical is certainly not a compliment. It was hl
(03:38):
Mancin back in the nineteen twenties who said that anyone
who thinks that somewhere someone might just be having a
good time, that's a Puritan. So what are we to
make of all this, and more importantly, what are we
to make of the New England Puritans? At first? Who
were they? The New England Puritans came from Old England.
(04:01):
The Puritans themselves were essentially legislated into existence. This was
under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and her Act of
Uniformity from fifteen fifty eight. It intended to bring conformity
to the religious culture of Great Britain. This was in
the wake of the Reformation. There was a great divide
(04:22):
between Catholicism and Protestantism, and England. Elizabeth needed a united
country to withstand Spain and Britain's enemies, and so she
enacted the Act of Uniformity. Well, there was a group
that dissented, and they were technically called nonconformists because they
(04:45):
would not conform to the Church of England. One of
the things they stressed was the nature of the church.
They believed that the church should consist of not simply
those who were baptized, but those who also believe the Gospel.
And they also believed in an idea that we call
visible saint hood, that is to say that the church
(05:07):
should be made up of professing Christians who well, who
act like Christians. And so immediately this group, these non conformists,
were criticized. They were given a name of derision, and
so they were called Puritans, not a name they gave themselves,
but a name that their enemies gave to them. They
(05:27):
were seen as holier than thou people. Well we fast
forward to King James the First and he did not
like the Puritans at all. It was King James who equipped,
I shall make them conform, or I will harry them
out of my land. Well, he couldn't make them conform,
and so eventually the Puritans left. The first group was
(05:52):
the Pilgrims. This is the group that landed sixteen twenty.
They came on the Mayflower and this group formed the
Plymouth Colony. The more properly Puritans came in sixteen thirty.
They set sail on the Arbella and when they landed
in the New World, they formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
(06:13):
It was really during that decade of the sixteen thirties
that there was a great migration of Puritans to the
New World. Almost each week a new boat would arrive
and would dock there, and it would bring in a
whole fresh group of Puritans. The Puritans in New England
formed a government, they carved a society in what, as
(06:36):
they called it, the Howling Wilderness of New England. And
even after just six years of being there, they founded
a college, the first college and the New World. Of course,
this is Harvard, And so we can take a look
at this first generation of Puritans and we can see
what they were truly about. One of the things that
(06:57):
we see is that they loved learning. Not only they
established Harvard, but they were very much for literacy for
their children, and they loved learning all learning. These Puritans
had a very substantial what we would call today a
classical education. The Puritans were very industrious people. They had
an incredibly impressive work ethic, and within that first generation
(07:21):
establishing towns and trade networks and establishing all sorts of
institutions and churches and schools and colleges there as they
carved out this community and this society for them in
New England. Well, this brings us, of course to that
(07:42):
subject of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, and that subject
is the Salem witch trials. These witch trials occurred from
sixteen ninety two to sixteen ninety three. Now to understand
these we need to sort of take a step back
and look at a broad or sort of European context,
and also look at the context of some of the
(08:05):
ideas that really were behind of the Puritans. So when
we go back to Europe, we see that which trials
go of course back into the Middle Ages. But in
the wake of the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church's
establishment of the Inquisition, there was an intense time of
which trials. This went from about the fifteen seventies or
(08:28):
fifteen eighties on into the sixteen thirties or sixteen forties,
as estimated by historians, that tens of thousands of which
trials occurred over these decades, and that many were executed.
The numbers range anywhere from lower end estimates to about
fifty thousand people to upper end estimates of one hundred
(08:52):
thousand were executed as witches. Across Europe. Pretty much every
single nation had a law on the books against witchcraft,
and it was also an offense that was a capital offense,
so one was found guilty, they were punishable by death.
So we have that context in Europe, and you've been
(09:15):
listening to doctor Stephen Nichols. When we come back more
on the Salem witch trials and the American Puritans here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories,
(09:41):
and we just heard Stephen Nichols talk about the European
witch trials that executed and estimated fifty to one hundred
thousand people all over Europe. Let's return to doctor Nichols,
who will pick up the story from there. As you
come to the New England Puritans, the different colonies, the
Massachusetts colony also had laws on the books against witchcraft,
(10:06):
and as with their European counterparts, this was also considered
a capital offense, with a lot of that as context.
Now we can talk about the trials themselves. I think
the first thing we have to say is these were wrong.
The judges of the trial were wrong. The townsfolk who
accused these folks of witchcraft. This whole episode of the
(10:31):
Salem witch trials is not something we want to make
an excuse for, or certainly not something we want to
say is inconsequential. It was very consequential and it was wrong.
But having said that, I think it's always important for
us to actually take a look at what happened and
to try to do as much justice as we can
(10:55):
to the event itself. So we look now at the trials.
Everything seemed to start in the winter of sixteen ninety two,
and it was started with two young girls. One was
just nine years old and the other was eleven years old.
One was the daughter of the minister there and the
village of Salem, and now these days the village of
(11:18):
Salem is Danvers, Massachusetts. But the daughter of the minister
and a niece of the minister, and they had these
episodes of what you would just call severe offense convulsions,
they'd be writhing on the ground, they'd be making strange sounds.
They were examined by the medical doctor, and there seemed
(11:39):
to be no medical reason, or at least as they
could at that time discern a medical reason, and so
they looked for another explanation, and very quickly the fingers
all started pointing to a slave that was in the home.
This was a Caribbean slave from Barbados. Her name was Titchuba,
(11:59):
and these young girls accused her of witchcraft. And alongside
of Tichuba, there were two women in the town. One
was a widow and from what we can understand, was
essentially sort of a homeless beggar, and the other was
also sort of in that category. As one I think
one historian referred to these ladies named Sarah Good and
(12:23):
Sarah Osborne. He called them social misfits. But as they
looked at Tichiba and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they
said these were witches and they had put these girls
under a spell. Well, of course they were questioned. Tichiba
actually confessed that she was a witch, that the devil
had come to her, that the devil had seduced her,
(12:46):
and that she did practice, in fact, witchcraft, and now
we sort of see how things begin to spread within
this town. There were trials and the event a sort
of snowball called out of control. People if they would
question the testimony of these girls, they would then be
(13:07):
accused of witchcraft, and they would be arrested and brought
into trial, and then others just started turning on each
other and turning in each other. These trials went on
from sixteen ninety two through sixteen ninety three. Over the
course of these trials, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of
about two hundred people were at one time or another arrested.
(13:31):
And of those two hundred people, twenty of them were executed,
So all that twenty were released, but there were in
fact twenty that were killed. They were hanged all except
for the instance of one, and they were sort of
hanged at particular times that the first execution came in
(13:52):
July nineteen of sixteen ninety two, and then another group
was executed in August nineteenth, sixteen ninety two, and then
again on September twenty second. Of those that were killed,
there were fourteen women, but among them were in fact
six men and often What had happened in these trials
(14:14):
was that if someone actually confessed to being a witch
and would repent, well they would be released. And so
the ones who maintained their innocence because they weren't witches
and they cared about their reputation and their name, met
a great deal to them, so they would maintain their innocence.
It was those, in the case of the twenty of
(14:35):
them that were executed during these trials. Well, how did
all this come to an end? A key figure in
all of this was Increase Mather. Increase Mather is probably
of what we might call Puritan nobility. He's both of
the Mather family and of the Cotton family. He was,
(14:55):
in fact, and during the time of the witch trials,
who was president of Harvard. As the trials were beginning,
he was back in Old England petitioning the king to
get a new charter for the colony. And actually it
was during this time that Simon Bradstreet, that of course
is the husband of the poet and Bradstreet. Simon Bradstreet
(15:16):
was installed as a governor again in sixteen ninety two,
and as governor he actually put a stop to the trials.
He was not very pleased with what was going on,
was not aligned with it, and so he just sort
of hit the pause button on it to keep any
more trials from happening. Well, eventually, Increase Mather comes back
and new governor is put into place, and the tribunal
(15:39):
was set in. The trials commenced. From the very beginning,
Increase Mather and other ministers across Boston and across Massachusetts
cautioned Salem to be cautious as they looked at evidence,
as they made decisions, to not be rash in their judgment,
and to weigh the evidence as you would in any workcase.
(16:01):
And increasingly that was set aside, and the trials there
at Salem focused on what was called spectral evidence. So
maybe someone was testifying that, you know, they had seen
one of these persons that was accused go off into
the woods and practice witchcraft, and then all of a
sudden during the trial, they would just sort of point
(16:21):
to the person and say, look, there's a witch above
the person. Well, of course you can't verify that, right,
And so that's the spectral evidence. And it was on
a lot of those kinds of evidences that the judges,
nine of them in total, overseeing Salem would make their decisions. Well,
when Increase Mather heard about this, he just wanted to
(16:42):
put an end to this and stressed in no uncertain
terms that this was not biblical and that these folks,
these judges, needed to conduct themselves and carry about the
law in a way that was biblical and reject this
notion of spectral evidence. And so thankfully that brought these
(17:05):
Salem witch trials to an end. A really crucial story
here is the story of Samuel Sewell. Samuel soul was
one of the nine judges and he sat on the
court was part of the Salem witch trials, but later
he was convicted of this. He repented of what he
(17:26):
had done. In his own testimony to how he came
to this realization, he says that he was reading a
biblical text. He was reading Matthew chapter twelve, verse seven,
and that text tells us, if you know what this means,
I will have mercy and not sacrifice, you would not
have condemned the guiltless. And Samuel Sewell just felt the
(17:50):
weight of that verse and he realized that what he
had done back in sixteen ninety two and ninety three
was that he had condemned the guiltless, that there were
those that were executed, that we're not witches. And when
he realized that he had relied on bad evidence in
making that decision, well, he repented and he published a
(18:12):
book that he just simply called his apology and spread
it widely. Sewel then just committed himself to calling a
day for fasting for the entire colony of Massachusetts for
what had happened at Salem. He worked almost tirelessly for
reparations and for a restitution of the accused. It's also
(18:35):
fascinating that a few years after this, in seventeen oh three,
Samuel Sewell wrote a book against slavery and he called
for its abolition. So Sewel's one of those figures who
often just gets associated with the Salem witch Trials and
then he just sort of gets written off as one
of those bad guys in the pages of history. But
there's little doubt that the Salem witch Trials was a
(18:57):
difficult moment for Puritanism in New England, and you don't
see much recovery of Puritanism after that. And so here
we have this time period, you know, of sixty seventy
years of the New England Puritans. And it's easy for us,
you know, I think we read Hawthorne again, Scarlet Letter,
we read Miller The Crucible. It's easy for us to
(19:20):
sort of just look back on these folks and sort
of dismiss them and judge them, you know, for quite
frankly being wrong. But I think we also owe it
to them to look at the full context of the
Salem witch Trials. And when we do again, we just
see a fascinating bunch of folks who were very pivotal,
(19:40):
very integral to the founding of what would become America,
and very much a part of the American story, these
American Puritans. And a great job as always to Greg Hangler,
and a special thanks to doctor Stephen Nichols, who the
(20:00):
president of the Reformation Bible College and the chief academic
officer for Ligonier Ministries. The complicated and rich history of
America as always told here on Our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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