July 28, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Salem Witch Trials of 1692–1693 have become a symbol of religious hysteria and injustice, but how much of what we think we know is true? For decades, a cultural silence surrounded the real story until Arthur Miller’s The Crucible gave it a new narrative. Dr. Stephen Nichols unpacks the deeper history of the Puritans, the role of religion in the Salem witch trials, and how popular portrayals have reshaped American memory.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 to sixteen ninety three Salem Witch Trials.
Then came playwright Arthur Miller, who made off with the story,
or at least his version of it. Since nineteen fifty three,
(00:33):
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 Ligoneer Ministries,
and as the author of Jesus Made in America, a
Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ,
(00:55):
He's here to tell the story of the Puritans and
the Salem Witch Trials. Here's Stephen.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Well. As we look over American history, probably one of
the groups that is misunderstood the most is the New
England Puritans. Most of 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,
(01:26):
and then there is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Neither
of these books paint a very flattering portrait of the Puritans.
The Scarlet Letter portrays the Puritans as a bunch of hypocrites,
as self righteous, as mean spirited people who are just
full of gloom and doom. Though you showed no modesty
(01:50):
in your diet, you have a chance still to repent
your sins. The hero of the 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
(02:15):
then we find Miller's play The Crucible.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I want to open myself.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
I want the light of God. 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.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Ory to God, it is broken there free.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Arthur Miller wrote this in nineteen fifty three. It was
a very gossamer, veiled criticism of McCarthyism 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 Maccarthyism. So Arthur Miller turned
(03:14):
his 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):
Mankin 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? A 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 non conformists because
(04:44):
they 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 saine 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 in 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 arribe
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 was,
(06:36):
as 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 in 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
(06:56):
things that we see is that they loved learning. Not
only did 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
(07:20):
first generation, 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
(07:42):
that 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 sort of European context
(08:02):
and also look at the context of some of the
ideas that really were behind 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.
(08:25):
This went from about the fifteen seventies or 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
(08:49):
people to upper end estimates of one hundred 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
(09:11):
we have that context in.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Europe, and you've been 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
(09:39):
continue with our American stories, and we just heard Stephen
Nichols talk about the European witch trials that executed an
estimated fifty to one hundred thousand people all over Europe.
Let's return to doctor Nichols, who will pick up the
story from there.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
As you come to the New England Puritans, the different colonies,
the Massachusetts colony also had laws on the books against witchcraft,
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
(10:18):
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
Salem witch trials is not something we want to make
an excuse for, or it's certainly not something we want
(10:39):
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 to the event itself. So we look now
at the trials. Everything seemed to start in the winter
(11:01):
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 Salem is Danvers, Massachusetts. But
the daughter of the minister and a niece of the minister,
(11:24):
and they had these episodes of what you would just
call severe fits convulsions. They'd be writhing on the ground,
they'd be making strange sounds. They were examined by the
medical doctor, and there seemed 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,
(11:49):
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 Titchubah, and these young
girls accused her of witchcraft. And alongside of Tichuba, there
were two women in the town. One was a widow
(12:10):
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 Sarah Osborne. He
called them social misfits. But as I looked at Titchubah
and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they said these were
(12:32):
witches and they had put these girls under a spell. Well,
of course they were questioned. Titchuba actually confessed that she
was a witch, that the devil had come to her,
that the devil had seduced her, and that she did
practice in fact witchcraft, and now we sort of see
(12:53):
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 accused of witchcraft, and
they would be arrested and brought into trial, and then
(13:13):
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, and of those
two hundred people, twenty of them were executed, so all
(13:37):
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. The first execution came in July nineteenth of
sixteen ninety two, and then another group was executed on
(13:58):
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 was that if someone
actually confessed to being a witch and would repent, well
(14:18):
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 them that were executed
during these trials. Well, how did all this come to
(14:42):
an end? A key figure in all of this was
Increase Mather. Increase Mathers is probably of what we might
call Puritan nobility. He's both of the Mather family and
of the Cotton family. He was, 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
(15:03):
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 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
(15:24):
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,
Increased Mather comes back, a new governor is put into place,
and the tribunal was set and the trials commence. From
the very beginning, Increase Mather and other ministers across Boston
(15:46):
and across Massachusetts cautioned Salem to be cautious as they
looked at evidence, as they made decisions, to not be
ration in their judgment, and to weigh the evidence as
you would in any case. And increasingly that was set aside,
and the trials there at Salem focused on what was
(16:08):
called spectral evidence. So maybe someone was testifying that 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 to the person and say, look, there's a
witch above the person. Well, of course you can't verify that, right,
(16:28):
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 Increased Mather heard about this, he just
wanted to put an end to this and stressed in
no uncertain terms, this was not biblical, and that these folks,
(16:50):
these judges, needed to conduct themselves and carry about the
law in a way that was a biblical and reject
this notion of spectral evidence. And so thankfully that brought
these Salem witch trials to an end. A really crucial
(17:11):
story here is the story of Samuel Sewell. Samuel Soule
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 had done. In his own testimony to how he
came to this realization, he says that he was reading
(17:33):
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 Sewall just felt the
weight of that verse and he realized that what he
(17:54):
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 were not witches. And when
he realized that he had relied on bad evidence in
making that decision, Well, he repented and he published a
book that he just simply called his apology and spread
(18:17):
it widely. Sewell 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
fascinating that a few years after this, in seventeen oh three,
(18:38):
Samuel Sewell wrote a book against slavery and he called
for its abolition. So Sewell is 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 difficult moment for Puritanism in New England, and you
(19:00):
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,
Scarlett Letter, we read Miller The Crucible. It's easy for
us to sort of just look back on these folks
(19:21):
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 a bunch of folks who
were very pivotal, very integral to the founding of what
(19:44):
would become America, and very much a part of the
American story, these American Puritans.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And a great job as always to Greg Hangler, and
a special thanks to doctor Stephen Nichols, who is the
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 to sixteen ninety three Salem Witch Trials.
Then came playwright Arthur Miller, who made off with the story,
or at least his version of it. Since nineteen fifty three,
(00:33):
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 Ligoneer Ministries,
and as the author of Jesus Made in America, a
Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ,
(00:55):
He's here to tell the story of the Puritans and
the Salem Witch Trials. Here's Stephen.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Well. As we look over American history, probably one of
the groups that is misunderstood the most is the New
England Puritans. Most of 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,
(01:26):
and then there is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Neither
of these books paint a very flattering portrait of the Puritans.
The Scarlet Letter portrays the Puritans as a bunch of hypocrites,
as self righteous, as mean spirited people who are just
full of gloom and doom. Though you showed no modesty
(01:50):
in your diet, you have a chance still to repent
your sins. The hero of the 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
(02:15):
then we find Miller's play The Crucible.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I want to open myself.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
I want the light of God. 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.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Ory to God, it is broken there free.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Arthur Miller wrote this in nineteen fifty three. It was
a very gossamer, veiled criticism of McCarthyism 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 Maccarthyism. So Arthur Miller turned
(03:14):
his 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):
Mankin 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? A 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 non conformists because
(04:44):
they 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 saine 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 in 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 arribe
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 was,
(06:36):
as 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 in 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
(06:56):
things that we see is that they loved learning. Not
only did 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
(07:20):
first generation, 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
(07:42):
that 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 sort of European context
(08:02):
and also look at the context of some of the
ideas that really were behind 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.
(08:25):
This went from about the fifteen seventies or 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
(08:49):
people to upper end estimates of one hundred 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
(09:11):
we have that context in.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Europe, and you've been 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
(09:39):
continue with our American stories, and we just heard Stephen
Nichols talk about the European witch trials that executed an
estimated fifty to one hundred thousand people all over Europe.
Let's return to doctor Nichols, who will pick up the
story from there.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
As you come to the New England Puritans, the different colonies,
the Massachusetts colony also had laws on the books against witchcraft,
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
(10:18):
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
Salem witch trials is not something we want to make
an excuse for, or it's certainly not something we want
(10:39):
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 to the event itself. So we look now
at the trials. Everything seemed to start in the winter
(11:01):
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 Salem is Danvers, Massachusetts. But
the daughter of the minister and a niece of the minister,
(11:24):
and they had these episodes of what you would just
call severe fits convulsions. They'd be writhing on the ground,
they'd be making strange sounds. They were examined by the
medical doctor, and there seemed 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,
(11:49):
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 Titchubah, and these young
girls accused her of witchcraft. And alongside of Tichuba, there
were two women in the town. One was a widow
(12:10):
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 Sarah Osborne. He
called them social misfits. But as I looked at Titchubah
and Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they said these were
(12:32):
witches and they had put these girls under a spell. Well,
of course they were questioned. Titchuba actually confessed that she
was a witch, that the devil had come to her,
that the devil had seduced her, and that she did
practice in fact witchcraft, and now we sort of see
(12:53):
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 accused of witchcraft, and
they would be arrested and brought into trial, and then
(13:13):
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, and of those
two hundred people, twenty of them were executed, so all
(13:37):
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. The first execution came in July nineteenth of
sixteen ninety two, and then another group was executed on
(13:58):
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 was that if someone
actually confessed to being a witch and would repent, well
(14:18):
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 them that were executed
during these trials. Well, how did all this come to
(14:42):
an end? A key figure in all of this was
Increase Mather. Increase Mathers is probably of what we might
call Puritan nobility. He's both of the Mather family and
of the Cotton family. He was, 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
(15:03):
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 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
(15:24):
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,
Increased Mather comes back, a new governor is put into place,
and the tribunal was set and the trials commence. From
the very beginning, Increase Mather and other ministers across Boston
(15:46):
and across Massachusetts cautioned Salem to be cautious as they
looked at evidence, as they made decisions, to not be
ration in their judgment, and to weigh the evidence as
you would in any case. And increasingly that was set aside,
and the trials there at Salem focused on what was
(16:08):
called spectral evidence. So maybe someone was testifying that 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 to the person and say, look, there's a
witch above the person. Well, of course you can't verify that, right,
(16:28):
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 Increased Mather heard about this, he just
wanted to put an end to this and stressed in
no uncertain terms, this was not biblical, and that these folks,
(16:50):
these judges, needed to conduct themselves and carry about the
law in a way that was a biblical and reject
this notion of spectral evidence. And so thankfully that brought
these Salem witch trials to an end. A really crucial
(17:11):
story here is the story of Samuel Sewell. Samuel Soule
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 had done. In his own testimony to how he
came to this realization, he says that he was reading
(17:33):
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 Sewall just felt the
weight of that verse and he realized that what he
(17:54):
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 were not witches. And when
he realized that he had relied on bad evidence in
making that decision, Well, he repented and he published a
book that he just simply called his apology and spread
(18:17):
it widely. Sewell 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
fascinating that a few years after this, in seventeen oh three,
(18:38):
Samuel Sewell wrote a book against slavery and he called
for its abolition. So Sewell is 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 difficult moment for Puritanism in New England, and you
(19:00):
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,
Scarlett Letter, we read Miller The Crucible. It's easy for
us to sort of just look back on these folks
(19:21):
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 a bunch of folks who
were very pivotal, very integral to the founding of what
(19:44):
would become America, and very much a part of the
American story, these American Puritans.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And a great job as always to Greg Hangler, and
a special thanks to doctor Stephen Nichols, who is the
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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