Salem and Friends: The Plethora of Witch Trials in Early America

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
A lot of people, when they thinkwitch trials, they instantly
think Salem. But not all witch trials were
the Salem witch trials. There were witch trials for a
very long time, and all of thesewitch trials that happened in
Europe and America especially influence the Salem witch

(00:21):
trials. And that's how we got what we
got, the beliefs that were shared in the accusations of
what which is dead and who they were.
Those came from European and other American, especially New
England witch trials because there were writings about those

(00:42):
and they were well read and alsospread through word of mouth.
Welcome to the thing about Salem.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
To really understand the Salem witch trials, you must know that
they did not happen in a bubble.That's right, there are many
other witch trials around the world in history that influenced

(01:06):
what happened in Salem. We're going to focus today on
British North America. Many European, particularly
English, writings were used by the justices of the Salem court
and the ministers who are advising them when they were
making their rulings and deciding what kind of evidences
they were going to accept against the accused witches.

(01:29):
Yeah, and tales of European witchcraft influence the very
accounts that the accusers and confessors claimed had happened.
Witch trials had actually been happening in New England since
1647. Now keep in mind that Salem
happens in 1692, so there were people being accused and tried

(01:52):
for witchcraft in the area 45 years before Salem even
happened. In fact, allegations had been
made since at least 1638 in New England when John Winthrop wrote
that Jane Hawkins, an associate of Anne Hutchinson.
Different Hutchinson family, She's not your Hutchinson was

(02:16):
believed by many to be a witch, but she didn't go to court.
She didn't go to court for that.In this time before Salem,
there's a name that you should know and her name is Alice
Young. She was from Windsor, CT and she
was hanged in Hartford on May 26th, 1647.

(02:37):
She was the first woman hanged by the colonies.
And that's by any of the BritishNorth American colonies.
She's the very first to be hanged.
And then the following summer, Massachusetts decides to get in
on the ACT and Margaret Jones ofCharlestown is hanged June 15th,

(03:00):
1648 in Boston. But after Margaret, it goes back
over to Connecticut, where 34 people were indicted, some more
than once, for witchcraft crimes.
In fact, in Connecticut, beginning in 1647, going on

(03:21):
until 1697, there were 14 peoplethat were convicted of
witchcraft. Three of them either were
reprieved or their conviction was overturned, while the other
11, sadly beginning with Alice Young, were hanged.
Have you heard of the Hartford Witch Panic 1662 to 1663?

(03:42):
There were 14 people accused there.
Four of them were actually convicted and hanged.
In fact, the final hangings for witchcraft in the Connecticut
colony occurred January 25th, 1663.
That's ending the hangings 29 years before the Salem witch
trials started. The witch trials that were

(04:05):
happening in Connecticut and throughout the American colonies
other than Salem were generally small affairs.
Other than the Hartford Witch panic, we're talking about 1-2,
maybe three people getting arrested at the same time in a
witch hunt and a couple going totrial and maybe generally one

(04:29):
person being convicted. Sadly, Margaret Jones wasn't the
only woman that was executed by Massachusetts before Salem.
There were more witch trials andconvictions that occurred. 31
individuals were indicted for witchcraft between 1648 and

(04:49):
1691, and those 31 indictments resulted in eight convictions.
And that was over 50 years. That wasn't over 50 minutes like
it would seems happens in the Salem where there was way more
than 31 indictments. Yeah.
Do you think about 1648 to 169131 indictments?

(05:13):
There's not even 1 every year, so it was sparse, sporadic,
localized individual accusationsgoing up against people in that
period. Yeah, and the 8 convicted of
Boston are still awaiting their exonerations.

(05:33):
If you would like to sign the petition with us to promote
having the General Court exonerate those 8, you can do
that at change.org/witchtrials. Those 8 convictions did lead to
five executions. Two women received lighter

(05:54):
sentences and one man was convicted.
But his conviction was reversed and he ended up escaping to
Rhode Island to get away from the accusations.
That was Hugh Parsons. And if you would be interested
in seen an exhibit about his life and his accusations, and if

(06:18):
you're in New England this fall before I think it's November
3rd, you can go to the Springfield Museums in
Springfield, MA. It's a really excellent exhibit
on his life. And another thing about the
executions in Massachusetts, they occurred in Boston.
All the witch trials before Salem occurred in Boston.

(06:41):
That was where any felony, any capital offense was tried by the
highest court in the land ratherthan by some local court, and
that court was reluctant to convict.
Indeed, between 1656 and 1688, there were no executions at all.

(07:02):
And finally, a Goody Glover was accused in 1688 because the
Goodwin children were afflicted,they were acting like they were
bewitched and they were modelingEuropean afflicted people
behaviors that were shared in these stories that were so

(07:24):
popular in New England among theministers and the people.
Cotton Mather wrote about the Goodwin children and their
afflictions and his disgust for Goody Glover.
That witch trial was very unlikethe Salem witch trials because

(07:46):
this woman English was not her first language.
She was Irish Catholic. Yeah, and the behaviors of the
children, because Cotton Mather wrote about this.
He published his book Memorable Provinces in 1689, and then he
published a second edition in 1691, just the year before

(08:08):
Salem. So the stories fresh in
everybody's minds and imaginations, including the
children who become afflicted inSalem Village in January 1692.
Their behavior really mimics thebehavior of the Goodwin
children. Flying around rooms, flapping
their wings, making animal sounds, being repulsed at the

(08:30):
idea of doing work or learning any good things but being
rambunctious. I guess you could say Goody Cole
is well known in New Hampshire for her witchcraft trials.
That's right. I said trials.
She's tried multiple times in Massachusetts because New

(08:51):
Hampshire is under the control of Massachusetts for a large
chunk of the 17th century. And so she keeps having to go
down to Boston for trial and stay in jails in Boston.
And she lives in Hampton, NH, where today she's memorialized.

(09:12):
A couple other notable witch trials elsewhere in the American
colonies are what happened in Virginia.
The very first accusation was in1626.
That was Joan Wright. And that's a great story.
It's a sad story, but it's interesting.
Wow, that's 66 years before the Salem Witch Trials.

(09:36):
Somebody down in Virginia as being accused of witchcraft.
There was a indentured servant who was convicted there.
His name was William Harding andhe was whipped and banished in
1656. And another very well known
woman who's like the Goody Cole of Virginia Grace Sherwood, the

(10:00):
so-called witch of Pungo, she was tried by the water ordeal in
17 O 6. So this is going on after Salem.
They're putting her in a body ofwater to see whether she floats
through sinks. And if she floats, that means
the water's rejecting her. And so she's a witch.

(10:22):
And guess what? She floated.
But unfortunately there was a fire in the courthouse later on.
And if there was a trial, the records of it were destroyed in
this fire. And we're not going to leave
Maryland out today. They have not exonerated.
They're convicted, but they do have two.

(10:44):
And one man was named John Common.
He was also an indentured servant, convicted, not hanged.
But there was a woman, her name was Rebecca Fowler, and she was
convicted and hanged in 1685 in Maryland.
Another thing I wanted to talk about is how the Salem witch

(11:04):
hunts didn't just affect Salem. We call it the Salem Witch hunt
in the Salem Witch trials because the trials happened in
the townhouse in Salem. That's where they actually
physically took place. But many of the 9 judges on the
court of Warrior and Terminer were from Boston, and the rest

(11:27):
worked in Boston a lot of the time because they were elected
legislators as well as justices.Beyond that, people were accused
of witchcraft in 25 different communities in Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, and Maine during the Salem Witch trials.
So there was a really wide geographical distribution of all

(11:51):
of these, and in fact, the town of Andover had more accusations
than Salem itself. Definitely not a bubble, it
sounds more like a Dome. It is now you're reminding me of
Stephen King Under the Dome and they're in there just accusing
each other of witchcraft. Then another effect that Salem

(12:14):
had. Actually, the Salem Witch trials
were so popular that the producers decided to launch a
spin off on the Connecticut Channel.
And so in Connecticut, a girl named Catherine Branch who was a
maid in another family other than her own, she started

(12:37):
getting afflicted in the summer of 1692 in just the ways that
the girls in Salem Village and surrounding communities were
being afflicted. She starts seeing spectral
visions and seeing people comingto her that she knows, but now
she knows them as witches and they're supposedly hurting her.

(13:01):
So this one resulted in several accusations but only two trials
and 1 conviction, and that one conviction was actually
overturned. So other than a woman spinning
about a year in jail, which is pretty bad, especially those
jails at the time, less damage done in Connecticut thankfully

(13:25):
than what could have been done based on potentially another
Salem starting there. All of these years previous,
prior to 1692, are full of stories of families and
neighbors and women and men and children affected by witch

(13:46):
trials long before Salem happened.
That's a lot to go back and lookat and to consider and to
understand the context of witch hunting in colonial New England.
We have another podcast, The Thing About Witch Hunts, which
conveniently you can go to to learn more history about the

(14:08):
witch house that we've touched on today and more in America, as
well as the witch hunt in Europeand elsewhere around the world.
We also have a bookshop online and it's full of witch trials
stories. There's a book that we have

(14:29):
authored by Dick Ross. We've interviewed on our other
podcasts called Before Salem. That's one of the only recent
coverages of the Connecticut witch trials.
Our bookshop is full of great books to help you get a fuller
understanding of the context of witch trials.
O do some more reading and help support our projects at

(14:53):
endwitchhuntsorg by shopping.

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Salem and Friends: The Plethora of Witch Trials in Early America

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