October 24, 2018 • 31 mins
While the events of the Salem witch trials began within the borders of the Salem village community, many of the forces that drove it forward were external. As we're about to see, Salem was full of more than stories about witchcraft—and those external threats were about to come home.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
There were a lot of rumors about Abigail. Some were small,
as you might expect. She was rude, she was unseemly,
she was irreverent. But there were other more specific rumors,
and those were the kinds that spread like fire in
a dry barn. They whispered that she lay out alone
in the woods at night, that she was disobedient at home,
(00:34):
that she openly mocked the traditions of the Puritan faith,
even going as far as to use the Lord's name
in vain, That she made a pact with the devil.
And all of it was true. Abigail's family lived in
the village of Topsfield, roughly five miles north of Salem Village.
(00:54):
They were part of that larger Salem community in which
the same way Beverly and over when Um and others were,
But they hadn't always been in Topsfield as far as
I can tell. Abigail was born there, but at the
age of four, ten years before the events of her father, William,
packed the family up and headed north to Fallmouth, Maine.
(01:17):
Over the next seven years, though tragedy crashed against her
family like ocean waves. The Native American attacks on those
northern frontier communities were brutal and deadly. Abigail lost siblings,
she lost her mother, and finally her father lost their land,
forcing them to return to tops Field and defeat. But
(01:39):
they didn't come alone. William had remarried, so his new wife, Deliverance,
came home with them. All of this is context. It's
stage dressing. If we want to understand who Abigail was.
These are stories that we need to hear because they
help us see her experience. But the one thing they
don't explain is why she being so hard into these rumors.
(02:02):
You see, These stories of Satanic packs and sleeping in
the woods weren't rumors told about her. These were things
she said about herself. Abigail Hobbs was a witch, and
she was proud of it. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(02:58):
To take our next step forward into Salem, we need
to travel somewhere else Maine. Now I know what you're thinking.
I'm here for the Salem, which trials, not the history
of Maine, and I can understand. But as I've often repeated,
context is everything. No historical event takes place inside a vacuum.
(03:19):
And if we're ever going to fully understand what happened
in Salem. We need to cast a wider net. Believe me,
we'll be better off for it. Maine was founded decades
before as a separate colony from the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
and the two regions grew differently as well. Massachusetts expanded fast,
allowing cities to form, which attracted better off families and
(03:42):
people who were less adventurous. Early settlements in Maine, however,
tended to stick to the Rocky Coast. They were less
city like, functioning more as outposts to gather materials needed
in the more urban communities around Boston. Here's Marybeth Norton,
professor of an American History at Cornell University. Maine in
(04:03):
the sixteen seventies and sixteen nineties was really where the
action was as far as 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 Maine were providing the timber
(04:24):
for the very well developed pines were perfect for ships.
Mass These early main communities places like Falmouth up in
Casco Bay and Wells York and Saco all served as
borderland between the safer realm of Massachusetts and the evil
of the frontier up north. More than anywhere else the
(04:47):
settlers could think of was darkness and danger. Around sixteen
fifty two, a group of settlers in Maine decided to
petition parliament back in England for the ability to rule themselves.
But when word of their plans got out, the government
in Massachusetts became worried. They were getting rich off of
those Maine frontiersmen, and they didn't want to lose that.
(05:10):
So they examined their own charter and somehow found a
loophole that gave them authority over Maine. Convenience I know,
but don't go assuming that the government of Massachusetts rushed
in to grab control of Maine because they loved the place. No,
they loved the resources that flowed out of it and
the wealth it pumped into their economy. But Maine itself
(05:31):
was something straight out of their Puritan nightmares. To the
Puritans in Boston and Salem, Maine was a godless land.
The settlers there rejected English communal order and were less
interested in building the Puritan city on a hill that
was so important to the folks in Salem. Abigail Hobb's
new stepmother was a great example of this. Here was
(05:55):
an adult woman living in Puritan New England, and she
had never been baptized by the Church. Maine came with
another challenge as well, proximity to the Native American tribes
to the north. Not just proximity, but conflict. As you
might imagine, the English settlers were spreading out, taking over
(06:15):
more and more land that belonged to the people who
already lived there. They justified it with law and religion too,
claiming that the Crown had given them authority over every
single person within their territory, whether they were English or not.
So as the Native Americans watched their lands get swallowed
up by a hungry colonial enterprise, they felt the need
(06:36):
to do something. Some of them fell in line and
accepted it, believing that being nice to the English would
benefit them in the long run. Others went looking for
powerful friends to help them, eventually connecting with the French
settlers far to the north. But there was a third
group that wanted none of that, and they lashed out
in the only way they could think of, with violence. Now,
(06:59):
of course, if Massachusetts hadn't rushed in and taken control
of Maine. Those frontier settlers would have had to defend themselves,
but that's not how it happened. Massachusetts got greedy, and
because of that they were responsible for that defense. In
sixteen seventy five, war broke out between the English colonists
and the Native Americans around them, who were led by
(07:22):
a man named Meta Coom. He preferred to call himself
by a more English title, though, so he went by
the name King Philip. The three year conflict then became
known as King Philip's War. It was a bloody, violent
time too. Both sides took hostages, both sides went back
on their promises that could have ended the fighting. There
(07:42):
were stories of Native children having their head smashed in
and of pregnant English women being murdered and sculped. Both
sides crossed the line of human decency far too often.
Mary Beth Norton once again. The Indian War then finally
came to an end more less with a truce in
sixteen seventy eight. It was devastating to the English who
(08:06):
had settled in Maine and New Hampshire. They had abandoned
their communities in that period. They moved back in and
then the Second War started in six and it all
happened all over again, so it was devastating. It was
devastating war. Basically, the Indian Wars devastated the economy of
Maine and Maine in a lot of ways never really recovered.
(08:29):
People didn't come back until the seventeen twenties, and when
they did a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone.
So it was really very bad. Abigail Hobbs family were
some of the people displaced by that war. They had
(08:51):
left hops Field in sixteen eighty two looking for a
better life. Most of the land in and around Salem
was owned by a small handful of wealthy families like
the Porters, and Putnam's Maine had represented their chance to
get out from under the thumb of the one percent
and make a better life for themselves. Elsewhere, the Indian Wars,
(09:11):
as they called them back then, ruined all of that.
Another person affected by the war was George Burrows. Now
if that name sounds familiar, that's because Burrows served as
minister of the Salem Village Church years before Samuel Parris,
way back in sixteen eighty one. But he started up
in Falmouth Maine, where he was the minister there. An
(09:32):
attack on Falmouth back in August of sixteen seventy six
left dozens of settlers dead and sent a wave of
refugees south to say For territory. Burrows managed to escape
along with a three year old girl named Mercy Lewis,
whose entire family had been killed. After living and working
for a time in the town of Salisbury, he and
(09:53):
Mercy traveled farther south, eventually arriving in Salem Village in
sixteen eighty one. After his time serving as the second
minister of the church in Salem Village, Burrows actually returned
to Maine. The war was over and many people were
beginning the long journey back north to reclaim their lost
land and try rebuilding, and George Burrows went along with them.
(10:17):
Money flowed back north as well. Folks in the Salem
area felt safe to reinvest money in Maine, including the Putnams.
And here's the amazing part of it all. If you
were to look at a list of the people settling
in or working with those settlers up in Maine, a
whole slew of Salem names would jump off the page
at you. Heck, when the conflict resurfaced in the late
(10:39):
sixteen eighties. It was the Salem magistrates John Hawthorne and
Jonathan Corwin who took a trip north to inspect the situation.
People in Salem were fully aware of the danger lurking
just beyond their borders. Here's Marybeth Norton once again. What
happened was all the people who had been settling in
(10:59):
Maine had to somewhere 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, are came indeed to live in Salem Village.
(11:20):
All of that is context. You can't understand Sale and
Village in without understanding Maine. In the decades leading up
to it. They weren't too disparate, places that never bumped
into each other. These were sibling communities joined at the
hip through family ties, military service, and economic needs. Every
(11:40):
person inside Sale and Village was acutely aware of what
was happening to the folks in Maine, even more so
when those refugees began to flood back toward them. Oh
and one last thing I want to point out. On
January six, just days before Betty Paris and Abigail well
Illiams were about to fall into fits for the first time,
(12:03):
a Native American raid destroyed another settlement in Maine. Not
Falmouth far to the north though no this raid happened
much closer in the southern town of York. From the
perspective of the people in Salem, the conflict and danger
was headed right toward them. So keep all of that
in mind as we move forward, because the next events
(12:24):
might very well take place in Salem, but that doesn't
mean they're isolated. And some historians think that everything that
was about to happen could be blamed on Abigail Hobbs, who,
thanks to the wild stories she was telling her friends,
ended up being arrested on April nineteen. Her examination happened
a short time later, and it came with some interesting revelations.
(12:48):
Standing before the magistrates, Abigail Hobbs spoke before they could
ask her any questions. I will speak the truth, she said.
I have seen sights and have been scared I have
been very wicked. I hope I shall be better if
God will help me. What sights did you see, Hawthorne asked,
(13:09):
I have seen dogs and many creatures. What dogs do
you mean, Hawthorne asked, ordinary dogs. Abigail shook her head,
I mean the devil. The magistrates pressed on. Where had
she seen them, they asked, and Abigail replied that her
encounter had taken place in the woods in the middle
(13:31):
of the day years ago, back when she lived at
Casco Bay. That was where she'd put her hand on
his book when they carried her off to jail a
short while later. The name Cascoe Bay still hung in
the air like a neon sign, pointing at the danger
that lurked the north, but Abigail had also made it
clear that it was spreading south and might already be
(13:53):
among them. She claimed that a shape shifting man had
visited her at her home here in Tompsfield. He had
alternated between the form of a cat, a dog, and
a black man with a black hat, and this man,
she claimed, had offered her fine clothes and the power
to harm others in town, a power that she had
(14:15):
readily accepted. If the news from the frontier was frightening
to the people of Salem Village. It was made even
more so by the actual presence in their homes of
people who had lived through the horrors of it all.
One of the most prominent of all of them was
(14:37):
the little girl who George Burrows had rescued from Falmouth
back in sixteen seventy six. Mercy Lewis my sixteen ninety two.
Though she was a nineteen year old woman living in
the home of Thomas and Ann Putnam along with their
violently afflicted daughter Annie, it's easy to believe that over
their time together, Mercy had been filling Annie's head with
(14:58):
horrifying tales of del buls who attack in the night.
But she had more to contribute than just tails. Mercy
Lewis was having fits of her own, and one of
the incidents that was recorded down Mercy claimed the Putnam's
house had become filled with the spirits of witches and
that they were trying to force her to partake of
some twisted red communion. Suddenly, the figure of a white
(15:22):
man appeared in the room, brightening off the witches and
casting a brilliant light across her face, and Putnam not
one to be showed up soon had a powerful vision
of her own. During hers the people around her heard
her shout, Oh, dreadful, dreadful. Here is a minister. What
are ministers witches too? Obviously this caught the attention of
(15:47):
the people around her, A minister implicated in assisting the
devil himself. Well, it was unheard of, and yet here
it was spelled out right in front of them. A
moment later, the minister's invisible spirit conveniently identified itself to
them all as well. It was their former minister and
hero of Maine, George Burrows. But George Burrows wasn't the
(16:12):
spotless minister we might assume him to be. Here's Stacy Schiff,
Pulitzer Prize winning author of several historical works, including The Witches.
Burrows is the ex minister who leaves the community on
bad terms and is as much a hero in his
new community in todays southern Maine as he had been
a persona on grata in Salem. He was clearly a
(16:33):
very stubborn and difficult man, and possibly an abusive husband
when he was in Salem. Stories of how he had
mistreated his wives will trail him even when he when
he moves to Maine with Burrows, there's this terrific, vexed
history with the community. There seems to be a certain
amount of getting back at him by women who may
have been friends with his dead wives. The day after
(16:54):
Annie Putnam's vision of George Burrows, original afflicted girl Abigail
Williams and her friend and Mary Walcott, both had a
frightening experience as they sat in Ingersoll's ordinary with a
number of their neighbors. They claimed that the spirits of
William and Deliverance Hobbs, parents to Abigail Hobbs, were there
and attacking them. One of the men in the room,
(17:16):
Benjamin Hutchinson, actually drew his sword and started swinging it
at the empty air in an attempt to kill the spirits.
As he did, the two afflicted girls recounted the blow
by blow action that only they could see. Goody Hobbs
had been injured, they claimed, and there was blood all
over the floor. Think about this moment from a different perspective, though,
(17:40):
Salem feared that the warfare of the North would spread
down to their own safe space, that before long, they
too would be battling with the Devil's forces. The Native
Americans who plagued their borders. So when you find a
scene in a public tavern where weapons are drawn and
flashing through the air, it's their greatest fears come to life.
(18:00):
Between this highly public display of panic and the new
accusations brought up by Annie Putnam and her friends, the
momentum of the witchcraft panic began to accelerate. Within ten
days of Abigail Hobb's examination, fifteen new names were submitted
as potential witches. Some seemed connected to pass suspects, while
others were more shocking to hear. Giles Corey and Mary
(18:24):
Warren were taken from their homes and then examined and jailed.
Their connections to Martha Corey and the proctors, both of
whom were already in jail, were just too close to overlook.
Rebecca Nurse's two younger sisters, Mary Etsy and Sarah Klois
were also imprisoned. Nathaniel Putnam had his black slave Mary arrested,
(18:45):
and another woman who had been acquitted of witchcraft years before,
name Bridget Bishop, was also arrested for a second time.
After a brief examination, she was jailed for trial, along
with two other members of her family. Ship was married,
so she's not alone in the world. That's Maryland ka Roach,
historian and author of Six Women of Salem. She's been
(19:09):
suspected before, however, of witchcraft, but she has survived that.
That's not as much paperwork on it as you'd like surviving.
She was confrontational. Some of the neighbors thought, I'd say
she stuck up for herself. This is her third husband.
The second husband would hit her now and then, but
she hit him back then. The crisis burst beyond the
(19:31):
Salem boundary. Arrests were made throughout Essex County, in the
towns of reading, Amesbury, Beverly, and more over in Topsfield.
Both William and Deliverance Hobbs were arrested. The logic was simple.
If their daughter had consorted with the devil, who could
be more to blame than they, But the most dramatic
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arrest would be the most unexpected. Rather than dismissing the
accusations against George Burrows, the magistrates all agreed that it
would be best to bring him in for questioning, but
he was far to the north of them in Wells, Maine,
and they feared that making a public declaration might tip
him off. And give him the chance to run. So instead,
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they gathered a group of men and gave them their
assignment in secret. They were to ride north, capture him,
and then bring him back for examination. George Burrows was
a wanted man. Salem Village didn't sit around waiting for
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Burroughs to arrive before making their minds up about him,
and we have a number of the locals to thank
for that. One was a young woman named Sarah Churchill
who worked as a servant in a local household, but
she was also a refugee from Maine. For a while,
Churchill experienced some of the same afflictions as the others,
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but her employer beat her until it stopped. That's how
John Procter had handled Mary Warren, but when her symptoms stopped,
the judges decided it was because she had given in
to the demands of the devil. When Churchill's afflictions did
the same, she stood at risk of the same assumption.
To help her case, she played along with the magistrates
and gave them whatever they wanted. In jail across town,
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Mary Warren was doing the same. She rolled on her employers,
the proctors, and said that they threatened to force red
hot fireplace tongs down her throat if she didn't sign
The Devil's Book. Even Mercy Lewis got back into the spotlight,
she claimed to have been attacked by the specter of Burroughs,
who she knew very well. She said that he tortured her,
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that he threatened to kill her, and that he carried
her up to a high mountain and offered to give
her everything she could see in exchange for her mark
in the Devil's Book, Mercy claims she refused, echoing the
willpower of Jesus. In a similar situation in the Bible,
one young woman, Sarah Morrell, seems to only have been
(22:04):
arrested because she too was a refugee from Maine. It
was ironic, really, Salem had been set up as a
place of peace, a city on the hill, as a
beacon of hope, and yet it was quickly becoming a
dangerous place to live. May nine saw a number of
arrivals in Salem village. William Stoughton, the Massachusetts Chief Justice,
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and Samuel Sewell, who was a young judge from the
Massachusetts General Court and a dedicated record keeper, Together with
John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, these four brought the entire
authority of the colony to bear on the next examination.
Here's Emerson Baker, professor of American history at Salem State
University and author of A Storm of Witchcraft. Here's the problem.
(22:51):
I really think the judges like Stowton were filled with
incredible self loathing. Stowton had been a minister, he had
been a minister in England. He's basically kicked out with
a restoration because he was a Puritan. And he comes
back to New England. And he comes back and he's
he's hailed as this wonderful leading figure the colony. He's
asked by several towns, please be our minister, please please
please be our minister. And he says, no, I'm not worthy.
(23:12):
I'm not worthy of being a minister. I can't do it.
Samuel sewell as well too. You can see his struggles.
He doesn't want to become a member of the church
because it doesn't think he's worthy. My God, the guy
was brilliant student at Harvard. He could recite the Bible
backwards and forwards. Read his two volume diary, and you
know he's an incredibly devout Puritan. But he thinks he's
not worthy. That examination was of the other new arrival
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in town, George Burrows. By the time he was escorted
into the Sale and Village meeting house, Stowton, Hawthorne, Corwin
and Sewell had already questioned him privately. They had focused
on the last time he had taken communion and where
George must have understood the seriousness of his situation. When
he answered that it had been such a long time
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that he couldn't remember, it didn't help his case for sure.
The afflicted girls appeared grievously tortured when Burrows stepped through
the meeting house door. One girl shouted out that Burrows
had killed his two wives, and that their spirits had
appeared right there in the room, with them wrapped in
their winding sheets, and laying the blame for their death
(24:15):
on their husband's head. Burrows was offered a chance to
respond to the girls, but all he would say was
that he understood nothing of it. After that, testimonies continued.
Men who had known Burrows in Casco Bay reported that
he had in human strength that he was able to
hold a seven foot rifle with one hand while other
(24:36):
men struggled to hold it with two he was able
to lift barrels of molasses and cider by himself to
unload the boats that supplied the coastal town. Of course,
Burrows tried to defend himself, but his explanations and protests
fell on deaf ears. The truth of the matter was
a lot more simple. He had lost his case before
(24:56):
he even entered the room, and the examination was for
no other reason then to just go through the motions
and make it official. When the examination was over, Burrows
was walked out of the crowded meeting house and into
an already crowded jail. He was their biggest catch of
the season, so to speak, and represented a major victory.
(25:18):
But all of that was about to change. The new
day would bring a new tragedy, and I'm not sure
anyone in Salem was prepared. On the day after burrows arrest,
the crisis claimed its first life. Sarah Osburne, already weak
(25:43):
with an ongoing illness when she had been jailed on
March one, died in her Boston jail cell. She had
been held there in horrible conditions for nine weeks without
ever getting a trial. The news had to have struck
the people of Salem village with a painful blow. Whatever
you could say about how they were handling the situation,
(26:03):
with all of their warrants and examinations and constables carting
suspects off to jail, there were real people involved, real lives,
real neighbors, real people who they had known for a
long time. But now those people were being turned into
something else, something less than human. That's something we're all
(26:27):
very good at. We always have been, if we're honest
about it. People have a knack for isolating certain individuals
or cultures and then stripping them of their humanity. When
things get rough and a community faces a crisis, it's
the dehumanized who are always the most vulnerable to violence.
I know there's a lot about the events in Salem
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that are singular. They are special and unique and one
offs that don't repeat themselves again. But this the dehumanizing
of the other to the point where lives are lost.
This is something that's tragically commonplace to our modern world.
Sarah Osborne was one of the first to step into
(27:08):
a local jail to await a full hearing before a
lawful court, but she was certainly not the last. Day
after day, new members of the community were accused of
allegiance to Satan. They were questioned by the wealthy, powerful
men of the colony and then torn from their lives
and their families. The fits and accusations of the afflicted
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would continue, The jails in Boston, Salem, and Ipswich would
continue to fill up, and the community would continue to wait.
The man they had pinned their hopes on, Sir William Phipps,
was rumored to be on his way. Phipps was the
newly appointed governor of Massachusetts. He'd sailed to England to
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retrieve a newly approved colonial charter. It was that magical
piece of paper that would help them fight off their
enemies and a abolished true justice with the righteous hand.
And so they waited. But thankfully they wouldn't have to
wait long. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured.
(28:15):
Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview
of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured,
we might look on Alden's capture by the French with
pity and see his release and plans to return to
his son to be noble. The magistrates, though, saw it
as a sign that he was in league with the
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devil the French word Catholic, and they had allied themselves
with the Native Americans, two groups of people viewed as
tools of Satan by the Puritans. John Alden wasn't the
only suspect to leave the meeting house in shackles that day, though.
One of them was Martha Carrier from nearby and over
Accusations about her involvement in witchcraft began after she used
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to leave town after her family contracted smallpox, which upset
her neighbors, never mind the fact that the outbreak was
really the fault of Phipps and his failed military expedition.
Everyone was carted off to jail that afternoon, but unlike
all the previous examinations that had taken place, these suspects
could at least see the light at the end of
(29:22):
the tunnel. With the oyer and terminer announced, they knew
their time in jail wouldn't go on for months. Finally
there was an end in sight, but that tunnel would
be much more dark and dangerous than any of them
could have imagined. Unobscured was created and written by me
(30:36):
Aaron Mankey and produced by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams
in partnership with how Stuff Works, with research by Carl
Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about
our contributing historians further reading material, resource archive, and links
to our other shows at history Unobscured dot com. Until
(30:58):
next time, thanks for listen. Name
There were a lot of rumors about Abigail. Some were small,
as you might expect. She was rude, she was unseemly,
she was irreverent. But there were other more specific rumors,
and those were the kinds that spread like fire in
a dry barn. They whispered that she lay out alone
in the woods at night, that she was disobedient at home,
(00:34):
that she openly mocked the traditions of the Puritan faith,
even going as far as to use the Lord's name
in vain, That she made a pact with the devil.
And all of it was true. Abigail's family lived in
the village of Topsfield, roughly five miles north of Salem Village.
(00:54):
They were part of that larger Salem community in which
the same way Beverly and over when Um and others were,
But they hadn't always been in Topsfield as far as
I can tell. Abigail was born there, but at the
age of four, ten years before the events of her father, William,
packed the family up and headed north to Fallmouth, Maine.
(01:17):
Over the next seven years, though tragedy crashed against her
family like ocean waves. The Native American attacks on those
northern frontier communities were brutal and deadly. Abigail lost siblings,
she lost her mother, and finally her father lost their land,
forcing them to return to tops Field and defeat. But
(01:39):
they didn't come alone. William had remarried, so his new wife, Deliverance,
came home with them. All of this is context. It's
stage dressing. If we want to understand who Abigail was.
These are stories that we need to hear because they
help us see her experience. But the one thing they
don't explain is why she being so hard into these rumors.
(02:02):
You see, These stories of Satanic packs and sleeping in
the woods weren't rumors told about her. These were things
she said about herself. Abigail Hobbs was a witch, and
she was proud of it. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky.
(02:58):
To take our next step forward into Salem, we need
to travel somewhere else Maine. Now I know what you're thinking.
I'm here for the Salem, which trials, not the history
of Maine, and I can understand. But as I've often repeated,
context is everything. No historical event takes place inside a vacuum.
(03:19):
And if we're ever going to fully understand what happened
in Salem. We need to cast a wider net. Believe me,
we'll be better off for it. Maine was founded decades
before as a separate colony from the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
and the two regions grew differently as well. Massachusetts expanded fast,
allowing cities to form, which attracted better off families and
(03:42):
people who were less adventurous. Early settlements in Maine, however,
tended to stick to the Rocky Coast. They were less
city like, functioning more as outposts to gather materials needed
in the more urban communities around Boston. Here's Marybeth Norton,
professor of an American History at Cornell University. Maine in
(04:03):
the sixteen seventies and sixteen nineties was really where the
action was as far as 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 Maine were providing the timber
(04:24):
for the very well developed pines were perfect for ships.
Mass These early main communities places like Falmouth up in
Casco Bay and Wells York and Saco all served as
borderland between the safer realm of Massachusetts and the evil
of the frontier up north. More than anywhere else the
(04:47):
settlers could think of was darkness and danger. Around sixteen
fifty two, a group of settlers in Maine decided to
petition parliament back in England for the ability to rule themselves.
But when word of their plans got out, the government
in Massachusetts became worried. They were getting rich off of
those Maine frontiersmen, and they didn't want to lose that.
(05:10):
So they examined their own charter and somehow found a
loophole that gave them authority over Maine. Convenience I know,
but don't go assuming that the government of Massachusetts rushed
in to grab control of Maine because they loved the place. No,
they loved the resources that flowed out of it and
the wealth it pumped into their economy. But Maine itself
(05:31):
was something straight out of their Puritan nightmares. To the
Puritans in Boston and Salem, Maine was a godless land.
The settlers there rejected English communal order and were less
interested in building the Puritan city on a hill that
was so important to the folks in Salem. Abigail Hobb's
new stepmother was a great example of this. Here was
(05:55):
an adult woman living in Puritan New England, and she
had never been baptized by the Church. Maine came with
another challenge as well, proximity to the Native American tribes
to the north. Not just proximity, but conflict. As you
might imagine, the English settlers were spreading out, taking over
(06:15):
more and more land that belonged to the people who
already lived there. They justified it with law and religion too,
claiming that the Crown had given them authority over every
single person within their territory, whether they were English or not.
So as the Native Americans watched their lands get swallowed
up by a hungry colonial enterprise, they felt the need
(06:36):
to do something. Some of them fell in line and
accepted it, believing that being nice to the English would
benefit them in the long run. Others went looking for
powerful friends to help them, eventually connecting with the French
settlers far to the north. But there was a third
group that wanted none of that, and they lashed out
in the only way they could think of, with violence. Now,
(06:59):
of course, if Massachusetts hadn't rushed in and taken control
of Maine. Those frontier settlers would have had to defend themselves,
but that's not how it happened. Massachusetts got greedy, and
because of that they were responsible for that defense. In
sixteen seventy five, war broke out between the English colonists
and the Native Americans around them, who were led by
(07:22):
a man named Meta Coom. He preferred to call himself
by a more English title, though, so he went by
the name King Philip. The three year conflict then became
known as King Philip's War. It was a bloody, violent
time too. Both sides took hostages, both sides went back
on their promises that could have ended the fighting. There
(07:42):
were stories of Native children having their head smashed in
and of pregnant English women being murdered and sculped. Both
sides crossed the line of human decency far too often.
Mary Beth Norton once again. The Indian War then finally
came to an end more less with a truce in
sixteen seventy eight. It was devastating to the English who
(08:06):
had settled in Maine and New Hampshire. They had abandoned
their communities in that period. They moved back in and
then the Second War started in six and it all
happened all over again, so it was devastating. It was
devastating war. Basically, the Indian Wars devastated the economy of
Maine and Maine in a lot of ways never really recovered.
(08:29):
People didn't come back until the seventeen twenties, and when
they did a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone.
So it was really very bad. Abigail Hobbs family were
some of the people displaced by that war. They had
(08:51):
left hops Field in sixteen eighty two looking for a
better life. Most of the land in and around Salem
was owned by a small handful of wealthy families like
the Porters, and Putnam's Maine had represented their chance to
get out from under the thumb of the one percent
and make a better life for themselves. Elsewhere, the Indian Wars,
(09:11):
as they called them back then, ruined all of that.
Another person affected by the war was George Burrows. Now
if that name sounds familiar, that's because Burrows served as
minister of the Salem Village Church years before Samuel Parris,
way back in sixteen eighty one. But he started up
in Falmouth Maine, where he was the minister there. An
(09:32):
attack on Falmouth back in August of sixteen seventy six
left dozens of settlers dead and sent a wave of
refugees south to say For territory. Burrows managed to escape
along with a three year old girl named Mercy Lewis,
whose entire family had been killed. After living and working
for a time in the town of Salisbury, he and
(09:53):
Mercy traveled farther south, eventually arriving in Salem Village in
sixteen eighty one. After his time serving as the second
minister of the church in Salem Village, Burrows actually returned
to Maine. The war was over and many people were
beginning the long journey back north to reclaim their lost
land and try rebuilding, and George Burrows went along with them.
(10:17):
Money flowed back north as well. Folks in the Salem
area felt safe to reinvest money in Maine, including the Putnams.
And here's the amazing part of it all. If you
were to look at a list of the people settling
in or working with those settlers up in Maine, a
whole slew of Salem names would jump off the page
at you. Heck, when the conflict resurfaced in the late
(10:39):
sixteen eighties. It was the Salem magistrates John Hawthorne and
Jonathan Corwin who took a trip north to inspect the situation.
People in Salem were fully aware of the danger lurking
just beyond their borders. Here's Marybeth Norton once again. What
happened was all the people who had been settling in
(10:59):
Maine had to somewhere 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, are came indeed to live in Salem Village.
(11:20):
All of that is context. You can't understand Sale and
Village in without understanding Maine. In the decades leading up
to it. They weren't too disparate, places that never bumped
into each other. These were sibling communities joined at the
hip through family ties, military service, and economic needs. Every
(11:40):
person inside Sale and Village was acutely aware of what
was happening to the folks in Maine, even more so
when those refugees began to flood back toward them. Oh
and one last thing I want to point out. On
January six, just days before Betty Paris and Abigail well
Illiams were about to fall into fits for the first time,
(12:03):
a Native American raid destroyed another settlement in Maine. Not
Falmouth far to the north though no this raid happened
much closer in the southern town of York. From the
perspective of the people in Salem, the conflict and danger
was headed right toward them. So keep all of that
in mind as we move forward, because the next events
(12:24):
might very well take place in Salem, but that doesn't
mean they're isolated. And some historians think that everything that
was about to happen could be blamed on Abigail Hobbs, who,
thanks to the wild stories she was telling her friends,
ended up being arrested on April nineteen. Her examination happened
a short time later, and it came with some interesting revelations.
(12:48):
Standing before the magistrates, Abigail Hobbs spoke before they could
ask her any questions. I will speak the truth, she said.
I have seen sights and have been scared I have
been very wicked. I hope I shall be better if
God will help me. What sights did you see, Hawthorne asked,
(13:09):
I have seen dogs and many creatures. What dogs do
you mean, Hawthorne asked, ordinary dogs. Abigail shook her head,
I mean the devil. The magistrates pressed on. Where had
she seen them, they asked, and Abigail replied that her
encounter had taken place in the woods in the middle
(13:31):
of the day years ago, back when she lived at
Casco Bay. That was where she'd put her hand on
his book when they carried her off to jail a
short while later. The name Cascoe Bay still hung in
the air like a neon sign, pointing at the danger
that lurked the north, but Abigail had also made it
clear that it was spreading south and might already be
(13:53):
among them. She claimed that a shape shifting man had
visited her at her home here in Tompsfield. He had
alternated between the form of a cat, a dog, and
a black man with a black hat, and this man,
she claimed, had offered her fine clothes and the power
to harm others in town, a power that she had
(14:15):
readily accepted. If the news from the frontier was frightening
to the people of Salem Village. It was made even
more so by the actual presence in their homes of
people who had lived through the horrors of it all.
One of the most prominent of all of them was
(14:37):
the little girl who George Burrows had rescued from Falmouth
back in sixteen seventy six. Mercy Lewis my sixteen ninety two.
Though she was a nineteen year old woman living in
the home of Thomas and Ann Putnam along with their
violently afflicted daughter Annie, it's easy to believe that over
their time together, Mercy had been filling Annie's head with
(14:58):
horrifying tales of del buls who attack in the night.
But she had more to contribute than just tails. Mercy
Lewis was having fits of her own, and one of
the incidents that was recorded down Mercy claimed the Putnam's
house had become filled with the spirits of witches and
that they were trying to force her to partake of
some twisted red communion. Suddenly, the figure of a white
(15:22):
man appeared in the room, brightening off the witches and
casting a brilliant light across her face, and Putnam not
one to be showed up soon had a powerful vision
of her own. During hers the people around her heard
her shout, Oh, dreadful, dreadful. Here is a minister. What
are ministers witches too? Obviously this caught the attention of
(15:47):
the people around her, A minister implicated in assisting the
devil himself. Well, it was unheard of, and yet here
it was spelled out right in front of them. A
moment later, the minister's invisible spirit conveniently identified itself to
them all as well. It was their former minister and
hero of Maine, George Burrows. But George Burrows wasn't the
(16:12):
spotless minister we might assume him to be. Here's Stacy Schiff,
Pulitzer Prize winning author of several historical works, including The Witches.
Burrows is the ex minister who leaves the community on
bad terms and is as much a hero in his
new community in todays southern Maine as he had been
a persona on grata in Salem. He was clearly a
(16:33):
very stubborn and difficult man, and possibly an abusive husband
when he was in Salem. Stories of how he had
mistreated his wives will trail him even when he when
he moves to Maine with Burrows, there's this terrific, vexed
history with the community. There seems to be a certain
amount of getting back at him by women who may
have been friends with his dead wives. The day after
(16:54):
Annie Putnam's vision of George Burrows, original afflicted girl Abigail
Williams and her friend and Mary Walcott, both had a
frightening experience as they sat in Ingersoll's ordinary with a
number of their neighbors. They claimed that the spirits of
William and Deliverance Hobbs, parents to Abigail Hobbs, were there
and attacking them. One of the men in the room,
(17:16):
Benjamin Hutchinson, actually drew his sword and started swinging it
at the empty air in an attempt to kill the spirits.
As he did, the two afflicted girls recounted the blow
by blow action that only they could see. Goody Hobbs
had been injured, they claimed, and there was blood all
over the floor. Think about this moment from a different perspective, though,
(17:40):
Salem feared that the warfare of the North would spread
down to their own safe space, that before long, they
too would be battling with the Devil's forces. The Native
Americans who plagued their borders. So when you find a
scene in a public tavern where weapons are drawn and
flashing through the air, it's their greatest fears come to life.
(18:00):
Between this highly public display of panic and the new
accusations brought up by Annie Putnam and her friends, the
momentum of the witchcraft panic began to accelerate. Within ten
days of Abigail Hobb's examination, fifteen new names were submitted
as potential witches. Some seemed connected to pass suspects, while
others were more shocking to hear. Giles Corey and Mary
(18:24):
Warren were taken from their homes and then examined and jailed.
Their connections to Martha Corey and the proctors, both of
whom were already in jail, were just too close to overlook.
Rebecca Nurse's two younger sisters, Mary Etsy and Sarah Klois
were also imprisoned. Nathaniel Putnam had his black slave Mary arrested,
(18:45):
and another woman who had been acquitted of witchcraft years before,
name Bridget Bishop, was also arrested for a second time.
After a brief examination, she was jailed for trial, along
with two other members of her family. Ship was married,
so she's not alone in the world. That's Maryland ka Roach,
historian and author of Six Women of Salem. She's been
(19:09):
suspected before, however, of witchcraft, but she has survived that.
That's not as much paperwork on it as you'd like surviving.
She was confrontational. Some of the neighbors thought, I'd say
she stuck up for herself. This is her third husband.
The second husband would hit her now and then, but
she hit him back then. The crisis burst beyond the
(19:31):
Salem boundary. Arrests were made throughout Essex County, in the
towns of reading, Amesbury, Beverly, and more over in Topsfield.
Both William and Deliverance Hobbs were arrested. The logic was simple.
If their daughter had consorted with the devil, who could
be more to blame than they, But the most dramatic
(19:51):
arrest would be the most unexpected. Rather than dismissing the
accusations against George Burrows, the magistrates all agreed that it
would be best to bring him in for questioning, but
he was far to the north of them in Wells, Maine,
and they feared that making a public declaration might tip
him off. And give him the chance to run. So instead,
(20:13):
they gathered a group of men and gave them their
assignment in secret. They were to ride north, capture him,
and then bring him back for examination. George Burrows was
a wanted man. Salem Village didn't sit around waiting for
(20:39):
Burroughs to arrive before making their minds up about him,
and we have a number of the locals to thank
for that. One was a young woman named Sarah Churchill
who worked as a servant in a local household, but
she was also a refugee from Maine. For a while,
Churchill experienced some of the same afflictions as the others,
(20:59):
but her employer beat her until it stopped. That's how
John Procter had handled Mary Warren, but when her symptoms stopped,
the judges decided it was because she had given in
to the demands of the devil. When Churchill's afflictions did
the same, she stood at risk of the same assumption.
To help her case, she played along with the magistrates
and gave them whatever they wanted. In jail across town,
(21:23):
Mary Warren was doing the same. She rolled on her employers,
the proctors, and said that they threatened to force red
hot fireplace tongs down her throat if she didn't sign
The Devil's Book. Even Mercy Lewis got back into the spotlight,
she claimed to have been attacked by the specter of Burroughs,
who she knew very well. She said that he tortured her,
(21:43):
that he threatened to kill her, and that he carried
her up to a high mountain and offered to give
her everything she could see in exchange for her mark
in the Devil's Book, Mercy claims she refused, echoing the
willpower of Jesus. In a similar situation in the Bible,
one young woman, Sarah Morrell, seems to only have been
(22:04):
arrested because she too was a refugee from Maine. It
was ironic, really, Salem had been set up as a
place of peace, a city on the hill, as a
beacon of hope, and yet it was quickly becoming a
dangerous place to live. May nine saw a number of
arrivals in Salem village. William Stoughton, the Massachusetts Chief Justice,
(22:27):
and Samuel Sewell, who was a young judge from the
Massachusetts General Court and a dedicated record keeper, Together with
John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, these four brought the entire
authority of the colony to bear on the next examination.
Here's Emerson Baker, professor of American history at Salem State
University and author of A Storm of Witchcraft. Here's the problem.
(22:51):
I really think the judges like Stowton were filled with
incredible self loathing. Stowton had been a minister, he had
been a minister in England. He's basically kicked out with
a restoration because he was a Puritan. And he comes
back to New England. And he comes back and he's
he's hailed as this wonderful leading figure the colony. He's
asked by several towns, please be our minister, please please
please be our minister. And he says, no, I'm not worthy.
(23:12):
I'm not worthy of being a minister. I can't do it.
Samuel sewell as well too. You can see his struggles.
He doesn't want to become a member of the church
because it doesn't think he's worthy. My God, the guy
was brilliant student at Harvard. He could recite the Bible
backwards and forwards. Read his two volume diary, and you
know he's an incredibly devout Puritan. But he thinks he's
not worthy. That examination was of the other new arrival
(23:34):
in town, George Burrows. By the time he was escorted
into the Sale and Village meeting house, Stowton, Hawthorne, Corwin
and Sewell had already questioned him privately. They had focused
on the last time he had taken communion and where
George must have understood the seriousness of his situation. When
he answered that it had been such a long time
(23:54):
that he couldn't remember, it didn't help his case for sure.
The afflicted girls appeared grievously tortured when Burrows stepped through
the meeting house door. One girl shouted out that Burrows
had killed his two wives, and that their spirits had
appeared right there in the room, with them wrapped in
their winding sheets, and laying the blame for their death
(24:15):
on their husband's head. Burrows was offered a chance to
respond to the girls, but all he would say was
that he understood nothing of it. After that, testimonies continued.
Men who had known Burrows in Casco Bay reported that
he had in human strength that he was able to
hold a seven foot rifle with one hand while other
(24:36):
men struggled to hold it with two he was able
to lift barrels of molasses and cider by himself to
unload the boats that supplied the coastal town. Of course,
Burrows tried to defend himself, but his explanations and protests
fell on deaf ears. The truth of the matter was
a lot more simple. He had lost his case before
(24:56):
he even entered the room, and the examination was for
no other reason then to just go through the motions
and make it official. When the examination was over, Burrows
was walked out of the crowded meeting house and into
an already crowded jail. He was their biggest catch of
the season, so to speak, and represented a major victory.
(25:18):
But all of that was about to change. The new
day would bring a new tragedy, and I'm not sure
anyone in Salem was prepared. On the day after burrows arrest,
the crisis claimed its first life. Sarah Osburne, already weak
(25:43):
with an ongoing illness when she had been jailed on
March one, died in her Boston jail cell. She had
been held there in horrible conditions for nine weeks without
ever getting a trial. The news had to have struck
the people of Salem village with a painful blow. Whatever
you could say about how they were handling the situation,
(26:03):
with all of their warrants and examinations and constables carting
suspects off to jail, there were real people involved, real lives,
real neighbors, real people who they had known for a
long time. But now those people were being turned into
something else, something less than human. That's something we're all
(26:27):
very good at. We always have been, if we're honest
about it. People have a knack for isolating certain individuals
or cultures and then stripping them of their humanity. When
things get rough and a community faces a crisis, it's
the dehumanized who are always the most vulnerable to violence.
I know there's a lot about the events in Salem
(26:48):
that are singular. They are special and unique and one
offs that don't repeat themselves again. But this the dehumanizing
of the other to the point where lives are lost.
This is something that's tragically commonplace to our modern world.
Sarah Osborne was one of the first to step into
(27:08):
a local jail to await a full hearing before a
lawful court, but she was certainly not the last. Day
after day, new members of the community were accused of
allegiance to Satan. They were questioned by the wealthy, powerful
men of the colony and then torn from their lives
and their families. The fits and accusations of the afflicted
(27:31):
would continue, The jails in Boston, Salem, and Ipswich would
continue to fill up, and the community would continue to wait.
The man they had pinned their hopes on, Sir William Phipps,
was rumored to be on his way. Phipps was the
newly appointed governor of Massachusetts. He'd sailed to England to
(27:52):
retrieve a newly approved colonial charter. It was that magical
piece of paper that would help them fight off their
enemies and a abolished true justice with the righteous hand.
And so they waited. But thankfully they wouldn't have to
wait long. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured.
(28:15):
Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview
of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured,
we might look on Alden's capture by the French with
pity and see his release and plans to return to
his son to be noble. The magistrates, though, saw it
as a sign that he was in league with the
(28:37):
devil the French word Catholic, and they had allied themselves
with the Native Americans, two groups of people viewed as
tools of Satan by the Puritans. John Alden wasn't the
only suspect to leave the meeting house in shackles that day, though.
One of them was Martha Carrier from nearby and over
Accusations about her involvement in witchcraft began after she used
(29:00):
to leave town after her family contracted smallpox, which upset
her neighbors, never mind the fact that the outbreak was
really the fault of Phipps and his failed military expedition.
Everyone was carted off to jail that afternoon, but unlike
all the previous examinations that had taken place, these suspects
could at least see the light at the end of
(29:22):
the tunnel. With the oyer and terminer announced, they knew
their time in jail wouldn't go on for months. Finally
there was an end in sight, but that tunnel would
be much more dark and dangerous than any of them
could have imagined. Unobscured was created and written by me
(30:36):
Aaron Mankey and produced by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams
in partnership with how Stuff Works, with research by Carl
Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about
our contributing historians further reading material, resource archive, and links
to our other shows at history Unobscured dot com. Until
(30:58):
next time, thanks for listen. Name
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