WEBVTT - S1 – INTERVIEW 2: Mary Beth Norton 0:00:00.040 --> 0:00:04.440 Our guest today is historian Mary Beth Norton. She's a 0:00:04.440 --> 0:00:08.479 professor of American History at Cornell University, where she's taught 0:00:08.520 --> 0:00:12.120 since nineteen one. In two thousand five to two thousand six, 0:00:12.200 --> 0:00:14.920 she was also the pit Professor of American History and 0:00:15.000 --> 0:00:19.200 Institutions at the University of Cambridge. She has received four 0:00:19.280 --> 0:00:24.120 honorary degrees and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, 0:00:24.239 --> 0:00:28.240 Melon and Star Foundations, as well as from Princeton University 0:00:28.320 --> 0:00:31.600 and the Huntington Library. She is currently the president of 0:00:31.640 --> 0:00:36.080 the twelve thousand member American Historical Association. My producer is 0:00:36.120 --> 0:00:38.840 Matt Frederick and Alex Williams had a chance to sit 0:00:38.880 --> 0:00:41.680 down with Professor Norton this past summer, and I want 0:00:41.680 --> 0:00:44.920 to share that great conversation with you today. So without 0:00:45.080 --> 0:00:48.960 further delay, let's get on with the show. This is 0:00:49.040 --> 0:01:21.000 the Unobscured Interview series for season one. I'm Aaron Mankey, 0:01:26.480 --> 0:01:29.320 I'm Mary Beth Norton. I'm a professor of American history 0:01:29.319 --> 0:01:33.120 at Cornell University. I teach a bunch of courses on 0:01:33.160 --> 0:01:37.360 early America and women. I have written several books, um 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:40.760 some of which are related to Salem Witchcraft, one of 0:01:40.760 --> 0:01:45.720 which in particular is called in the Devil's Snare subtitle 0:01:45.800 --> 0:01:50.280 the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of sixte two and very deliberately 0:01:50.320 --> 0:01:53.560 subtitled a crisis rather than trials, because the book is 0:01:53.640 --> 0:01:57.640 much broader than the trials themselves. When you call it 0:01:57.680 --> 0:02:00.720 a crisis is because there are so many things occurring 0:02:00.800 --> 0:02:05.120 outside of this very specific instance of the witch tribals. 0:02:05.520 --> 0:02:09.200 Can you talk about a few of those contributing factor well, 0:02:09.240 --> 0:02:11.720 I think in my book I argue that the most 0:02:11.800 --> 0:02:16.280 important contributing factor is the um Indian War that's going 0:02:16.360 --> 0:02:19.960 on on the northern frontier. We don't really know much 0:02:20.000 --> 0:02:22.360 about this war. I certainly didn't know much about it 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:25.880 until it popped up as I was working on my 0:02:25.880 --> 0:02:29.400 my study of Salem Witchcraft. I did not intend to 0:02:29.520 --> 0:02:31.920 make the book what it turned out to be, which 0:02:31.960 --> 0:02:34.639 is a dual narrative of war and witchcraft. I did 0:02:34.680 --> 0:02:39.040 not understand the significance of the war until I kept 0:02:39.040 --> 0:02:42.120 coming across material relevant to the war in the stuff 0:02:42.160 --> 0:02:45.480 I was reading, and Uh, I went to look for 0:02:45.639 --> 0:02:48.359 histories of the war, and I didn't find any um 0:02:48.520 --> 0:02:50.320 And this was why I didn't anything about it. Was 0:02:50.360 --> 0:02:52.560 because there have been no modern histories of it. The 0:02:52.600 --> 0:02:56.919 most recent history to this day, the most recent history 0:02:57.120 --> 0:02:59.320 of the war, which is known as King William's War 0:02:59.480 --> 0:03:01.960 on the North in Frontier, was written by Cotton Mather 0:03:02.080 --> 0:03:05.400 and published in the sixteen nineties. Was the only comprehensive 0:03:05.440 --> 0:03:08.200 history that I found, and still there has been not one. 0:03:08.440 --> 0:03:11.960 So I did not anticipate finding the war to be 0:03:12.000 --> 0:03:15.840 as important as it turned out to be. And before 0:03:17.560 --> 0:03:21.440 there was Philip, yes, there was King Philip's War. And 0:03:22.480 --> 0:03:26.720 another problem with the literature on King Philip's War until 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:29.960 my book was that it's always focused on King Philip's 0:03:30.000 --> 0:03:33.440 War in the south, that is, southern New England. King 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:36.400 Philip's War is thought of as an Indian war in 0:03:37.160 --> 0:03:41.600 the old Plymouth Colony, uh in Rhode Island, and in 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:47.320 parts of southern Massachusetts Bay. But I discovered that there 0:03:47.440 --> 0:03:49.960 was a northern part of it also, which has been 0:03:49.960 --> 0:03:53.200 given very short shrift in histories of King philips War. 0:03:53.280 --> 0:03:56.080 There is one history of King Philip's War that gives 0:03:56.120 --> 0:03:59.800 a chapter to the northern part of the war, but 0:04:00.280 --> 0:04:03.800 the King Philip's War is started in the sixteen seventies 0:04:04.000 --> 0:04:09.600 and um the leader of the Indians was King Philip Um, 0:04:09.720 --> 0:04:15.760 a Wampanoag chief who was very concerned about English encroachments 0:04:15.880 --> 0:04:20.560 on his land and very concerned about missionizing activities of 0:04:20.600 --> 0:04:25.880 the Christians in his lands. Um and he led his 0:04:25.960 --> 0:04:31.160 warriors in raids, very devastating raids on New England communities. 0:04:31.600 --> 0:04:35.000 But the war um leaked over, I think we can say, 0:04:35.160 --> 0:04:39.320 into the north. The Indians in the north, the Wabanakis 0:04:39.360 --> 0:04:41.680 did not particularly want to get involved in it, but 0:04:42.120 --> 0:04:46.719 they basically were forced to because of pressure from the 0:04:46.720 --> 0:04:51.320 Wampanoag's in the south and from the English settlers who 0:04:51.320 --> 0:04:54.440 didn't trust them because of what was happening in the South. 0:04:55.680 --> 0:04:59.520 And in fact, the English treated them extremely badly in 0:05:00.200 --> 0:05:03.200 King Philip's war, Um did all kinds of things that 0:05:03.240 --> 0:05:06.640 you can only call the furious um to them. And 0:05:06.720 --> 0:05:09.839 so they did become involved. And so the Indian War 0:05:09.920 --> 0:05:14.560 then became in the sixteen seventies, became general. Um. It 0:05:14.640 --> 0:05:17.279 was finally came to an end in more or less 0:05:17.480 --> 0:05:22.520 with a truce in sixteen seventy eight. And UH they 0:05:22.920 --> 0:05:26.120 it was devastating to the English who had settled in 0:05:26.240 --> 0:05:32.080 Maine and New Hampshire. Uh, they had abandoned their communities 0:05:32.240 --> 0:05:35.640 in that period they moved back in um and then 0:05:35.839 --> 0:05:39.279 the Second War started in sixteen eighty eight and it 0:05:39.360 --> 0:05:41.920 all happened all over again. It was devastating. It was 0:05:42.000 --> 0:05:45.719 devastating war. UM. We don't think of Maine as a 0:05:45.920 --> 0:05:49.240 very um well, we don't think of Maine is a frontier. 0:05:49.279 --> 0:05:52.159 We don't think of Maine as a prosperous area. But 0:05:52.320 --> 0:05:56.960 in fact, Maine in the sixteen seventies and sixteen nineties 0:05:57.120 --> 0:06:01.600 was really where the action was as far as um 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:06.920 profit to be made in New England. In Boston, people 0:06:07.000 --> 0:06:11.000 had bought land, they had set up sawmills. Boston had 0:06:11.040 --> 0:06:14.919 a very vigorous ship building industry that the sawmills in 0:06:15.000 --> 0:06:18.760 Maine were providing the labor the time, the timber for 0:06:19.080 --> 0:06:25.279 the um. The There was a big business of masts 0:06:25.320 --> 0:06:31.479 of the very well built, very well developed pines which 0:06:31.520 --> 0:06:35.320 were perfect for ships masts in in Maine. And so 0:06:35.480 --> 0:06:38.320 these people who owned this property in Maine were making 0:06:38.360 --> 0:06:42.480 money handover fest and they also were fishing off the 0:06:42.600 --> 0:06:45.920 coast uh and so there was a lot of money 0:06:45.920 --> 0:06:48.799 to be made in Maine. And basically the Indian Wars 0:06:48.880 --> 0:06:52.880 devastated the economy of Maine and Maine in a lot 0:06:52.880 --> 0:06:56.240 of ways never really recovered. Um. People didn't come back 0:06:56.360 --> 0:06:59.840 until the seventeen twenties. And when they did, UM the 0:07:00.400 --> 0:07:04.359 um a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone. So 0:07:04.400 --> 0:07:08.360 it was really very bad. How did those same things 0:07:08.400 --> 0:07:11.120 in the economic wars that were occurring because of these wars, 0:07:11.120 --> 0:07:15.680 how did that affect the town sae Um? Well, what 0:07:15.760 --> 0:07:18.920 happened was, um all the people who had been settling 0:07:18.960 --> 0:07:21.400 in Maine had to go somewhere they if they weren't killed, 0:07:21.880 --> 0:07:25.800 and so they filtered down into Massachusetts. They filtered down, 0:07:25.880 --> 0:07:29.880 especially into Essex County, which is the northernmost county of Massachusetts, 0:07:29.920 --> 0:07:32.720 the northeastern most county, and so a lot of the 0:07:32.800 --> 0:07:36.240 people came to live in marble Head, or came to 0:07:36.280 --> 0:07:39.040 live in Salem, or came indeed to live in Salem 0:07:39.120 --> 0:07:43.040 Village uh and Um in particular. One of the things 0:07:43.080 --> 0:07:45.960 that I discovered. I didn't discover it, I learned it 0:07:46.000 --> 0:07:49.720 in other people's work, but that I've pursued to a 0:07:49.800 --> 0:07:53.120 greater extent than other people did was how many of 0:07:53.160 --> 0:07:58.200 the young female accusers were in fact refugees from the 0:07:58.240 --> 0:08:03.360 main frontier, where people whose families had been killed, even 0:08:03.360 --> 0:08:07.640 though they had survived, and they had come to um 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:11.520 to Salem, or to the area of Salem, and we're 0:08:11.560 --> 0:08:16.160 living as servants or living with their families that were 0:08:16.200 --> 0:08:19.440 only shall we say partial families because people in the 0:08:19.480 --> 0:08:23.480 family had been killed. So UM. I argue in the 0:08:23.520 --> 0:08:27.920 book that one of the reasons why these women were 0:08:28.040 --> 0:08:33.800 so um conflicted shall we say um, was that we could, 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:36.319 in a modern sense say they say that they were 0:08:36.360 --> 0:08:40.800 suffering from PTSD, that they had suffered such trauma on 0:08:40.880 --> 0:08:46.400 the frontier as young people, that they acted out in 0:08:47.960 --> 0:08:54.520 in ways that helped to further, if not begin, the 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:59.199 Salem Crisis. I was very fortunate to be able to 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:07.040 find very scattered records biographical information about the youthful experiences 0:09:07.080 --> 0:09:10.560 of three of the young women, very explicit information about 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:14.280 what they've gone through as young children, and that was 0:09:14.360 --> 0:09:19.520 very helpful to my making my argument. Uh where I 0:09:19.600 --> 0:09:23.080 find it. I found it and actually was mostly published 0:09:23.120 --> 0:09:27.320 but in sort of obscure places, um, in compilations of 0:09:27.360 --> 0:09:30.120 documents that were done in the nineteenth century. Until I 0:09:30.160 --> 0:09:33.760 wrote my book, nobody was focusing on it. Until I 0:09:33.800 --> 0:09:36.520 wrote my book, nobody really focused on the war it 0:09:36.640 --> 0:09:40.240 was listed. If you read most other books about Salem, 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:43.800 there'll be a first chapter, and the first chapter will 0:09:43.840 --> 0:09:48.560 say sort of underlying factors behind um Salem witchcraft, and 0:09:48.600 --> 0:09:50.760 one of them will be problems of the governance of 0:09:50.760 --> 0:09:54.160 the colony, and then there'll be other issues, but one 0:09:54.200 --> 0:09:57.080 of them will also be UM the Indian War, and 0:09:57.120 --> 0:09:59.960 it will get a few pages. UM. But the Indian 0:10:00.000 --> 0:10:02.480 War came to dominate my narrative because I think it 0:10:02.559 --> 0:10:06.760 dominated the lives of people then, and the way I 0:10:06.800 --> 0:10:14.200 said earlier, I I didn't um expect it um. But 0:10:14.360 --> 0:10:17.560 what happened was I decided to do something in my 0:10:17.679 --> 0:10:21.640 research that other people hadn't done, which was to look 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:26.840 for letters written by anybody in the sixteen nineties, hoping 0:10:26.920 --> 0:10:31.240 that I would find comments about Salem witchcraft about which is. 0:10:31.280 --> 0:10:34.960 I was hoping I would find comments about what people 0:10:35.040 --> 0:10:38.600 thought about which is. It turned out there's only one 0:10:39.080 --> 0:10:43.160 really good set of letters that talks about witches, and 0:10:43.240 --> 0:10:45.720 it's in't Dutch, so I had to rely on somebody 0:10:45.760 --> 0:10:49.920 else's translation of those. But what I did so I 0:10:49.960 --> 0:10:52.600 was very disappointed because I got these letters that would 0:10:52.640 --> 0:10:55.800 say things like five witches hanged yesterday, But then they 0:10:55.800 --> 0:10:59.000 wouldn't say anything about what they thought about that fact. 0:11:00.559 --> 0:11:04.079 But what happened was, Um, they were not telling me 0:11:04.120 --> 0:11:06.280 about the witches. They were telling me about the Indian Wars. 0:11:06.679 --> 0:11:09.120 The letters that didn't tell me about witchcraft told me 0:11:09.160 --> 0:11:10.920 all this stuff about the Indian War. You know, my 0:11:11.040 --> 0:11:13.840 cousin tells me from Maine that thusn't such as happening, 0:11:13.960 --> 0:11:17.199 or I hear from New Hampshire that thusn't such as happened. 0:11:17.760 --> 0:11:20.839 And it's suddenly the penny dropped that that was what 0:11:21.040 --> 0:11:24.360 was really crucial, that was what was controlling people. So 0:11:24.600 --> 0:11:28.240 I um added a whole lot of stuff about the 0:11:28.280 --> 0:11:31.160 Indian War to what was my previous idea of thinking 0:11:31.200 --> 0:11:35.199 about Salem witchcraft. Let's take it and boil it down 0:11:35.240 --> 0:11:38.000 into maybe an individual and try and just imagine what 0:11:38.600 --> 0:11:40.840 it would be like for a single human being living 0:11:40.920 --> 0:11:44.480 in one of these colonies. What kinds of horrors have 0:11:44.640 --> 0:11:48.720 they or their their family? Right? Well, one of the 0:11:48.760 --> 0:11:51.640 people that I talk a lot about in the book 0:11:51.920 --> 0:11:56.600 is Mercy Lewis, who was a servant in Um the 0:11:56.640 --> 0:12:01.000 home of Thomas Putnam, which is a crucial family for 0:12:01.160 --> 0:12:06.040 the witchcraft crisis because his young daughter and Putnam Jr. 0:12:06.920 --> 0:12:11.240 Was one of the first children who accused people, and 0:12:11.640 --> 0:12:14.520 Mercy Lewis, I was able to discover, was from a 0:12:14.600 --> 0:12:18.080 family that had lived in what was then called Falmouth, 0:12:18.120 --> 0:12:21.520 Maine is now called Portland, UM for a number of 0:12:21.600 --> 0:12:25.640 years um And I discovered that basically most of her 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:30.120 family except for her parents were wiped out in the 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:34.319 First Indian War in King Philip's War, and then the 0:12:34.320 --> 0:12:36.960 ones who weren't killed in the First Indian War were 0:12:37.000 --> 0:12:40.240 mostly killed in the Second Indian War. She and her 0:12:40.320 --> 0:12:45.920 sister alone were left. Her sister married someone in Salem Village, 0:12:46.600 --> 0:12:49.679 UM in the late sixteen eighties, as I remember correctly, 0:12:49.920 --> 0:12:53.240 and that seemed to me why Mercy Lewis eventually made 0:12:53.240 --> 0:12:58.840 her way to that area. She also crucially was a 0:12:58.920 --> 0:13:01.160 servant for a while in the home of the Reverend 0:13:01.160 --> 0:13:04.040 George Burrows, who is a crucial figure in my book 0:13:04.160 --> 0:13:09.000 and who is someone who ties Salem Village together with 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:16.120 um Ti, Salem Village together with um Uh the main Frontier, 0:13:16.200 --> 0:13:19.600 because he worked both places. He was both a minister 0:13:19.720 --> 0:13:22.400 in Salem Village and a minister on the main Frontier 0:13:23.360 --> 0:13:27.920 and um he um and she lived with him for 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:30.600 a while and she became one of his key accusers, 0:13:30.640 --> 0:13:32.800 and so did Ann Putnam Jr. Become one of his 0:13:32.880 --> 0:13:36.400 key accusers. So I like to say when I give 0:13:36.480 --> 0:13:41.000 talks about Salem witchcraft, that I have spectral a spectral 0:13:41.080 --> 0:13:44.280 vision of my own, and that my spectral vision is 0:13:44.600 --> 0:13:50.160 of um uh and Putnam Jr. As the daughter of 0:13:50.200 --> 0:13:54.559 this family, and Mercy Lewis as the servant sharing a 0:13:54.600 --> 0:13:57.800 bed in what we've been called the chamber, that is 0:13:57.840 --> 0:14:01.920 an upper room above the main and floor Uh And 0:14:02.240 --> 0:14:06.880 basically Mercy Lewis filling and Putnam Junior's head full of 0:14:07.040 --> 0:14:10.680 stories of the Indian War. And we see in An 0:14:10.840 --> 0:14:17.160 Putnham juniors accusations in sixt details about things that happened 0:14:17.160 --> 0:14:21.160 in Maine and details about George Burrows that you don't 0:14:21.240 --> 0:14:26.080 see in, for example, the accusations of Abigail Williams, who 0:14:26.200 --> 0:14:30.600 is the niece of the Reverend William Paris, whether Samuel 0:14:30.640 --> 0:14:33.680 Paris in um in Salem village. That to me was 0:14:33.760 --> 0:14:37.320 very telling. It told me that Ann Putnam Jr. Had 0:14:37.400 --> 0:14:41.240 information about Maine. The only person she could have gotten 0:14:41.280 --> 0:14:44.160 that information from was Mercy Lewis, who was a servant 0:14:44.240 --> 0:14:47.640 in the household So let's talk about power within the 0:14:47.680 --> 0:14:53.120 colonies and how it ended up being subverted throughout this crisis. 0:14:53.160 --> 0:14:59.200 How about consolidated? I mean, what again, I'm fond of 0:14:59.200 --> 0:15:02.160 saying two people when I'm trying to explain what the 0:15:02.240 --> 0:15:05.480 power structure of the colony was like at the time 0:15:05.720 --> 0:15:08.920 of the Witchcraft crisis, I am fond of saying the 0:15:08.960 --> 0:15:12.560 following that making the following analogy that would be though 0:15:12.760 --> 0:15:16.920 in the US today the joint chiefs of Staff were 0:15:16.960 --> 0:15:19.800 also the president's cabinet and also the judges of the 0:15:19.840 --> 0:15:23.680 Supreme Court, because that's the power structure of Massachusetts at 0:15:23.720 --> 0:15:27.440 the time. The same men were the judges in the 0:15:27.520 --> 0:15:33.320 trials and the chief advisers of the governor, and the 0:15:33.400 --> 0:15:36.080 men who led the local militia in the Indian War. 0:15:38.440 --> 0:15:40.680 So you talk about consolidation of power there, it is 0:15:41.640 --> 0:15:48.800 absolutely So We've got the power dynamics of the men 0:15:49.120 --> 0:15:54.920 who are there filling all these rules, the same guys. Right, 0:15:55.400 --> 0:15:58.040 Let's just go over the gender dynamics. So we have 0:15:58.320 --> 0:16:03.920 powerful are the women, Well, the women are of different status, 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:07.400 is um. There are the women who are married to 0:16:07.440 --> 0:16:10.360 those powerful men, and they are known as mistress. They 0:16:10.400 --> 0:16:14.120 have a title um, and so they have a certain 0:16:14.160 --> 0:16:16.960 status in the community. They don't play much of a 0:16:17.080 --> 0:16:19.360 role in the in the Salem crisis. We don't know 0:16:19.480 --> 0:16:22.360 much about them. We know about a few of them, 0:16:22.480 --> 0:16:24.960 Um asked Tad Baker about the wife of the governor, 0:16:25.000 --> 0:16:29.440 for example. Um. They we know about some of them. 0:16:29.600 --> 0:16:32.840 But mostly we have ordinary women who are known as 0:16:32.880 --> 0:16:37.160 good wives or goody and we have young women who 0:16:37.200 --> 0:16:41.720 are children. In the case of the three beginning accusers, 0:16:41.720 --> 0:16:46.640 Abigail Williams and Um, Um, come on, I'm now I'm 0:16:46.640 --> 0:16:52.360 blanking um. Abigail Williams and um and Putnam Jr. And 0:16:52.880 --> 0:16:58.040 Paris's daughter. Those are the children, and they're always called 0:16:58.080 --> 0:17:01.600 the children, and they're always separ rated by as far 0:17:01.640 --> 0:17:05.120 as other people are concerned, from the somewhat older accusers. 0:17:05.760 --> 0:17:09.040 Then you have the group of accusers who are the 0:17:09.080 --> 0:17:14.000 teenagers and twenty somethings, many of whom are servants, but 0:17:14.080 --> 0:17:16.800 not all of whom are servants. And then you have 0:17:17.240 --> 0:17:20.960 the older women, um, the good wives, the women of 0:17:21.040 --> 0:17:25.080 some stature in the community, mostly in their thirties. A 0:17:25.160 --> 0:17:29.840 couple who are older who play roles as accusers. And 0:17:29.960 --> 0:17:31.760 one of the arguments that I make in the book 0:17:32.680 --> 0:17:40.600 is that when it the children's accusations are not it's 0:17:40.600 --> 0:17:43.440 not that they're not taken seriously, it's that they don't 0:17:43.560 --> 0:17:48.320 lead to politically, they don't lead to judicial um uh, 0:17:48.840 --> 0:17:54.240 they don't lead to judicial activity until somewhat older women 0:17:54.359 --> 0:17:57.399 and girls way in. There was a rule at the 0:17:57.480 --> 0:18:01.879 time in English law that it was more it was 0:18:01.920 --> 0:18:03.720 a common law rule. I don't think it was written 0:18:03.760 --> 0:18:08.000 down anywhere that if you're that the evidence of someone 0:18:08.119 --> 0:18:13.840 under fourteen would not be acceptable in a UM in 0:18:13.960 --> 0:18:20.840 a capital case, and so the because witchcraft, of course 0:18:20.880 --> 0:18:24.439 was a capital crime. And so I think that it 0:18:24.960 --> 0:18:31.280 that in the beginning, they the authorities in Massachusetts waited 0:18:31.600 --> 0:18:34.960 in effect for older people to weigh in. And what 0:18:35.119 --> 0:18:39.119 seems to have been especially important was when women in 0:18:39.200 --> 0:18:43.919 their thirties also became accusers. When Um and Putnam Senior 0:18:44.040 --> 0:18:48.480 became an accuser, When Sarah Viber became an accuser, even 0:18:48.520 --> 0:18:51.040 though she was not a woman of particular standing in 0:18:51.080 --> 0:18:57.160 the community, my student discovered that she appeared in more 0:18:58.680 --> 0:19:04.119 prosecutions than anyone else UM, and so it was clear 0:19:04.400 --> 0:19:09.080 that a woman of that standing UM, who was seen 0:19:09.119 --> 0:19:13.320 as more mature, was more believable as far as the 0:19:13.400 --> 0:19:18.320 judges were concerned. I might add that the young woman 0:19:18.720 --> 0:19:23.000 um Oh among the accusers Susannah Sheldon, who seemed to 0:19:23.040 --> 0:19:28.280 be the craziest and she seemed to give the weirdest 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:34.480 um accusations. If you read her statements to the court, 0:19:34.600 --> 0:19:39.520 they're very strange. She is herself a refugee from the 0:19:39.560 --> 0:19:43.480 main frontier, living with her mother. Her father is dead 0:19:44.240 --> 0:19:47.919 um and her older brother seems to have been killed 0:19:48.200 --> 0:19:54.240 in the Indian War uh. And she is often cited 0:19:54.320 --> 0:19:56.200 as an important accuser, but if you look at the 0:19:56.280 --> 0:20:00.159 legal records, she hardly ever appeared in a case. She 0:20:00.280 --> 0:20:03.840 doesn't They don't let her swear to the truth of 0:20:03.880 --> 0:20:06.040 something because I think they don't trust her. They only 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:08.119 let people swear to the truth of something if they 0:20:08.119 --> 0:20:10.320 trust them, and I don't think they trust Susanna Sheldon. 0:20:10.640 --> 0:20:13.240 She is nuts and they seem to recognize that she's nuts. 0:20:13.240 --> 0:20:16.359 They don't say that anywhere. But so I think people 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:22.080 who have not paid attention to the way these testimonies 0:20:22.119 --> 0:20:26.320 are used in court miss out on a number of 0:20:26.440 --> 0:20:30.080 aspects of the trial. And I will say that of 0:20:30.119 --> 0:20:32.960 the trials, and I will say that the new addition 0:20:33.160 --> 0:20:37.000 of the papers done by the international team under the 0:20:37.040 --> 0:20:39.679 direction of Bernard Rosenthal has really helped us in this 0:20:39.800 --> 0:20:45.280 regard because they give us all the legal notations on 0:20:45.320 --> 0:20:48.520 the documents that in fact sometimes we're missing from the 0:20:48.600 --> 0:20:52.040 previous addition that we had to work with, which was 0:20:52.080 --> 0:20:55.360 based on w p A transcripts done in the nineteen thirties. 0:20:55.880 --> 0:20:59.760 So the recent edition has really helped us with understanding 0:21:00.400 --> 0:21:05.000 the legal process and how it was pursued. But back 0:21:05.000 --> 0:21:09.000 to your question about the UM, the believability or about 0:21:09.040 --> 0:21:12.040 the roles of these younger women UM. One of the 0:21:12.040 --> 0:21:16.560 things I discovered from my previous book UM called Founding 0:21:16.560 --> 0:21:21.840 Mothers and Fathers, which is about UM seventeenth century society 0:21:21.840 --> 0:21:24.800 in general and compares what happens in New England to 0:21:24.880 --> 0:21:27.840 what happens in in the Chesapeake. One of the things 0:21:27.840 --> 0:21:30.840 I discovered from that was that young women tended to 0:21:30.840 --> 0:21:33.840 be disbelieved when they spoken court. So to me, when 0:21:33.880 --> 0:21:36.000 I looked at the Salem records for the first time, 0:21:36.520 --> 0:21:38.639 one of the things I was particularly interested in figuring 0:21:38.640 --> 0:21:42.600 out was why were these young women believed, because the 0:21:42.640 --> 0:21:45.600 young women in the past were usually not believed. And 0:21:45.680 --> 0:21:48.119 of course my answer was the Indian war because the 0:21:48.160 --> 0:21:52.240 consolidation of the power um by the in the hands 0:21:52.320 --> 0:21:55.560 of the judges UM and the who were also the 0:21:55.640 --> 0:21:58.520 leaders of the war, meant that they basically wanted an 0:21:58.520 --> 0:22:00.760 explanation for why they were losing the war, and they 0:22:00.760 --> 0:22:11.880 were losing the war because of witchcraft. Qwi D. Let's 0:22:11.880 --> 0:22:16.480 get into how faith shades everything that occurred throughout this 0:22:16.760 --> 0:22:21.359 faith in what faith in witches, belief in witches everybody 0:22:21.359 --> 0:22:26.480 believes in witches greater or something a bit mystical, and 0:22:26.600 --> 0:22:30.320 how the Puritan faiths specifically shaped a lot of this well. 0:22:31.359 --> 0:22:36.640 UM Actually, Um, a lot of people in Maine were 0:22:36.680 --> 0:22:41.479 not Puritans, and so we don't know that much about 0:22:41.680 --> 0:22:45.840 what the refugees thought, the people who came down into 0:22:45.880 --> 0:22:52.840 Salem in Salem Village, because Maine was settled not by Puritans, 0:22:52.880 --> 0:22:54.880 but for the most part by members of the Church 0:22:54.920 --> 0:22:57.040 of England, one of whom was my very own ancestor. 0:22:57.119 --> 0:23:04.000 But that's another story, and so UM, the it's really 0:23:04.040 --> 0:23:09.320 hard to know the Uh. Certainly Cotton Mother, who becomes 0:23:09.320 --> 0:23:12.879 a great defender of the trials, is one of the 0:23:13.000 --> 0:23:17.239 leading young clerics of the colony. His father Increase is 0:23:17.320 --> 0:23:21.159 gone in England for the previous several years. He's in 0:23:21.160 --> 0:23:24.639 England negotiating for a new charter for the colony. Comes 0:23:24.720 --> 0:23:27.920 back with a new governor, arriving in May, by which 0:23:27.960 --> 0:23:31.520 point the witchcraft crisis is well underway. There's lots of 0:23:31.560 --> 0:23:39.000 accusations by then. So UM, certainly Samuel Parris uh is 0:23:39.040 --> 0:23:44.640 a believer in UM a very harsh version of Puritanism. 0:23:44.680 --> 0:23:49.680 He's known for his UM, very what we'd say today, 0:23:49.720 --> 0:23:54.400 hard line sermons. Uh. He was having a big dispute 0:23:54.480 --> 0:23:57.879 with members of the congregation and members of this town 0:23:58.000 --> 0:24:01.320 in Salem Village. They were happy with him. They were 0:24:01.400 --> 0:24:04.439 withholding his salary, they were withholding firewood. He was not 0:24:04.560 --> 0:24:08.840 happy and uh, so he started giving UM more and 0:24:09.000 --> 0:24:12.280 more angry sermons. Everybody had to attend. It was part 0:24:12.280 --> 0:24:14.680 of the law. Everybody had to attend church services, where 0:24:14.680 --> 0:24:18.760 they were church members or not. So everybody was hearing 0:24:18.880 --> 0:24:21.840 Samuel Paris rant and rave. And we're lucky that we 0:24:21.920 --> 0:24:25.440 have transcripts that have been published of many of those sermons, 0:24:25.440 --> 0:24:27.240 so we have an idea of what he was saying. 0:24:28.359 --> 0:24:34.679 So yeah, I mean Puritanism was important to all these people, UM, 0:24:35.119 --> 0:24:39.399 and they were the faith was significant, and that faith 0:24:39.440 --> 0:24:44.200 included a belief in the existence of witches. In England 0:24:44.240 --> 0:24:46.879 at the time there was beginning to be skepticism about 0:24:46.880 --> 0:24:51.119 belief in witchcraft, but not in America, not really. Even 0:24:51.160 --> 0:24:54.000 when the witchcraft crisis came to an end, it wasn't 0:24:54.040 --> 0:24:56.800 because people did not believe in witchcraft. It was because 0:24:57.200 --> 0:24:59.760 they came to believe that you couldn't prove someone was 0:24:59.840 --> 0:25:03.680 a which in court legally, that was why they stopped. 0:25:04.280 --> 0:25:09.239 And we have a letter that has survived from um 0:25:09.720 --> 0:25:15.080 a magistrate in northern Essex County who who wrote a 0:25:15.160 --> 0:25:17.080 letter to a judge who was a friend of his 0:25:17.600 --> 0:25:21.280 and basically laid out, shall we say, the Puritan case 0:25:22.119 --> 0:25:28.359 for why you can't convict a which on spectral testimony, 0:25:28.640 --> 0:25:32.840 And basically his argument was like follows went as follows, um, 0:25:33.960 --> 0:25:39.040 spectral testimony must come from the devil, because God would 0:25:39.119 --> 0:25:42.440 never tell us what's going to happen in the future. 0:25:42.440 --> 0:25:44.600 When God does not speak to us this way, we 0:25:44.640 --> 0:25:46.560 all know that, so it has to come from the devil. 0:25:46.960 --> 0:25:49.440 And if you are convicting these people on spectral test 0:25:49.680 --> 0:25:52.119 on spectral evidence, you are convicting them on the testimony 0:25:52.160 --> 0:25:54.560 of the devil. And we all know, you can't trust 0:25:54.600 --> 0:25:58.240 the devil, and so that's really why they stopped the trials. 0:25:58.320 --> 0:26:01.240 That worked. That worked. It didn't stop the trials, I 0:26:01.240 --> 0:26:04.160 should say, I should stop that, because indeed they did 0:26:04.200 --> 0:26:07.600 continue the trials after the dissolution of the of the 0:26:07.720 --> 0:26:13.679 special court. They did um get um. They did in 0:26:13.720 --> 0:26:16.760 fact have three further convictions of people who had confessed, 0:26:17.240 --> 0:26:21.280 but all those people were had their convictions in effect 0:26:21.320 --> 0:26:24.119 overturned um. And in the regular courts they did not 0:26:24.200 --> 0:26:27.479 allow spectral evidence. This is the trials that occurred in 0:26:27.600 --> 0:26:33.480 January of sixte and UM. So there were no executions 0:26:33.560 --> 0:26:36.960 after late September of six and those were the last 0:26:37.600 --> 0:26:41.040 executions that were based on spectral evidence. In part I 0:26:41.119 --> 0:26:43.560 hastened to add there was always other evidence too. There 0:26:43.600 --> 0:26:47.800 was no one he was convicted solely on spectral evidence. Uh. 0:26:47.960 --> 0:26:50.720 There were the what we would call the usual kinds 0:26:50.760 --> 0:26:55.880 of evidence of witchcraft, which is neighbors accusing someone of 0:26:57.280 --> 0:27:04.920 doing um witchcraft against him from from the proceedings that 0:27:04.960 --> 0:27:07.280 had happened prior to that. The only thing that's different 0:27:07.280 --> 0:27:09.520 about an oyer in terminal court is it's a special court, 0:27:09.960 --> 0:27:12.840 as a court established by the governor for a special reason. 0:27:13.320 --> 0:27:15.679