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On 26 May 2022, the Massachusetts State Senate passed Amendment 842, part of the process to clear the name of Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted witch from the Salem witch trials. Now it will go to a conference committee made of senators and representatives who will create a compromise budget.

Twitter, 26 May 2022

Watch: The Last Witch: A Documentary 330 Years in the Making

Watch: Diana DiZoglio’s Senate Floor Speech on the Exoneration of Elizabeth Johnson Jr.

Read previous post: Civics in action: Exonerating Elizabeth Johnson Jr.

Rev. John Higginson grave in Salem, Massachusetts

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While Massachusetts Bay ministers were lamenting the lack of devotion to the Puritan ideal and dwindling numbers of covenanted members in the late 17th century, everyday people were struggling with forces beyond their control. Between 1645 and 1715, the Little Ice Age was wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic region, which already was one of the most climatically unstable areas in the world. Bitter cold winters and hot summers not only impacted farming but fishing as well. Two of the biggest exports in Mass Bay were wood and codfish. Crop failures and early frosts, unexpected livestock deaths, and smallpox ravaged many communities. On top of that, political instability without a charter, high taxes, and inflation cut deep at every economic level.

Also struggling to survive from territory loss, famine, and cultural clashes, the Wabanaki attacked villages on the edges of the frontier. They sometimes teamed up with the French, who had a different motive but the same agenda to banish the English settlers. The seas weren’t safe either, with prowling pirate ships ready to attack fully loaded vessels.

One family’s story

In 1629, John Higginson (1616-1708) arrived in Salem on the Talbot with his parents. John grew up to become a minister like his father and married a minister’s daughter in Guilford, Connecticut. In 1659, his family decided to sail from Connecticut to England, but bad weather caused the vessel to shelter at Salem, where his father had first built a congregation. Perhaps it was fate when the town asked him to preach there for a year. He never left, though his sons ventured to Barbados, England, Arabia, and the East Indies.

While his son Nathaniel flourished in the employ of the East India Company (living in London and Fort St. George, Madras, India), his family in Salem struggled. Letters could take a year or longer to find their intended recipients if they arrived at all, but we’re fortunate some of the Higginson letters survived.

Rev. John Higginson was not of the upper echelon of society—like Samuel Sewall who married the mint master’s daughter—but he made a comfortable living. With the arrival of Sir Edmund Andros and his new government in 1686, however, political instability and economic factors infringed upon Mass Bay lives, including Higginson’s. In one letter to son Nathaniel, he writes about his ministerial salary: “almost 500 pounds of arrears [are] due to me from the town since 1686 and I saw no hope of receiving it” in his lifetime.

Higginson letters

“The French and Indian war, with other calamities, have greatly impoverished, diminished, and brought low New England,” Rev. Higginson writes to son Nathaniel in India. As a father, he’s concerned about his son Col. John Higginson, who lives in Salem:

“By his singular prudence and industry, [John] had attained a competent estate; but by the misery of these times, he has met with great losses, by the French, &c.; and so put out of his way as to be disenabled from making any use of the fishing trade; and been worsted in his estate, I believe, above a thousand pounds: and yet he is a Major and a Justice of the Peace, and the show of public occasions lies much upon him.”

Col. John Higginson writes to his brother in 1697:

“In the year 1689, when the war first broke out, I had obtained a comfortable estate, being as much concerned in the fishing trade as most of my neighbors. But since that time, I have met with considerable losses; and trade has been much decayed. Of 60-odd fishing catches belonging to this town but about six are left. I believe that no town in this Province has suffered more by the war than Salem.”

And in 1699:

“The late war with France and the Indians, which held almost 10 years, has greatly impoverished this town; by which means my Father’s salary has been much abated…. The war has also damnified me, not only by losses, but by being put out of a way. I have had a pretty large family of my own, and relations; and the several places I have held in civil and military concerns, have taken up much of my time, and not been advantageous to my estate…. The marrying and settling my children has much abated my quick stock; though I have an estate in house and land, &c.”

Several times Nathaniel sends money to his family in Salem, but it doesn’t always arrive. In 1695, for example, “the ship being taken, the money was lost.” Col. John explains:

“At this time, there are many men in our gaol for piracy; namely, Captain Kidd, who went from England with a ship and commission to take pirates, but turned pirate himself, and robbed many ships in the East Indies, and thence came into the West Indies, and there disposed of much of his wealth; and at last came into these parts with some of his stolen goods; who was here seized, and some of his men, and goods, who are in irons, and wait for a trial. And there was one [Joseph] Bradish, a Cambridge man, who sailed in an interloper bound for India, who, in some parts of the East Indies, took an opportunity, when the captains and some of the officers were onshore, to run away with the ship, and came upon our coast, and sunk their ship at Block Island, and brought much wealth ashore with them; but Bradish, and one of his men, broke prison and run away against the Indians; but it is supposed that he will be taken again.”

In the end it’s all about survival

What’s curious about these letters is that there’s no mention of witchcraft or the devil among them in Salem, even though Rev. John Higginson’s daughter Ann Dolliver was accused in 1692. Unlike his colleague Rev. Nicholas Noyes (1647-1717), with whom he shared the pulpit in Salem, Rev. John Higginson had little involvement in the Salem witch trials. His mentions of Ann are all about survival, like what provisions he made for her (since she was abandoned by her husband and “crazed in her understanding”) and her three children, who were apprenticed to learn trades “whereby they may get a livelihood when grown up.”

Read more “Higginson Letters” from Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, series 3, Vol. 7, pp. 196-222.

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On 10 August 1692, 22-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr. of Andover, Massachusetts, was arrested for witchcraft. Probably influenced by 7-year-old Sarah and 10-year-old Thomas Carrier’s confessions, she told Justice Dudley Bradstreet that she too was baptized by Martha Carrier and participated in the big witch meeting in Salem Village. The daughter of Lieut. Stephen Johnson (b. c. 1640, d. 1690) and Elizabeth Dane (b. c. 1643, d. 1722), Elizabeth Jr. was called “simplish at best” by her grandfather Rev. Francis Dane. Along with many other Dane relatives, she was jailed for months.

On 11 January 1693, Elizabeth was found guilty of covenanting with the devil and three days later Judge William Stoughton signed her death warrant. Fortunately, Elizabeth and several others were reprieved at the last minute by Governor William Phips. Today, she remains the only condemned witch who was not exonerated from the 1692 witch trials in the last 300-plus years.

Civics in action

While researching his book, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692, Richard Hite discussed with Carol Majahad of the North Andover Historical Society how Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was never cleared like the other convicted—but innocent—witches from 1692. Working with local teacher Carolyn LaPierre, they put hundreds of 8th-grade students in North Andover Middle School on the case during 2020-2021. The students were involved in research and in the process of creating a bill to propose that Elizabeth’s guilty verdict be lifted.

Presented by Senator Diana DiZoglio (D-First Essex), Bill S.1016 seeks to add to chapter 145 of the Resolves of 1957 of the General Court of Massachusetts, as amended by chapter 122 of the Acts of 2001, the name of Elizabeth Johnson Jr. The original title from 1957 reads: “Resolve Relative to the Indictment, Trial, Conviction, and Execution of Ann Pudeator and Certain Other Persons for ‘Witchcraft’ in the Year Sixteen Hundred and Ninety-Two.” Without specifically naming “certain other persons,” the 1957 resolve did not provide the reversal of attainder for the five “other” women. In 2001, the words “one Ann Pudeator and certain other persons” were replaced with “Ann Pudeator, Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Margaret Scott, and Wilmot Redd.”

As of late October 2021, the bill remains referred to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. From there, it will go before the Senate and House to be voted on before the governor signs it. It’s not expected to be a contentious issue, since the previous one was signed in 2001, but it’s just one bill among many for the 192nd Session. The bill needs to be approved by the end of July or else the whole process of submitting it will need to be done again. Richard Hite and others would like to get the bill signed on a significant date, like January 11, when the court said Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was convicted of witchcraft, or February 1, when she and the other last convicted witches were scheduled to be hanged.

Like many other victims of the Salem witch trials, under pressure, Elizabeth did confess to witchcraft but she was innocent of the charges. Elizabeth died, unmarried and without descendants, on 3 January 1746/7 in Andover. No headstone or memorial remains to tell her story. It’s time to clear Elizabeth Johnson Jr.’s name.

Stay tuned for more!

Written with information from the 28 October 2021 Zoom session, Civics in action: Exonerating Elizabeth Johnson Jr., hosted by the North Andover Historical Society with Carol Majahad, and featuring Richard Hite and Carolyn LaPierre.

Chapter 145, Resolves of 1957:

Massachusetts, 1957 Resolve, Chapter 145
Charter Street Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, photo by Frank Cousins

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With the new Welcome Center now open inside the circa 1665 Samuel Pickman house and after the major restoration work on headstones, box tombs, and landscaping at the Charter Street Cemetery, let’s look back at this historic burying ground through the eyes of Frank Cousins (1851-1925).

In 1868, Cousins opened a general store at 170-174 Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts. Besides the necessities of local Salemites, his shop carried photo postcards and other knickknacks for tourists. At first, he bought other photographers’ images, but then he became interested in photography and sold his own images. (He also was interested in the colonial architecture of Salem and wrote a book about it.)

The Old Burying Point (or Charter Street Cemetery) was first used in 1637, though the earliest surviving gravestone dates to 1673.

Just inside the Charter Street gate.
In the center of this photo, you can see the box tomb of Governor Simon Bradstreet (1604-1697). He was acting governor at the beginning of the witch accusations until May 1692, when Rev. Increase Mather returned from London with the new Massachusetts charter and the new governor, William Phips.
The plaque on Governor Simon Bradstreet’s box tomb.
At the time of Nathaniel Mather’s death at age 19 in 1688, his father Rev. Increase Mather (1639-1723) was in London lobbying the king for the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter. Increase first visited his son’s grave while in Salem for the 1692 witch trials.
At two years old, Samuel Shattock (1678-1695) suffered from fits and catatonia. By 1692, his health issues were unresolved. During the Salem witch trials, people said he was bewitched. His parents, Samuel and Sarah Shattock, testified against accused witch Bridget Bishop.
Mary Corey was the second wife of accused witch Giles Corey. In 1678, she was charged with cursing & swearing, being drunk, and using abusive speech. She died in 1684, aged 63 years. Giles and his third wife Martha were executed as witches in 1692, Giles by peine forte et dure (stone weight torture) and Martha by hanging.
This dual headstone, featuring a death head and an urn, is for William Hollingsworth (1655-1688) and his mother Eleanor (1630-1689). Eleanor’s daughter Mary married the prosperous merchant Philip English (1651-1736) in 1675. Mary and Philip English were arrested for witchcraft in 1692. They escaped from the Boston jail and returned home after the trials were over.
This is my favorite Frank Cousins’ image from Charter Street Cemetery, and not because it’s the gravestone for Col. John Hathorne (1641-1717). This stone was encased in cement after being seriously damaged many years ago. (I’d guess the damage happened in the 1930s, based on a postcard.) Hathorne was the magistrate who handled the early arrests of accused witches and depositions of their accusers. He also became a judge on the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692.

No convicted witches executed at Proctor’s Ledge in 1692 are buried at Charter Street Cemetery. Their remains were taken from the shallow graves near the gallows and buried in secret by their family and friends. Their burial locations remain unknown. Requiescat in pace.

Digital Commonwealth features 2,669 images of the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives 1890-1920, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. The original negatives are located at PEM’s Phillips Library in Rowley, Massachusetts.

Read more: If these stones could speak

Examination of George Burroughs

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A conversation between Tony Fels and Margo Burns about the confessions during the Salem witch trials. Read the original post, part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Margo Burns responds:

Tony: Thanks for your thoughtful reply, but I still don’t accept your claim that my argument is based on the “straw man.” It is very common in popular explanations of the trials to claim that people consciously confessed to save themselves. As for “No serious historian of the Salem witch hunt believes that the confessors thought that, in confessing, they had obtained a ‘get out of jail free card’ or had ‘caught on to the deal’ about how to handle the witchcraft interrogators,” here are four—Norton, Rosenthal, Baker, and Ray—who suggest that the confessors themselves believed that confession would spare their lives:

1) Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, p. 303: “By [August and September], as other scholars have pointed out, it had become clear to the accused that confessors were not being tried.”

2) Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story, p. 151: “Some did manage to escape; those who could not generally opted to save their lives by confession.” p. 155: “On September 1, [Samuel] Wardwell, in a move that he had every right to believe would protect him, confessed to his witchcraft.”

3) Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, p. 154: “So when [Samuel] Wardwell was questioned about witchcraft on September 1, he and others appear to have believed that confessing would at least delay their trial and execution, and might possibly even spare their lives.” p. 155: “[B]y the time [George] Burroughs was executed on August 19, it was clear that straightforward denials would be no use. Anyone who had pled not guilty was quickly convicted and executed .… Confession and cooperation at least gave the advantage of delay and offered some hope that the individual might ultimately be spared.”

4) Benjamin Ray, Satan & Salem, p. 123: “[Sarah] Churchill never formally retracted her confession. She almost certainly realized that to have done so would have forced the judges to put her on trial.” p. 125: “Hobbs and [Mary] Lacey clearly believed themselves to be free from trial because of their confessions.”

When I return to my original post in this thread, the point I was trying to make is that I do not accept the popular portrayal of those executed as martyrs. A martyr, by definition, is “a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle.” For this to be true, those who hanged would have felt or known that they had a choice that could affect whether they lived or died. That is just not true. This is all part of the general origin myth of America portraying our ancestors as noble. Then of course there had to be a reason why the condemned didn’t confess and save themselves, right? Maybe they were really principled Puritans, not willing to “belie” themselves. Really? This is not the case. Part of dismantling this whole portrayal is careful examination of what the accused could actually have known and when they could possibly have known it. The timelines of prosecutions and confessions don’t have any correlation, then or now. The confessions were coerced, which removes the possibility that the confessors knew what they were doing. The people who were executed are not martyrs, including my own ancestor, Rebecca Nurse. They were victims and it was tragic what happened to them, but they had no more agency in the outcome than the people who confessed had.

You are correct, Tony, that I put the blame and responsibility for the whole episode on the judges, because they controlled everything. They decided which legal precedents to follow and which to reject. From the start, local magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin made multiple decisions to accept all accusations. They entertained spectral evidence as valid, and then held everyone over in jail without the option of being released on bond, against legal precedent. These and other local magistrates were the ones coercing the false confessions. As for the assertion that the judges were all elected, that was not the case. William Phips and William Stoughton received their commissions as Governor and Lt. Governor from King William & Queen Mary in the new charter. Phips handed the management of the legal system over to Stoughton—when precedent would have had put the Governor himself in charge of such a court. Stoughton processed all these cases rapidly and left no opportunity for the convicted to appeal their sentences to the General Court, again, against precedent. Stoughton had been a judge on a variety of courts across Massachusetts and Maine for two decades and had served on the bench during numerous witchcraft cases before this, and he chose to handle things differently in 1692.

Margo Burns is the associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009), the most complete compendium of the trial documents. She’s been the expert featured on several Who Do You Think You Are? TV episodes and regularly speaks on the Salem witch trials at History Camp, historical societies, and libraries. Check out her 17th-Century Colonial New England website.

Indictment v. Candy for afflicting Mary Walcott

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A conversation between Tony Fels and Margo Burns about the confessions during the Salem witch trials. Read the original post, part 1, and part 2.

Tony Fels responds.

Margo, I’m afraid you have posited a straw argument concerning the confessors in order to knock it down. No serious historian of the Salem witch hunt believes that the confessors thought that, in confessing, they had obtained a “get out of jail free card” or had “caught on to the deal” about how to handle the witchcraft interrogators. Nor would any serious historian contend that simply because no suspect who confessed was executed, that this fact alone meant the authorities had decided on a policy to spare those suspects’ lives. Indeed, we know that the witchcraft court convicted five confessed suspects (leaving aside Samuel Wardwell, who recanted his confession) at the court’s fourth and last session in mid-September. These individuals might have met their deaths if events had turned out differently.

The whole Salem witch hunt process was a terrifying ordeal that unfolded without any certain outcome. As you point out, confession was nothing anyone would take lightly, since the last person who had confessed to witchcraft, Goody Glover in Boston just four years earlier, had been put to death for the crime. For strictly religious reasons alone, no pious Puritan—and nearly all of the adult confessors could be classified as such—would have casually acknowledged such terrible acts of blasphemy in their own behavior. And yet, of the 150 or so accused in the Salem witch hunt, roughly one-third of these suspects confessed to the crime, and none of these confessors was ultimately executed. Plenty of evidence, much of which is included in your own 2012 article (“‘Other Ways of Undue Force and Fright’: The Coercion of False Confessions by the Salem Magistrates,” Studia Neophilologica 84: 24-39), suggests why this outcome was not purely coincidental: confessing increased one’s chances of survival.

I agree with you that such a likelihood could not have been discerned before the trials themselves got underway with the court’s first session on June 2-3. Eight people had confessed by this point (Tituba, Dorothy Good, Abigail Hobbs, Deliverance Hobbs, Mary Warren, Sarah Churchill, Margaret Jacobs, and Rebecca Jacobs). In your post, you mention 11 confessors before the first trial, but I’ve never seen the names of the three additional people you are referring to. You know the examination and related records better than I do, and these additional names may have surfaced since the publication of your own article. But just focusing on these eight, while one (Good) was a young child and two (Warren and Churchill) quickly recanted their confessions, the other five were all people who could have been selected to be tried at the court’s first session (June 2-3) or its second session (June 28–July 2), but none was. Instead, one non-confessing suspect (Bridget Bishop) was tried and convicted at the first session and on June 10 hanged, followed by five non-confessing suspects (Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth How, and Sarah Wilds) tried and convicted at the second session and hanged on July 19. At this point (roughly mid-July; there were no confessions in June) it seems possible to imagine that some of the remaining suspects and others still to be named might have begun to see an advantage to confessing.

One (the Salem slave Candy) did so on July 4, followed by five people (Ann Foster on July 15, and then Mary Lacey Sr., Mary Lacey Jr., Richard Carrier, and Andrew Carrier, all on July 21-22), all from Andover, the town to which the witch hunt had by now spread. These latter five were all linked to Martha (Allen) Carrier, an Andover woman strongly suspected of witchcraft by many of her neighbors and who had been accused and arrested at the end of May. It is reasonable to believe, though we have no direct evidence to this effect, that all five, which included two of Carrier’s children, confessed in the hope that their confessions might insulate them from sharing in what appeared to be the impending fate of Martha Carrier. The non-confessing Carrier was indeed tried first at the court’s third session (August 2-5) and was hanged along with the session’s four male convicted suspects, all also non-confessors (John Willard, George Jacobs Sr., John Procter, and George Burroughs) on August 19.

The approach and aftermath of the court’s third session opened a floodgate of further confessions coming from Andover or Andover-related suspects: two more relatives of Martha Carrier on July 23 (niece Martha Emerson) and July 30 (sister Mary Allen Toothaker); a middle-aged woman (Mary Bridges Sr.) on July 30 and her five daughters on August 3 (Mary Post) and August 25 (Mary Bridges Jr., Sarah Bridges, Susannah Post, and Hannah Post); two more of Martha Carrier’s children (Sarah and Thomas) on August 11; Rebecca Eames on August 19; and at least seven more Andover individuals (Elizabeth Johnson Jr., Mary Barker, William Barker Sr., Mary Marston, Elizabeth Johnson Sr., Abigail Johnson, and Abigail Dane Faulkner) by the end of the month. September brought perhaps another 22 confessions along with the court’s fourth session (September 6-17), during which some of the first confessing suspects (Abigail Hobbs, Ann Foster, Mary Lacey Sr., Rebecca Eames, and Abigail Dane Faulkner) were convicted based either on their guilty pleas or by a jury’s decision after a trial. Still, even these convicted confessing suspects avoided execution on September 22, on which date eight more convicted non-confessors (Martha Cory, Mary Esty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Mary Parker, and Samuel Wardwell) were hanged.

(I have checked all of the above names and dates with the authoritative Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, ed. Bernard Rosenthal, Margo Burns, et al., 2009. The same information may be found in Margo’s article, referenced above. Most historians, including Margo, seem to use Thomas Brattle’s assertion, written on October 8, 1692, that there were 55 confessors among the accused. Nobody, so far as I know, has published a complete list of these names. Based on data found in Records, I include Abigail Dane Faulkner among the August confessors. When she, along with Elizabeth Johnson Sr., and Abigail Johnson, are added to the other August confessors, the total for that month reaches 15, not 12, as noted in Margo’s Table 2 on p. 26 of her article. If 55 is the correct total for the overall number of confessors, then 22 additional suspects must have confessed in September.)

Why did all these individuals confess to crimes we know now they had never committed? We cannot expect the suspects themselves to have explained their motives at the time, because a confession by definition offered an admission of guilt. To the examiners and their surrounding communities, these people acknowledged they had entered into a pact with the Devil to hurt others through witchcraft. In your own article on the subject, Margo, you have emphasized the role played by judicial intimidation, which included everything from intense questioning and incarceration under harsh conditions to the occasional use of physical torture. This is undoubtedly a part of the story. For myself, I would emphasize the role played by guilt for these highly religious people. Under the frenzied conditions of a witch hunt, it was not hard for many of them to imagine that in some way or other they had allowed Satan to enter into their lives by wishing someone harm or hoping to gain personal advantage in some way that the Puritan community frowned upon. There is explicit evidence of this motivation in the confessions of Abigail Hobbs, Margaret Jacobs, Abigail Dane Faulkner, and others.

But confession also carried the hope that the Puritan belief in public repentance might take precedence over the Biblical injunction to “not suffer a witch to live.” Most confessions, beginning with Tituba’s, included anguished portions in which blame was shifted to someone else, typically to suspects who had previously been named. Confessors claimed that these other persons—for example, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn for Tituba, Martha Carrier for many of the Andover confessors, George Burroughs for nearly all of them—had forced them to carry out the Devil’s wishes. In so doing, they likely hoped to elicit some sympathy for their plight as victims. Family members and friends also played key roles in exerting pressure on suspects to confess, believing that this might be the only way to save their lives. Andover resident Mary Tyler’s brother insisted repeatedly that she do so, both because he thought she must be a witch if so many people had said so and also because “she would be hang’d, if she did not confesse.” A petition submitted in January 1693, urging the newly reconstituted court to ignore the confessions made earlier by some of the Andover suspects, acknowledged the same motivation when it stated, “Confessing was the only way to obtain favor, [and] might be too powerful a temptation for timorous women to withstand, in the hurry and distraction that we have heard they were then in.” That these desperate strategies probably worked to some degree is suggested by the facts that it took until the witchcraft court’s fourth session before any of the confessing suspects were brought to trial, and that when the first group of confessors were finally convicted, this step seems to have been forced on the justices, who were coming under criticism for apparent hypocrisy in overlooking such “obviously” guilty suspects in favor of going after only those who had forthrightly proclaimed their innocence. Even after their conviction, these confessed suspects were still shown a final, and, as it turned out, decisive bit of leniency in receiving temporary stays of sentencing or execution, which Thomas Brattle stated, “for two or three [of them] because they are confessours.” (Abigail Faulkner received a stay of execution by reason of her pregnancy, and Dorcas Hoar, convicted during the same fourth session of the court, also received an unusual stay of execution following her confession just after her sentencing.)

Confession also had a larger impact on the overall course of the witch hunt. From Tituba’s admission of guilt at its start all the way up through the first group of Andover confessors in mid-July, confessions gave credence to the accusations of witchcraft and accelerated the drive to uncover more witches in the communities. Only toward the witch hunt’s end did the sheer number of confessions serve to undermine the credibility of the charges and help bring the panic to a close.

As I see it, the crux of the dispute between you, Margo, and me, lies, as with so many of the controversies generated by the study of the Salem witch hunt, in the question of where blame should be placed. In rejecting what you see as a “nice [but fictitious] story” that draws a moral distinction between those suspects who went to their deaths upholding the truth that they were not witches and those suspects who confessed to crimes they had not committed, you appear to want to concentrate all of the blame for the witch hunt on the Puritan judicial establishment, making sure that nobody gets distracted into thinking that confessors bear at least part of the blame. Hence your emphasis as well on the coerced nature of these confessions. There really was no meaningful choice for a suspect to make, you assert, since all were headed for execution anyway. Confessors did no greater harm than truth-tellers at Salem.

But the Salem magistrates, it’s worth remembering, were not autocrats but elected officials. The Puritan colony of Massachusetts, from top to bottom, fully supported the witch hunt when it was at its height, and even after the English-appointed governor in early October had abolished the first witchcraft court (which the Massachusetts House of Representatives endorsed only in a very close vote of 33-29), it took years for most residents to recognize that a serious miscarriage of justice had been done. In 1695, three years after the witch hunt’s end, a majority of Salem villagers could still sign a petition in support of Rev. Samuel Parris, perhaps the chief instigator of the panic.

In my view, the colony as a whole bears the lion’s share of the blame for the witch hunt, chiefly because of the extremism of its religious views, which lent themselves to picturing the world as a Manichean struggle between Christ and Satan, good and evil. In this context, the determination of thoroughly average people like Rebecca Nurse, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs Sr. to tell the truth about themselves at all costs—itself one of the great virtues taught by Puritanism—may be seen as genuinely heroic, because it was the accumulated truth-telling of those 20 martyred individuals that did more than anything else to put an end to the catastrophe Massachusetts had brought on itself. The confessors, too, ironically testified to the great power of telling the truth, because when they later recanted their confessions after the witch hunt was over, the aspect of their behavior that they regretted most was that they had “belied themselves” before God.

Continue to Part 4.

Tony Fels is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of San Francisco, where he taught for 29 years. At USF he taught, among other courses, American religious history and historical methods, the latter of which centered on the historiography of the Salem witch hunt. His book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, was reviewed on Witches of Massachusetts Bay. For more about Tony Fels, go to https://www.tonyfels.com.

Ann Foster examination, 1692

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A conversation between Tony Fels and Margo Burns about the confessions during the Salem witch trials. Read the original post and part 1.

Margo Burns responds.

Tony, respectfully, it’s necessary to look at the historical data more closely—per case and on a timeline—before making claims about patterns that may have been discernable by the accused at the time they were accused. It’s simply not possible that the 11 people who confessed between February and May could have discerned any “pattern” about how their cases would be handled and made choices to confess. The magistrates easily forced confessions out of these people, people who were vulnerable and easily manipulated to say anything the authorities demanded of them—youths, people with low social status, or with some mental defect. And hardly people who were looking at some “big picture” or as some kind of “legal strategy.” No one knew anything about the plans or timing for prosecution anyway, or for certain who the Crown’s attorney or Chief Magistrate would be. At that point, June 2, over 70 people were in custody and 11 had confessed. Before then no one could have thought that confession might be some kind of get out of jail free card, especially considering that in the most recent witchcraft case in Boston, just three years earlier, with Stoughton on that bench. Goody Glover confessed and was hanged. Why would they think it would be different for them?

The first mittimus, in late May, to bring accused people back to Salem from jail in Boston for trial comprised a list of eight people who would ultimately put on trial that summer, plus Tituba, a confessor. While Tituba was the only one not tried that summer, she completely disappears from the legal record until she pops up again a whole year later to have her case dismissed. There is no way to figure out why. She is not part of any of the trials, including Sarah Good’s, for which she should have been a prime witness but she’s not there. The second best convictive standard as evidence in a witchcraft case was the testimony of a confessed witch—so why wasn’t Tituba called as a witness? By mid-July, this is all anyone knew about how things were going to unfold. A single data point, Tituba, does not make a pattern, and she wasn’t used as a witness against anyone.

By late June, before the court hanged 5 more people, the first prosecutor left, and frankly, a lot of things were up in the air about how the following cases would be handled. Ann Foster was interrogated five separate times in mid-July to produce a pretty amazing confession. How could she have concluded anything except that the authorities demanded a confession from her and would not stop until she had? And so she did. That is the purpose of interrogation: to elicit a confession to make prosecution easier. It’s hard to argue with evidence of someone speaking against their own self-interest. Before the Court had even convened in early June, only those 11 people had confessed. ALL the rest of the confessions, 43 of them, starting with Ann Foster’s, came from Andover residents or those who lived near enough to attend the church in Andover or were part of a family from Andover. You’d think that if there was a pattern to be discerned, people in other towns would have figured it out, too, to save themselves. Maybe you’d have some people who were already being prosecuted who would have caught on to the “deal” and recanted their claims to innocence at trial and thrown themselves on the mercy of the court, but no one did.

It’s also important to look at the recantations from several fully covenanted members of the Andover church who confessed in August under pressure and immediately recanted when the interrogations ended. Why would they recant? None of them claimed they’d confessed because they knew it would help them in any way, despite what they may have been told during the interrogations. For the rest of that summer, the interrogators used high-pressure interrogation tactics to coerce false confessions. The case of Samuel Wardwell in September is telling. He was the first confessor to be tried, and was hanged. When the time came for him to acknowledge his confession, he refused. He had discerned a pattern: everyone who was indicted end up being hanged. He knew that it didn’t matter if he confessed or not, and he knew his confession had been coerced. The court was going to hang him either way, so he recanted it.

In September, Dorcas Hoar possibly made a legal last-ditch effort to get some extra time before certain execution by confessing after she was sentenced. She probably did see that the four confessors sentenced to die got temporary stays, but it seems really unlikely that she was in a position to leverage four ministers to come to her aid to close the deal, unless it was in their best interest somehow, perhaps to show that it was still possible to save one’s soul.

I appreciate your effort to make the people who were executed “noble” for not confessing, but it’s revisionist history.

Continue to Part 3.

Margo Burns is the associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the most complete compendium of the trial documents. She’s been the expert featured on several Who Do You Think You Are? TV episodes and regularly speaks on the Salem witch trials at History Camp, historical societies, and libraries. Check out her 17th-Century Colonial New England website.

#CommissionsEarned on Amazon links.

Tituba's testimony, 1692

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After publishing “Traditional Understanding Overshadows Academic Explanations at Rebecca Nurse Commemoration” by Tony Fels, a fascinating discussion ensued in the Comments section between Tony Fels and Margo Burns. Since readers often skip the Comments section, I wanted to share this important conversation about the meaning of the Salem confessions. As Tony put it, “The Salem witch hunt is one of those subjects that simply crosses the boundaries between what interests academics and what interests the general public. We’re all involved in its meaning simply as people, as evidenced again and again by events like the 400th anniversary of Rebecca Nurse’s birthday.”

Margo Burns responds to original post:

Something that I can’t get through to people, both those who adhere to the traditional understanding as well as academic explanations, is that the notion that confession somehow spared people is simply not accurate. Just because no confessors were hanged does not mean it was the intention of the Court to spare confessors—that’s a historian’s fallacy. The Chief Magistrate wrote a warrant for the execution for several confessors in January, but they and the rest of the people sentenced to die then were all spared by the Governor.

Confession was the gold standard of convictive evidence in witchcraft cases in that era, mentioned in all the contemporary books about witchcraft, and it was not controversial legally the way spectral evidence was. The belief that a confession, even a false one, could spare one from being hanged in 1692 makes it easier to then cast those who were executed as martyrs. They had a way to save themselves but they refused to tell a lie even though it would save them from hanging. So noble! It’s a nice story, but it is not based on historical facts.

Tony Fels responds:

I can’t agree with Margo Burns on this point. She’s technically correct: Confession was the best of all evidence of witchcraft, and those who confessed would have had no assurance that they would not ultimately be hanged for the crime. Indeed, six confessors were convicted by the first witchcraft court and three later on by the second court. But all those trials and convictions occurred late in the witch hunt (mid-September 1692 and then January 1693).

Meanwhile, Tituba had confessed back in March 1692, followed by Abigail Hobbs in mid-April, Deliverance Hobbs a couple days later, Margaret Jacobs in May, Ann Foster and her daughter Mary Lacey Sr. in mid-July, and then a great many more from Andover. A pattern must have been discerned that the confessors were at least being held temporarily without trial in order to name others or to rid the community of the more dangerous, recalcitrant suspects first. Thus, to confess at least bought a suspect time.

By contrast, those suspects who early on proclaimed their innocence, even as they were brought to the first trials in June, July, and August, refused to take that step of falsely confessing. We can surely sympathize with those who were intimidated into confessing, but the actions of those who resisted such pressures do present us with a noble story!

Continue to Part 2.

Margo Burns is the associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the most complete compendium of the trial documents. She’s been the expert featured on several Who Do You Think You Are? TV episodes and regularly speaks on the Salem witch trials at History Camp, historical societies, and libraries. Check out her 17th-Century Colonial New England website.

Tony Fels is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of San Francisco, where he taught for 29 years. At USF he taught, among other courses, American religious history and historical methods, the latter of which centered on the historiography of the Salem witch hunt. His book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt (2018), was reviewed on Witches of Massachusetts Bay. For more about Tony Fels, go to https://www.tonyfels.com/.

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By Tony Fels

On June 7, 2021, the NPR show, “Here and Now,” aired a segment on the 400th birthday of Rebecca Nurse, broadcast from the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. Readers of Witches of Massachusetts Bay will doubtless recognize Nurse as one of the most well-known of the 20 individuals executed at Salem for alleged witchcraft.

The radio program struck my interest for revealing the enduring strength of what might be called the “traditional” understanding of the Salem witch hunt over more recent explanations advanced by some of the many scholars who have studied the tragedy. By the “traditional” understanding, I mean the one made famous by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, though Miller’s play in fact owed practically everything to journalist-historian Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts, which appeared four years earlier. As Starkey (and then Miller) saw it, the witch hunt was a product of social hysteria, brought on by a lethal combination of extreme religious values, calling on people to live up to impossible standards of piety, and ages-old communal scapegoating based on personal enmities. When individuals can’t meet their own community’s norms for a life of rectitude, their sense of guilt may lead them either to imagine they have committed terrible transgressions or else to deflect the blame onto others. Intolerance toward oneself in effect breeds intolerance of others. The heroes in both accounts (Starkey’s gripping narrative and Miller’s equally chilling drama) were the 20 martyrs, who, like Rebecca Nurse, went to their deaths rather than confess to the falsehood that they had made a compact with the Devil.

In an early part of the 11-minute segment, “Here and Now” host Robin Young discusses some recent academic explanations for the witch hunt with Kathryn Rutkowski, curator and president of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. “Historians say the witch trials were to keep women in line,” Young suggests, referring, without naming the source, to the feminist argument advanced especially by Carol F. Karlsen in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987). Young, however, omits the fact that Karlsen’s study actually showed little interest in Rebecca Nurse or any of the other courageous Salem martyrs (14 were women, 6 were men) in favor of concentrating on the young women who, out of the anguish Puritans are said to have foisted onto women in general, did the accusing.

Rutkowski responds by referencing two other recent scholarly interpretations (again without mentioning the names of authors). One, set forth by Mary Beth Norton in her book, In the Devil’s Snare (2002), argued that the Puritans’ continuing conflicts with Native Americans to the north brought on the witch scare, by depositing orphaned victims of Indian attacks in Salem Village, where they reenacted their childhood traumas by accusing other people of attacking them through witchcraft. Another, advanced by Emerson Baker in his A Storm of Witchcraft (2015), proposed a catch-all explanation for the witch hunt under the phrase, “a perfect storm,” said to include the Native American context, the insecurities of a new colonial charter, a harsh winter, village factionalism, and the local pastor Samuel Parris’ rigid orthodoxy. In truth, no such extraneous circumstances or “perfect storms” are needed to account for witch hunting, which occurred with deadly commonality across nearly 300 years of history throughout western Europe, including in its colonial outposts like New England. Indeed, Hartford, Connecticut, was the scene of a lesser version of the Salem events in 1662, when another witch panic led to 14 indictments and four likely executions.

But all these considerations fall by the wayside as soon as the program turns to Beth Lambright, one of a large number of proud Rebecca Nurse descendants who live throughout the United States. As Lambright tells Robin Young, Nurse, age 71 at the time of her death, lived a quite ordinary colonial life, raising eight children and helping with the work on her family farm. “Yet this ordinary life became an extraordinary moment of, really, heroism,” Lambright explains, when by “standing in the truth, [Nurse] paid for that with her life.” Lambright took her family to visit the Danvers homestead a few years ago because she wanted to pass on to her children the important lesson of what their colonial ancestor had accomplished. As Lambright puts it, “No matter what your community might say about you, if you do not believe it’s true, you stand in what you know to be true.” These are lines that Arthur Miller might have included in The Crucible, a work that Lambright knows well, both from having read it and from having watched her daughter perform in a high school production of the play.

Hoping to draw out a political lesson for today’s times, Young asks Lambright if she doesn’t see some parallels to what’s been happening lately, with America menaced by “conspiracy theorists” and “angry mobs” with “pitchforks.” It’s clear from Young’s left-leaning political perspective that she sees these Trumpian manifestations as the equivalent of 1692’s witch hunters. Lambright appears to agree, but I’m not so sure. She observes, “We’re seeing loud voices. They might look like the majority for a while, but it doesn’t mean that they’re always speaking truth. We have to be really careful that we understand who we are and what our truth is.” Most recently, it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have been in the majority. And antiracist zealots on the left are just as capable of trying to enforce conformity of belief on a particular community through scapegoating as are extremists on the right.

Arthur Miller himself might similarly have seen threatening “pitchforks” coming from the margins of both ideological extremes. While it is well known that The Crucible offered up the Salem witch hunt as an allegory for Senator McCarthy’s red scare of the 1950s, in his later life the playwright acknowledged that the lessons of the Salem witch hunt fit the murderous excesses of the Chinese Communists’ Cultural Revolution just as well. The Salem story for good reason continues to resonate with Americans now nearly 330 years after it drew to a close.

(The NPR program may be heard at https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/06/07/rebecca-nurse-salem-witch-trials. A popular show like this one naturally comes with some factual errors. In the introduction, Robin Young speaks of about 200 people who were tried at Salem, when she means the number who were accused. The Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer (the special witchcraft court) tried 27 suspects, while the later Superior Court of Judicature (which produced no lasting punishments) handled about 70 remaining cases. Later in the show, Young refers to “one man” who was executed at Salem, when actually there were six men. Beth Lambright meant to say that George Jacobs Sr.’s body, not George Burroughs’, is also buried on the Rebecca Nurse Homestead grounds.)

After this post was published, a fascinating discussion ensued between Tony Fels and Margo Burns. Read the four-part conversation on witch confessions, martyrs, and more.

Tony Fels is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of San Francisco, where he taught for 29 years. At USF he taught, among other courses, American religious history and historical methods, the latter of which centered on the historiography of the Salem witch hunt. His book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, was reviewed on Witches of Massachusetts Bay. For more about Tony Fels, go to https://www.tonyfels.com/.

Giles Corey pressed to death. Unknown artist.

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A follow-up to the post Richard Francis: From Sewall biographer to Salem witch trials storyteller.

In Olde England as well as New, hangings were a public spectacle. Despite the grim proceedings, executions drew large crowds. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, hangings may not have had a carnival-like atmosphere, with vendors offering meat pasties and barkers selling broadsides of the convicted’s confessions. Still, farmers, clergy, merchants, gentlemen, sailors, servants, housewives, and children attended the Salem witch trials and executions.

Two miles from the prison, Proctor’s Ledge was chosen as a place where crowds could gather and still see the victims swinging from the rope. And if the convicted witches had strong voices, like Rev. George Burroughs, those gathered could clearly hear his perfect rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Silent protest

Giles Corey was never convicted of witchcraft. He pleaded “not guilty” in the Salem court but would not agree to stand trial. In consequence, the judges chose to inflict peine forte et dure (French for “strong and hard punishment,” or pressing to death with heavy weights). Perhaps after a night or two in the already crowded Salem prison, the judges expected Corey to change his mind. For two days, Samuel Sewall wrote, the Court, Captain Gardner of Nantucket, and other friends begged Corey to agree to be tried by the judges and a jury of his peers. He remained mute.

In Crane Pond: A Novel of Salem, Richard Francis said Corey’s pressing death occurred at Proctor’s Ledge—the site of the witch hangings. Given that at any moment Corey could put a stop to his punishment and agree to be tried, it’s highly unlikely that he was carted all the way to Proctor’s Ledge. Besides, the crowds would not see much of a spectacle from their vantage point, and watching an old man being crushed to death was agonizingly slow. (It was not as slow as two days,* but stubborn and silent Giles Corey may have survived two or three hours as the rocks piled up, his ribs cracked, his lungs collapsed, and his last breath escaped.)

Where did Giles Corey die?

In 1867, Charles W. Upham asserted Corey’s torture occurred “in an open field somewhere between Howard Street Burial Ground and Brown Street.” Other authors—and tour guides—mistakenly claimed Corey was pressed to death at Howard Street Cemetery near the prison. In 1692, however, the land was privately owned and only became a burial ground in 1801. More recently, Marilynne K. Roach suggested Lieutenant Thomas Putnam’s lot bordering the prison yard would be a likely spot, especially agreeable to Thomas since his daughter Ann Jr. was one of the major witchcraft accusers.

Sidney Perley believed rocks were carried inside the prison to be placed on top of Corey’s prone body. I believe the answer is much simpler: In the prison yard. While no contemporaneous writers described the location, the prison yard had enough space—and rocks—to carry out the deed without drawing large crowds. After all, the laws of the colony did not permit such “inhumane, barbarous, or cruel” torture as inflicted on Giles Corey—at least not publicly. While people did witness his punishment, they were not able to stop it. And if they tried, he’d probably die of his internal injuries anyway.

* Thanks to Professor Tony Fels for correcting me in his comment to my previous post, Richard Francis: From Sewall biographer to Salem witch trials storyteller. Tony is the author of Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, which I wrote about here.

“Where Was Giles Corey Pressed to Death?” by Marilynne K. Roach (American Ancestors Magazine, 15.4:36-39)

Diary of Samuel Sewall