Category: Q&A

By Posted on Posted in History, Q&A Tagged with ,

Professor emeritus of English at State University of New York at Binghamton, Bernard Rosenthal is the author of the classic Salem Story: Reading the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and general editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which includes all the extant legal documents newly transcribed, in chronological order, with notes.

WitchesMass Bay: In Salem Story, you essentially peel back the onion, and tell people to read the primary sources. With all the books and movies that have covered the subject, what one thing do people keep repeating about the Salem witch hunt that is inaccurate, untrue, or has no 17th-century corroborating evidence? (Your favorite pet peeve!)

Bernard Rosenthal: Over and over again, scholars and others go back to the idea that the Salem witch hunt was all started by village quarrels. If I were to rewrite Salem Story I would start by showing how that idea has been taken apart. The evidence just doesn’t support it. Fortunately, some recent scholarship has dismantled parts of the village quarrels idea. I proposed to Cambridge University Press a revised edition of Salem Story with a new first chapter that addressed this, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t work out.

WitchesMassBay: What made you decide to tackle the huge editing project that became Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt?

Bernard Rosenthal: Tackling Records, like a lot of other things, just sort of happened. I found some errors in the standard work, poked around, and the next thing you know 20 years went by. I had made a mistake in Salem Story based on an incorrect transcription in the source I was using and gradually, after looking at other manuscripts, I came to the conclusion that a new edition was needed. It proved a lot more complicated than I had anticipated and took a lot more time—20 years I think. I chose a wonderful group to work with me on this—and without them the book would not have been possible for me alone—but working with a group also involved heavy work of administration, group dynamics, as well as pure scholarship.

WitchesMassBay: One of your causes is social injustice and fair trials. Do you find something about the Salem witch hunt that we as a society or our court systems still need to learn?

Bernard Rosenthal: Yes, but I think this answer is going to surprise you. I think what we need to learn from Salem is how a community can do something awful, but be courageous enough to realize and acknowledge it. Our modern criminal justice system is based on an adversarial system, and institutions that have little interest in justice. Our prisons have too many inmates who do not belong there but remain locked up because the state’s legal team was better than the defendant’s legal team. The state has enormous power against which its victims can do little.

I am working now on something called the Headstart case, and am doing what I can to get out the word of the injustice done to two people. One is now out of prison, but with a criminal record. The other remains in prison. Neither committed the crime for which they went to jail, and in fact the “crime” never happened. Just like the witchcraft claims. You can see my Facebook page, Free Joseph Allen, and you can get an excellent account of it all on the web at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

There are other cases on that website of innocent people incarcerated, and not by a long stretch inclusive of them all. The Puritans, for all their faults, really wanted to get it right, and when they saw they had failed they did what they could for the survivors and for families of the victims. I don’t present them as an ideal, and I don’t want a government without due process. But due process needs serious fixing, and a good place to begin is to look at how the Puritans had the courage to stay with the witchcraft matter and to do what they could to remedy the mistakes. You will not find that in our contemporary criminal justice system, at least nothing analogous to what the Puritans did. But it makes us feel superior to say that they were crazy and we are wise.

Note: Joseph Allen was released from prison 23 December 2021.

By Posted on Posted in Q&A Tagged with , , , , ,

Recently, Juliet Haines Mofford published a historical novel on Abigail (Dane) Faulkner, accused of witchcraft in 1692 in Andover, Massachusetts. I had some questions for the author of The Devil Made Me Do It: Crime and Punishment in Early New England and other non-fiction books.

Abigail Accused by Juliet MoffordWitchesMassBay: How did you become interested in the Salem witch trials, and specifically in the witch hunts in Andover, Massachusetts?

Juliet Mofford: I first got hooked on the Salem witch trials when we moved to Andover and I learned that more citizens from here were imprisoned for witchcraft than from any other town in New England. I soon found little in print about Andover’s 1692 experience even though this town had the most persons who confessed to committing the capital crime of witchcraft and the most children arrested.

An assignment to write a local history required research into primary documents at the Andover and North Andover historical societies. In 1992, I presented “The Andover Witch Hunt” at the Tercentenary Conference in Salem. As a lifelong writer and a professional museum educator, I developed and directed such programs as Cry Witch!—The Andovers Remember 1692, a community play I scripted and produced under Massachusetts Cultural Council grants; The Suspicious Season, about the accused women of Reading; and an interactive play entitled The Judgment of Martha Carrier. Later, as Director of Education and Research at Andover Historical Society, I had access to early town, land, and court records. I have lectured and taught classes on the Salem witch trials at Phillips Academy, for Elderhostel, and at Middlesex Community College.

WitchesMassBay: Why did you decide to write a book about Abigail (Dane) Faulkner?

Juliet Mofford: Since every person accused of being a witch in 1692 was different, each witchcraft case is unique. The daughter of Andover’s senior minister Francis Dane who opposed the trials, she was convicted of witchcraft and narrowly escaped the gallows. I wanted to get to know Abigail better so I might understand, for example, why her sister and her own daughters testified against her in court.

I was especially drawn to Abigail because she was a survivor and, obviously, a strong and articulate woman. The petition she wrote Governor William Phips from Salem prison won her early release on bond while another written in 1703 resulted in a Reversal of Attainders that revoked the court ruling and restored legal rights to those convicted.

WitchesMassBay: How does writing historical fiction help tell Abigail Faulkner’s story in ways beyond the basic historical record?

Juliet Mofford: Many myths and misconceptions about Puritans have been perpetuated by Victorian authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and passed down to us. And many historical errors are found among the countless books about Salem witchcraft, including Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. Historical documents, and court records in particular, demonstrate that Puritans were not “goody-goodys,” all dressed in black who seldom dared laugh.

I wished to present an actual family whose members were impacted by the horrifying events of 1692, and base the book upon the original documents. I wanted to recreate the realities of their daily life and personal experiences such as courtship, marriage, childbirth, the sin of fornication, poverty, and—in Andover’s case—terrifying attacks by Native Americans and their French allies upon this frontier community.

WitchesMassBay: It’s been more than 300 years since the Salem Witch Trials. Why do you think it’s still relevant today?

Juliet Mofford: Abigail’s personal life has contemporary relevance because PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is in today’s news. This Colonial goodwife sustained her husband through the “fitts” he suffered as a result of sporadic Indian attacks.

Abigail Accused: A Story of the Salem Witch Hunt is the historical revelation of how one particular wife and mother, alongside her minister father, fought bigotry and religious fanaticism and helped bring an end to the deadly witch hunt. Petitions by both father and daughter represent landmark documents of free speech that serve to remind us of the ongoing struggle for human rights. Lessons hopefully learned from the Salem witch trials remain relevant today because, unfortunately, prejudice, intolerance, and xenophobia have raised their ugly heads throughout history and continue to happen.