Tag: Bernard Rosenthal

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.

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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.