Tag: Margo Burns

Salem witchcraft trials scrapbook at the Superior Court in Salem, Massachusetts, 1973 (AP photo)

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by Margo Burns, associate editor, Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

On January 11, 2023, the Peabody Essex Museum turned over 527 original documents from the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Archives in Boston. Owned by the Commonwealth, these documents had been on deposit with the Phillips Library since 1980.

In 1980, the entire collection of the records in the colonial Essex County Court Archive, from 1636 to 1800, moved from the basement of the Salem Superior Court building into the care of the renowned Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. Ellen Mark, manuscript librarian at the Essex Institute, described the courthouse in an AP news story in December 1980 as “a typical old building basement, complete with dripping heating pipes. It was a very poor place to store old documents.”

Fortunately, the Salem witchcraft trials records were still in their scrapbooks, on display upstairs. Upon being deposited at the Essex Institute, the two scrapbooks were disassembled, de-acidified in alkaline baths, and earlier hinges used to mount them in the albums were carefully removed. A minimal amount of conservation work was done to support their physical integrity, aside from being ironed flat. In January 1982, the records went to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover to be microfilmed.

Afterwards, the Essex Institute—whose collection concentrated its focus on local history, genealogy, and art—hosted the exhibit Salem Witchcraft: Documents of an Early Colonial Drama (June 1 to Oct. 31, 1982). In addition to a selection of original documents, the exhibit included George Jacobs Sr.’s cane and John Procter’s brass sundial, which were owned by the Institute. Admission was $1.50. The first item listed in all newspaper promotions was that “original documents of the Salem witch trials” could be seen at the Essex Institute by the public.

At the tercentenary of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1992, the Essex Institute opened the Days of Judgment exhibit in Plummer Hall, which included 33 documents and some of the objects in its collections related to people involved in the 1692 trials. That same year, the Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum merged to become the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).

Direct access to the Phillips Library collections was in a reading room in Daland House, where I first started my own research, in what I recall as a tiny, dim room with only a few tables. In 1997, the library closed for nine months for a “massive restoration project, including climate control and modern archival storage” (PEM press release). In May 1998, the reading room reopened next door on the second floor of Plummer Hall: “Lined with columns and illuminated by chandeliers, it manages to be both formal and comfortable. The room is right out of the 19th century, complete with antique globe, oil paintings of Saltonstalls on the walls, and busts of Peabodys framing the door,” according to a January 14, 1999, article in the Boston Globe. On the first floor, the Essex Institute also featured a small display, The Real Witchcraft Papers “permanent exhibit,” with the canes, sundial, and a few original documents, including the warrant to arrest my ancestor Rebecca Nurse.

Transcriptions in process

In the 2000s, our team for Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt visited these documents frequently, working on making the most accurate transcriptions of them that we could, correcting a variety of previous errors in Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Witchcraft Papers (1977), and including 71 more documents previously uncollected. Published in 2009, Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt was part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that also supported a website at the University of Virginia, where a hypertext version of Salem Witchcraft Papers and digitized images from the 1982 microfilm could be accessed by anyone online. The website reduced the demand for access to the original documents, which was better in general for the integrity documents—but if one wanted to consult them, it was still possible.

From left: Marilynne K. Roach, Bernard Rosenthal, Margo Burns, Richard Trask, and Benjamin Ray, editors of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, working at the Phillips Library in Plummer Hall, June 2005.

On November 24, 2011, the Phillips Library again closed for “preservation and renovation work on Plummer Hall and Daland House (expected completion 2013).” That meant the entire collection—42,000 linear feet of historical documents—was moving off-site to a temporary location, where PEM announced there would still be access to the records until the work was completed. At this time, Elizabeth Bouvier, from the Supreme Judicial Court Archives, collected the 150-shelf-feet of the colonial court documents—still folded in docketed bundles, tied with string—but again, not the witchcraft trials documents. The word—whether true or not—was that out of deference to Salem, the witchcraft trials documents belonged in Salem and so they would stay.

Time wore on, and the off-site location remained a mystery, concerning a lot of us. More than 20 months later, the temporary location opened August 1, 2013, in an industrial building in the next town of Peabody. Although access was once again possible, the stark white walls and absence of windows had none of the charm of the resplendent reading room in Plummer Hall.

In 2015, Peabody Essex Museum announced a “$20 million renovation and improvement of PEM’s Phillips Library … housed in two noted 1850s architectural treasures, the John Tucker Daland House and Plummer Hall, both of which are being renovated by Schwartz/Silver Architects.”

What wasn’t clear to the public, of course, is the hard work that was happening behind the scenes: The entire collection of the Phillips Library was now physically on a single level, and the re-organization of the materials—which had at least four different cataloging systems—was under way, to produce what a 2017 press release would call “a consistent catalog of the entire Library collection and to make the catalog of the collection accessible online.” PEM’s website announced that the temporary location was going to be closed another six months (Sept. 1, 2017 through March 31, 2018), to move to the “new location,” which was assumed to be back in Salem.

Rumors bring people together

At a public meeting of the Salem Historical Commission on December 6, 2017, the architectural firm of Schwartz/Silver, with Bob Monk and Phillip Johns of the Peabody Essex Museum, submitted an application for renovations to Plummer Hall and Daland House. They revealed that the Museum had “no current plans to move the library collections back into this building.” The size of the growing collection was already twice as large as the capacity of the Stacks, but also that it was “not code compliant for staff use.” The cost would be enormous.

This was news. Everything that the public had heard before was that the two buildings were going to be renovated and the collection would be returning there. What was going on? It turned out that the plan was to move the Phillips Library holdings to PEM’s new Collection Center in Rowley, a building that had once been a toy factory and was now being re-fitted to store items from PEM’s vast collections in a climate-controlled space. The plan to move the library holdings away from Salem upset a lot of people, and the witchcraft documents were the prime example held up of why people felt the library needed to be IN SALEM. 

Frankly, it was a public relations fiasco that did not have to happen. CEO Dan Monroe did little to help the situation at a hastily called public forum in the atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum on January 11, 2018, which attracted “hundreds of people” working in the tourist industry, local academics, historians, and lovers of Salem, according to the Boston Globe coverage of the event. Monroe told the Globe, “There was an expectation by a number of people that we had a responsibility to consult with them about what would be done with the Phillips collection. That’s an expectation that we didn’t particularly share or understand.” Clearly. Donald Friary, Salem resident and President of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, summed up the biggest issue: “No one in Salem knew this was happening. No one knew that they were looking for other sites… There is a very high level of mistrust.”

It seemed like Monroe was there to just show up and just get through the evening and keep doing what he had already planned anyway. There were heated exchanges. Monroe explained that it was going to be impossible to redo the buildings, and that the existing archival storage addition was deemed unsound and really was “condemned.” The audience offered many suggestions and questioned why different options had not been considered. Monroe just stood there and took it, looking impatient and petulant as he did, rebuffing it all. There was a claim that the witchcraft documents had “all been digitized” and were at the website. This was not entirely accurate: At that time only the 30 documents owned by the Phillips Library had been digitized.

Monroe was quoted in the Boston Globe stating, “History doesn’t reside in a specific state or a specific set of documents.” Except that when it comes to the Salem witchcraft trials, history is all about that place and those original documents.

Bottom line: Had Monroe been transparent ahead of time and let the public know that there turned out to be a severe structural problem with the building and PEM was very concerned about how to best preserve and protect such an important historical collection, things could have gone smoother. Yes, there still would have been lots of public discussions and sundry opinions, but with a shared goal of figuring out what was best for the collection—even though the final decision would always be PEM’s.

The newly formed group, “Save the Phillips Library,” collected over 5,000 signatures on a petition at change.org, appealing to Monroe not to move the collection out of Salem, but in vain. In July 2018, four months longer than originally announced, the Collection Center (recently renamed the James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center) opened with great fanfare, with PEM-hired buses taking people on the 15-miles-plus drive from Salem to Rowley that weekend. Finally, the new Reading Room was available to researchers again. The collection was in an excellent state of organization and preservation. Although the room had windows, it had all the atmosphere of an open-plan industrial office, despite being designed by Schwartz/Silver. Access was restored.

All disputes about the move were resolved by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on October 20, 2020, when it ruled in the case of Peabody Essex Museum v. Maura Healey, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that the relocation was “consistent with equitable deviation from the terms of the founding statutes establishing the Essex Institute, an organizational forebearer of PEM,” but, even now, as a recent article in The Salem News observed, “there’s still lingering feelings back home from local historians over the Phillips Library’s distance from Salem.”

Reparations

Dan Lipcan, PEM’s Head Librarian since 2019, gets it, telling the Boston Globe in 2020, “The move to Rowley was very hurtful to people. One of the charges when I arrived was, ‘You need to repair relations with the community.’”

After years of ignoring its local history archival and artifacts collections, PEM opened its rotating Salem Stories and Highlights from the Phillips Library exhibits. In PEM’s main gallery, the Salem Witchcraft Trials 1692 exhibit opened, featuring the original documents in exquisite public displays, along with associated historical objects. Even with COVID rules keeping people six feet apart, the witchcraft exhibit drew thousands of visitors during its six-month run (Sept. 26, 2020–April 4, 2021).

In 2021, the Salem Witchcraft Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming exhibit cross-curated original documents with a gown by fashion designer Alexander McQueen from his 2007 collection inspired by his ancestor, “Memory of Elizabeth How, 1692,” plus selections from photographer Frances F. Denny’s series Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America (Sept. 18, 2021–March 20, 2022). There was something for everyone, including a board for visitors to post their own thoughts and responses to what had happened in 1692.

Then in 2022, there was the surprise pop-up exhibit, The Salem Witchcraft trials: The Towne Sisters with more original documents about the cases of sisters Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyse (Sept. 10, 2022–Nov. 28, 2022). This small exhibit was featured in the Phillips Library rotating exhibits space at PEM.

Meanwhile, the entire collection of the Salem witchcraft trials documents on deposit at Phillips Library has been professionally scanned and indexed on its website, paired with references to the transcriptions in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Plus, if you missed any of the witchcraft trials exhibitions at PEM, you can select the exhibitions at the website—including the 1992 one—to see what was in each, along with photos of all these installations.

With the recent expansion and modernization of the Massachusetts Archives facility in Boston, the Supreme Judicial Court called for the return of the Salem witchcraft trials documents to the Judicial Archives. This was done in January 2023 at a ceremony at the Massachusetts State Archives with Peabody Essex Museum CEO Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Director of the Phillips Library Dan Lipcan, Judicial Court Chief Justice Kimberly Budd, and Essex County Clerk-Magistrate Thomas Driscoll. PEM also presented another 30 Salem witchcraft records from the Phillips Library’s own collection to the Archives, from donations it had received over the years.

In an article in the Salem News, Hartigan said, “PEM is committed to telling the story of these events through exhibitions, lectures, and public programs as well as by making reproductions of the Salem Witch Trial documents available to the public on our website.” Driscoll summed it up about the documents, “These things belong to the people. I think it’s the right place for them to go.”

These 1692 witchcraft trials documents are now at the Massachusetts Judicial Archives located in the Massachusetts Archives building at Columbia Point in Boston. They are not the only original records from the witchcraft trials. More are in the Massachusetts Archives, as well as the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Public Library, and a few at various historical societies and libraries.

This post is a part of a more detailed presentation on the history of all the witchcraft manuscripts, to be presented at History Camp Boston 2023, on August 12, 2023, at the Suffolk Law School in Boston.

Many thanks to the numerous people who kindly answered my questions and made connections for me during my research: Dan Lipcan and Jennifer Hornsby (Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum), Michael Comeau (Massachusetts State Archives), Donna Segar and Emerson Baker (Salem State University), Marilynne K. Roach, and Robin Mason, who sent me down this path.

See also:

Salem witch trials documents return to SJC

Why go to Rowley? Salem’s PEM research library of course

A tribute to the Essex Institute—and Mary English’s chair

Teaching the everyday & the extraordinary: Salem in 1692

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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ergot fungus on rye

A Q&A with Margo Burns, associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt and expert featured on the Who Do You Think You Are? TV series.

WitchesMassBay: What is the premise behind the idea that ergot caused the Salem witch hunts?

Margo Burns: The initial proposition of this idea came from an observation that the symptoms of the accusing girls in Salem Village appeared to resemble the physical and hallucinogenic symptoms of convulsive ergotism. Ergot is a toxic fungus that can grow on rye grain used to make bread in the 17th century, and it has a chemical similarity to LSD, a known hallucinogen. The connection does not explain why the adults in the community—parents, clergy, judges—interpreted such reported symptoms as being caused by bewitchment.

WitchesMassBay: Some notable people, including accused witch John Proctor, believed the core group of afflicted accusers were lying and pretending their illnesses. In 1692, would people have had an understanding that ergot (or contaminated food) caused hallucinations and physical reactions?

Margo Burns: Doctors and “chirurgeons” were often called for help when someone fell ill mysteriously, and ministers were often asked to come pray for the patients to recover with the help of God. A popular witch-finding guide of the period by Richard Bernard gives a list of examples of how doctors were able to diagnose what may have appeared to be bewitchment instead of known physical ailments, including one case that was as simple as the patient having worms, and who got better after “voiding” them. Blood-letting, laxatives, emetics, and diuretics were common treatments as a result of their understanding of how the four “humours” worked in the body. Some of their cures were actually right on the money. They knew about the dangers of spoiled food and many other things, which, frankly, were more common then than now.

WitchesMassBay: Today, the debate on ergot continues, with scientists and witch-hunt historians on both sides. Why is this such a popular theory?

Margo Burns: It is not technically a theory, but a hypothesis, a guess. It would be a theory if there were solid evidence to support it, but it is circumstantial at best. Both historians and medical professionals have found that the evidence offered contains cherry-picked data and ignores known exculpatory evidence. There doesn’t seem to be a debate about that, even though it is often portrayed as such in the popular media, because who doesn’t like experts disagreeing? Except that they don’t. If there’s debate, it is more like debating whether the moon landing was real or not: There will always be someone who believes it was faked, no matter what is presented to them as evidence.  Also, many people who hold this explanation as valid often do so because it positions the people of the 17th century as ignorant and superstitious while we in the 21st century are superior in our scientific understanding. Single-bullet solutions for complicated events are also reassuring, especially if it feels like a secret has been revealed, and we’re in on it.

Ergot as the toxic culprit behind the accusers’ symptoms was not necessarily what engaged people about this idea in the mid-1970s when first posited: It was that ergot was chemically and symptomatically similar to LSD.

WitchesMassBay: Any other theories you would like to debunk?

Margo Burns: It is not really about debunking as it is understanding that every critical approach to historical material is actually a filter through which the facts are perceived—some coming into focus and others blurring into the background, depending on the person’s interests and world-view, often with some creative embellishment to complete a popular trope of the time period.

Charles Wentworth Upham, an antiquarian from Salem writing during the mid-18th century, portrayed Tituba, known to be a slave from Barbados, as a Civil War-era stereotype of a voodoo-practicing Black African Mammy from the South, even though Tituba was consistently described in the primary sources as being an Indian. From this, he fabricated the story that the accusing girls had been learning magic from her and went dancing in the woods—none of which is in any of the primary sources—to explain the girls’ behavior. Because this story is vivid and shocking, it comes across as plausible and is generally accepted as true, even now and even though it is not supported by any primary sources.

Arthur Miller repeated the story about the girls dancing in the woods in his play, The Crucible, in the 1950s. Miller was swept up personally in Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities, and the story of public trials based on false accusations condemning innocent people in Salem resonated for him. The Crucible is an extremely popular play, and his craftsmanship so superb that audiences start believing that the story and characters are based more closely on the real events and people than they are. His use of names of real people for his characters further blurs the line. The play is so compelling, in fact, that over the years in discussing the origins of his play, Miller himself began to believe that some of the fictive things he wrote were in the primary sources he had read, even though he hadn’t.

Margo Burns was project manager for Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, the most complete compendium of the trial documents.

Margo recorded two lectures on ergot—and both of them are different:

Ergot – What a long strange trip it has been -The Moldy Bread Myth by Margo Burns (Witch House, 2018)

The Salem Witchcraft Trials and Ergot, the “Moldy Bread” Hypothesis by Margo Burns (History Camp 2018)