Transcript for:
Salem Witch Trials Overview

so this lecture here is on the salem witch trials uh so this lecture is going to be a little bit longer specifically because uh as a historian and and doing my own research uh the salem witch trials is a topic which i have studied and in fact i wrote my master's thesis uh concerning the witch trials so this is definitely something that i have a thorough understanding of and i like to share with my students because i feel that most people even though they think they know what happened with the witch trials they actually uh don't so hopefully this will be able to uh really shed some light on an experience from american history that a lot of people are definitely intrigued by but perhaps don't quite know what actually happened uh so of course we're gonna go through um you have to understand the puritans first in order to understand what happened with salem and we've talked a little bit about the puritans so some of this should be a recap uh we're also going to go over what were some of the problems in salem how salem was really kind of set up for some sort of crisis to happen and then of course like i said we're going to go through the fact versus the fiction there are some things that people think they know but then they don't uh and then of course we're going to go through just really a chronology of how things started where the trials went uh and then we're going to go into more of the explanations uh this is you know the sandwich trials are something that a lot of people don't uh really understand why they happen so historians have been struggling over the centuries to try and figure out uh why they actually occurred so we're going to delve into some of those hypotheses so for our first slide here in order to understand what happened at salem you have to understand the puritans uh so of course we've been talking about the puritans a little bit so some of this information might be recapping but some of this information is also going to be new uh so first off just a reminder uh the religious beliefs is that um they puritans were uh either congregationalists or separatists from the anglican church basically they thought the anglican church needed to be cleansed it needed to be purified uh the congregationalists wanted to stay with the anglican church and fix it from within whereas the separatists wanted to break away from the ancient church and make their own church so the the specifically the puritans that lived in salem were separatists they were the ones that believed that they needed to create their own faith create their own utopia away from the anglican church they were inspired by calvinism by the ideas of john calvin uh but they also had a strong work ethic uh the idea of predestination again that god had chosen who would be saved and who would not be uh and then they also had strict morality with intense piety really this intense piety of this this intense religious attitude is what's going to be a key factor in the witch trials in salem religion is everywhere religion is a part of every moment of every day and so also some people in salem are not as devoted to their religion and so this is going to be seen as a problem by some and this is definitely something that we're going to discuss now a central aspect of puritan theology which directly comes into play with salem is the reality of the devil uh not only is satan very real but he is in their mind he is present in in everything he's basically lying in weight to to catch you to harm you uh now this isla idea is also intensified with life on the frontier uh the puritans at this time were on the edges of civilization but they're also on the edges of the christian world so many other religions see native american people as people to be converted however a lot of puritans especially the more intense individuals like those living at salem uh they did not feel this way about native americans in fact they viewed them as followers of satan uh they are wicked and evil they they don't realize that they're following satan but they are and so because of that the the threat of satan is very present and very near being in this you know foreign land this place where the devil is kind of allowed to reign in fact a quote by a puritan minister by the name of cotton mather and you'll hear his name again this was uh preaching just before the time of the salem witch trials this quote was given in 1689 so three years before the trials at salem this is what cotton mather has to say he says go tell mankind that there are devils and witches and that though those night birds least appear where the daylight of the gospel comes yet new england has had examples of their existence and operation and that not only the wigwams of the indians where pagan powwows often raise their masters in the shapes of bears and snakes and fires but the house of christians where our god has had his constant worship have undergone the annoyance of evil spirits go tell the world what prayers can do beyond all devils and witches and what it is those monsters love to do so basically what he's saying here is we have to tell people you know we here in new england the devil is real his followers um and their evil practices of the native americans can be found uh but also that the that evil can be found here within you know the puritan community within the christian community so this is a big deal a big problem for them uh also the idea of witches was very very real for puritan people uh so in uh puritan theology and this uh also combines with some of course anglican catholic theology uh basically witches were evil people who had pledged their souls to satan uh usually it's through um signing their name in a book uh perhaps even at uh you know a bonfire where there is dancing frolicking um nudity and other you know certain acts to uh confirm their their connection to the devil and specifically these witches seek to destroy the righteous using satan's power so witches were in in this theology it was it was believed that witches thought that they had gained magical powers but this was all just a trick of the devil he was the one doing everything uh but making the witches think that he had given them magic and so because of this witches were tried as heretics for denying god as well as true religion of christianity whether it was you know a protestant faith or a catholic faith uh and so in order to determine who was a witch uh or who were witches the most common uh actual manual if you will for hunting them down uh was a book called malleus malafikaram which translates to the hammer of the witches it was basically a how-to handbook written by a catholic clergyman by the name of heinrich kramer and it was basically uh you know how to hunt them how to figure out who is the witch how to try them in a court of law and how to properly execute them i was you know start to finish how to witch hunting manual uh by the time salem was around of course this book had been used for quite a while and they had already kind of established a legal code a standard operating procedure for prosecuting witches and it was based on not only of course latest religious ideas but also the latest scientific knowledge which sounds a little bit ridiculous uh but we're gonna get into that in in a minute here uh but there's this is something that has long been established it's not a new concept by the time the puritans are in the colonies so here's what's going down in salem here's what the problem is a little bit of background about the uh the the town of salem itself it was started out as a small fishing settlement established in 1626 it was founded by a fisherman by the name of roger conant conant was very displeased with the strong puritan rule in the plymouth colony so he took a small group of people with him to settle in what is now salem massachusetts he actually named the city gnome keg after the native american people that lived there but once the massachusetts bay colony arrived conant was replaced by an appointed governor and the city of salem was officially cor incorporated into the massachusetts bay colony charter and the city was renamed salem it's based on the hebrew word shalom which means peace so salem was basically forced to incorporate into winthrop's colony so going actually there's a map on the next page to kind of give you an idea of where things are let me go ahead and pull up a pen here so according to this map you can see plymouth is right here this is where the plymouth colony was and they were 1620 and then salem is all the way up here but when winthrop comes he establishes pop excuse me establishes boston uh right here so salem and this whole area is incorporated into the massachusetts bay charter and of course you can see that over time it gets a lot larger and so there's definitely a huge boundary here but that's where the locations are to give you just a spatial layout of where things are so going back to our previous slide here so with winthrop leading the great migration that we talked about uh in the previous lecture many more puritans come of course to the massachusetts bay colony and to salem specifically it was a major fishing city it was a very important port in the region uh so there's definitely a lot of people that are coming into the area but not all of these people are very strict staunch puritans some of them are just coming for the money for the wealth that the fishing provides so there's definitely a more secularized portion of the town uh as opposed to some of the puritan population which actually increases in their piety as kind of a contrast to the increase in more secular society so so as the city grows up there there continues to become an increase in a separation between what historians have dubbed salem town versus salem village uh basically two regions of salem itself uh salem town is of the more commercialized it's right on the water it's where the port is uh therefore it's the more wealthy people of society live there uh and generally less religious members of the community whereas salem village uh was more inland a little bit it's where the poor farmers were living uh they were outside the main you know the city center uh and so they were also tended to be more religious and more devout in their religion in general uh and so this this social division uh really kind of created a divisive mentality between the people who lived in salem town versus the people who lived in salem village so that's going to be one issue and i'll explain how that comes into play another problem was with the creation of the dominion of new england if you remember that from the previous lecture basically the massachusetts charter was revoked people could no longer appoint their own governmental representatives they were given higher taxes uh and various issues that that angered them and and specifically a lot of them felt like this was god testing them you know we have the the crown is anglican and they're they're pr pressuring us they're testing us this is you know another issue that we have to deal with uh so that's going to be one big problem and and even though it was resolved before the witch trials started it's still the the effects of it were still strongly strongly being felt by the people of salem uh also as was discussed in last week's lecture there was a strong increase in native american warfare and conflicts with native american people it was almost constant skirmishes and battles along the frontier native americans were constantly raiding settlements people were dying getting uh kidnapped and the people in and specifically during the salem witch trials were in the middle of what would be known as king williams war it's not a war that we discussed uh but it was basically just a series of skirmishes from 1688 to 1697. so the salem witch trials happened smack dab in the middle of those events so that's also going to be important as we will discuss and then of course the last really main issue plaguing the people of salem and this is very specific to salem itself was uh the newly appointed minister by the name of samuel paris in fact if you see that that picture to the side there is actually the only known depiction of an individual involved in the salem witch trials it is a small portrait of paris that was painted and kept inside of a locket uh so it's definitely very interesting because we don't know what anyone else involved in salem looked like except for samuel paris but it's also interesting because um as you will go through and see a lot of people do not have a positive perspective of samuel paris he's kind of viewed as a very negative individual involved in all of this and so it's definitely very interesting to think that someone obviously cared about him enough to have a portrait painted of him and to keep it in a necklace so you know it goes to show that people have different sides that history doesn't tell about them sometimes now paris or specifically salem as a city or as a town had a history of disliking and replacing their ministers so paris was a recent arrival to salem he was disliked by about half of the church population uh and the division seemed to really follow the salem town versus salem village divide in general the people of the town disliked him he was very strong on you know we need to be more religious wealth is bad uh we have to you know turn back to god uh whereas the village did like him because he was you know more of preaching to a message that they identified with of you know we are the poor and he seems to agree with kind of our perspective on things uh but he was so disliked that there was even talk of having him replaced so this is you know there's of course a lot of issues going on uh in massachusetts in uh but specifically in the community of salem itself that really primes it for the conflicts that would come so of course there's our map again but going into the salem narrative here uh i've got a little quiz that i've got put up here so if you just kind of on on your own as yourself if you want to maybe write down the answers to this but this is basically a true false quiz so as i go through and read just kind of decide whether you think each statement you see is true or false so statement number one the accusers were a quote small circle of girls in their early teen years number two the strange fit started after this circle of girls watched or learned magic from tituba magic in quotations as in voodoo uh ritualistic practices uh now number three tituba was an african or black slave number four mass hysteria broke out after the first accusation number five those executed were burned at the stake number six all of those that were accused and killed were women number seven hundreds of people were executed and the last one number eight this was the only instance of which accusations and deaths in the american colonies so if you've got your true false list altogether here i'm going to go ahead and reveal the answers it's actually going to be pretty easy because every single statement you see here is false i basically i like to do this when i teach uh the salem witch trials because these are facts that people think they know about the salem witch trials these are facts that are taught about the salem witch trials in classes and in courses i have had classes that have taught this information as truth but these things are not true as we will see as we go through the narrative so i just want to do uh just a bunch of myth busting right off the bat so now that we know that this is all fake let's get into what is actually real with salem so everything starts uh really in january on january 20th of 1692 uh the records indicate that betty parris uh who was nine years old and the daughter of reverend samuel paris who we talked about earlier and his niece abigail williams who is about 11 years old began to suffer from some mysterious fits they're they're hard to explain exactly what they were but their bodies would contort into odd positions they would sit catatonic for hours in these painful uncomfortable positions they also had a very difficult time listening to sermons listening to scripture and hearing the name of god specifically after a month of suffering from these strange fits paris finally decided to call a doctor so this is interesting because number one he let this go on for a month but then number two he thought that the cause was medical he did not initially think that there was anything supernatural about this in fact when the doctor examines the girls he is the one that cannot find anything wrong with them medically he sees nothing that would explain their behavior so it's the doctor that determines the girls are bewitched so that's of course a very interesting part of the narrative that it was a doctor who said they were bewitched as opposed to the reverend now in general the ideas of a witch were that they had to be in close proximity to the person they were bewitching they had to be close by to make sure that their curses were actually working so it was decided that someone in the town of salem had to be the witch so after being pressured to identify who the witches were uh the girls uh betty betty and abigail named three women tituba who was uh the paris slave uh and she was actually from barbados and was actually of indian descent native american descent so uh she was not african-american uh as we will see or of african descent uh and sarah goode was another accused and she was a very poor impoverished woman who actually went around town begging for money and the third was sarah osborne she was an elderly outspoken woman who did not regularly attend church so all of these women follow a typical pattern for which accusations that you see throughout europe and through colonial north america as well so they were social outcasts and they were generally disliked by the community so if anyone's going to be a witch it's obviously going to be one of these three people uh so one one thing that's interesting is that for most which trials that happened in the colonial era an accusation would be made it would be investigated one person would either be executed or would be found innocent and that would be the end of it uh in there are instances in connecticut in um other regions of colonial america where where people were accused and tried of witchcraft like i said some were found guilty some were found innocent but definitely salem was the largest scale witch hunt and trial in colonial america so so at the start it looks like this might be like any other witch trial that has happened in the colonies before but something happens that makes salem different uh so first off sarah osborne uh actually in in the questioning of course these three women are gathered together in question sarah osborne denies that she or any of the other women are witches you know this is ridiculous let's go home uh sarah goode however says that she is not a witch she is innocent but she knows that sarah osborne is a witch so i i know it's not me but i know it's that other girl that or that other woman that was accused uh the real problem comes when tituba admits to witchcraft now not only did she say that both osborn and good were witches as well but there was a coven of nine other witches in salem so first question is why would she say this if this was not true this is one question that really makes historians question because it was tatuma's confession that launched a larger scale investigation that hadn't really happened before so first is the questioning was very intense uh it was much very similar to the the spanish inquisitions it was very ag not agonizing but very intensive so perhaps she admitted to just stop the questioning to stop you know people from pressuring her uh in fact a farmer who lived just outside of boston a man by the name of robert calif actually wrote an account and he said that paris beat her until she would confess unfortunately no other records have substantiated that that doesn't mean it's not true but it's it's in only one record um also another option is that she she wanted to scare the court uh you have to think that she was a person who had no freedom no power no liberty and so she wanted to do something to get back at the people who were keeping her captive uh and been treating her so terribly you know if you want a witch trial i'll show you which trial there's an entire conspiracy and we saw satan and we danced with him in the woods uh this is i'm scaring you with your worst fear uh it was just something that she wanted to do to get back at them uh that's definitely a possibility um it could also be that she um she was from barbados she was a native american woman and so she had what were you know called pagan practices or what we would call homeopathic practices today uh and she was under the impression that that was witchcraft that oh oh no that that is witchcraft i didn't realize that i'm so sorry but then of course that brings into question why did she admit that there was a man dressed in black why did she admit that she had signed a book uh because that's not homeopathic practices so um tituba's confession is definitely one of the things that makes people question um why she actually did that but the most important part about her confession is that it it clearly indicates that there is a massive conspiracy in salem uh so that's that's a huge reason why the trials continue instead of being so small but another reason why the trials don't end after the first accusation is because more people in the community start to have these strange fits uh this actually included a 12 year old girl by the name of ann putnam now ann putnam actually becomes uh the main accuser of that stereotypical circle of girls that we think of uh but um she she definitely was by far one of the most common accusers uh but of course there were some older girls in their in their teens and even some adult women anne's mother for example she was in her 30s and she started to have these strange fits another individual was actually a man tituba's husband known by the name john indian he began to have strange fits and he started to accuse people and then there were people who did not suffer from the fits who did accuse as well so it really starts to spread into kind of confirming this idea that it's a larger conspiracy now because witchcraft was a capital offense it had to be tried in the highest court of the massachusetts bay colony unfortunately at this point in time the court had actually adjourned and so they were not able to hear any of the witch trial cases so the cases are rapidly increasing there's a large number of them so to deal with this kind of you know miniature crisis that is slowly building uh before it before it's even reached a crisis just really to deal with the rapid number of cases the governor a man by the name of william phipps uh decides to set up a special court called the court of oyer and terminer if you're going with the traditional latin it would be pronounced oye each terminae but we're going to go with the english version here he sets up that court on may 27th in 1692 to hear specifically the cases of salem oye is of course latin for to hear and determine uh so this this courts was to hear and determine if there were witches in salem uh so what we see here though is that it was five months since the fits occurred in the paris household to the time that the official court is even set up they haven't even tried any cases yet so this does not fit the idea that it was mass hysteria once which tri or once the word which was thrown around everybody started freaking out it took some time before things really kind of got underway and again that's something that we're going to talk about now a minister who was a professional demonologist was actually called in to help advise the council advise the members of the court and his name was cotton mather he was the individual who wrote the quote that i read earlier but he had also worked on several witch trial cases prior to this and he had even helped uh get a woman who was accused uh actually acquitted her she he proved that she was innocent uh so cotton mather is often depicted as kind of a witch-crazy you know hunter of sorts but he was more of a scholar than a witch hunter and he had worked to prove that some women were innocent another magistrate that is brought in to hear the cases is a man by the name of john hathorne he is actually the ancestor of a very famous author named nathaniel hawthorne nathaniel hawthorne wrote the scarlet letter the house of seven gables a very very amazing american uh author uh but historians at one point it was believed that john hawthorne was you know the the head of the court he was very vicious and very uh intense but he was actually one of many judges that they had uh and he was actually not as involved they think that just because his grandson became famous people decided to place john himself on a more prominent role than he had actually been uh but we'll discuss who was the real hanging judge uh later on in this lecture so moving on to the trials themselves first off when you think of a witch trial this is really one of the greatest scenes from cinema it's from a movie called monty python and the holy grail and their version of a witch trial is pretty much like this you have this woman that is brought forth as a witch and of course the the individual says what makes you think she's a witch this man in the back here claims that she had turned him into a newt and of course everyone goes undue what the heck and then he goes well i got better and then after that of course they they make some other ridiculous accusations the woman is deemed guilty and she is burned uh but this is not what which trials were like they were very methodical they were based on like i said the latest religious and scientific information of the time of course this is nowhere near as advanced as today's modern standards in fact witchcraft isn't even a crime uh but it was definitely not as ridiculous or obnoxious they wanted to make sure that they were actually executing the right people they didn't want to kill innocent good puritans uh now in order to be convicted of witchcraft there were certain types of evidences that had to be used so uh the general evidences that were pretty common in most witch trials both with salem and throughout the colonies and even in europe with the the witch trial craze that we talked about uh there had to be witnesses at least two witnesses someone to either witness the bewitchmen the actual cursing or perhaps witnessed a specter a specter was like a spiritual projection of the witch and and it looked like the individual who was cursing them so you had to have witnesses who had seen the bewitchment happen or who had seen a specter they also looked for signs of what was called a witch's mark or which is teat uh basically a large mole uh uh uh wart uh somewhere on your body uh was the idea that um witches had familiars which are basically creatures like this is where the the idea of a black cat comes from a black cat was very common uh familiar basically their servants servants of satan creatures of satan uh that had to feed off of the witch and so they would suckle on the witch's mark uh and so the woman or even the man would be strip searched and they would look for that which is mark uh also if you confess if you said yes i am a witch i have been practicing i signed the devil's book that was considered pretty darn good evidence because people they expect truth they think that if you're accused of witchcraft and you say you did it then that means you're not lying um definitely we'll talk about the motivations of truth and lying but you know a confession was considered ironclad evidence that you were a witch um also poppets were very common one uh basically we call them voodoo dolls today but puppets were dolls that were meant to help curse people prick them with pins and hopefully hurt the individual also the touch test was a very popular one if a person was suffering from some sort of bewitchment if they would touch the witch that was supposedly afflicting them the evilness and wickedness would kind of get sucked out of them and returned to the witch and the individual would supposedly recover so those were all general evidences that were used uh all of these were definitely used in salem but these were general witch trial evidences but some of the unique evidence that was used in salem was definitely a lot stranger one of the big things that happened is that people of course you have the strange fits and the bewitchment which was on a much larger scale than you had seen it in other places uh but also that these contortions and these um writhings you have young girls that are doing this yet strong men are trying to hold them down and stop them and they can't do it they can't keep these girls down so you know you've got an 11 year old girl who's writhing and screaming and an adult male can't stop her from doing that that makes him think that it's something more than just a strange illness these girls also a lot of the bewitched and afflicted had bruises they had scratch marks in places that doctors had deemed that they couldn't have done it to themselves they couldn't reach that spot they couldn't get to it and make it themselves uh also uh people were coughing up pins uh one that was one thing that was recorded actually a couple of times and that's where the the poppet theory comes into place is you know if someone has pricked me with a pin then it supposedly you know magically appears out of my mouth um there was uh also one woman who actually in the middle of the court had her hands magically tied behind her back while she was writhing in pain on the ground uh so again that's you know that that couldn't have happened she couldn't have tied her own hands uh so definitely some things that make people question what's going on but definitely today can indicate fraud as we will discuss later on now an important note to make is also that uh there were afflicted and accusers afflicted were the people that were bewitched the ones that were writhing on the ground the ones that were being poked pinched bruised scratched but there were also accusers people who had seen things people who had witnessed strange occurrences who had seen familiars or seen specters and so they weren't always the ones that were afflicted uh they were not always the ones that were writhing on the ground uh and it was puritans and non-puritans alike in fact there were some quakers who came forward and accused individuals of witchcraft uh in fact most of the accusers were just witnesses and not actually afflicted bewitched people uh so this idea that it was you know this circle of teenage girls that was going around wreaking havoc was actually an incorrect interpretation most of the accusations came from full-grown adults and so that's why that myth is is so um it's very common but it's definitely inaccurate so getting into the details of the trials themselves uh the court of oyer interminer first uh came decided to go with the case of a woman by the name of bridget bishop uh simply because they had the most evidence against her in fact she had actually been accused of witchcraft several years before and specifically two witnesses had seen a poppet in her house so there was even even though they didn't have the poppet there were two witnesses that had evidence of a physical nature so she had a very strong case against her and she was found guilty and on june 10th in 1692 she was executed for witchcraft uh now the punishment normally as we saw especially in europe was actually burning uh burning of a witch as a heretic however this practice fell out of favor because of the torment that it created for the individual it was it was just viewed as too violent too vicious uh so all of the convicted witches in salem were executed by hanging now this is not as merciless as it sounds uh in fact during this time hangings were not dropping a person from a very high gallows to break their neck and kill them instantly in fact the main form of hanging uh which was used particularly in salem was a strategy called turned off the ladder or turned off the wagon a person would be carried up a ladder uh or perhaps uh sitting in the back or standing in the back of a wagon and then they would have a bag placed over their head a noose tied around their neck and then they would either be turned off the side of the ladder or the wagon would be pulled forward out from under their feet and they would hang until dead this was strangulation not neck breaking whether it was from the ladder or the wagon in fact it could take up to 20 minutes for a person to die in this manner so it was still quite an unpleasant sight to see now after bishop's death everything comes to an abrupt halt there's definitely a realization and a recognition of what's going on here you know this is real do we really want to continue with this in fact one of the judges who was opposed to the trials or opposed to bridget's conviction actually stepped down from the court he did not want any part to do with it so unfortunately however the fits start again the accusations start again and the trials resume so the image that you actually see to the bottom right there is actually the original site of the hangings uh it was lost for a while from the historical record but it was rediscovered in 2017 uh and then the image that you see above that on the top right is actually a recreation of the town hall where many of the rich trials would have actually taken place so it's definitely not as you know grand as we sometimes envision it was just a small little courtroom and the site was just a a simple wooded area uh now uh over the course of the next couple of months uh 200 people are going to be accused of witchcraft and 79 of those individuals are actually going to make it to the courts so there were a lot of cases that there just wasn't deemed enough evidence and so they were thrown out the oldest individual accused was 81 years old and the youngest individual was a four-year-old girl the four-year-old girl was actually the daughter of sarah good and her name was dorothy it was actually believed that witchcraft traveled through families mothers taught it to their daughters and so on so after good was accused it only made sense that her daughter would be a witch as well now her mother had been executed uh shortly after the birth of her her child but unfortunately i was a different child from from dorothy but her her baby actually passed away because of the conditions of the jail they were obviously they were horrible uh the pregnancy and the last end of it was very rough because she was in prison so the newborn baby passed away dorothy had seen the suffering of her mother and the the death of her baby sister and she had a very hard time in the jail in fact she was so young and so little that her hands kept slipping out of the iron cuffs so they had to make special cuffs to hold her hands in the jail because you had to be shackled the entire time you're in prison so the her time the jail was actually so rough and so intense she was not executed but she was actually kept in jail for quite a while after the trials had ended because you had to pay for your food your bedding uh even your irons you had to pay the cost of your iron so before her father could raise the funds to get her out of jail she actually stayed in there for quite a while but she basically went insane because of what happened to her during you know being in the jail so she her life even though she was not killed her life would never be the same so as the trials continue there are also going to be two major changes the main change uh first is who is being accused uh the first individuals that were accused were as i said they they were the outcasts they were the typical suspects uh tituba sarah good sarah osborne you know the the rejects of society the the weirdos if you will however as the trials progress people who are not typical subjects are going to be accused an excellent example of this is an elderly woman by the name of rebecca nurse she was known as being an extremely religious member of community she had had many children and she was a good long-standing puritan individual she was well liked and actually she got a petition with 39 people who had signed it saying that they believed that she was innocent now of course she was tried and when the verdict was initially read she was found not guilty however the girls who had accused her starting to have fits in the middle of the courtroom they claimed that her spirit was still torturing them the judge encouraged the jury to reconvene specifically he wanted to readdress some of the questions that she had not clearly answered so when they did ask nurse these questions again she just did not answer she was very hard of hearing and could not hear them talking to her because it was actually very loud in the courtroom the girls were allowed to you know ride around on the ground allowed to scream and shriek throughout the trials without repercussion so she couldn't hear the questions that were being asked to her she was eventually found guilty despite the initial verdict of innocence and would eventually be executed another atypical suspect was a man named george burrows burroughs was actually one of the former reverends of salem uh he had left to go to maine but was actually arrested after he one of the girls in salem accused him he was found guilty and determined not only to be a witch but to be the leader of salem's coven he was the one that had you know started it all that was trying to get everyone uh to join satan's side another one of these interesting individuals was a man by the name of giles corey he was brought in for questioning but he refused to say anything he figured that that would be the best method to avoid conviction so an old medieval technique of pressing was used to try and get him to cooperate the image that you see on the bottom left there is the pressing basically your body is placed between two boards and then you have very heavy rocks boulders and weights placed on the top panel and theoretically the idea was to you know gradually over time you add more weight to to press the answer out of the individual you can you know eventually they would be because torture was viewed as a way to get the truth people don't lie under torture that was the thought so they thought that they could get him to answer truthfully in fact corey who was 80 years old actually lasted for three days as he was pressed and pressed and pressed and supposedly his last words were to look up at the sheriff and ask for more weight uh before his lungs were completely crushed and he suffocated so he is one of the deaths that was not a result of hanging but definitely still a victim so people who definitely would not have normally been accused were accused in salem and that's point number one point number two is how people are punished there are new trends in punishment uh in in general in europe and in other witch trial cases in the colonies if you admitted to witchcraft you would be executed you admitted your guilt the evidence was obvious uh you would be killed because this is a capital offense however in salem if people admitted they were guilty and gave the names of other witches they were not executed this was a completely different system that had than others that had been used in other witch trials in fact all of those who were executed maintained their innocence until their death so people who did not admit to it were the ones that were killed whereas those that did admit to it were allowed to live this is definitely a huge shift in how a typical witch trial worked so moving on to really the the wind down in the end of the trials here uh they continued until september 22nd in 1692 and this is where the largest group of individuals were executed it was eight people in total uh the names that you see there are in uh chronological order of their death so starting with bridget bishop and making our way down to nurse uh and going down the list this way here so governor phipps had actually been gone during a lot of what was going on with the witch trials he was in england trying to fix the charter get some issues resolved and when he came back in september he saw just how far the situation had gone in fact people started to accuse his wife of witchcraft so he decides to immediately disband the court of oyer and terminer he actually saw the conditions of the jail and how terrible they were and ordered that all individuals be allowed to go home they were still under investigation but they didn't have to stay in the jail which was usually the law for people that had committed witchcraft increase mather who was actually cotton mather's father spoke out against spectral evidence he said that it wasn't reliable it wasn't legitimate and he even wrote how it was better to let 10 witches go free than to let one innocent person die in fact one of the victims a woman by the name of mary eastie who is actually the sister of rebecca nurse if you remember which which uh craft usually travels through families so when rebecca was accused so were her sisters mary actually wrote a letter to the court before her execution she did not beg for her own life but for the life of those who were still on trial just begging for them to have mercy and to let them go her words struck a chord with many individuals and since really since the beginning of the trials this is also something that a lot of people don't realize is they think that you know everybody was drinking the kool-aid everyone was caught up in the hysteria but really since the beginning of the trials people had been speaking out against them uh one of them was a man by the name of john proctor of course he's very famous in the crucible uh but he was a 60 year old farmer who of course never had any sexual relations with abigail williams that is a completely made-up story that did not occur uh but he spoke out against the trials and eventually was accused himself um but there were other people that signed petitions like i mentioned rebecca nurse had 39 people sign a petition for her innocence elizabeth and john proctor had a petition with 20 people uh other people gathered together and wrote petitions and a group of ministers from boston spoke out against the trials so from the beginning people did not like them uh but one of the main problems was a man named william stouten if anyone would be called the hanging judge it should be stouten stoughton was the deputy governor and had been left in charge when phipps went to england uh so stoughton was under the impression that there was a massive witch conspiracy and he needed to root it out it was his mission from god to end the witchcraft in salem when phipps returns uh and the courts like i said the court is shut down but over time it is set back up again a new court is established with new judges uh and in fact spectral evidence is no longer allowed in this new court so because of the loss of spectral evidence most individuals are found innocent some people still are convicted but the governor actually takes a look at the cases and pardons all the individuals and in fact stoughton was so angry when he heard about phipps uh pardoning them that he stormed out of the courtroom so he was definitely an individual that wanted to try and keep these trials going but by april of 1693 the last of the accused individuals was set free the last person to be freed would from jail was none other than to tuba who was the first person arrested uh she had been purchased by a wealthy bostonian and left salem and actually falls out of the historical record we aren't sure what happens to her but it was basically just over a year following the you know the initial fits all the way back in january of 1692 uh but things end of course in the spring of 1693 uh and everything is is over of course things quiet down uh but it it definitely challenges this idea that you know it was necessary it was crazy people were running around accusing stuff because this was this was over a year that this event was occurring uh and especially with those of us that are you know living through the the covid 19 crisis right now we've only been in quarantine for a couple of months and it's gone on for so long and it seems like it will never end so going through an event that is traumatic that is difficult takes a lot of time when you're going through it it's not the mass hysteria that people believe it to be it's definitely different when you're living through it now the reverend samuel paris actually leaves salem shortly after the end of the trials basically he just he couldn't stay there was too much bad blood and he had to leave he was replaced by a reverend by the name of john green who actually made it his priority to heal the community to bring everyone back together it was not long before those people who had been on you know supporting the witch trials actually realized that some some wrongs had occurred and of course the people that had hated them from the beginning were basically saying we told you so in fact anne putnam actually gave a public apology in church saying that the devil had tricked her into accusing innocent people uh so it's important to note that people did not lose their beliefs uh they did not you know they did not deny that devils or or that the devil and that witches existed but they realized that people in the community were innocent and it was actually pretty early on that uh peoples uh were starting to be their names were starting to be cleared for the crime of witchcraft but interestingly enough the last individual would not be cleared until 2002 i believe so it was quite a while before all the names were cleared but another judge a man by the name of samuel sewell uh was actually also initiated a public apology for his role in the trials so at the end of it all people realize mistakes were made they realized that uh it wasn't quite the situation that they thought it was uh and the individuals like i said the individuals you see listed above are those that were killed uh 19 people were hanged one person was pressed to death and five people died in prison uh just another interesting point part of the reason why i am so interested in the salem witch trials is actually because i'm a descendant of three women that were executed and killed uh specifically uh rebecca nurse uh margaret scott and ann poudader uh the names that you see there were actually my ancestors so again i encourage you to look into your family history see what you can pull out because there are always some interesting things that you will find so the last portion of this lecture is going to be talking about the explanations what caused this to happen why did it explode in the way that it did of course we did see in the beginning that there were a lot of tensions in the community of salem but but what caused these tensions to explode in the form of a witch trial so here are a lot of historians and their ideas and and theses as to why these things happen so first off is that it was fraud it was a lie it was fake it was a conspiracy in fact one of the girls even admitted in court that they did quote but dissemble which means pretend we were messing around uh but when she admitted that she was shortly accused and then she changed her mind and said oh john proctor made me lie he's a witch uh so you know you have one of the girls even admitting and saying yeah we were lying we were making it up there is this idea that people did it to get land from other people that is a misconception really people did have to sell their land and personal property if they were accused of witchcraft simply to pay their debts for jail like i said if you were in jail you basically had to pay rent you had to pay for your jail space you had to pay for your food your bedding your shackles uh and there's not a lot of actual coins sitting around people don't have paper money but they have property they have land they have furniture so in order to pay their jail debts they sell you know their personal belongings to the government so that they can pay off those debts so that's why when you look at the record it looks like people had their land taken uh but that was not the case uh also uh we do get a sense that there was a conspiracy uh specifically with like you know for example the woman that had her hands tied or the girls that puked up pins uh that's not something that happens without planning it without trying to make sure to you are getting someone convicted for something uh another explanation and this is one that has really taken popularity in in the last uh couple of decades is psychological um of course uh the the um ptsd is a very common one and we'll actually talk about that when we talk about king williams war and indian conflict so keep that on the back burner for now but ptsd or post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychological condition uh but hysteria hysteria is um it was used a lot in you know the 19 eight excuse me late 1800s early 1900s and even up until the 1940s and 50s uh it was a general um condition that women experienced it's not so much a condition now uh as uh as much as you know some of the other things we're gonna talk about but basically that there was a reaction to stress uh specifically that uh these young girls were upset with their surroundings and so they were behaving in a hysterical manner but as i said hysteria is really um it's not even a condition in the dsm in the um basically the psychologist's manual of illnesses um it's hysteria isn't really a thing that most people consider anymore but one psychological disorder is a is a illness called conversion disorder and this is intricately linked to stress basically people are experiencing such intense psychological stress caused by various factors uh that their their mental anguish kind of converts itself into physical uh illness physical manifestations uh and this this version or this illness called conversion disorder can actually be epidemic it can spread from person to person in fact in 2012 there was a case of a high school in new york where um it started with uh the cheerleaders in the school they started to have these strange fits they started to uh contort and to scream and a very similar fashion to these young girls in salem and it started with the cheerleaders but then it spread to other students and even teachers it got to the point where if us if a person heard a fit or something going on in the hallway the teachers would run up and close the door so that it wouldn't start in their own classroom and they believe that it was this conversion disorder this manifestation of stress in a physical form so that's definitely a very interesting theory that um is something that i encourage you to look more into if that's what interests you but then of course there is also the salem village versus salem town divide and that coincides with the pro paris villagers and the anti-paris um towns people uh and so this is not necessarily you know we hate you so we're going to accuse you of witchcraft to get rid of you as much as as it is you know the the pro paris very religious people saying okay if there's something evil going on here there's no way it's us there's no way it's the people that listen to the minister and go to church on sunday it has to be those people from the town they're the ones that are obsessed with money they're the ones that don't go to church if someone's going to be a witch it has to be them and so we have to accuse them and you know you're almost kind of expecting them to do something you know you're looking for them to make a mistake to you know utter a word under their breath and then you assume that it's a curse towards you so it's more of not necessarily targeting as it is expectations being set um for the less religious less pious individuals uh to to basically make a mistake if that makes sense uh and then of course there's gender gender is a huge part of which trials of course by far more women were executed for witchcraft than men uh and that's definitely the gender factor is a common one women were more susceptible to wickedness and evil also because of uh the part of swearing to satan uh was often involved sexual intercourse with uh his his demons or you know satan his self and women were viewed to be more promiscuous and more more sexualized uh so so gender is definitely an intricate part of witch trials and definitely salem is is no different women were the first ones accused and women were more often accused than men however salem is not as staunch on the gender divide of course women accuse other women men accuse other men and in fact if you remember george burrows who was a minister was actually uh found to be a witch and found guilty so so the gender divide is not as strict uh with this particular trial as it is with the general uh you know european trials that were occurring uh there's also um one recent hypothesis which has been suggested that people were actually practicing quote-unquote magic this is very much you know like you know pagan practices you know homeopathic remedies as as you know we said earlier with tituba um in fact there is an incident of a woman in salem who made uh shortly after the girls got sick abigail and betty she made what was called a witch cake it was basically a cake that contained rye as well as urine from the inflicted girls and that cake was fed to a dog the idea was that the infection or the the cursing uh the bewitchment passed you know from the girls into their urine and then when the the cake was fed to the dog that the dog biting down on the cake would hurt the witch uh so this is one of those old world pagan practices it's you know consider what we call white magic or you know good magic if you will uh just you know it's the same as you know someone throwing salt over their shoulder that's a you know a white magic kind of practice um of course the woman that did this was heavily criticized by samuel paris he did it without her permission or she did it without his permission uh but she was not accused or anything but it does show that there are some weird things going on in salem and so perhaps that also explains why some people may have admitted to witchcraft is because they were doing things that they realized were not you know completely okay with the church that may have been you know pagan practices that were not acceptable um one thing that i will say that i i forgot to put up on the slideshow here is one thing that people know it was not is the fungus called ergot a lot of you have probably heard or seen an article that you know it was a fungus that caused the salem witch trials people ate this fungus and that's what made everyone act crazy so ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and rye is the type of grain that would have been used in salem and it does cause lsd like hallucinations it causes illnesses however things don't quite line up and in fact when this theory was first suggested in 1972 historians very quickly discounted it they said no that's not right sorry you're off uh but unfortunately a uh the newspaper uh i believe it was the new york times picked up the article and spread it and so most people read it thinking oh wow we solved it the salem witch trials were caused by ergot well um first of all uh ergot specifically um the illness would have lasted way too long basically girls were having fits from january of 1692 all the way until september and and early october if you were to be infected that long you would probably die uh the the the and you would have lifelong repercussions if you didn't die and according to the records none of the inflicted individuals died and no one seemed to have any long lasting conditions as a result of ingesting ergot also uh rye bread or the rye grain came from many different locations not everybody got their stuff from the same place uh you know certain people grow it themselves other people buy it from the market uh so in order for this grain to be in infected with this fungus and for everyone to get it is is really improbable especially since a lot of these people are scattered around the area it's highly improbable that there would have been a um an infection that large scale and more importantly if one person in the family was having fits because of ergot poisoning theoretically the entire family would be behaving strangely because of the ergot poisoning not just one person because everybody theoretically would be eating this poisoned bread so basically the whole if the entire town was infected then theoretically everybody would be experiencing this not a small number of people so historians have very quickly renounced the ergot explanation and just definitely don't really think that it actually happened now uh one last point and this is another modern theory that has come to into play here uh is king william's war and conflict with native americans uh there's a really good book written by a historian called mary beth norton uh and she basically explains that it was the conflict with native americans that was a major factor in initiating the witch trials and it definitely seems like these two events are unrelated but norton argues that there was of course heightened stress heightened anxiety because of these conflicts with native americans also if you remember puritans saw them as as wicked as evil people as servants of satan uh if they are winning wars against us if they are invading us and taking our people and you know killing us then satan's winning right now satan is on the rampage so it would make sense for witches to be on the rampage as well also several of the individuals who specifically some of the girls who were the afflicted ones actually had experienced attack by native american people one of them actually abigail williams the reason why she lived with paris was because her family had been killed by native americans during an attack another girl hid in her house while her family was killed parts of her family were killed so they actually argue that these girls are experiencing ptsd and that's why they're behaving the way that they are and more importantly when they are asked to identify the the person that's causing trouble the person that is afflicting them they pick tituba tituba was an indian woman of course she was from barbados so she had a different uh cultural background but she was the woman who embodied what was traumatizing all of new england she was a native american and so that was a factor in initiating the conflict uh and and you know if we fight the war on witches today and we win the war on witches then maybe we can win the war against the indians next uh so that was definitely a huge factor in what pushed the events forward uh but basically at the end of the day you know regardless of what really caused the trials what initiated them what launched them uh they happened they were the largest wish trials in american history in colonial america and and really the witch trials have taken on mythic proportions uh remember that true fall test i had you take uh it definitely shows that a lot of mythology has come into play here there's definitely a big lack of understanding but but of course the witch trials are definitely a very strong part of american memory in american history uh so it's of course very important to to try and understand this event better and of course that's why i study it why i think it's something that's very interesting is is how we remember events from the past