What was Wrong with the Judges at the Salem Witch Trials?

Nicholas Breyfogle: 

Hello and welcome to “What was wrong with the judges at the Salem Witch trials?” brought to you by the history department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and by the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm a professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today.

Welcome to everyone and thank you so much for joining us. While most of the stories that are told and the books that have been written about the Salem witch trials concerned those who are accused of witchcraft and their accusers. Matt Goldish's new book entitled Science and Specters at Salem turns the spotlight on the judges. They were after all the men who decided to accept the accusations and move the trials forward. Historians have long wondered why the judges accepted evidence based on visions of apparitions and touch tests. Today Goldish will offer us some unexpected answers. 

Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Professor Matt Goldish is Samuel and Esther Melton Chair in history at the Ohio State University is a specialist in Jewish and European history with interest in Messianism Jewish-Christian intellectual relations and Sephardic studies. Matt has a B.A. from the University of California Los Angeles in 1986 and his PhD in 1996 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Goldish has published multiple books including but not limited to Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton in 1998 The Sabbatean Prophets in 2004 Jewish Questions: Responsa on Jewish Life in the Early Modern Period in 2008 and now Science and Specters at Salem. 

Professor Goldish is active as an invited lecturer in various academic and community environments. With that introduction let me mention the plan. Professor Goldish will open with a presentation on the judges at the Salem witch trials and then he'll take your questions. If you're interested in asking a question please write in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen on zoom. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. We received several questions in advance. As a reminder this event will be recorded and posted at a later date on YouTube and made available to everyone who was registered for the webinar.

Also we'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that the land the Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee Potawatomi Delaware Miami Peoria Seneca Wyandot Ojibwe and Cherokee Peoples. Specifically the university resides on land ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the forced removal of tribes through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that had and continues to affect the Indigenous peoples of this land. Now without further ado let me pass you over to Professor Matt Goldish. Over to you Matt. 

Matt Goldish: 
Thank you so much Nick and thank you to all the participants. I'm honored to be here. So let me start very briefly by saying that witch trials were not a matter of the Middle Ages. Despite what you might think if you watch Monty Python they are really a a phenomenon of the early modern period roughly 1450 to 1750. And that is more or less the exact period of what we old style people still refer to as the Scientific Revolution. And it's really the relationship between those things that's going to be relevant here. So there were big European witch trials in the 16th and 17th centuries in New England. There were quite a number dozens of small witch trials all throughout the 17th century the period in which Europeans had settled especially in North America. The Salem trials are different largely because they are very big. I am going to try and give you a quick roundup or overview of what happened at Salem. This may be very familiar to some people and I apologize if I'm going over ground with which people are already familiar but I feel like this this needs to be clear in order to understand what comes after. 

So in January of 1692 the minister in Salem village to be distinguished from Salem Town we're dealing with Salem village. And the minister was a man named Samuel Parris. And living in his house were various people. His wife he had two servants. One was named Tituba who was apparently an arrow Indian and her husband who is referred to as just John Indian. And the children including his daughter Elizabeth Parris, often called Betty, and his niece Abigail Williams. In January of 1692 Abigail and Betty had started having some kind of odd fits. They seemed to be in a trance, somewhat like a possession state, and crying out and some strange things. The doctor who was called is apparently Doctor Griggs who is the only doctor in in the village at that time. In case you're wondering if you happened to find yourself living in 1692, you're probably much better off not going to a doctor. But that's not relevant for us.

Doctor Griggs could not figure out what was wrong with the children and at a certain point he sort of gave up and said that he thought that maybe there's witchcraft going on. Samuel Parris did not immediately grab on to this conclusion and he called in some other ministers. There was a lot of praying and nothing seemed to help. Meanwhile the fits spread to other children in the area. And at a certain point a neighbor of the Parris' named Mary Sibley sort of grabbed the two Indian servants working at Parris's house to bind Tibuba. And together they made what's called a witch cake or a urine cake out of the urine of one of the afflicted girls and some wheat flour, and they baked it. This is an old English method for uncovering a witch. It's supposed to cause the witch pain, and it's supposed to reveal who she is. Well, we don't know whether it did any of that, but Samuel Parris found out that this was done, and he was absolutely furious because any sort of magic was considered absolutely anathema to the Puritans. Terrible, terrible, to practice any sort of magic. And so, he excoriated Mary Sibley and his servants. But the next thing you know Abigail Williams and Betty Parris had named Tituba who helped make this witch cake as one of the witches who was afflicting them. They said they were, they felt they were being bewitched. And Tituba was one of the witches. And they also named two other unsavory local women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Well, the three women were called in front of some magistrates. I'll talk about that in a moment. And Tituba after initially denying any wrongdoing confessed. And she gave a long and detailed confession, which sort of set off the events that would follow afterwards. The afflicted girls as this group was known, it's first Abigail Williams and Betty Parris and then a bunch of other young women from the area and eventually 1 or 2 men and some women who were not so young joined this group and they're still referred to as the afflicted girls. 

So pretty soon after this they started naming other witches that they felt were attacking them. Now it's a little hard to explain this, but because of historical events having to do with the king back in England and the glorious revolution that had just occurred in England and so on, the Massachusetts Bay colony had been incorporated into a different political structure. It had no charter at this time. The original charter which had been issued in 1628 had been vacated. There was no charter and there was no governor. They were waiting for their new charter and for the governor to come. But until they came, they could not constitute or create a court which could try capital cases. And so, what happens is that two magistrates are appointed that's John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin and they go to Salem. They sit in the, actually in there, what was just the largest space available at that point. And they start conducting interviews with the afflicted girls and with the people whom they accuse, and they take testimony and ask questions and so on. And they keep an extensive record. That record that these two men have, which is quite extensive by the time that they're done with the whole situation, is the core of the evidence that we have because the actual trial records from Salem have been lost, but these are very extensive. 

So, over the coming months dozens of people are accused of witchcraft. Hundreds of testimonies are taken in May. Finally, a boat shows up from England. It contains the new governor named William Phips and the new charter for the colony. Phips is faced with the situation in which dozens of people are in jail for witchcraft. And the whole place is going crazy about what's happening with these witchcraft accusations. And he appoints a court which he can do. It's called the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Meaning listen and determine and it's a type of court that was sometimes used when the regular local courts were overwhelmed. Or in this case there were a whole bunch of capital cases that needed to be adjudicated. So, the members of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, I'll just mention their names. And if you want to know more, I can tell you about them. It was John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, William Stoughton, who was the lieutenant governor was the chief justice on the court. Waitstill Winthrop, Samuel Sewell, John Richards, Bartholomew Gedney, Peter Sergeant, Nathaniel Saltonstall. So that was the court. And over the subsequent months at least 150 people were accused of witchcraft. Many or most of them were accused by the group of afflicted girls and many other people showed up with additional testimony. In the end 20 people were put to death by the court. Yeah. Sorry. I'm just looking. Okay. 20 people were put to death by the court. 19 of them were hanged in New England. Nobody was burned at the stake. And one of them was pressed to death. Giles Corey was pressed to death for not entering a plea. Five other people died in prison. There was some criticism of the court largely because of the numbers of convictions and the fact that many of the accused and the convicted were people of standing people of excellent reputation in the colony. And in addition, there was criticism of the evidence that the court was using to arrest and to trying to convict people especially what's called spectral evidence. And this is critical to my story. 

So let me just explain what spectral evidence is. Spectral evidence is, let's say Sarah Good one of the first accused people is sitting in the court. Everybody can see her. She's right over here or wherever she is. Right? And one or more of the afflicted girls cries out that Sarah Good has sent her specter or her spirit out to attack them. And they show evidence finger marks and nail marks, bite marks, and so on on their bodies. And they seem to be attacked by something that's invisible that nobody else can see. And they say Sarah Good or whoever it is sending her “specter or her spirit which is attacking me.” And that's and that is spectral evidence. A lot of it is used. And I'll explain why, where at least the context for that, you know, in a couple minutes. But a lot of the critique of the court has to do with their use of spectral evidence. 

Eventually in October after Governor Phips’, his wife is accused of witchcraft by the afflicted girls, the governor decides to shut down the trials and he sort of shuts them down in stages. But as September, is the last time that convicted witches are hung now I want to tell you about my little book "Science and Specters at Salem." And what my, what my case is. So, most of the scholarship is, as Nick was mentioning, most of the scholarship on the trials involves the accused people who are accused of witchcraft and the people who accuse them. And there is quite a large literature and it's a very effective and meaningful literature. And we have learned a lot from that. So, it turns out that accusing a neighbor or even a relative of witchcraft is not uncommon. All kinds of people did it for all kinds of reasons. Really for me and for a lot of people perhaps a much larger question is why does a court or magistrates, why do they accept that testimony and move forward with the trial for somebody based on evidence which might not seem very convincing? And this is a question about all witch trials. It is particularly a problem for the Salem trials because as I said the Salem judges accept the types of testimony which caused a lot of skepticism and questions. 

So one of those two types of testimony is spectral evidence, which I just described to you. The other type, which again was not very much being used anymore in European courts but which they accepted at Salem, was what's called touch tests. And what would happen is that the afflicted and all the afflicted persons would be sitting in front of the courtroom, and they would bring in the person that they had accused of witchcraft. And what would happen is the person would enter the room and the afflicted girls would start going into their fits and convulsions and screaming and things were coming out of their mouths. And all this stuff that goes with being bewitched and the court would make the accused witch go over to the afflicted girls or the afflicted persons and touch them. And if their fits stopped immediately upon the touch of the alleged witch that was considered a proof that that was the witch who was afflicting them. So that's called a touch test. Again, largely discredited or little used forms of testimony in European trials. They were used by the court in Salem. 

I'm going to explain why in particular spectral evidence had to be accepted by the court in Salem in order to get any convictions. And I want you to follow it. I'm going to say here in order to convict a witch especially when you're at the end of the 17th century this is the period of the early Enlightenment. Already the evidence has to be convincing. And there are two aspects to it. The first aspect is called malefic. Malefic means somebody hurt you using magic, right? There's a fight between neighbors. One neighbor curses the other that all her pigs should die. And sure enough her pigs die. Right? That's malefic. Yeah. That's using not physical means, but magic to hurt somebody. But that is for various complicated reasons, that is not what witchcraft really means to judges, magistrates, theologians, by the 17th century. But at least by the late 17th century they believe that the witch gets her powers to hurt people. And she is a witch per se because she has made a pact with the devil that is called diabolism. And because she has made a pact with the devil, she has these powers to use magic to hurt people to do maleficia and she is also a heretic and an apostate from the church, somebody who is extremely dangerous on religious grounds. So malefic was not usually enough an accusation of maleficia to convict anybody. Usually, it required proof of diabolism as well. So, the convictions of the Salem court were usually gained by the testimony of the afflicted girls. They were the main opponents who testified to the accused witches covenant with the devil. In most cases the spectral evidence and the references to the contract with the devil came in the same testimony. They were locked together. 

I'll give you an example of what this kind of testimony sounded like. Ann Putnam Jr. who was one of the afflicted girls who made many of the accusations is speaking against Sarah Good, one of the earliest of the accused witches at a hearing. And she says on February 25th, 1692, I saw the apparition of Sarah Good which did torture me, most grievously the apparition of Sarah Good which did torture me most grievously. And then she did prick me and pinched me most grievously and also since several times urging me vehemently to write in her book the torturing apparition is spectral evidence. The book mentioned by the deponent is the Devil's Book in which witch recruits were directed to sign their names as a form of a contract with the devil. So, you see the spectral evidence and the evidence of diabolism are locked together in these testimonies. And this is a very typical one. And so, the court essentially had to accept spectral evidence if it wanted any convictions at all. The only other way that it was really going to happen is if somebody openly confessed, okay. Most New England courts rejected spectral evidence and touch tests and were not nearly as zealous for convictions as this court was. So why did it happen? Many scholars have speculated about this. I find most of the theories pretty unconvincing. So, in order to get to my answer, we need to travel overseas to England and see what's going on there. And actually, different parts of Europe. And my answer or my response about this question has to do with something called the mind body problem. And I will explain how many of us have wondered about the following philosophical question, what can be the relationship between physical things like our bodies for objects around us and things which are equally real but are not physical such as personalities, consciousness, ideas, or emotions? For some people the nonphysical things also include a soul or God. And that was certainly true of the people in the period we're studying. We know that these two types of things, the physical and nonphysical, must interact because we see for example that a particular personality in here is in a particular physical body. 

During the later Middle Ages philosophers became increasingly puzzled about how exactly a physical thing can interact with a nonphysical one. Many people for example believe in ghosts and think that ghosts can hurt people. If you are like me and your radio has ever been on over the last month you have heard over and over a song by Michael Jackson called Thriller. That song is all about this type of interaction where ghosts and ghouls hurt people. If you ever watched a TV show called Casper the Friendly Ghost you know what I'm talking about. Awesome. 

So, the problem was put in its most stark terms by the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Descartes proposed a complete dichotomy, the complete separation between physical things and nonphysical ones. For convenience we can refer to them as bodies and spirits. So, this is called Cartesian dualism. And he says that they exist right? Bodies or physical things and nonphysical things exist in completely separate realms. Descartes. The critics asked him, well then how can they interact? And he didn't really have a very good solution. And that becomes a huge problem. Many theologians and religious thinkers had a deep problem with Descartes. Now Descartes was a deeply religious man himself. But and he probably came up with this idea largely to solve certain theological problems, and you don't need to go into. But his dualism presented many challenges to Christian beliefs which were the pillar of European thought. God for example is a spirit. How can God create the world, relate to the world? If spirits and physical things can't really interact how could transubstantiation work in the Eucharist according to the Catholic Church? If mind and body or bodies and spirits were totally separate things how could a man's soul be punished in the afterlife for the sins of the body and so on? 

The backlash against Descartes scared his fellow philosophers and scientists and mathematicians. This was the height of the scientific revolution. Almost all the scientists, and scientists by the way at this time called natural philosophers, were deeply religious people. That's Galileo, Kepler, Emerson, Jacinda, and in the next generation Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Leibnitz. Very deeply religious people among others. They knew Descartes had made a strong argument for dualism, but they did not want to be accused of heresy or atheism for accepting his position. And that's what had happened to the pious Descartes himself. They had also seen what happened to Galileo and to the earlier heliocentrism. Giordano Bruno. If however, a natural philosopher was being philosophically honest he was stuck. Descartes was clearly right, right? He had made a very strong, powerful argument. But the theologians were right to, how is one to explain the relationship of the body and the soul or of God to the world if Descartes is right? Well, this is where enter two people who were at the core of my argument Henry Moore and Joseph Glanville. Among the thinkers vexed by this problem was the English philosopher and minister Henry Moore. He thought that he had a solution to the mind body problem about how they interact. I won't try and explain it to you. It's pretty abstruse, but he felt that he could explain it. Descartes did not think much of Henry Moore, his explanation about the interaction of minds and bodies. But and neither did a lot of Moore's own colleagues. But other people did find it convincing. What Moore's colleagues, ministers, and scientists alike did agree was that Moore was absolutely right about the danger of Cartesian dualism if no solution was found to the mind body problem. 

Some European thinkers were suggesting that following Descartes one should stop bothering to think about the spirit world since it is unknowable. That was the position more or less of Thomas Hobbes. Or people thought that you could just fool the physical and spiritual worlds together leaving little autonomy for any deity. That was more or less the position of Spinoza. These people were considered incredibly dangerous to Christendom by most Europeans and intellectuals. Moore, his student Joseph Glanville, and their circle of scientists and ministers said that there is evidence from every quarter that that the spirit and physical worlds do interact, whatever the mechanisms. So, we know that Moore thought he understood how this worked. But whatever the mechanism, bodies and spirits do interact. There is a world of invisible spirits, and it is constantly interacting with bodies. They also said that anyone who denies this or any of the biblical and Christian evidence for it implicitly denies the existence of God. Because God is a spirit who interacts with bodies. He also said that there are definitely witches whose magical powers prove that there is a world of spirits interacting with bodies and that there are ghosts, specters, angels, demons, all the other spiritual beings described in the Bible and in Christian literature. They must exist and they are spirits which interact with bodies. This group of intellectuals Henry Moore, Glanville, and their colleagues often referred to their contemporaries who denied the world of souls and spirits interacting with bodies as Sadducees. Sadducees were a sect from the period of Jesus which denied the existence of souls and they denied an afterlife. So, Moore, Glanville, their group attacked all these modern Sadducees as heretics and even atheists and their motto, which you see over and over in the books that they write, is some version of the phrase “no witch is no God.” In other words, if you deny the existence of witches and witchcraft you are implicitly denying God, the existence of God, because they're all about spirits and bodies interacting more. And Glanville wrote extensively against the modern Sadducees and especially in a work called Saducismus Triumphatus, the Triumph Over the Sadducees. They offered a twofold proof for the existence of a spirit world which interacts with the physical world. 

First there was Henry Moore's philosophical theory which I mentioned. It is called The Spirit of Nature Theory. And he explains that at great length. The second prong of their attack on these modern Sadducees was an enormous collection of stories about ghosts and witches and specters and demons and any other anecdotal evidence that they could bring up about the actual documented interactions between spirits and the physical world. And they brought this material from literature from all over the world and especially from things which had happened recently in which there were living witnesses to. All right, now this type of anti-Catholic group existed in New England and in Salem, as well. This anti-Sadducees literature was taken extremely seriously by intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic and Boston. The famous minister and president of Harvard College Increase Mather became an author of anti-Sadducees works as did his son Cotton Mather. They modeled their books on this subject on the works of Moore and Glanville and other anti-Sadducee authors from England such as Richard Baxter and Richard Bovet. The judges at Salem were very close with the Mathers. Most of them were members of the Mathers’ Church in Boston. Several of them were also trained at Harvard, particularly Stoughton, Winthrop, and Sewall. And we know from several contemporary sources that they read and thought very carefully about the book by Moore and Glanville called Saducismus Triumphatus when they were in the Salem witch trials, when they were prosecuting the Salem witch trials. They were reading that book among others very carefully. We have eyewitness accounts of that, that they were also reading those anti-Sadducee works by Increase and Cotton Mather, of course their own ministers and other related works. In other words, the Salem judges, or at least some of them, were deeply engaged with a philosophical and scientific movement occurring in England which focused on Descartes's dualism and on the methods for proving that an unseen world of spirits worked on bodies including through witchcraft. 

In my book I show how a critique of the Salem Trials’ Thomas Brattle attacked the court in October of 1692. And among the things that he says in his attack he states explicitly that the judges fancied themselves Cartesian studies, followers of Descartes, and in other words they were up with pretty much the latest scientific developments. And they used, what he says is about understanding a Cartesian philosophy taken from Henry Moore and Joseph Glanville to support their use of touch tests in particular. I also show how it's possible to see the judges using their interpretation, that same book, Saducismus Triumphatus to justify the use of spectral evidence. Since spectral evidence is all about the actions of the spirit world on physical bodies in the ways Moore and Glanville demonstrate, my conclusion is that the judges at Salem who were, that was one of the most philosophically and intellectually sophisticated groups of men ever to adjudicate witch trials. It may seem very paradoxical but the reason that they were so zealous that they accepted touch tests and that they accepted spectral evidence was because of their intellectual and philosophical commitments especially to Moore and Glanville's school of understanding of René Descartes. This led them to believe so deeply in the presence of witches and to accept those touch tests and spectral evidence. If there's time if anybody wants, I can explain more about who Thomas Brattle was. He was a fascinating figure. His relationship to the judges, he was related to half of them and was very close with them in fact. And I can tell you more about how this idea about how the touch tests work. So, I'm going to stop there and see if anybody has any questions. 

Nicholas Breyfogle: 
Thank you so much Matt. For that. Fascinating. I mean there was so much that I've never learned about before. Never heard about before. That was really, really fascinating. 

Matt Goldish:
That's why I wrote a book. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Yeah. I'm so glad you did. We're starting to get some questions coming in and… But let me just say, if anybody is interested in asking questions please do just type them into the Q&A, which is a little button at the bottom of your screen. And but we have one question that came in as part of the registration that I just want to send your way which was a kind of question of kind of how were judges determined at that time? Were they appointed with the elected and in particular? So, what happened to these judges after the trial? Is there a story about what they went on to do after this trial that you know about? 

Matt Goldish: 
Excellent questions. So, the first problem is well the very first issue is that these men were not trained as judges. They had not gone to law school. They had not. Right. That this was true in most of the colonies. It was true a lot of places in England. In other words, people were adjudicating cases and acting as judges who were certainly very sophisticated and knew a lot and knew a lot about the law and so on but were not trained as judges. 

So, and in terms of how they become judges in any given case so there are quarterly assizes, things like that. But this Court of Oyer and Terminer was indeed appointed by the new governor Phips. And they were mostly the people who had acted as judges for, in many cases decades, in the colony. The governor refers to them as “people of the best prudence,” right? So, they were, these I say in the book at some point that, these men were essentially the Washingtons and Jeffersons and Adams as of two generations earlier they were the top most prudent, most aspiring men in the colony. So, I'll just tell you. Right. Stoughton had not only graduated from Harvard, he was at Oxford for eight years, clearly trained as a minister major intellectual. Waitstill Winthrop was the grandson of John Winthrop, a very famous figure, the longtime governor of Massachusetts Bay colony. I'm sure anybody who studied colonial New England knows about him. Samuel Sewell left a diary that he kept over 50 years. Fascinating. I use it a lot in my book. So, we know a fair amount about those three judges in particular. We know way less about the other judges. There are a lot of people who really didn't leave much of much evidence about their lives, their opinions and so on. But what we can tell is that these judges continued to judge when the Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved and a new superior court of the colony was created by Phips at the beginning of the next year, 1693. And many of these same men served on that court. They were elected to various colonial offices over and over. In other words, there was no backlash against them. And until our period Stoughton was incredibly honored. All of them were honored by their fellow colonists, by the leaders of the colony and so on. So that's kind of who they were. 

When you look at the literature about the witch trials in by modern scholars and especially by sort of popular authors people dump on these judges like crazy. They say terrible things about them. And it's clearly because they were judges in a witch trial. And nobody today can believe that a judge in a witch trial was a good person. But if you read, for example, Samuel Sewell's diary you love the guy. He's a terrific guy. You read Waitstill Winthrop's extensive exchange of letters with his brother. It's John Winthrop who was the governor of Connecticut. Wait Still Winthrop's brother was known as Fitz-John. You admire him. He cares about everybody. Stoughton. He's a tough guy but he's really fair and seems like a much beloved figure. Sewell is the first person, I think, it's Sewell who writes this book explaining why there should be no slavery, especially of Indians. You know they're mistreated by the modern literature. But these were some very impressive figures. 

Nicholas Breyfogle: 
Well I we have a couple of questions about witches or the term kind of witch hunt. So one one question is were witches ever allowed to live or were they all killed in this context? And a second kind of question and putting these together over the not entirely related but there's a question about the term witch hunt. So, we hear the phrase witch hunt bandied about in popular contemporary culture quite often. Do you find this to be overused? How would you define the phrase in a modern setting? 

Matt Goldish: 
So in reference to the first question if somebody was convicted by a court of witchcraft it was very uncommon for that person not to be put to death. This was an offense that carried a death penalty in Europe in certain places in times there are cases where somebody is just exiled or something else. But normally especially in Western Europe and New England if the person was convicted and in the case of England and New England there was a grand jury involved. If the grand jury approved the decision of the court that person was put to death. It did occur in Salem. In fact, there is a testimony that about a couple people where the grand jury came back with a return of what's called ignoramus which means they didn't think there was enough evidence to convict the person and the judges. Or in one case Cotton Mather turned around and sort of pushed them to reconsider and they reconsidered and ended up putting the people to death. So not common for anything except the death penalty. 

As far as the term witch hunts, yeah. I mean it gets used. And I suppose it's a personal preference about whether it's an appropriate term or not. The McMartin case in what was that the 1980s or 90s? Of course the Red scare in the 1950s in the House un-American Activities Committee often called a witch hunt. Famously Arthur Miller wrote his play about the Salem witch trials called The Crucible as a way of addressing the House un-American Activities Committee and the accusations of communists and all kinds of industries and so on in the 50s. And he's very explicit about it. He wrote an article in The New Yorker explaining that that's exactly why he wrote that. 

So it has become part of our culture, the idea that a witch trial is any sort of unfair chasing after people who are victims rather than perpetrators. And of course it happens all the time. I think the term has just become part of our language. And like it or not it's used to mean that. 

Nicholas Breyfogle: 
We have a series of questions kind of comparing the witch these witch trials and then the longer kind of legacy. Let me do a couple of questions. They're different, but they're dealing with the kind of longer legacy of these witch trials. So, one of them is a question which asks, were there judicial reforms related to spectral evidence after the trials and the criticism of the trials? And the second question is, what happened to the girls who accused Sarah Good of witchcraft? So, I suppose what happened to the accusers? And then also is there ever a moment where spectral evidence is challenged in terms of its judicial uses? So, it was challenged during the Salem trials? 

Matt Goldish: 
The governor in June of 1692 asks a group of ministers to give their opinion about the trials and what's going on. And they say, well we think that the court's doing a good job. It should be careful not to convict anybody based only on spectral evidence. And I'm sure that the court imagined that it was not convicting anybody strictly on spectral evidence. Here's the problem. If you're sitting on a court and there's a whole bunch of different evidence coming in it all goes into the mix, right? It's all part of a sort of a stew of information that you have. And you come out with a certain conclusion, go oh no, it wasn't based only on the spectral evidence, right. That was just one piece of what we had. We had all this different evidence. But I won't try and explain how I did this, but in the book I attempt to prove that at least in one case probably in more than one case maybe in all the cases, spectral evidence really was probative. It really was the thing that pushed the case over the edge. But the judges were warned multiple times that it shouldn't be that way. This wasn't because of any legislation. Legislation didn't forbid spectral evidence. As far as I know ever the way the these write the laws about witchcraft were really general and vague and it was expected that the courts would use the literature about prosecuting witches. And so, there were several books. And we know that the judges at Salem consulted all these books, Gaule and I forgot who the other authors were, standard books coming out of England about prosecuting witches. And they all say don't convict anybody strictly on spectral evidence. It's right. We can't do that. And I'm sure that they thought that they didn't. But eventually in the colony Phips forbids any use of spectral evidence at a certain point. And that's probably as close as you get to an actual law about the use of spectral evidence. 

The second question was about, oh yes. The afflicted girls. So, we don't know much about them in the future but it's interesting that whoever asked that question, you asked specifically about the testimony that I gave as an example that was Anne Putnam Jr, against Sarah Good. And Putnam is the one of the afflicted girls, the only one who apologized afterwards. But let me explain the conditions of the apology which might mitigate its meaningfulness. She was it, it's 14 years. I think it's something like that. 14 years after the trials and she issues this apology. When you read the apology very carefully it's not really an apology. She sort of says, well I was under the impact of the devil. It wasn't really me. I didn't understand what was happening and my household was afflicted and blah blah blah. It's not exactly an apology. She says she's sorry for what happened, but she sees herself as kind of a victim also. And what was the condition the situation under which she issued that apology? She was trying to become a member of the Salem Church. And it seems clear that essentially to become a member, which, right, it wasn't just a matter of paying your dues. You had to be accepted by the congregation. It was quite a story. They clearly expected something of her. They wanted her to apologize for a very public, very well-known role in, in these trials which by this point were really an embarrassment and a shock to the colony. And so, she came forth with this summary apology. I don't think any of the other afflicted girls, I mean these are people who are pretty obscure. If it weren't for the Salem witch trials we wouldn't really know much about anybody involved in this whole situation with the exception of the well-known judges. So, we don't know. We don't know much what happens with these people in the future. I will tell you that everywhere I go I meet people who tell me that they are descended from one or more of the accused witches, including Bill Childs who was our colleague in the history department at Ohio State who told me very specifically who he was descended from. I had a student last year who said he was descended from Giles and Martha Corey, who, Charles Corey was the man who was pressed to death by having stones piled on him for refusing to enter a plea refusing to acknowledge the court’s right to try him. Here and there I've met other people but the afflicted girls you know aside from this and Putnam Jr, I'm not really sure what the future of any of them looked like very much. 

Nicholas Breyfogle: You can rest easy that I am not one of the descendants. I will never, I am really, I don't want anybody putting a spell on me. Let's look at one more question. So, there's a there's a question here which is a kind of comparative one. So, were there any differences between the types of accusations typical of witches in Salem compared to other parts of early modern Europe? And were there differences in the Salem case in terms of how judges used evidence compared to other examples in in early modern Europe or early modern American? 

Matt Goldish: 
Absolutely. Very important question. So, I've tried to explain some of the differences in the way the judges approach the evidence. But the evidence that was brought to them was significantly different than it was in almost any other case. Because these afflicted girls brought a testimony that looked almost identical over the course of months and with reference to multiple defendants and I I've read you an example of what that looked like that business of tying together spectral evidence and the witches book in which they were being asked to sign. Those are not to, neither of those is really typical of the evidence brought against witches in New England or in Europe. That is a kind of, not just the combination, but each of those two. It's not totally unique but very different. And very unusual types of evidence. Now there's other evidence that's given in Salem which is much more typical. For example, I had a fight with Bridget Bishop because she was the first accused, wished to be hanged. I had a fight with Bridget Bishop and she cursed me and my pig died. Right? That kind of thing. That is straightforward maleficia. Yeah right. Somebody doing magic doing evil magic. No reference to be, to the devil, to contract with the devil or anything like that. And one of the things that I try to show in the book is that we only have two death warrants that have survived. One of them is for a bunch of people. I wasn't able to learn much from it. One of them was from Bridget Bishop. This whole line of people comes and gives testimony against Bridget Bishop. It's the afflicted girls with that kind of testimony like what we saw. And then it's a whole bunch of people who just had bad experiences with her as an individual and think that she performed magic on them or that she owned what's called puppets which were almost like voodoo dolls you know stick pins into them to hurt somebody, you know, and all kinds of other evidence in the death warrant, the only causes. Right. The only reasons were her conviction of witchcraft that are listed are the ones given by the afflicted girls. All that other evidence of maleficia is ignored. 

The thing is this idea of the contract with the devil that is an idea that comes from theologians. It comes from educated Europeans and they don't think very much of the accusations by themselves. They think that these two things come together, that the power of the witch comes from her contract with the devil. Most people, most ordinary Europeans in particular, but most ordinary New Englanders too couldn't care less about the contract with the devil. That's not what they're worried about. They're worried about why did my child God forbid, right, why did my child die? Why did my pig die? How is it that right after she looked at me funny my wagon hit a rat in the road and broke the wheel? Right? That's what's bothering them. And it's a problem getting convictions. England has really not very much, not very many convictions of witches because number one they won't use torture. And number two they have a grand jury involved. But in the rest of Europe especially the German speaking lands the parts of France which border Germany, parts of Switzerland, if they, if somebody comes with a claim about a maleficia, the judges will take the accused witch, and they will torture her until she admits that she has made a contract with the devil. And often they will continue to torture her to name all the other people whom she saw at the Witches Sabbath. Right. The meetings of the witches. And they will get further names. And that's why especially in southwestern Germany late 16th early 17th centuries you get these enormous witch trials in which hundreds of people are accused and put to death. It's because that system is the way they do it over there. They didn't do it that way in England or in New England. So there is a huge difference in the types of evidence and there is a huge difference in what judges did with it based partly on what the laws were that were governing them. 

Nicholas Breyfogle: 
That's a very interesting answer to that question. My friends, we unfortunately are falling into the category of all good things must come to an end. We're coming up on our hour. And my apologies to those who we couldn't get your questions asked and answered. Now please do feel free to reach out to Dr. Goldish to ask these questions of him. Had a particularly interesting one made about kind of gender and what we can learn about women from the sources that you have. That's a tough one but, yeah. But so please do contact him to get answers to these questions. And but first let me just thank you all very much for joining us today. And for your excellent questions and particularly grateful to Matt Goldish for sharing his expertise and the history of you know what was going on with the judges of the Salem witch trials. Please join me in giving him a virtual round of applause. And thank you so much. If you'd like to learn more, we'll send out an email soon with information about how you can access the book and with a link to the recording of this event. We'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Goldberg Center, and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective for their support. Stay safe and healthy and see you all next time. Thank you so much. Goodbye.