Transcripts For CSPAN3 Salem Witch Trials Legal Documents Project 20170824

Margo burns discusses the documents in a book project she titled records of the salem witch hunt. This is part of a Salem University seminar on the legacy of the witch trials. Welcome back. Im tad baker and thrilled to see you all here for what should be an interesting session. I would like to introduce to you my good friend and partner in witchcraft studies, margo burns. Margo is one of the leading experts on the witch trials. One of the editors of the incredible records of the salem witch hunt. In some degrees she has probably forgotten more about the individual documents than ill ever know. We asked her today to speak specifically about those records and Amazing Things you can learn from a close read of the salem witch trials. I should also mention that margo absolute favorite articles on the witch trials and one of the issues of false confession. I strongly recommend to you as well. Margo burns. [ applause ] thank you. So you know, i have a completely different read on the coercion of false confessions than he gave you moments ago. So read my article and you will find out. Im here today to primarily talk about the actual documents and how do we know what we know . One of the things that tad was doing was quoting from here, there and everywhere and im going oh, i know where that came from. I know where that came from. Which document is that . So when i read and here anything about the salem witchcraft trials, i always go, lets go back to the primary source. This is records of the same lem salem witch hunt. It is about the size after ream of paper and hard cover. It now comes in paperback. You dont have to pay 150. You can pay about 50 in paper back. If youre serious about studying the salem witchcraft trials, i recommend getting one. There were some of us doing this, i dont get a penny in revenue from it because we had to split it 12 ways. The history of this book, you will see, bernard rosenthal. Tad mentioned his book, the salem story. He was head of the English Department at a university. When he discovered salem, he was also very interested in social justice. He thought it was a great injustice what happened here. As a literary critic, he started reading the primary sources. Thats what literary people do. What did they actually write. He also discovered there were a lot of mistakes in transcriptions of the documents. He got caught up in the middle after couple of them and said it would be nice to fix and change and thats when he embarked on it. He did not realize it would take as long, he was figuring two or three years. It took 12 of us ten years to do this. When i saw this book, as heavy and hefty as it is, i got it in my hands and i said, is that all it is . We had taken so long. Including bernie. His first project manager was supposed to be joe flibbert, long time professor here at salem state, who tragically passed away just as the project was starting. I dont know how it happened, but it happened. Bernie found me right when he was about to start working on this and he took a huge chance on me. Later on he would say, oh i knew what i was doing. No, he doesnt. But it worked out well. When you talk about the 12 people, the other 10 were six linguists from scandinavia. They can read old handwriting. They are used to dealing with primary sources that are handwritten. He didnt think he could find anybody here. He was in finland, and said, oh, i dont think i can find anybody. The first person he found was a linguist interested in reading the transcripts of the interrogations. He said, i know where they are. They are in helsinki. Next, another person from helsinki. Then his colleague and they each came on and brought a colleague. And they brought on the only swede among them. It was an interesting crowd to work with. I was very happy i have a masters in linguistics so i could interpret because people are interested in literature and people are interested in historical linguistics dont have a lot of common ground. We have some americans, Gretchen Adams who wrote the spector of salem, tracing witch hunt as an epithet. We also had benjamin ray. Who you probably know the website of the university of virginia. Also he has a book, i believe, the eversion gives you a portal into his website. Pretty nifty. Richard trasing who you probably already know. Our very own marylyn rae roach who i think you will see and hear. People say you know more than anybody. No, no, no. Marilyn roach is the person. She has been doing this longer than well, maybe not longer than dick. That didnt come out right. But marilyn, she knows so much and has looked at absolutely everything and is just invaluable because she would say oh, do you know about this document . And she ended up writing the thumbnail bios for everybody in the book. Just a herculean task. We are very indebted to her. And the whole team was just an amazing thing. And the fact we actually finished it in less than a decade was amazing. Tad has given us an overview of what has happened. I wont repeat that. What i would like to talk about is the actual documents. If we talk about what happened, if you have ever heard me talk before, i do go indepth into what it took documentary wise to do a whole case. This is my one slide summary. Basically, three phases to me case. First is an investigation. Thats when someone would complain, magistrates would send out a warrant. Have the person arrested and interrogate them. Sometimes in public, sometimes in private. If they decided that well yes there was grounds for holding them over, they hold them over and a jury of inquest, grand jury, called. They would look for facts so they would summons people. They would have dead bodies examined. Especially in witchcraft trials. They look for existence of very similar to other kinds of trials for instance there was a case in 1600s of a woman accused of having a bastard child and killing it and not in the witchcraft trials. But they empaneled a jury of woman who had given child. And they found this woman hadnt had a baby. This is the kind of thing they would typically do. Finders of fact. So in this case, especially looking for witches teets. The grand jury could decide whether the charges were true or not. This is when the actual charges were being made. They would write up an indictment specifying those things. And the grand jury would then look at it and say well we believe this is a true bill. Crime took place. We think there is good reason to go to trial, or say then no, and they would write on the back ignoramous, we do not know. You could be arraigned and plead guilty or not guilty. Most people dont know, but four people plead guilty. They did not have trials. They went straight to jury. You had to testify before god the country, the country being the jury. That sort of put things to a halt. It was all the steps that you would have to follow do this and he was throwing a Monkey Wrench in it. They found that very strange old torture that would end up in his death. That pressed him to death. If you were tried in this case, everybody was tried in the salem trials. Was found guilty. And within short order you would be executed unless you were pregnant or in case you plead guilty they would give you a little bit of time to make your peace with god and do all the things to clean up your act before they were going to execute you. This last one is the death warrant for bridgette bishop. The next is the seal. And set only one who signed it. Thats the basic thumbnail for a case. To learn about this we went to look at all the documents. The original manuscripts are in about 12 different archives. When we first started out, the one on the left is digitized from microfilm. If you go to look at mass documents, they point you to microfilm first. Before you get to look at anything. And great at making grants, he had all of the documents digitized. Immediately we had some things. That made my little heart go quiver. Oh, manuscripts. But within short order we are looking at these things and they are not great. Ben and i went to a lot of trouble to go back to the Phillips Library where most of the documents are and photograph and scan them. You can see a big difference. The one on the right, this is one of the indictments for Rebecca Nurse. Its nice and bright. Can you see the two colors of ink. That is something immediately apparent to us. That wouldnt have been from the microfilm version and sort of like whats going on there . Guess what . Even in those days, legal documents could be boilerplates. Then someone else filled it in. But it is all handwritten. This is what we can see when we look at actual manuscripts. Volume 135 when you look at mass archives is an actual book, bound book, of documents, all silked into the pages. Would you have a page with a cutout and they would put the manuscript in between two layers of silk. You could see both sides kind of through the silk, and you could actually page through them. And but the microfilm, they didnt even have the master any more. Just the one in circulation. You could see, it was horrible. Poor gretchen trying to transcribe from these. Finally i went down and got permission and i tell you, people in the archives of all these places were fabulous for us. And i photographed them all. That point, still in the book. And i had to shoot and shoot. Most recent time they had been in there and put it in its archival folder as they should be. They are still silk. They have wax seals. The silking goes over the wax seals. They are not optimal but they are preserved. We also in addition to original manuscripts, there were facsimiles of manuscripts that we did not know where they were. The one on the far left is a negative photo stat of the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs. Why do we have this . In the early 20s, people had interesting old documents. They would go to libraries that had photo static copier and say, i got this interesting document, you want a copy . The actual positive of this one is that the mass historical society. They have a mass collection of photo static records. The book at massachusetts state archives, when i opened it up to photograph these things, this fell out. It was tucked inside. And i went, i know exactly what this is. But who knew it was here . I was hoping it was something not found yet. But no. The middle is from a 1936 catalog selling this document for 85. If you remember the news a couple years ago there was another witchcraft trial document that came up for auction, it went like 30,000. An investment of 85 in 1936. What i could have gotten. On the end is an 1904 book. This is the only version we have of it. Kind of tattered. While working on it, dick trask somehow tracked it down and it was university of michigan. You never know in some cases where these are. We dont know where the document for Abigail Hobbs is. There is a little bit of providence at Massachusetts Historical Society but not much. We also discovered that we had handwritten contemporaneous copies of things. On the left we have one. On the right, basically an account of the same interrogation. Both in handwriting of Samuel Parris. We have no idea why there are two versions. Except he was taking things down in short hand then reconstituted them into his accounts. Shorthand was very, very useful for a young minister because they could listen to divines, cotton mather, increase mather, and use shorthand to take down absolutely everything. And reconstitute it. That is one reason why we know so much about Salem Village. Why we know so much about the pleas of innocence because Samuel Parris took it all down. There is a reason that Arthur Miller poached from him as it reads like a play. She says this. He says that. Oh, there is sound over here. Couldnt hear. Girls were flailing around. All those descriptions come from Samuel Parris because he was reconstituting it from his short hand. If i could find one of those documents, i would love the shorthand on that. But he sometimes made two copies. We had to figure out which one was actually used and we dont know why there is a second. If you look at the one on the left, clearly first draft, several different people crossing things out and adding things. We also have later handwritten copies. The one on the far left is a tracing of one of the documents that was out in public for a very long time. Original is now pretty tattered. I was looking at it saying, this is the same as the other. And i went, but its not fluent. Whats going on . Finally held them up. Someone went through the trouble to trace the documents. To make something new. This is in a different archive. So they thought they had original manuscript but who knows when the tracing was done. Second is a copy of Samuel Parris interrogation. It maintains the same line structure and same lay out on the page the two columns but it was done later. There were things oh boy, librarians and archivists like to include little tidbits to say when things are wrong. On the far right is just another copy of some of the old records. We had to tease these things out. There are also things we dont have manuscripts for. These are published transcriptions and we dont have any. The one on the far left, lawsons account for some of the days in april in 1692 when he went to visit and find out gee was his wife murdered by the specters. That came out quickly. There is a lot of information in that. Third one over is from the account from 1700. He is describing a lot of things and taking everything to task. Especially cotton mather. There are things in there we dont have original manuscripts. When you heard Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty, this is how we know. He has accounts in there and from the family accounting. Saying they were pressured to go back and bring her in guilty. Last one is page from thomas hutchinsons governor thomas hutchinsons, from the 18th century. He took them home and was writing this history of massachusetts. These are all kind of documents we dont have today. Three words, stamp, act, riot. His whole house was trampled and some of the, ive heard, you know one of those, maybe fake news. I dont know. But his library was trampled and some of the draft pages still have were dirty. They just trampled everything. A lot of the documents just disappeared. At one point in the 1900s, there was a man named poole who discovered they had a draft, earlier draft, and there were snippets of other documents we didnt have. We are slowly but surely putting together all these pieces because we dont have everything. In 1840, thomas gauge in massachusetts, he has nine documents in the case of Margaret Scott. Margaret scott is executed. I bet very few of you even know who she is. You might have seen her bench but there are only nine available to tell her case and two of them are in the Essex County Courthouse that the Philips Library holds. And two are ones in private collections. If you hear about an auction of one, those are the two indictments that pop up. But there are five more. And where are they . Four of them are in the Boston Public Library. After the book was published. We were pursuing some we were trying to figure out if we could identify more handwriting in these documents. We were archive hopping for two weeks. We went to Boston Public Library to go to rare books and manuscripts room to see if they had handwriting. We had been doing this in our book. At one point we were looking up all the towns because that might be helpful. Opening up one of the drawers of the card catalog, card catalog, okay, and this is march 2012. Five years ago. Card catalog. And he was looking up rowley. He said, what do you think this means . The card said four documents in the case against Margaret Scott. And my heart skipped a beat. I went we only have nine. Maybe we will go up to 13. Turns out, these are the 4 of the 5 that we didnt know where they were. Yeah, okay. We already knew the text. But we were looking at the manuscripts. Really nice to see the handwriting. See all the things. Quite often in older transcriptions, didnt look at absolutely every mark on manuscript. Sometimes on the back side they wouldnt copy that stuff. But we did. We looked at everything to try and figure out the date, who wrote it. One of the big things about the witch hunt is bernie was determined to set it up chronologically. And handwriting came second thing because when we are all transcribing, if you have a document with about this much of somebodys handwriting and you have an ambiguous area, dont know quite what that says. Would be helpful if you had a couple pages by someone in their handwriting and you could compare and resolve the ambiguity. So we started sorting early on so we could keep track of whose handwriting was where. We will be able to identify Samuel Parriss handwriting, Thomas Putnams. But we wanted more. And to see the handwriting this gave us a little bit more information. For a side note. Pedra went back about a week later and they couldnt find them. Very apologetic, but they couldnt find them. This is around the time the Margaret Scott indictment had just gone up for auction and brought in about 30,000. A month later i called, they were ticked at me. I told you we would call you. Everyday that passes is not good, i was home sick up a couple of days and i said im going to call. I went up the chain. I know somebody that used to work there. By the end of the day they had gone through and found them. And she called me back. A couple years later when you heard about the rembrandt that had gone missing. [ inaudible ] this is Boston Public Library. Worth over a half a million dollars. The couple had etchings or engravings. They were worth 30,000 and lost them . I sat there and went they just misshelved them. Theyre going to find them. Theyre just misshelved, and when it was, i went, yes, i knew that would happen. People say, why do they even have these things . Shouldnt they know more about their collection . Im thinking, card catalog. I doublechecked and they are going through inventory and making improvements. So closed until 2019. Happy to report they are responding to that. Oh, there is stuff i have to see. I have to wait how long . But anyone whos been around for the Phillips Library, how long did we have to wait to access the Phillips Library content . There were other transcriptions going on. Arthur miller probably used records of salem witchcraft. This is a page of it. Came out in 1864. Woodwards crew transcribed. This is a page from titubas examination. This reads like drama. I want to draw attention to this one. Two rats. Red rat and black rat talked to her. Oh, rats . Thats an interesting one. Some of this stuff i had been reading and said well talking about rats and cats. And im going thats odd. Why rats and cats . Here is a little piece from the document. Red rat, black rat. Okay. Woodward didnt know there was another account. This one is written in Salem Village. This particular one is at the new york Public Library in the Thomas Madigan collection. These old libraries often started rare book rooms from collectors. Putting together nice documents. This is jonathans account here. If we zoom in here, i saw two cats, one red, another black. What did these cats do . You could see the curves. One says cats and one says rats. Did they just hear it differently . How do we resolve this . I lot of people say, she saw cats and rats. Is it cat or rat . It kind of looks like rat, doesnt it . Until you look at some of the other things, the devil rang to me . No, came to me. Child. I dont know how to pronounce that with an r. The children. These are unambiguous cs. He was hearing cats. No rats at all. But there are all these transcriptions out there that say rats. This is a piece from in Thomas Putnams handwriting. On the 15th may 1692, i looked at it and went, ive seen the calendar. The 15th of may was a sunday. Why would they do an examination on a sunday . They have Better Things to do. I looked at it again. The 11th may be more appropriate. I looked at more examples of putnams handwriting. Look that. Definitely a 5. Unambiguous 1, he just made little curly 1s. So we were able to make that date, but we had to make a case for everything we did. Sometimes we called them recorders, sometimes a scribe, sometimes a hand, we couldnt describe what we were going to do. We had examples of different peoples handwriting and we had profiles. Some features were that helped us recognize that persons handwriting. And a list of the documents that included that persons handwriting so we could refer to it to make our transcriptions better. Thats our original reason for doing it. Eventually we had so much information we said we have to share. If you look at entries, you see in some we identify whos handwriting is where. And we have that really ugly bracket, hand 1, hand 2. Every document starts off with hand 1. Little more detailed than i can bear. It has particular meaning. You can find out most of the people, about 24, 25 people that we came up with and identified in the book. However, we found over 200 variant hands as we went through. And most of them have really weird names. Fourth one down, unidentified scribe, w. I want to know who unidentified scribe w is. We have not found out. While we were doing our archive hopping i was determined to find out who scribe w was. I had a couple links. Didnt find out. Called him w because lower case u looked like a if you look at older transcriptions they tribe it as a w, but it isnt. Im sure its a he and somebody involved in the grand jury proceedings. I saw someone who had other contemporaneous documents. Still dont know who he is. We look at features after particular hand, these are just shots from our database. We were looking at things with an overview. Very small cramped hand. Orthography. Big word for spelling. Thomas putnam could not spell the word witch. Witch, i dont even have to see his handwriting to know who wrote it. If i see that spelling, i know it was him. With persons he spelled with an a, parsons. Distinctive spellings who will tell you who the person is. Letter forms is probably how most of us match up handwriting. Common things like es and rs or anything distinctive that could help tell apart two different handwritings. Punctuation, you dont necessarily think of punctuation as something that can identify you, but simon weller loved colons. He loved colons so much but sometimes colon followed by another colon. And then a word and another colon. Why do you wait three words to put another colon . I have have no idea what a colon means. But if i see a document with a lot of colons, i know its simons. And abbreviations were critical. We use a lot of contractions, and they didnt do that then. Actually the y is a stands for th. Thorn y with a t and sometimes a w with something. They would put these things together. And how they made their abbreviations was quite telling. Just put these things together and how they made their abbreviations was quite telling. Some people would use that thorn, e, ye, and other people wouldnt. And there were others they would use. Superscript or something called a macron. If you write the word common, there were a lot of loops and ms. Sometimes one m with a line over it. That meant make two. You know, otherwise you going, mmm. Too many loops. They have been using that as an abbreviation. A lot of particular styles and we could keep track of what a persons style was for doing abbreviations. These were all things we were playing around with. And of course the documents were cocreated by a lot of people. So any given document might have several peoples handwriting in it. Eeca, Essex County Court 1. Very early on we had our own custom names for them. So youre seeing some of the stuff behind the book. These became different numbers in the book when we decided to do the chronology. That was a challenge unto itself. You are seeing the behind the scenes piece in here. The hands in document, because we were looking to make sure we got good transcriptions, we also kept track of word count because if you are looking for a big chunk of text by a particular person and their handwriting was nice to know. You could look and say do i have a good example of someone elses handwriting and give mae bunch of it. And also whether or not we would include them in the book. We had parameters for inclusion. We ended up saying we had to have a persons name and it had to be a significant contribution. It couldnt just be, yeah, we know this person did it because they wrote it and signed it. That wasnt enough. We were looking for the big players, par dlris and putnam. Looking for anybody that you would recognize as one of the people. I think 24 or 25. Its been eight years. I dont remember if its 24 and 25. We have lots of things we are doing behind the scenes. We when finally did the book, everything is in chronological order. So this is the warrant of apprehension for sarah good. This so document on the left and transcription on the right. We have a lot of documents that dont have dates. They were cocreated at the time. This on the front is the warrant written on february 29th, however it was handed to the sheriff to go get her. And on the back hes saying, okay, i brought her in on the day you requested, march 1st. So here we have a document that has two different dates associated with it. How do you put that into chronology . We just kept track of where how many dates we had. We got six slots. Only got to fill up five, though. We kept track of the dates, what was the function of this piece in the document. More commonly there were things of evidence. And this was used at three points in time. This is one of the pieces by Thomas Putnam. This is a deposition of mary wolcot against john willard. And one piece here, that seems to everything dates from may 8th and earlier. And thats the deposition, the evidence the woman was turning in. Then we have this next thing which is the oath. At the grand jury you had to swear to the truth of your testimony. So when we see one of these, we know that it was used before the grand jury. Thats also scribe w. My friend, i will find who scribed that. This document used at trial and this trial in august. Three different dates. Three different handwriting. Thomas putnam, scribe w. Steven sewell, the clerk of the court. Thats our database. Bernie liked putting beads on a string. When you have to organize them, thats hard. We looked at each document separately then i could string the beads for him. It was tough for him because he is a real linear guy. And at the end when i produced the book. I think i made four different versions. I have an algorithm for printing a book. I would print it all out and would he read the whole thing and see if things went doing together right. At the end, he and i spent two days on skype. When i say two days, 8 00 in the morning until noon. Break for lunch. 1 00 until 5 00. Break for dinner. 6 00 to 10 00. Two days on skype. Went through every decision we made and check our algorithm to make sure everything was ordered perfectly. When you see the entries here. Thats exactly what my algorithm put out. All of the notes and things people included. We had six people in scandinavia doing things. With we had to have a common place to do it. I want to bring you back to this document though. And here is the testimony. Deposition. This is what she was saying. You have a pretty good read on this. You can see the top is sort of in brown ink and bottom is in gray ink. Here is a line. I was sitting in the reading room at the Phillips Library and with dick trask and bernie. Dick was going, this is interesting. Looks like an ink change. We are looking at it. If you ever worked in an archive, they only give you one document at once. Only one at a time. But there were three of us. So each ordered up one of these documents that they had several of. Turns out we have a bunch of them from Thomas Putnam with that twoink quality. If we look at different across the archive, i dont know if there are 15, 16 of these that occur out of the 200 that he wrote. But all curiously, ink changed in a particular spot. If you could understand if perhaps he ran out of ink and started up with a different batch. You here whinnying and hoof beats you think horse before zebra. But they all started with, also on the, and they have a date. Being the date of his examination, i was most all starting with the word also and named the date. This is critical. Almost every indictment, the crime itself, is listed as the date of their examination. That was because of the crime witnessed by two people, you to have two witnesses to the same act, during public examinations, things that were happening and girls were suppose lid afflicted right there. Air quotes, everybody could see crimes they had done before they were arrested. They were actually charged with what they had done during their examinations when they were in custody. This piece below there adds in the information that will support that charge on the indictment. It adds in all of the stuff that happened that day and so it really will support the indictment. And then of course, it got scribe w confirmed that. This whole piece was added, reposit, to support the indictments. As i said, one of the things we came up with had five dates. Poor ann foster. Oh, my goodness. In the middle of july, over in andover, they were relentless. She started confessing, they kept going back to her. Again and again. So we had actually five different dates associated with that particular document. So thats why i was really glad i had six spots. Always try to have more room just in case. One of the things you may notice on these is there were the types of uses because within a particular day, we needed to be able to sort whats the order on a particular day, because there are a lot of things happening. We wanted to make sure we could put things in the right order. We wanted to keep the officers return with the warrant or with the summons. We had to keep things together. They were all sorts of pieces here, there, and everywhere. We had about 60 different types of uses. And you may see officers return, but what it was connected with. All these different arrest warrant and return the same day. Arrest warrant and return on a different day. This could help my algorithm. We had this information of what function and part in time does this particular piece of this document have. This is a lot of fun. I have to say. This just warmed the cockles of my heart doing this. What kinds of questions can you ask, though, with all this information about the handwriting and the time . Because these are two big pieces of records of the salem witch hunt. The chronology and the handwriting. There are a couple things you can do. One is figure out a pattern of participation in the events. So probably the person who gets blamed a lot for the salem witchcraft trials is Samuel Parris. We know his handwriting. Most people do, and a lot of the documents have his handwriting on them. If you go through and date them, they are show up in one place. I passed out the handout with this timeline. The pink area is before the court was actually seated. This is the time when people kept accusing people, and hathorn and cole said well hold them over. By the time the court is seated, there were 60 or 70 people already in custody. All of the things that Samuel Parris did, those documents and the interrogations he did accounts of, everything was in that time period. You dont see him going forward. So we take his handwriting and the timeline. He was only doing things at the very beginning, before the official court even took place. We see his handwriting again a couple other times later, but those are mostly just to swear oaths on his testimony. If you really want to see when Samuel Parris is doing his stuff, thats when it was. They kept going. They didnt need him to do this anymore. And actually, if you take a look, this is the other timeline thats in your handout. Each one of those spikes is a day. And it tells you how many people were caught up on any given day. How many people did they snatch up, so the first yellow one on the far left would be sarah goode, sarah osbourne. There were a lot of towns involved in this, but the ones in yellow are from Salem Village. The ones in green are from salem town. The ones in black are all other towns. But i would like to point out that the yellow and green are really on the first half. And red is andover. So you can visually see that there were two phases to this whole episode. And the total of Salem Village and salem town is less than the number of people in andover. So when we talk about the andover aspect of it, and it changes a great deal in quality and the kinds of accusations. But remember, see that march, april, may . Thats when Samuel Parris was involved. I would like to also point out that big spike is one thats higher than any others. That was a particular warrant right before the court of lawyer determiner was instituted, and its sort of like they said, have we missed anyone . And theres this warrant for all these different people. Thats when you get the warrants for Suzanna Martin and john alden and all these people that maybe had a reputation or had some legal history. So thats why you see that spike. They maybe had a reputation or legal history. Thats why you see that spike. When i started putting this together i like this chart. I still love time lines. I have another one in the works that i cant wait to show people. I like nailing it down to individual people and watching the whole piece because when youre talking about over 150 people being wrapped up in these accusations, it really is hard to sauce it out. You have to see it over time. You have to see so many. Its a multivariant data set. Trying to come up with ways to think about. It isnt like and then there were all the people in andover. It wasnt just like all at once. We have all the people in andover. It unfolds over time. One of the other things we can tell about samuel paris, we can see who elses testimony his handwriting appears on. Its one thing if you have his testimony and signs it. One thing we discovered was that the top thats samuel pariss document. Saying who he was accusing. Sarah good and tituba. The one on the bottom is Abigail Williams testimony against sarah good, osborn and tituba. Id like to point out one other thing. One of the first pieces. This is her testimony and if you look carefully, theres stuff thats crossed out. By an existing transcription sort of skipped over the cross outs and corrections. Again has written a whole article all the corrections in all the documents. 12 people, ten years. People were looking at little tiny details. Looking into actual documents. When you get a magnifying glass on that it separates out into 3 d. Elizabeth paris jr. And, betty paris. And shes been crossed out. And the other pieces, it says testify. That would have been for plural. Betty and abigail testify. In very light ink you see th. So its abigail to testify. It changes they to she. And changes their to her. So this document is where betty paris drops out. Of everything. The only time you see her in anything. And shes been dropped out. Probably around may 23rd. Probably too young to be a formal accuser. But also they were trying to get her out of the limelight. Maybe. Theres an anecdotal talk that the family took her in. She got better. Marilynne roach wrote a great thing about betty paris and her life. She got married and had kids. But this is where she disappears. A lot of these sets where samuel paris and you see the dot dot dot on that. He would grab two other guys, a lot of times Thomas Putnam. But he put his own thing in and grab a couple guys so they have multiple adult men making these accusations. And then theres the parallel one that hes written for Abigail Williams. So theres martha, Rebecca Nurse. Elizabeth proctor. John proctor. Susan martin. A few others we have just her or just him. We assume that there are a lot more of the pairs. Clearly these are the early ones. We dont have all of the documents. That was enough of a pattern. Hes just doing Abigail Williams and no one else did williams testimony. Thomas putnam had written over 200 things depositions for other people. For which i got a very nice paternalistic pat on the head for telling him something about his ancestor he didnt know. That was my one meeting of him. Oh yeah. It was good. That same conference ben ray and whos the other. Dick latner had produced papers that were challenging some of the data that was used to make their decisions. And john didnt like it. He told them they had a big idea. It was sort of like how dare you criticize boyar. They had a big idea. Im sitting there, they got their data wrong. Wait, wait. They cherry picked the data . They got the map wrong . That would seem to be important to me. But they had a big idea. It was something that changed how how historians were doing work. They were looking at the communities, looking at relationships. They did have a big idea, but their data is flawed. So. John didnt like that. I got a nice pat on the head. The other thing when youre looking for patterns of participation, this theres a close up of my timeline on this. We know that Thomas Newton was the first crowns attorney to be prosecuting the cases and then little later on anthony checkly came in to do it. So we know about this. Thomas newton left because the province of New Hampshire was opening up. And his job it turned out was to be the treasurer of the new province. And one point because the state archives is down the street from where i work. I wonder where that went. I kept finding document after document of him trying to get somebody to give him the ledgers of the province. So he would know how to manage the money. All the complaints they wouldnt give me the books. And im going, okay theres a an article in that sometime. So he went up to New Hampshire and was trying to do things. He was out. We know their handwriting because we have a couple documents. The left is a letter he wrote in may of 1692. The one on the right is a petition by anthony checkly in 1693. In the very awkward position of having conducted all of the cases and they never paid him. And hes trying to figure out how to do it. Hes representing the crown. Hes the crowns attorney. And if it was somebody else that the crown had been stiffing for their fees, they would be trying to sue the crown. Except he couldnt sue the crown because he was representing the crown. Hes in this tough position. He had done all this work and they hadnt paid him. He wrote a petition saying you know this is the case. Is there anything you can do . He couldnt actually sue and be on both side. We have the two wonderful examples of their handwriting. One of the things that came across, these are the guys we could find where their handwriting showed up. And we had a couple dates we knew that newton came in june 2nd. And we knew that checkly came in on july 27th. Because we have the actual commissions for what they were doing. When we started looking at the indictments and im sorry indictments are probably the more boring documents in all of these. Until i discovered they were boilerplates. They revealed a lot more than you really know because you were looking at the handwriting. And one of the left we saw this earlier. One of the indictments about Rebecca Nurse. That we can see. Filled in the blanks. And the on the right is the indictment against Abigail Hobbs in september 10th. All the fill in the blanks are done by checkly. You expect that. Okay, now part of the pattern of participation you can see one of the things the crowns attorney does is fill in the blanks on the boilerplate indictments. Except that there are some that dont have either of them filling them in. For like really. Who is this . And it turns out we also know who the handwriting that was. It was Steven Sewell. The clerk of the court. Wait a minute, when did this happen . So we discovered that when we looked at Thomas Newton, his handwriting only appears on the indictments for the first three cases. We get to anthony checkly, he doesnt even start doing things in july. Hes starting to do things in early august. And then Steven Sewell, the clerk of the court, has working on the indictments in the middle. Hes just the clerk. Hes not the crowns attorney and yet hes serving that function. In this time between when Thomas Newton left and anthony checkly had started. And you would think you would see checkly and all the ones that came in early august. Clearly steven was still shouldering a lot of it. He did george burros. He did all of these people. And we dont know if maybe he even acted as a crowns attorney to present those cases to the petty jury and with disasterous results for the people involved. We dont know. I dont know what to tell you about this other than its a pattern that i discovered looking at handwriting and time. And i leave it to somebody else to try and figure out is this significant or not. I think its significant. Because if they didnt have an actual crowns attorney doing this, i dont know. It raises questions for me. I hope somebody else did possibly use this as a starting off point to see why was this the case. That they actually allowed them to continue before they had a formal crowns attorney to continue the prosecution. So thats a question ill leave you with. And im happy to take questions. I have taken you on a bit of a romp around things. But i hope i have given you some ideas and maybe have a fueled a couple questions. Yes, make sure you get the microphone, please. Was Steven Sewell an attorney at all . No. Basically even newton and checkly were not really attorneys. They were pointed as such. In england they had a much more of a profession. And you were in the bar and you had training and there were a lot of different kind of ways you can be a lawyer or attorney. And we didnt have that formally here. Youll hear people saying oh by we didnt have attorneys or they were illegal. We didnt have the kind of structures that they had in 17th century england. In england all the stuff for medicine also had lots of structures. Whether you were a physician or an apothecary or barber surgeon, all the structures for professions in england did not come over here. So maybe somebody had training. But it wasnt like they were getting the same kind of training that somebody in the bar in england was having. So they were the only ones who were actually lawyers in any sense of, we didnt have the adversarial kind of thing. Nobody is represented by a lawyer. It was just the lawyer the crowns attorney was presenting the case to the grand jury and petty jury. Putting it all together to present them. Wait for the mike. The camera crew likes me because i do that. I imagine you get used to working with the documents after ten years. But what was the first salem witch trial document that you held . And what was the was there a particular one that made it real in that personal way to you . To be working with. I can tell you which one of the documents caught me first. I can tell you which document got me into this whole thing. I dont say this when im talking to middle school kids. But the one that caught me was the the description of the search for witches teets. And i was reading it and im reading a description of my ancestor Rebecca Nurses genitalia. And i went, holy cow. Why do i it looks like a prolapsed uterus. But how come i know gynecological information about my ancestor . That caught my attention. But thats the one that made me go what else is there. The document that really got me into this was the document where you saw the two versions of it the corrected verse and the clean one. Theres a curious piece of that because thats a document of testimony against george burros. I was reading the 3 volume witchcraft papers and came across it. Its a testimony against george burros but the date was a month after he had been executed. Wait. So thats when i contacted bernie. I knew he was starting the project. Is this one of the errors you were saying occurred. And he said well, no. I did talk about that in my book. Im going oh. Theres something i want to talk you about. It doesnt work very well on email. He doesnt like email i found out later on. Easier maybe if we talked in person or on the phone. I dont know if youre comfortable. I said fine ill call the guy. Thats when he needed a project manager. And he invited me to come on. I was asking one of the questions that was at the heart of records of salem witch hunt. The other document when i was holding it in my hand. The other two were just records. Was these documents the indictments against Rebecca Nurse, and the account of her interrogation in samuel pariss handwriting. And holding a document that you know who actually wrote it down, and the context. And its a about your ancestor. It was just like this is basically part of what cost your execution. I know who wrote this document. I feel like i could be in the same room because i could identify the handwriting. I knew who these people were because they were writing things and this was right in front of me. And i dont think you have to be a descendent of somebody who was executed. That had reverborance, for me. That i knew who it was. And what he had written down and what was the end result was from him writing that down. So. Anybody else . Tad. Wait for the microphone please. So, observation and question. I guess im intrigued by the whole Steven Sewell and all the parises. Reverend. First betty and abigail. And also samuel. All kind of disappearing early on. And i think theres a lot going on there. Particularly im intrigued by the fact that there is a relationship that stevens sisterinlaw is pariss first cousin. That makes sense. At the same time you read the document, theres no real proof that thats where betty went. Ago makes sense. And its clear hes trying to get the girls out of the trial. I think. Still. Steven sewell. Hes taken over and running the cases. There are a lot of questions. For me the documents are the heart and soul. You have seen some arent actual primary sources. Theyre secondary sources. For me anecdotal means i cant come up with the primary source. Primary source doesnt necessarily mean its true. Fips writing and saying i was on the frontier and then tad discovers hes listed in the people being present at the governor in counsel how many times over the summer . He was there with the guys running the trial. But politician, liar. Okay. You cant necessarily believe everything that everybody says. In these things. You just know the record is they said it, somebody wrote it down. So. Again. Follow up. Shouldnt have run away. Could you tell the audience and give us your impression of that burros document . A deposition a month after he was executed. Tell your take on that. Part of it was it was thomas green i believe. He was related to around the time of she was being accused and some of the some of the discussion that some people have is he was trying to help her out by giving extra information about burros. Burros his execution was very they probably also could walk into the courthouse and actually see the documents. But woodward a two volume set in a couple decades ago. Republished it in a two volume in one. Also you can get that as a pdf at archive. Org. All the stuff you can get now in free Public Domain things. But those earlier antiqerians. They did a lot to collect things. And sort of made up some stuff. If you heard about the girls dancing. Tituba teaching them voodoo and dancing in the woods. That theres no information before he tells that story. Were like, what . Theres just absolutely nothing before that. You would think there would be something. He came up with this. So each generation brings to all these primary sources the things that are pertinent to them. So when you hear that tituba was voodoo practicing. She comes across as a black mamy from barbados she was a slave and from barbados and there was witchcraft. Its in the civil war era. Northerners think slave, witchcraft. They have a stereotype of a voodoo practicing black mamy from the islands. And she was an indian. We dont see she did anything other than her husband mostly used a english white magic recipe for making the rye cake with the girls urine and feeding it to the dog. Thats english white magic. She got recast in the context of how people saw the world in the civil war era. Every single generation brings to this material their own stuff. Arthur miller suddenly its all about the anticommunist things going on. I read the crucible and say interesting story about marital infidelity. Its all about salem. No its not. He uses the specific details and i wish he hadnt used real peoples names. It makes it very confusing for people. Hes renamed a few and conflated a few. But used real names and its a constant challenge. Because people find out about this story and theyre interested in salem because of it. And you have to detangle it to get back to the primary source. So if he had just given them other names i would be very happy. As i see it, its a story of marital infidelity. People say its about the communist era. I say maybe. Marital infidelity. Everybody wants to have it be about salem. Tad already brought up the fungus among us. The fungus that dare not speak its name. The theory published first in mid70s by a graduate student. And she had written it as an undergraduate paper. Here she was a science major having to take the class. She thought it was interesting because here it is mid70s. Dropping acid and the from the 60s. When she found this out. That was on the minds of people. Drugs, hey they were tripping. As soon as her article got published in science magazine, boom. It made every single wire service. How long did it take to get refuted . Refuted it like the next day. But it had made all the wire services. I want to give a whole talk on that at history camp. Next year. So look for either the fungus that dare not say its name or the fungus among us. And ill have a lot more details. Its a lot of fun. Every era brings to it their own. Mine is the coercion of false confessions. Thats one of my favorite parts of this. Because i can tease it apart. Unlike just about everybody including tad, i think they were planning to execute all the people who confessed. Stoten was. And hes the court. I make a case on what happens i draw a lot of the stuff on the project Innocence Project shirt. I have drawn on a lot of the research on how that functions. To apply it to what we see in the primary sources and they were heavily trying to get people to confess because its much easier to convict them if you have the confession. Its Gold Standard then and now. So. Questions . Could you comment on the i heard both of you mention people giving i dont know if it was a deposition. Being visited by the spector of someone. Or hearing something from someones spirit. Could you explain what that is . Spectral evidence. The basic premise of spectral evidence is that a person a witch could send their spirit their image from their physical body, to somebody at a distance. Whether its kroos the room or another house, to do their afflicting. So you could be standing right there, Rebecca Nurse standing there in custody. And the girls would claim to see an image of her coming across the room, and strangling them and poking them, and trying to knock them down. And nobody else in the room can see this. But the girls who are accusing people are claiming they see it. Now the first one says shes afflicting me. And all the other girls are saying yes i see. And everybody else is watching and going i dont see anything. But they start believing what the girls are saying because they are so passionate about it. Its like teenage girls. If you have a group of middle schoolgirls and one of them says oh theres a bug on me. How many other girls are starting to look for bugs. Next thing you know oh yes im being bitten. When we talk about the mental state of people. As soon as one girl says oh yes her spector is afflicting me. The rest of then concurred. Part of the reason we have the indictments that are date for the date of the examination is so many people witnessed that. They saw all the things that led up to the girls claiming affliction. All right there. Invisible things like spectors were like ghosts. Ghosts appeared to people and claimed they had been murdered. But the other piece about the specter. This was controversial at the time. As to whether the devil could use the specter, the image of an innocent person, to attack somebody. Because the devil is a trickster. And the court and i say the court i mean william stoten. Believed that the devil had to have the permission of somebody to use their likeness or image as a specter. So. Law and order. Yeah. But the devil couldnt do it with an innocent persons image. Couldnt have that afflict them. So that was a major legal point of dispute. And there were a lot people bring up the witch of indoor and look at biblical things. If a girl claimed theres a specter of rebecca nothing further afflicting her. The court saw it as Rebecca Nurse allowed the devil to use her image to afflict. Therefore it was evidence. My follow up question is the court seemed to operate in a loose fashion. If they were allowing people sitting there to suddenly burst out with things. You can imagine today maybe theyd say, oh take that person out they are disrupting the proceedings or something. Could you comment about that . Because it wasnt really the kind of Court Proceeding that were used to. When you see portrayals of the questioning and answering. We sort of imprint it from what we know of perry mason and law and order. And any instance we have seen of some legal thing going on. It looks like hamilton burger interrogating the perpetrator. When really that wasnt the case. These were pretrial hearings. And thats when they did interrogations. Im likely to call them interrogations than examinations. Youll see the word examination a lot. Its a public interrogation. It was more like lenny brisco going after somebody. Even today police when theyre interrogating operate from a presumption of guilt. So when you see the questions that tad had up there. Why do you afflict these girls . Theyre all leading questions. Because they have already concluded youre guilty and do anything they can to elicit a statement against your selfinterest. All of these seem to be court things. But these were interrogations and when i said theyre trying to find out the investigative part of it. And so, it wasnt that uncommon. The girls did however come to the grand jury and were at the trials because we have some instances where during grand jury hearings the girls flipped out again. And when Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty by the jury, apparently the girls really flipped out there and it was very noisy. And stoten sent the jury back out. They came back and said she was not guilty. They said not again. And stoten said what about when she said xyz. Shortcut here. So the jury said well, what did you mean there . And it was so noisy she couldnt hear. Because the girls were flipping out. Finding her not guilty. When she didnt answer because she didnt hear. The jury said okay because failure to respond to an accusation was tantamount to agreeing to it. If you think that was old fashion, and what were they thinking. Its still the case. It went to the Supreme Court a few years ago if you are asked a question, and you refuse to answer that can be used as evidence against you. So then and now. Theres so many parallels between what they did then and now. The reason it could get so chaotic, by the time they got to the actual Court Hearings they were used to having the girls there. Early on they were part of the crowd. Anyway. So you laid out the speech with the three documents. Three fazes of the trial. Were the complete cast of characters there for each event. Or were the judges brought in for the third part . Or there for the all the other parts . In the investigative phase, you got the local magistrates. Or and they were the ones that would be called in to just see if theres a reason for arresting people. And one of the things thats really interesting is they traveled to Salem Village to hear the complaints. They didnt make everybody go into salem. It was easier to go there. They stayed and the longer they stayed the longer people say by the way i think this. They were trying to figure out how to handle this. Every person brought before them. With one exception, they threw in jail. The only exception was nehamiah bottom jr. And he was a young guy and the girls started giving physical descriptions. They said he had a wen on his forehead. A bump. Youre welcome to everybody who does scrabble. Wen is a bump. And they said he had a bump on his forehead. They had to brush his hair aside and no wen. And im thinking teenage guy, okay that part of acne went somewhere else. But he doesnt have it there. And they let him go. Because he didnt match the description of the girls had. After that, if Mary Beth Norton brings this up. After that the girls didnt do physical descriptions. They said how did you know it was goody martin. She told me her name and she was from. Sort of like what . The specter who was afflicting you identifies themselves. This is how you know. Im going to hold you up and give you my wallet. By the way my name is. All the things of a stupid criminal who leave their check deposit slip when they rob a bank. Who does that . Essentially they made out these witches really worked against their own selfinterest. I think thats another reason why they thought they could get them to confess. Very easy to get these people to do that. You want to ask another question. Come on up. I wanted to ask partly was there anything to learn from the paper the ink, the things that were not the handwriting. And i was wondering if you could debunk something i heard. Some popular. For starters we didnt look at paper. There was lots of paper with hell follow up that question. We looked at the paper but decided that was outside of our scope. A lot of watermarks and things like that. We probably could have gone further with material culture. The ink they probably made themselves. Theres one document the pen was so sharp it poked holes in it. They were making their own pens and mixing their own ink. Beyond that, nothing. Follow up question which was . Which was, i heard recently i dont know from where, that someone had a theory that paris received a copy of the book on trying witches. And used what was in it to coach titubas quote confession. Not too long afterward. You saw the National Geographic special. Yes it was a couple years ago tad and i were in there thing and katherine how the author talked to us. And i remember watching that. And going, really . Actually when it came out i was going this is awesome. It came out it was a couch between mystery of shrunken heads and the witch doctor will see you now. No joke. Those are the two it came out in. In the end, they have katherine traveling to i believe it was the mass historical society. There was a copy of a book on how to prosecute witches. This was an inscription and it was given to paris. The date was the date of her interrogation. So i cant imagine him being able to read that whole book on that day the same day that shes being interrogated and know what to do. I tend to think if this was the case it was probably a follow up. You should see this. But i dont think he had time unless he stayed up late with his kindle reading it. That he could read the whole book and use the information to work on tituba. Tituba was a slave. She had nothing to gain if people told her confess, she was going to confess. The easiest people to convince to confess falsely are people with no agency. So a slave, small children, servants. Theyre easy to coerce. It didnt take much. And tituba is probably the most fantastic and bizarre