American History Hit - The Salem Witch Trials

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

More than 200 accused, 20 executed and a village plagued with hysteria. Were the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693 the work of superstition, a power struggle, fungus or actual witchcraft? What makes them stand out in the history of witch trials?In this episode, Don speaks to Jessica Parr from Northeastern University about the alleged crimes, persecution and lasting memory of the so-called Salem witches.Jessica is a historian of the Early Modern Atlantic and author of 'Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon.'Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tean Stewart-Murray. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In 1957, the General Court of Massachusetts issues an official resolve regarding a scandalous legal matter of the distant past, one that occurred more than three centuries earlier.

It declares the court's belief that, quote, such proceedings, even if lawful under the province charter and law of Massachusetts as it then was, were and are shocking, the result of a wave of popular hysterical fear of the devil in the community. In a time when Dwight D. Eisenhower is president, Elvis purchases Graceland and releases jailhouse rock, when Jack Kerouac pens on the road. Massachusetts is, in a sense, legally apologizing for the conviction and execution of accused witches in 1692. But they do not exonerate the women and men who suffered this injustice. That would be a struggle that would continue on for many years to come.

Good day, listening public. I'm Don Wildman, and you are. our tune to American history hit. Today, we are way back in the long ago. In Salem, Massachusetts, where one of colonial America's most notorious events transpired, the subject of so many movies and books, even a classic Arthur Miller play, probably as best. It's the Salem Witch Trials, 1692 to 93, when a proper Puritan community lost its grip on itself, became hysterical, paranoid for reasons we are still deciphering 350 years later.

Before it was over, more than 200 people had been accused of salacious crimes related to witchcraft, and upwards of 20 paid with their lives. A famously lurid tale, but likely we don't know the half of the real history. So let's learn with Jessica Parr, Professor of the Practice in History and Digital Humanities. So states the website of Northeastern University, where she teaches in Boston specializing in early modern Atlantic history. Dr. Parr, Jessica, welcome. Thank you, Doc. Let's first understand where and when these events.

unfold. Today, Salem, Massachusetts is a pleasant suburb of Boston, half-hours drive near Marblehead and Beverly, as I understand it. Back in this time, February 1692 to 1693, this would have been a remote farming region of the coast with all the inherent dangers of the frontier. Am I correct? Correct. It would have been, even today, it is kind of difficult to get to. There's not a direct road traffic. And one of the things we also want understand is that the boundaries of the contemporary city of Salem don't exactly align with Salem villagers. It's actually broader included Danvers, Massachusetts, which has sort of chosen to distance itself from the past, whereas Salem Mass has decided to lead into the tourist dollars. We're talking about a region of this part of the world at that time even, right? I mean,

it's identified with Salem, as you say, but this was even back in the day, several different places. Correct. What kind of population of people are out there at that time? Fairly small, isolated. We want to understand that in terms of New England, a lot of the communities or basically many theocracies, they're rooted around the congregationalist churches, which are dissent or churches. Some of the original settlers were separatists. Some of the first settlers, for instance, in Plymouth Bay, which is south, but sort of the ancestral to Salem and Boston and all of that tried to thoroughly. separate from the church. The brownest separatists, the ones that were in Leiden, Netherlands for about a decade or so, and then wind up coming over on the Mayflower. So we want to remember that a lot of these folks are both some of these original sellers, but as well as the waves of English dissenters that come over in the 1630s, 1640s, 1650s because of all of the religious unrest in England. Right.

You've anticipated my next question. Society in those days, I mean, everywhere, really, was so focused on the church. But this was especially true in the Boston area, which, as you say, had been founded by Puritan colonists. I suppose it's a general term for a lot of doing things. 50, 60 years earlier. Famously rigid society. High standards of behavior, to put it mildly. And this would have gone for the whole colony, even out there in the burbs, right?

Correct. All of the colonies were fairly conservative, fairly isolationist. although Boston by this period is starting to open up a little bit to the commercial world due to English commercial interests, very hostile to non-congregationalists, including the Church of England, you know, forget it about being a Quaker, never mind a Catholic or anything else, which is messy because its commercial ties are also to Barbados and English settlements in the Caribbean, which have a not inconsiderable number of Irish Catholic indebted. servic, especially after Cromwell's little protectorate, and they're starting to creep up into New England. And a lot of the colonies were anti-Catholic, but New England in particular, it was very hostile for Catholics. So much of this is the foundation for another conversation, which is, you know, separation of church and state. I mean, people were getting how difficult it was to run a kind of place that America was going to be if all of this was going on. But this particular

community, Salem Village, had a tough time finding steady leadership in their church. four different ministers over a short period of years, eventually securing Reverend Samuel Paris, who will play a leading role in this story. Pretty intense fellow, I imagine. Yes. So there were four ministers. One of the things that separated Salem Village from some of the other Massachusetts settlements is that it was notoriously quarrelsome. People really didn't like each other. And one of the things that we want to remember with the congregationalist churches is that the congregations, its leadership, its elders are the ones that call the ministers. And the ministers in this period basically serve at the pleasure of the village slash congregational leadership. So if they tick people off, they wind up moving along, getting stuck out.

So Samuel Paris is the fourth in a close number of years. in a very quarrelsome community, and in fact, by the time of the Salem Witch Trials, is already facing a lot of hostility again because he has failed to solve the quarrel. What were the quarrels from? Mixedure stuff over church governance, property ownership, theology, sort of things that you would expect just even higher levels than we see elsewhere in New England in this period. Prinkly personalities throughout this congregation throughout this community. That's going to start to blow up in a little bit of time.

But before we get into that, I want to talk about how this carries over from Europe. I mean, witchcraft, all the controversies of this have been going on for several centuries in Europe. Can you explain that phenomenon and how it came over as well? Sure. Well, there are a couple of things we want to keep in mind. So England had a long history of religious descent and tension by this part. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about come out of the Protestant Reformation, right? The original schism with Martin Luther and all these other folks.

And when we get Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, the Church of England, of course, when Henry VIII famously wants to divorce his wife. Those Quakers, you mentioned? Quakers are certainly one, yes. The congregation was the Baptist, there are no Methodists just yet. They become their reformed sect off of the Church of England. But there's a lot of arguments.

And one of the big blowouts in England is over religious toleration. And by toleration, we would remember that toleration comes from the Latin, tolerare, which means you put up with it doesn't mean that they're equal or that you necessarily like them. You just sort of leave them alone to do their own thing. And there is a lot of hostility over the 17th century in England over a number of kings that are seen as too sympathetic to the Catholics. So, for instance, Charles I, who very famously winds up being executed at Whitehall. And there's this sort of bizarre ritual where you actually have people rush forward

after he's beheaded and dip their handkerchiefs in the blood from his execution. And then you have Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protectorate, that follows, who is very, very vehemently anti-Catholic and, of course, is very responsible for some atrocities in Ireland, to put it mildly. And then you have later on, you know, Charles II in the restoration in 1660. and then James the second in England in Ireland and James the seventh in Scotland, who has a French wife and his cousins, the King of France. So he has a lot of hostility, both because he's seen as much too sympathetic to the Catholics

and because he makes some really big diplomatic miscalculations to say the least, including helping to stir off a series of wars between England and Dutch over treat. Yeah, there's tremendous civil unrest and instability. The whole structure of society in Europe at that time, 16th, 17th century is really up in the air. In the midst of all of this, witchcraft becomes this kind of go-to outlet, I suppose, would be the way to say it. People were being called out for crazy behavior. How much of it was a direct result of that civil unrest, or was it really, from the churches. I mean, you also had the Catholic Church really inflicting itself in the world,

Spanish Inquisition being the least of it. But all of this really erupts in this sort of crazy criminal persecution of people based on suspicions of witchcraft, that Satan was at the heart of these matters, right? It's true. I mean, Satan and various forms of evil are often the explanations for behaviors as well as, you know, natural disasters like earthquakes. But there are a series of Inquisitions in England, too, where there are actually courts of inquisition in England that go around examining things. And so they function differently than what we would think of as traditional courts, which the Salem Village, the witch trials, functions differently as well.

And we'll probably suppose we'll get to that. You wind with people being tortured, often into confessions, neighbors turning on to neighbors. So this isn't new. We're just pointing out that this becomes a tool, as much as it is a symptom of what, you know, people are feeling in these crazy times, especially out there in the woods of New England. But it's also a tool of social control and a flame that is often fanned by those in control. So this is certainly what happens in Salem, but it happens in a peculiar way. When does this all begin? We're talking about late February 1692.

What are the inciting incidents? So there have actually been in the previous 50 years, five other witch hysterias that are related to some of the stuff that we just talked to, spelling over from England into the colonies. But some of the things that are happening between 1688 and 1692, particularly are that England is trying to reassert or streamline its control over the colonies, and particularly in New England, which is very used to having quite. a bit of freedom. We want to remember that the New England colonies were largely founded on commercial compacts rather than being formerly royal colonies. And one of the things that happens under James II is that he tries to reassert control and is particularly trying to move more freedom into the Church of England into New England. And it really becomes a thing in Massachusetts because Massachusetts is so hostile to the Church of England.

For instance, before that, there is a dominion of New England in Britain that goes for a couple years as deeply unpopular. And there is a big revolt in Boston. You know, Boston, we like our rebels, right? So there's some of that. There is a lot of anxiety with the Puritans in general, the Puritan leaders in New England start to feel some of their authorities slipping away. We also have intellectually speaking, we want to think about the Enlightenment. The start and end date of the Enlightenment, a little bit of a slippery slope. You can say 1660s onwards and it's starting to hit the colonies at this point. But one of the big emphasis of the Enlightenment is on rational imperial evidence,

you know, explanations for things. And in fact, one of the things that happens about six months before the cell and witch trials is that Increase Mather, who is Cotton Mather's father and president of Harvard, actually pushes for the end of the use of spectral evidence in Massachusetts colonial courts. What is spectral evidence? So spectral evidence is stuff that you can't see. So it's when you hear about, you know, so-and-so turned themselves into a cow and right, or so-and-so appeared in spirit form and was.

poking me and then nobody else sees it. Somebody snuck in and poisoned my livestock, that spectrum of it. Stuff that could be very fabricated essentially, right? Exactly. Yeah. So that's sort of what is a big part of what is happening. The Puritan leadership feels inter control. This is what a historian named Mark Knowles, the Puritan canopy, is starting to slip away in the 1690s. And it doesn't really fully dissipate until the early 18th century. But some of this, is because of the fact that New England and Massachusetts is becoming more of a royal colony. One of the big turns is, you know, with the glorious revolution where you have William and Mary put on the throne, the English constitution, and then William and Mary then turn around and dissolve some of the compacts that originally governed a number of different Massachusetts colonies,

and Massachusetts becomes a royal colony. The new constitution underneath as a royal colony comes around, I think, 1690 or thereabouts. So, you know, big political changes are happening that really are kind of scary to these guys. I've yet to read the book that talks about how tiresome of trying to figure out the kings and queens psychology. You're trying to read the tea leaves of royal behavior and thinking, especially from across an ocean. How much that informed the eventual revolution? Like, oh, enough of these people. Like, who are they and what do they think about? So out here in the dark, you know, out there in the woods, we have a very unstable community that's been unstable for a while. A very unpleasant man

named Samuel Paris comes along. He is the Reverend. He is one of these hardcore guys, as I understand, who's going to get a lot of pushback from his community in various ways. But he also is pushing himself. And so in the midst of all of this, his own daughters are either accused of or actually behave in such a way publicly. I'm not sure of that. But it's a 9-year-old and 11-year-old. One is a niece and one is a daughter, right? They are accused of or have fits of screaming, throwing things, making weird sounds, physical contortions. I mean, this is right out of the exorcist.

So take it from there. How is this accusation made and then sought to be proven? So what we want to think about this is in terms of a couple of. of tweens, and those of us who are parents are probably a little familiar with tween behavior at how it might not have been the most pleasant of experience for bored young adolescents. They wind up involved with some store with Tichiba, who is enslaved by the Paris household. Tichiba is a woman who is at least of indigenous descent brought up from the Caribbean, Barbados, where the Paris family had been, because he,

He had also been a planter down in the colonies. And then her husband, John Indian, who is probably of Arawak extracts. And there's also some speculation that Tichiba was part African as well. And one of the things that winds up happening is that she's telling them a lot of stories and they wind up doing this ritual that is gestures at some Afro-Sycratic religion. Some have described it as Haitian voodoo. Others have described it as Obaya, which is sort of similar Afro-Socratic religion that's all over the Caribbean, especially in the English colonies, where they mix some of the

girls urine with rice and they make these cakes and they get fed to the dog. And the idea behind this is sort of the predicting the future. Samuel Paris finds out about this and is, as he says, can imagine not too pleased with with tituba because you can't be doing anything that suggests witchcraft, let alone any sort of pagan religion in a very strict Puritan household. But the girls wind up acting up after this. And some of the theories is that these are sort of bored tween. They start having fits. They start making accusations. Originally, Tichiba is one of the first who's accused. And then the accusations spread to.

other, mostly women, but, you know, some men too in the communities, including a couple of women who are outliers, even a pretty contentious community. Sarah Good, for example, is one. And as you say, they wind up, you know, throwing convulsion, making accusations, so-and-so, you know, dab me with a hot poker and so on and so forth. Were these witnessed behaviors, or is it Gossip. Well, it's a mixture of both. The convulsions and stuff were witnessed. One of the things that we want to remember is that there is a similar case in Boston in 1688 of an Irish indentured servant woman named Ann Blover. And the details are very, very similar. We have some young tweens or teens in a household who get caught up in acting up in hysteria household and wind up accused.

of witchcraft and Anne Glover becomes the last witch hand in Boston. Hey folks, we'll be right back after the break with more from American History hit. And while you're listening, make sure you never miss another episode by clicking like and follow. And while you're at it, please share this episode with a friend or family member. Thank you so much. The colonial magistrates pressure the girls into blaming three women for stirring their passions and having this reaction. And as you say, they target Tituba, the Caribbean woman, enslaved, as well as Sarah Good.

I'm reviewing here. But important to understand Sarah Good, a homeless beggar, another woman, Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman. How unusual, the enslaved, the homeless, and the elderly blamed for so-called crimes. Where does it go from there? It spreads to other folks in the community, a lot of whom are poor or had quarrels with their neighbors. It just sort of spiral. And in fact, Tichuba winds up confessing to witchcraft. Samuel Paris beat a confession out of her.

And she expresses regret at having engaged in that sort of ritual with the girls. Tituba winds up testifying against a number of folks, undoubtedly to, you know, she had to save her own hide. And that, you know, cooperation in this period sometimes was in means of self-protection. She has a colorful confession. The devil came to me and bid me serve him, she says, describing elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds, and a tall man with white hair who wanted her to sign his book. Sounds awfully like Satan. These are images that they would have heard about in church, I imagine. Yep.

And she would have absolutely been fully aware of the ramifications of what she was saying. Yes. But by confessing, she's saving herself, as you say. Correct. This already surprises me because my image of this sort of myth of this whole thing is that there were just all kinds of witchcraft incidents. Actually, this all sort of roots from these original girls, right? Correct. But it just snowballs.

By snowballing, you mean there are other accusations, unproven. It becomes kind of a hysteria, a mob hysteria, right? Exactly. It is a mob mentality. And one of the things that happens that differs what happens, in Salem versus some of the other contemporary witch accusations is Cotton Mather, his inserting of himself. That's interesting. So we have Increase Mather, who's the father, and Leeds Harvard College. His son, Cotton Mather, will follow him. There's a tension between them. Is the son trying to inflict himself upon the father? Increased Mather was a little bit less of a zealic from, I mean, he's still very, very, you know, conservative and austere.

But one of the differences they had, for instance, so when the Salem witch trials start, they start under commissions of Oyer and Terminer, which are a little bit different than conventional court systems. They have usually limited jurisdiction, limited, but they're used for special circumstances. And that's part of why the spectral evidence, which Cotton Mather pushes for, is let in. And increased Mather seals that his son really kind of stirred the pot. He's certainly, he's the one who led the, let's not slip in as spectral evidence into, you know, legal proceedings, even though there's not really per se court proceedings the way there are now. So, you know, and in fact, the village they write to Cotton Mather. So he's invited, but he does sort of become the proverbial gas on the fire.

So when we call it the witch trials, is this a separate kind of institution or is this a separate kind of court than what normally would occur or does this sort of fall into the usual legal institution? So the annoying historian answer is it depends. It kind of depends on local politics. The commissions of lawyer and terminer weren't that different than in some respects than the inquisitorial courts in Europe, which weren't the same as courts, right? And they were religious proceedings. There's no right of defense necessarily. There's the use of things like waterboarding. And, well, we would consider waterboarding, but, you know, the dunking stools and with, you know, Giles Corey who winds up dying, it's actually when, you know, he has rocks piled on top of his chest.

And the idea was to try to squeeze a confession over him. And he famously says, you know, more weight. until his chest cavity goes, you know, it's fatal. So it really kind of depends. You could have some cases of witchcraft heard in conventional courts. And in fact, this does move into the precursor for the Massachusetts General Court after there's a lack of satisfaction in the way the Commissioner Oyer and Terminer is handling things. But the goal of this of this court is, basically confessions. They basically want to out the people who are doing this. And that will not,

and this is the old thing. We all learned in grades ago, you have to confess to the crime in order to be freed of it. But, you know, the old dunking until you, oh, she's not a witch because she drowned, you know, is that whole thing. All of that comes out and all that sort of mythology that we grew up with is about this. But this is very specific. And so we have a case-by-case schedule, I suppose, that begins in May, May, 1692. So we're about five months into this whole thing. So many people at that point have been accused. Many outsiders have sort of fallen into the net. The first trial is against Bridget Bishop, literally for gossip and promiscuity. She declares, I am innocent as the child unborn. Several weeks later, she has found guilty. June 10th becomes the

first person hanged on what is later called Gallows Hill. And thus begins a whole bunch of trials, right? And this lasts for months and months and months. I think of chaos when I think of this. Is that fair? I mean, people screaming in rooms or is this a kind of calm methodical process? Oh, and it is anything but calm. I mean, you have during the trials, for instance, the niece and nephew, you know, and sometimes other girls sitting in the courts as these are going on and as witches are being accused, you know, start, you know, fainting and convulsing and shrieking and acting up. So it's almost like a game to them. I see. Yeah. Well, this is quite a stage to be on in those days. This is the media of the time. So if you wanted a starring role, it would be in this courtroom, I suppose.

Not just for those victims, but also for the lawyers who are proving themselves in the most outlandish way possible, I imagine. I'm casting these roles in my mind already. Governor Phipps is a figure in this. And this is where we begin to see the political element moving into this. I mean, there has to be some management. beyond the church, right? Right. Phipps actually is the one who has the trials move from the commission of lawyer and terminer to the court system, to the early court system, because he is not happy with the way things are going. My suspect, my suspicion is that he's starting to recognize this for what it's becoming.

I'm fascinated by this. I should probably wait to say this at the end of this program, but I can't help myself. The emergence of the Enlightenment, as you mentioned earlier, as a backdrop to all of this, becomes kind of the really important way to see this. This is such an eruption of human passions and suspicions and all these negatives of mob behavior for sure. But it's within a time frame when people are starting to think very, very differently, culturally, especially in Europe. You know, it's like being anywhere in the backwater, you get it later on. And so what has been happening in Europe for more than a century, I suppose, the beginnings of the Enlightenment, is starting to take hold over here. Scary to anybody in power because it really is a threat to their structure, their system, their power structure.

Well, I mean, what's interesting is that within, oh, say, 15 to 20 years of the end of this, Cotton Mather himself becomes swept away by the Enlightenment. It really gets into reading in science. He's involved, for instance, in when there are a series of smallpox outbreaks, there's like a six smallpox outbreak in Boston. He gets involved in the investigation based on what some of his enslaved man of Simeas tells him about West African inoculation practices along with Zepidaya Boylston to just sort of reproducing the smallpox vaccine. and, you know, trying to get himself admitted to the Royal Academy for science.

So he really does a pretty quick 180 after the end of this trial. But, yeah, things like the idea of spectral evidence flew against the Enlightenment. In the scientific revolution, which really predates the Enlightenment, so you have folks like Robert Boyle, who is the godfather of the scientific method. So for those of us who suffer through writing lab reports in high school chemistry, you know, that's the guy you're going to blame for that. Right. You have the beginnings of an actual legal system here. I want to cover some of the consequences before we move to a much more interesting question for me. As I said, 20 people die as a result of this. Are these all executions as a result of lack of confession? Is that basically how this boils down? A mixture of them.

I mean, some of them are, I think the ones that fail to confess are books like Giles Corey who refuses to confess and just basically it's sort of a mixture of execution slash suicide while they're trying to get. So there's some of those scenarios. The hangings were mostly found guilty or declined to confess. Because one of the things we want to remember that there were some legal ramifications for confessing to save your own skin is that it would be the loss of property. So if a man, for instance, or property owner, you know, because coveture, right, confesses his property

could be taken away. And not only is he going to die, but he's condemning his family to homelessness and poverty. One cannot miss the fact that we're talking about witchcraft, which has a lot to do with women. There's no coincidence here that this is a male-dominated patriarchy of a community that, you know, has this convenient tool of controlling women who seem to be acting out. And this goes back to Europe as well. It's true. You know, there are certainly a number of men accused and some who are executed, but they are mostly women. And women who often, for various reasons, class or otherwise, don't conform to the expectation.

And, you know, in Europe, some of the folks who are accused, for instance, our midwives were popular target for these accusations, you know, involved in herbal medicines, right? And in some of them in ways they challenged the, frankly, not terribly good medicine in Europe in general. You know, they are often more skilled than some of the physicians. It's also xenophobia. I mean, there's all these different elements to, you know, the, you know, the. threat from the outside or from within, you know, anything that was out of the norm was really intolerable, as you say. People are suspicious over the time. Historians have conjecture about ergotism, you know, the eating of food that had fungus in it. There have been, you know,

huge incidents in Europe. I did one on a TV show about people dancing in the streets in an Italian town because they ate bread that was essentially LSD, you know. That had a lot to do with, well, I don't know if it had a lot to do with it, but could have been one of the factors, right? I think the fungus theory has mostly been debunked in the case of Salem. You know, it was a theory that popped up in the 70s, I think in the late 70s and 80s originally. Gee, I wonder who thought of that one. Timothy Leary. Yeah.

You know, food hygiene wasn't really a thing in this period. So, you know. It's really more sensible to see this as a tradition. that was now becoming sort of old school by those more forward-thinking politicians, especially, who are beginning to see that this was a society taking root and really needing to, you know, think outside the box that it was so used to thinking about for almost a century at this point, right? Right. Things are opening up.

Yeah, and commercially too. You know, there's the rise of the sugar complex, particularly the you have after the 1670s, England, has the Royal African Company, which opens up their involvement in the slave trade. There's expansion of things like sugar and tobacco and indigo and rice, mostly in the Caribbean, but then increasingly in the southern colonies. England is well on its way and as being both a military and economic force in the Atlantic in this period. So after the summer and these executions begin and throughout that year, How do things wind up as far as the legalities of this go?

The governor has a lot to do with that, right? He's moved the whole thing to a different court and taken more control over this. Where did Samuel Paris land in the ending of this story? He winds up being pushed out, you know, in part because of his rule. In fact, two of the judges that wind up on the Supreme Court to hear these cases, including Samuel Sowell, wind up expressing remorse over their role. You know, there's a, there are confessions letter of notes of contrition later on. There's a reason, for instance, Hawthorne's changed their name slightly.

So Nathaniel Hawthorne is the descendant of one of the judges and he kind of switches his name, you know, the house of seven gables to sort of distance himself, you know, disavow that black sheep in your family, right? You know, hide the crazy in your family. So Paris actually winds up in a. with his former congregation because since he fails to settle the not only settle the problem but also helps to stir up more animosity within the village, his congregation decides that they're not going to pay him. So he then turns around and tries us to seize land to get his pay and winds up in a series of court cases over property that goes at least until I think 1697 or thereabouts. So legally, he stays messy for quite some time. Years later, period like 1697 to

1711, I have written down here, there's a period of reassessment when Massachusetts really looks back and says, oops, this was really wrong. We, you know, we got this wrong in many ways. They declare the trials unlawful in 1702. 1711, the colony passes a bill restoring the rights and good names of many of the accused, as well as granting a number of, Money and restitution. I mean, there's a whole reparations act there, isn't it? Yeah, and it actually continues. I think there was another round of this under Massachusetts governor Weld around 1990. The echoes of this keep going. And then there is now a push to exonerate some of the women, including Anne Glover and the five women executed in Boston. I really have, I mean, I'm big Arthur Miller fan. So the Crucible was really a perfect use of this in terms of symbolism.

That was a depiction of McCarthyism, you know, as symbolized by the witch trials, which is really a kind of perfect parallel because you have this small group of people who are being controlled by what was a small group of people, theocracy, in the face of change, you know, in a world expanding around them, so often the human response is one of fear and hatred. And so this is the case with the rich trials. It's sort of a last ditch effort by this very extreme. bunch to control as they always had. It is very true. And in fact, there's a book written by another historian named Gretchen Adams on the McCarthyist elements, the Specter of Salem, echoing in the 1960s and 70s. I mean, you have this group led obviously by Eugene McCarthy, you know, this inquisition of of this new element in the world, this communism, a stain on the American system, you know, whether or not it's true or not, the extreme persecution that was happening with so many, you know, you can argue it one way or the other.

But it's a very similar kind of situation of dealing with new elements in society in a certain way. Why New England? I didn't ask you this. Was it really because of the Puritan element? Was that why it happened there and not say Virginia? Virginia was a lot more homogenous group in a lot of ways. So it was culturally very more, I think, than any other colony. It was much more Church of England, planter elite. There were laws that you had to baptize your children and bring them to church and and so on and so forth. I think, and it didn't have that sort of same ethos.

It always was kind of a royal colony. There were certainly other unrest in other colonies. but, you know, in the Carolinas, but different because they're planter societies, right, versus the strict, theocratic, tightly knit, close together colonies in New England. One of the things, too, we want to remember is that right around these, this time, we're starting to see, you know, from the 1630s onwards schisms from the original Massachusetts colonies. You have, for instance, Thomas Hooker, who was originally affiliated with the Salem,

village. There's a mutual parting of ways and he goes off to found Connecticut. And in fact, Connecticut is responsible for helping to hide the seven who are responsible for the execution of Charles, right? You have Roger Williams who breaks off rather quarrelsomely from a Massachusetts colony and founds Rhode Island, which is a Baptist colony, which has one of the most rigorous religious toleration laws of any of the colonies other than, you know, South Carolina. In fact, there's a reason why it has one of the first Jewish congregations, synagogues, in what becomes the United States, right, Turo, because of religious toleration. We can't skip the fact that you've already mentioned it.

What happens in America is people start making money. Yes. To boil it down. It becomes a mercantile culture. And once you have upward mobility due to the fact that you can have a system that gives people a ladder, it's a more efficient, ultimately fairer system one way or the other, versus the church. And that's really what's been going on in Europe and also in America. And so all of that sort of works out.

But you never lose that certain something that is Boston, right? You can still be accused of witchcraft. Jessica Parr is a historian of the early modern Atlantic period at Northeastern University. Her focus is largely on slavery. Boston history, Salem included. Thank you so much, Jessica. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing

colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.