American History Tellers - Salem Witch Trials | A Descendant Remembers | 5

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

In the midst of the public hysteria surrounding the Salem Witch Trials, a respected Puritan woman named Rebecca Nurse was accused of using witchcraft to “afflict” girls in Salem. Despite her status as a pious church member, Nurse became one of the many innocent people to stand trial and be executed. Today, Lindsay is joined by one of Rebecca Nurse’s descendants, historian Margo Burns, to discuss the fate of her ancestor and other victims of the witch hunt.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's March 6th, 1712, and you're in the parsonage in Salem Town, Massachusetts. You're standing in your reverend's dining room, and a cold wind is howling outside. A dozen members of the Salem Town Church have gathered around the reverend's large oak table. It's been two decades since your mother, Rebecca Nurse, was tried and executed for witchcraft. Three months ago, you finally convinced the Massachusetts government to clear her name, but now you have one last obstacle to overcome. Good afternoon. The church members

look up at you with stern faces. Your heart pounds in your chest, but the weight of the last 20 years urges you on. I stand before you today on behalf of my late mother, good wife Rebecca Nurse. It has been nearly 20 years since the church expelled her from the congregation. Doing so destroyed any hope of her salvation. The time has come for us to right this terrible wrong. An older man named Jonathan Davis crosses his arms. He's one of the most influential church elders, and 20 years ago, he joined the chorus of accusations against your mother. Oh, is it truly necessary to revisit such a painful chapter?

Of course it's necessary. My mother was a devout member of this church for many years, yet she was forced to endure baseless accusations and the hatred of her neighbors. Still, her faith never wavered. Davis holds up a hand impatiently. We are all aware of the tragic events that transpired, but we cannot change the past. Perhaps not, but my mother was condemned and executed upon the basis of evidence we now know to be insufficient. If you refuse to acknowledge the profound wrong done to a respected member of your own community, you must at least acknowledge that the General Court of Massachusetts voided her conviction last December. If the court can clear her name, why not her own church? The church members fidget and exchange glances. Your resolve

strengthens. Because I know this church regrets those hours of darkness. My mother's excommunication is a stain on her memory and a source of grief for me, my brothers and sisters. But if you will not void her excommunication for her sake, do it for your own. I wonder if God will ever truly pardon the sins that were committed in Salem Town 20 years ago. A look of fear crosses Davis's palate face. I think we've heard enough. Let's put it to a vote. All those in favor of overturning the excommunication of Goody Nurse, raise your hand. Eleven hands shoot up. Davis sweeps his gaze across the table, sighs, and then slowly raises his own hand. Then it's settled. Let us

blot the record of her excommunication, and may we humbly request that God pardon whatever sins have been committed in her censure. Davis nods to the Reverend, who then stands to retrieve the heavy book containing records of every member of the Salem Town Church. You breathe a sigh of relief as you watch him update your mother's record. After all these years of grief and pain, you feel you have finally repaired the damage done to your family's reputation. You can take comfort knowing that at last, your mother's soul can rest.

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From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. On March 6, 1712, Samuel Nurse urged members of the church in Salem Town, Massachusetts to reverse the excommunication of his mother, Rebecca Nurse. The members unanimously agreed to his petition, restoring Nurse's reputation and assuring her loved ones that she would not be denied eternal salvation. It was a final act of healing and reconciliation, but one enacted two decades after witchcraft hysteria consumed Salem and sent 20 people to their deaths. Today, I'm joined by one of Rebecca Nurse's descendants, historian Margo Burns, to discuss the fate of her ancestor and other victims of the Salem witch hunt.

Margo Burns, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me, Lindsay. Now, you have a great, great, great, great, great ancestor, Rebecca Nurse, who was tried and executed for witchcraft. How did you discover this portion of your family history? My grandmother really liked doing the family history, and her inspiration was discovering that we had Mayflower ancestors. So that's a big deal in the family. And I inherited a lot of her work, and I saw The Crucible being put on in a high school play, and I went, oh, Frances Nurse, Rebecca Nurse, I think those might be real people. And when I went to look at her notes, there it is, Rebecca Nurse, and there was an asterisk.

And I looked down at the bottom, and the asterisk said, executed for witchcraft, July 19th, 1692, in Salem. And I was just like, oh, that's the only thing that she had in there was this thing and an asterisk. So she never really was as interested, but that just sort of put a little bee in my bonnet. Now, your book, Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, uses the official court records to try to paint a picture of what the trials were like. And today, we're kind of asking you to take us through a trial as best you can and maybe talk to us about what happened to your ancestor, Rebecca Nurse. So let's imagine ourselves in Salem Village, now Danvers, Massachusetts, but the year is 1692. First, who her 70s, and she had six grown children. And the family lived on a fairly large compound because it was a farm. Now, at this point, some of the kids went married and

went to other places, but this was a very good farm. And her husband took on a variety of roles for the town itself, including being one of the people who was responsible for collecting the minister's rate to pay him. So he was very well placed in the community, and she, as a fully covenanted member of the church in Salem, now that means on Sundays when they let the reprobate go after all the sermons, the covenanted people would stay and have communion. It was a very important thing socially, and there she was, one of the elder women in the community. Basically, she was one of the most respected women in Salem Village, and she was one of those people who stayed. There were a few people who were already accused before her, and they're the

names you might already know, Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne. And when she was accused, she was very, very surprised. You mentioned that she was surprised to be accused for witchcraft, and I think this starts to talk to the divide in Salem at this time. Explain kind of these cultural, economic, and spiritual divides in the town. Well, the reason it was a surprise is that as a Puritan woman, you don't think you're going to get accused of witchcraft. As we look back in time, we think about maybe the weird woman who lives on the edge of town, or somebody that's not coming to church, or all these things that would make them a likely suspect. And she fulfilled none of those, none of those things.

So that's one reason why it was a big surprise. When we have the first few people who were accused before that, we have Tituba, who's an enslaved woman, and we have Sarah Good, who was a little indigent, and Sarah Osborne, who wasn't going to church. But the idea of accusing Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft was just inconceivable to so many people. So the whole family was just blown away that this was happening. Two of her sons went to the Putnam household where the accusations were coming from and asked,

you know, how do you know it was our mother? And when they asked the young woman who was having fits, she said, well, what I saw in my visions was that an old woman was sitting in my grandmother's seat at the meeting house, and that's who was afflicting me. I said, well, but how did you come up with Rebecca Nurse for a name? And at that point, her mother and the housemaid started arguing about who could it be, and they decided on Rebecca Nurse. The Putnam family and their ilk really wanted Samuel Parris as the minister, and the Nurse family was on the other side. It really wasn't about him so much as the Putnam family and those guys decided that the new minister should own the parsonage rather than just live in it. And they deeded it to him. And a lot of people in the town said, no, you can't do that. So that caused a real rift.

And one of the things that then happened was that Francis Nurse, Rebecca's husband, was with a group of three men and they were to be collecting the minister's rate. And they decided not to. His rate for the year was 66 pounds, half of that in money and half of it in country rate. And country weight was like a bushel of corn, those things that would add up to another 33 pounds. And Francis Nurse and the others weren't going out and getting it. So that meant that the minister wasn't having the supplies and things. So that really caused a big rift. So then we get to the accusation itself, I suppose. We have this new minister, Samuel Parris, some divides in the society about him, about other things. And then

all of a sudden, children start behaving strangely, and people start making accusations of witchcraft. So what were the specific accusations made against Rebecca Nurse? Primarily, the early accusations were for afflicting people with their specter. Now, if you've heard anything about spectral evidence, this is what it is. The afflicted girls would claim to see a vision, an image of the person coming through the air and coming to them and choking them and pinching them and almost just almost killing them. And the person is not really even there. Now, one of the problems with this right from the beginning is that there was criticism that this was not really sufficient evidence. The argument was that the devil could send their specter of an innocent

person and could afflict somebody with that. And there were a lot of people who said, no, it could only be somebody who had given permission to the devil, i.e. that they actually were guilty of it. So, it was a big discussion between the people who were looking at this. The ministers especially weren't happy, but the magistrates, yep, spectral evidence was okay. On the complaint, it was complaining that she had afflicted these two girls, and that was sufficient to get the magistrates to arrest her. So, these magistrates then, presented with spectral evidence, issue an arrest for the person. What happened to Rebecca

Nurse when her warrant was issued? Well, she was arrested and brought to the meeting house, and lots of people showed up at the meeting house, and it was a very rowdy kind of crowd. The space isn't all that big. So, it's a fairly high-roofed room. There's a gallery. There's a place up front for the minister when he was preaching, and there was a table in front of that where the elders of the church would sit. If we see dramatic presentations of this scene, it looks like a court. Two local magistrates, justices of the peace, interrogated her. If you look in the records, it says examination, but it's really an interrogation. And they just kept pummeling her with questions about why she had hurt these people and how she

was doing it. And the young girls were in the room and they would scream out that they saw her specter coming and afflicting them. Now, she's just standing there with a constable by her side and they're screaming that she's afflicting them. So you can imagine that that's a little strange to see. But so many people in the village were right there, and they were witnessing their afflictions and the accusations. And they seemed to be pretty convincing in what they were saying. At one point, Rebecca Nurse had tipped her head to the side, and the girl starts saying, oh, straighten up her head. She's trying to break our necks.

And so they did. So the girls were really convincing to people. And at the end, the magistrates decided they would keep her in custody. As a matter of fact, they did that with everybody. In a lot of witchcraft cases in the time, you could be interrogated and then released on a hundred pounds bond, but not any of the people that the local magistrates were interrogating, they sent them all to jail. But this was not a trial. They called it an examination, but yet it was in front of the entire town. Yes, that was unusual. When you're trying to interrogate

somebody, you know, you think about Lenny Briscoe bringing somebody into the box in Law and Order, and this was very unusual because they were having them in front of everybody and people would pop up and say things and make further accusations. And the purpose of an interrogation at the bottom line is they're trying to get a confession because confession is the gold standard for convictive evidence in one of these cases. So everything was to get her to confess, and she wouldn't. You know, I am an innocent person. And when you read these things in the accounts of the examinations, you hear these professions of innocence.

And looking back in time, when we read that, we know through the lens of history that Rebecca Nurse was going to be executed. Didn't matter that she was professing her innocence. So it just makes it that much more poignant to hear it. So did Rebecca, like any other person accused in Salem, have any public defender who was on her side in this? Well, that's a modern day thing of having a public defender. In that period, they had magisterial justice. So you didn't have somebody behind you. But what would happen

in somebody's defense is they would call their neighbors, their friends, their family to speak to their good character and how they had never expected anything like this from her. So it took her family, it took the friends, everybody speaking for her. So it took her family, it took the friends, everybody speaking for her. So then after the examination, what happens to Rebecca Nurse? Oh, she gets thrown in jail. They send her off to the jail in Salem and eventually in the jail in Boston. There were a lot of people who were accused. I mean, in the first three months before the trials actually started, there were 70 people in jail. They hadn't bailed anybody out.

And they were filling the jails in Salem and in Boston and in Ipswich and in Charlestown. So there they are. They're all in jail. And they can't get out on bail. And their families have to support them. There's a little minimal bread and water for them in the jails. Also, she was being accused in March, so it was still pretty cold. She'll be in jail through July. One of the people who was accused

before her, Sarah Good, went in breastfeeding. Now, the jails were pretty rough places to be. If you think about just a huge room with maybe a chamber pot in it and maybe some food, it was a tough place to be. Miserable. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792,

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ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. So at this point, Massachusetts' new governor, Governor Phipps, arrives in late May of 1692. And seeing the jails filling up, he convenes a special court and a grand jury to deal with these accusations of witchcraft. What happens in specific to Rebecca Nurse under the grand jury? Well, as a matter of fact, her grand jury was one of the very first ones. After Phipps had arrived and was trying to clear out the jails, they started this court of Oyer and Terminer to hear and decide. So, the very beginning of June, there were three

people who were processed. Bridget Bishop, who had her grand jury confirming the charges and her trial on the same day. And the next day, Rebecca Nurse had a grand jury. And they found four different counts that they felt there was a preponderance of evidence that she should go to trial. Now, she didn't go to trial immediately the way Bridget Bishop had. She was in the next phase at the end of June and the beginning of July. So finalizing the actual charges was really important for the grand jury. The people coming to the grand jury had to swear an oath to their testimony. In addition to people being summonsed and swearing their testimony under oath, there were also fact-finding

juries. This is separate from the grand jury, but if somebody had died, the coroner would put together a jury and they would look at the dead body and decide whether they'd been killed by witchcraft. And there were a few people they did. One of the more interesting ones and curious to us is that they were searching the bodies of the accused looking for witch's teats. And a teat could have been a mole, a wart, a scar, you name it. It could be anything on the skin that seemed unusual. And the idea behind this search is that the devil would issue a familiar, usually an animal, we think about black cats, but issue a familiar who would help the witch do her witchy things. And the familiar had to have a place to suckle on the

body of the witch. So, does Rebecca Nurse go through with this physical examination? Yes, she did. And the women who are searching her body thought that they had found teats in her private parts. This was really challenging because they were looking at people stem to stern, and they claimed they found things. And Rebecca Nurse said, no, you don't know what you're looking at. There are no midwives on this jury that's searching the bodies. And, you know, she is 70 years old. She gave birth to a lot of children. She probably had tearing and scarring, maybe a prolapsed uterus.

And she said, you know, what you're seeing is the results of my labors. But she knew that these women did not know what they were looking at. And she wanted a midwife to be on that. And they did not get a midwife. So there were possibilities for objecting to evidence. And she took advantage of every single opportunity she had to push back to say that these accusations were wrong and the evidence was inconclusive. So I believe it was the description of this event that really got you looking at the documents of the Salem witch trials. Oh, yes. It's something very startling

to look at a historical document and go, wait a minute, what? Why do I know this personal information, the genitalia of my ancestor? That was really startling and really got me going on saying, what else is there in these records? So, when this formal fact-finding ends, what does the indictment say about Rebecca? There were four indictments against her, and each was for afflicting a different person. So, just as today, when you indict somebody, the indictment has to specify who did it, what they did, when they did it, where they did it, and who they did it to. So, that's what they did with four of these indictments. So, she was accused

of using witchcraft to afflict these people. And witchcraft, you have to know, is the first capital crime in colonial time, when they have a list of all the capital crimes with homicide and piracy and things like that. Witchcraft was the first one on all those lists. And it was from the biblical injunction from Exodus, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And there was only one penalty for it, and that was execution. Does Rebecca Nurse say anything in her defense? We have all these accounts of the interrogations. They're all very, very specific. And we know the actual words because Samuel Parris, the minister, was writing them down as she uttered them. She says, I am an innocent person. I'm as innocent as the babe unborn, because she was really trying

to emphasize that she had nothing to do with this. So we have this amazing document in the account of her examination where she's not just somebody, a name, and a date. We can hear her voice. That was the thing about how Paris wrote things down. It sort of read like drama, but these are real people. And Rebecca Nurse is proclaiming her innocence. So then about a month later, we move on and Rebecca Nurse's case goes to trial. So let's spend some time in the courtroom here. What happens in her trial? So the grand juries in the trial sometimes took place on the same day. Rebecca Nurse's took place on June 3rd, but she wasn't tried until the end of June. And they were generally very quick because they'd already come up with all the charges.

The grand jury would hear the basic evidence. The grand jury wasn't deciding what the charges would be. The Crown's attorney would determine what the charges were in this case, that she had afflicted these four different young girls. And they decided, yes, they returned a true bill. And we hear about true bills these days in the news, but the true bill meant you can now try somebody. If they rejected a true bill, they would actually write the word ignoramus, which is Latin for we do not know. And we see that on the back of some, but on all of hers, it says in Latin, bila vera, a true bill. Sometimes from the grand jury to the trial, it would be the same day, but not for Rebecca Nurse. And part of the reason for that is that between the grand jury and the trial, she was pushing back.

She was trying to appeal these things. She was trying to get as many people to come forward in support of her. So that's probably why we have this delay. There were a lot of people who signed petitions in support of Rebecca Nurse, saying that we never heard anything about her anywhere nearly like this. And the court would take that into consideration. But it's kind of interesting because the twist on this is this jury found Rebecca not guilty. And this just upset everybody. The people in the courtroom were just like, wait a minute, what? And the chief magistrate, William Stoughton, then turned to the jury and said, well, I think you need to go back and look at it a little bit more. So the jury went back and reconsidered,

and then they came out again and said, no, we think she's not guilty. And at that point, William Stoughton said, well, you know, at a certain point when Deliverance Hobbs came out, Rebecca Nurse said, what is she doing here? She's one of us. And what did she mean by that? And they asked Rebecca Nurse, what did you mean by that? And of course, the two possible things were, oh, she's one of us witches, or she's one of us accused. And the question was, why was she Deliverance Hobbs coming forward? It was very noisy in the courtroom. And Rebecca Nurse did not hear that she was being asked a question. And in those days, it was different from now,

you have the right to remain silent. But in those days, you really had to respond to an accusation. And she didn't hear it. And as a result, she didn't answer. So, at that point, the jury, deliberating again, said, well, you know, if she's not going to answer, that's tantamount to saying, oops, you got me. So, then they finally, third time around, brought in a guilty verdict. This was immediately appealed afterwards. And you even have a statement from the foreman of the jury explaining what happened and something from Rebecca Nurse saying, you know, I didn't hear it. So even though the jury and Rebecca Nurse were appealing the conviction, it didn't go anywhere. William Stoughton was dead set on

convicting witches. Knowing that the punishment for witchcraft is death, and knowing that this jury had twice prior found her not guilty, and then only on the third time found her guilty because she did not answer a question, I just want to ask what you think the state of justice is in Massachusetts where a death penalty can be assessed for what is essentially not answering a question. They're trying to get confessions out of people, and not answering the question was tantamount to confessing. And I'm sure that day in the courtroom, there was a lot of stuff going on. There were people there, it was loud, it was chaotic. But if she was not defending herself that was the critical piece if you don't defend yourself especially on a capital crime they were pressed into thinking well okay she's guilty and it doesn't work that way today but we look at what the judge wanted and he wanted a guilty verdict so he just kept pushing and when Rebecca Nurse didn't respond to this question, that was tantamount to her confessing, you've got me. But of course, we know she didn't hear it. And also, when you get the foreman of the jury saying, oh, that's not what we thought, it still didn't matter to the

chief magistrate. He was bound and determined to convict all these people. So, Rebecca Nurse is sentenced to death. You have actually held her actual death warrant in your hands. What does it say? What does it look like? Well, the death warrant seems like, when you look at it, it just is a whole bunch of things written out and you go, well, how does this really kill somebody? The first part of it repeats all the accusations against her and how they were found to be true by the grand jury and the trial jury. And then in the bottom of it, it's an order to the sheriff to take her to a specific place at a particular time. It was 8 a.m. where the sheriff was ordered by the chief magistrate to hang her by the neck until she was dead. It's signed by William Stoughton and actually has this beautiful big red wax seal with his family crest on it.

When you look at it, that just sort of stands out at you that this big red seal. And then there's a little bit of a line and the bottom of it is a response from the sheriff saying, I have taken Rebecca Nurse to this place at this time and I have hanged her by the neck until she was dead. She was among five people who were executed that day. And the poignancy of that document just, you realize that this is what killed her. So then knowing that Rebecca is your ancestor and this is the document that was her demise, how did you feel? My chest sort of tightened up. It's one thing to sort of know the general history of what happens. But when it's your ancestor and you know that this document signed by this person, you're seeing it in ink.

I saw his handwriting. I saw him sign it. When you see somebody's handwriting, you start interpreting things, but somebody signing something and sealing her fate, you know, I get little chills, even just talking about it now, a little bit of a chill that this person was responsible for executing her. And we know it was wrong, but there it is. She has no way out. And this is the document that did it. This is the document that did it. years ago to the Barbie movie today. Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast

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You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Rebecca Nurse was hanged on July 19th, 1692. Have you been to the place where she was executed? Yes. Several of my colleagues, Tad Baker, Marilyn Roach, Ben Ray, went to great effort to go out and find every single little piece of documentation to indicate where the gallows was. And that was on Proctor's Ledge. And it's not near the downtown, so it's not really on tours, and the buses don't go by there because it's next to a Walgreens. Historically, that was a piece of land owned by the city of Salem, and it was really in bad shape. There was trash, it wasn't taken

care of. And these folks actually got the city of Salem to make a whole memorial in that place with the names of all the people who hang there carved in stone. So it's a very different experience now because you can stand there at the foot of Proctor's Ledge and look up and imagine what it must have been like. Quite often, if it's an anniversary of one of the executions, people bring flowers, they leave little gifts in this particular location. Not to get too gruesome about this, but let's discuss the execution itself. How was it conducted? What would someone see if they went to see it? Well, the execution method was hanging. If you think about the Wild West, you know, where they constructed gallows and they put the rope around a person's neck and they kick something else and they just drop and snaps their neck.

That's not what was happening. It's more gruesome, actually. What they would do is they'd have them climb a ladder to where the noose was hung. It could have been a gallows that was built, but we're assuming it was a tree with branches. And they would have the sentenced person climb this ladder and they would turn them off the ladder with the rope around their necks. And then they would dangle there. Within a short period of time, depending on where the rope was,

they would go unconscious. Now, if it was against one of the arteries or the carotid or the jugular, then that lack of blood to the brain would knock them out. If they were choking, they'd still be knocked out in a couple of minutes. That sounds really, really gruesome. And then unconscious, they weren't dead yet, and there could be spasms in the body. It would take about an hour for somebody to die that way with a crowd looking on.

Do you know what happened to Rebecca Nurse's body? Well, generally speaking, the oral history that comes down from families is that they came under cover of darkness and retrieved the bodies of their family members and buried them privately on their farms or their own property. Where was Rebecca buried? Rebecca was, her family had a fairly large farming compound over in Salem Village. She would have been in the family graveyard. People didn't necessarily have stones. Anytime we see beautiful old gravestones, that was very expensive. In farming families, you just buried people in your own private plot. If there was a marker, it would have been wood. So we don't really know exactly where she was buried. So we look back on this episode now as an extraordinary moment of public hysteria. But I'm wondering, when did public opinion of the witch trial shift then? How quickly did the townspeople of Salem and Salem Village realize that they may have made a mistake? Within a few years. By 1696, one of the other judges, Samuel Sewell, issued an apology.

He wrote it down, he brought it to his minister, and specifically in this apology, which his minister read, he said he desired to take the shame and the blame of it. So within a few years, people realized that they'd done something wrong. It took a while, though, for the communities to come around because, you know, they'd actually tried, convicted, and executed people. When you are sentenced to death, you lose all of your rights legally. And there was something called a tainter that attached to you. Basically, you were dead in the eyes of the law. Within a few years, within the first 10 years afterwards, this started to be complicated because there were people who were sentenced to death, but the governor had spared them. So they weren't hanged. And this caused them a lot of problems legally. So people were applying for a reversal of attainder. Everybody knew that the trials went awry. They knew people weren't guilty, but the people or their heirs wanted this attainder

reversed. So, there were all these appeals to say, you know, we didn't do it. But also, within another 10 years, people going, you know, all that stuff we did, bringing our mother blankets and food down in the jail in Salem, you know, we need stuff we did, bringing our mother blankets and food down in the jail in Salem, you know, we need to be compensated for that. And the nurse family went and asked for compensation, and they really weren't asking for a whole lot. They didn't come up with an exact amount. They left that to the court to decide, but they did invoke the fact that they had supported her her entire time in prison for about four months. So they had been taking care of her, going to visit her, bring her food, firewood.

They also spent a lot of time on those journeys, and they wanted compensation for that because there they are living in Salem Village, and she was being held in Boston. So that was a day's journey to do that. Eventually Eventually they said 40 pounds would do it, but they'd accept 25. And they were granted that. So now the entire episode is over and the only thing that remains are questions. And probably the most obvious one is, why do you think the witch hunt and executions in Salem happened? Why would people accuse somebody else wrongly? That's a $64,000 question. When the early accusations came along, the local magistrates had choices to make.

I mean, neighbors can fight all they want. They can say things against each other. They can call the police. They can do all these different things. But the really critical piece in this is that the local magistrates decided, we're going to take all of these seriously, even knowing that it was a capital crime. And they didn't balk when they were hearing professions of innocence. They just went straight through. I mean, the local magistrates kept everybody in custody. They didn't let them out on bail. And we also saw that William Stoughton was not even willing to accept

a not guilty verdict. So the legal system had checks and balances, but the magistrates themselves, I hold them responsible for taking each and every case to the extreme that people were hanged. So then for you personally, what does it mean that your ancestor, Rebecca Nurse, was a victim of this legal system run amok? For me, you know, when I first discovered this, I really wanted to write something up for my family because this is a really poignant example of how history can go so wrong and what happened to our ancestors. But it brought me to the larger story. Yes, my ancestor definitely was not guilty. She did everything possible, and yet she was hanged. But it brought me to look at everybody else,

to look at the wider picture, because I could only look at her in the context of all these other cases. And of course, there's so many cases, it's really hard to stay on top of them. If you tell the story of the Salem witchcraft trials, as we're doing today, it's easier to tell the story of one person. And as important as that is to me personally, I think about it in the larger context, that things can get really out of hand. And I think they really got out of hand with her case, but that just sort of sparked the rest of it. And we have this very horrific experience of all the people who were brought into jail, all these things. It wasn't just her individual story. It was the story of

a whole community of the province. And how do you move back from that? When I started reading her story and seeing how many other lives were intersected with her life, when she was transferred from Salem to Boston, you know, there are other people on that ox cart. She wasn't alone. And the idea that a whole group of people could be treated that way, and they were all wrong convictions, yet it just sort of mushrooms. She was one of the first, and because they pushed through hers, she was a pious Puritan woman, and if they could get her, they could get anybody. And isn't that something that we're always concerned about? We worry about the people we trust turning on us. And she was trusting her whole community, her church,

and it turned on her. And that's something I think resonates for us. I look at Rebecca Nurse, because she was so obviously not one of the usual suspects, makes her whole case much more emblematic of everybody. And that to me me, is the important thing in this, the fact that they could get her, they could get anybody. Well, Margo Burns, thank you so much for sharing Rebecca's story with us today. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Margo Burns, project manager and associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, the definitive collection of transcriptions

of the legal records related to the Salem witch trials, available now from Cambridge University Press. From Wondery, this is our fifth and final episode of the Salem Witch Trials for American History Tellers. In our next season, in the early morning hours of April 18th, 1906, a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco. The force of the quake toppled buildings, killing thousands of people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

The earthquake also sparked numerous fires, which soon raged through the heart of the city, leaving civic leaders scrambling to stop them before it was too late. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Audio editing by Christian Paraga. Sound design by Molly Bach.

Music by Lindsey Graham. Additional writing by Ellie Stanton. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alita Rozanski. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Managing producer, Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Ryan Lohr. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Desi Blaylock, Managing Producer Matt Gant, Senior Managing Producer Ryan Lohr, Senior Producer Andy

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