Transcripts For CSPAN3 Salem Witch Trials Legal Documents Pr

CSPAN3 Salem Witch Trials Legal Documents Project July 17, 2017

Host welcome back. Im thrilled to see you here for what should be a really interesting session. I would like to introduce to you my good friend and partner in witchcraft studies margo burns. , margo was one of the leading experts on the trials. One of the editors of the incredible records of the salem witchhunt. She has probably forgotten more about the individual documents than i will ever know. We asked her to speak about those records and the Amazing Things you can learn from a close read of them. I should also mention that she is the author of my favorite article on the salem witch trials. It looks at the issue of false confession that i strongly recommend to you. Margo burns. [applause] margo burns just so you know, i have a completely different read on the coercion of false confessions than he gave a few minutes ago. Read my article and you will find out. I am here today primarily to talk about the actual documents. And how do we know what we know. One of the things he was doing was quoting from here, there, and everywhere. I know where that is, which document is that . Whenever i read or hear anything about the salem witchcraft trials, i tried to go back to the primary source. This is records of salem witchhunts. It is about the size of a ream of paper. It does now come in paperback. You dont have to pay 150. You can pay 50 and get one in paperback. If you are serious about studying the trials, i highly recommend you getting one. Just so you know there were so many of us doing this. I do not 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 absolutely amazing man. Tad mentioned his book, salem story. He is a literary critic who is the head of the English Department at binghamton university. Melville scholar. When he discovered salem, he was also very interested in social justice. He thought there was a great injustice that happened here. As a literary critic, he started to read the primary sources because that is what literary people do. You read and say, what did they actually right . The end result was the salem stories. He also discovered a lot of mistakes in the transcriptions of the documents. He got caught up in a couple of them. He thought it would be nice to change and fix all of those things. And that is when he embarked on this project. He did not realize it would take this long. He was figuring two or three years. It took 12 of us 10 years. When i saw this book, and it is heavy i thought is that all , it is . Because we had taken so long. Including bernie, the first project manager was supposed to be joe, a longtime professor at salem state who tragically passed away just as the project was starting. I dont really know how it happened but it happened that bernie found me right as he was about to start work on this and he took a huge chance on me. Later on, he would say he knew what he was doing. He did not it worked out well. , when we talk about the 12 people. The other 10 include six linguists from scandinavia. Why a linguist . They can read old handwriting. They are historical linguists used to dealing with primary sources that are hand written. He did not think he could find anybody here. He was in finland. The first person he spoke with was a linguist interested in reading the transcripts of the interrogations. And he said he knew where they are, they are in helsinki. The next person he talked to was from the university of helsinki. He got him on board. And one of his colleagues, who is not the university in sweden. The three of them came on and they each brought a younger colleague. It was an interesting crowd to work with. I was very happy i had a master in linguistics so i could interpret. People are interested in literature and historical english physics historical linguistics but we did not have a lot of common ground. We also had some americans including gretchen adams. We also had benjamin ray. You probably know the website at the university of virginia. He has a book. I believe the deversion gives you a portal into his website. Pretty nifty. Richard trafton. And our very own marilyn. Anybody who says you know more than anybody, no, she is the person. She has been doing this a very long time. She knows so much and has looked at everything. She was invaluable in this. She would say, do you know about this document . She ended up writing the thumbnail bios for everyone in the book, a herculean task. We are very indebted to her. The whole team was an amazing thing. And the fact that we finished it in less than a decade was amazing. He has already given us an overview of what happened. I will not repeat all of that. I would like to talk about the actual documents. If we are going to talk about what happened, if you have ever heard me talk before, i do go in depth into what it took document wise. Documentary wise to do one case. There are three phases to any case. First, the investigation, when somebody would complain. The magistrates would send out a warrant and the person would be arrested and interrogated. Sometimes in public and sometimes in private. If they decided there were grounds to hold them over, they would hold them over and then a jury of inquest, a grand jury, would be called to look for facts. They would summons people. They would have dead bodies examined. They would look, especially at witchcraft trials, they would look for the existence of witches teats. The 1600s case in of a woman accused of infanticide, having a bastard and killing it. It was not in the witchcraft trials. They impaneled a jury of women to examine her body and they said that she had never given birth. No baby, no death. This was the kind of thing that they typically would do. Finders of facts. After the inquest, 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 look at it and say we believe this is a true bill. The crime took place and so there is good reason to go to trial or they would say no, and my favorite word in all the documents they would write , ignoramus. We do not know. If they wanted it to be a true bill on the indictment, it would go on to prosecution. You would be arraigned and you could plead guilty or not guilty. Most people do not know but four people pled guilty. They did not have trials. They went right to sentencing. But you could plead guilty or not guilty. When you hear the story about giles corey getting pressed to death, there is another phase at the hearing. You had to agree to be tried before god and the country. The country being the jury. Giles corey said no and that put , things to a halt. There were all the steps you would have to to follow to do this. He threw a monkeywrench into it it which they found very strange which prompted them to find that strange torturous death, they pressed him to death. Everybody tried at the salem trials was found guilty. And in short order you would be , executed unless you were pregnant. If you pled guilty, they would give you a little bitif you pled give you a little bit of time to make your peace with god. This last one was the death warrant for bridget bishop. The seal was from william stoughton. His personal seal. He was the only one who signed it. That is the basic thumbnail for a case. To learn about this, we looked at all of the documents. The original manuscripts are in about 12 different archives. When we started, the one on the left is a digitized image from microfilm. If you go to mass archives to see documents, they point you to microfilm first. Before you get to look at anything. I believe it was ben ray who had grant, he is great at making grants, he had all of the microfilm digitized. Immediately, we had some things. That made my heart go a quiver. Manuscripts things, theyese were not great. So ben and i went to a lot of trouble to go back to the library where most of the documents are and photograph and scanned them. You can see a big difference. The one on the right was one of the indictments for rebecca. We should be able to see it. It is nice and bright. You can see the two colors of ink. It was immediately apparent to us that would not have been from microfilm. Sort of like, what is going on . Guess what even in those days, legal documents could be boiler plates. One person would make the boilerplate and someone else would fill it in. But it is all handwritten. Those were the things we could see when we looked at the actual manuscripts. Volume 135 at the archive was an actual book, a bound book of documents. You would 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. You could page through them. The microfilm they did not even have the master anymore. They just had the one in circulation. You can see that it was horrible. Poor gretchen she was trying to transcribe from these. Her eyes were going crazy. She was using photoshop and all sorts of things. Finally, i went down and got permission. The people in the archives of all of these places were fabulous for us. I photographed them all. At that they were all still in point, the book. I had to shoot and shoot. The most recent time i was there, they had taken apart the book and put each one in their own archival folder as they should be. They are still in silk. A couple of them have wax seals. The silk goes over the wax seal. Not optimal but preserved. This allowed us to make that are make better transcriptions. In addition to original manuscripts, there were a lot of facsimiles of manuscripts and we did not know where they were. The one on the left is a negative photostat of the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs. Why do we have this . In the early 1920s, a lot of people had interesting old documents and they would go to libraries and historical societies that had a photo static copier. They would say i have this interesting document. Do you want a copy . The positive of this one is at the mass historical society. They have a collection there of photo static records. The book at the massachusetts state archives when i opened it up to photograph those things this fell out. , it was tucked inside. I knew exactly what it was. Who knew it was here . I was hoping it was something we had not found yet. But no. The middle one is from a 1936 catalog selling this document for 85. If you remember in the news a couple of years ago, there was another witchcraft trial document that came up for auction that went for about 30,000. Think of the investment of 85. In 1936. What i could have gotten. The one on the end was from a 1904 book. This is the only version we had a bit, kind of tattered. While we were working on it, dick trask tracked it down at the university of michigan. You never know in some cases where these are. We do not know where that document for Abigail Hobbs is. Theres little bit of problem prominence there is a little bit of provenance at the Massachusetts Historical Society but not much. We also discovered that we had handwritten contemporaneous copies of things. On the left we had one and on the right is an account of the same interrogation. Both in the handwriting of Samuel Parris. We do not know why there are two persons, except that he was taking things down in shorthand and then reconstituted them into his account. Shorthand was useful for a young minister because they could listen to some of the divines and use shorthand to take down absolutely everything and then reconstitute it. That is one reason why we know so much about Salem Village, while we know so much about the pleas of innocence because Samuel Parris took it all down. There is a reason why Arthur Miller poached from him. It reads like a play. She says this, he says that. All of the descriptions come from Samuel Parris because he was reconstituting it from his shorthand. If i could find one of those documents i would love the shorthand of that. He sometimes made two copies. We had to figure out which one was used. We also had some handwritten, contemporaneous copies. On the left, clearly a first draft. Several people crossing things out and adding. And the cleaned up copy on the right. The challenge, and we have not figured this out, is that the markup on the bottom of the left one, the messy one, looked like a mark from the person signing it. You did not necessarily have your signature. You might have a mark. It looks like that is the actual signed one but the other one is cleaned up. Why we have these contemporaneous copies, we are not sure. We also have some later, handwritten copies. The one on the left is a tracing of one of the documents that was out in public for a long time. The original is pretty tattered. I was looking at it and said it was the same as other but it is not fluent. What is going on . I finally held them up to somebody had gone to the trouble to trace the document. This is in a different archive, the Boston Public Library. They thought they had an original manuscript but who knows when the tracing was done. The second one is a copy of Samuel Parris interrogation. It maintains the same line structure and layout on the page with the columns but it was done later. There are Little Things with errata. Librarians and archivists like to include little tidbits when things are wrong. And on the far right is another copy of some of the old records. We had to tease these things out. What is it we are looking at . There are also things we do not have manuscripts for. These are published transcriptions of documents. We dont have any. The one on the far left is lawsons account of some of the days in april in 1662 when he went to find out if his wife was murdered by the specters. That came out pretty quickly. There was a lot of information on that. The next one is a decree from 1692. Those things would be written out and officially published. The third one over is from 1700 when he is describing a lot of things and taking to task everybody involved, especially cotton mather. There are things there that we do not have in the original manuscripts. When you hear that Rebecca Nurse was originally found not guilty, this is how we know. He has accounts there from her and the jury foreman saying they were pressured to go back and bring her in guilty. The last one is a page from governor thomas hutchisons history in the 18th century. He had taken a lot of the original manuscripts home and he was writing a history of massachusetts. There, he has transcriptions of all sorts of documents that we do not have today. Two or three. Stamp act riot. His whole house was trampled. I have heard maybe it is fake news, i dont know. But his library was trampled and some of the draft pages still were dirty. They just trampled everything. A lot of these documents just disappeared. The 1900s, in there was a man named poole that discovered they had an earlier draft of this book. In that, there were snippets of other documents. We are slowly but surely putting together all of these pieces because we dont have everything. In 1840, thomas gage published a history of raleigh, massachusetts in which they have , nine documents of the case of Margaret Scott. Margaret scott was executed. I bet very few of you even know who she was. You might have seen her bench. There are only nine available to tell her case. And two of them are in the Essex County Court archives. That the Phillips Library holds. And two of them are in private collections. If you hear about an auction of one, those are the two indictments that pop up but there are five more. Where are they . Four are at the Boston Public Library. After our book was published, we were pursuing trying to figure out if we could identify more of the handwriting in these documents. We did archive hopping for two weeks. We went to the Boston Public Library to go to the rare books and manuscripts room to see if they had any contemporaneous so we could maybe identify handwriting. We were doing this in our book. At one point, we were looking up all the towns because that might be helpful. We opened up one of the card drawers of the card catalog. Ok. This was five years ago, card march, 2012, catalog. We were looking up raleigh. And we wondered what this meant. The card said four documents in the case of Margaret Scott. My heart skipped a beat. We only have nine. It turns out that these are four of the five that we did not know where they were. Because we were really looking at the manuscripts, it was really nice to see the handwriting. Quite often, these older transcriptions did not look at every mark on a manuscript. Sometimes, on the back, they would not copy that stuff but we did. We were looking at everything so we could try and figure out the date who wrote it. One of the big things about records of the salem witchhunt is bernie was determined to set it up chronologically. The handwriting came as the second thing. When we were all transcribing, if you have a document with this much of somebodys hand writing, and you have an ambiguous area where you do not know what it says, it would be helpful if you had a couple of pages of someones hand writing to compare and resolve the ambiguity. We started sorting early on so we could keep track of whose handwriting was where. Anybody who spent some time with the documents would be able to identify handwriting. But we wanted more. To see the handwriting gave us a little more information. Just a side note, pedro went back about a week later to take a look at them again and they could not find them. And they were very apologetic. But they could not find them. Remember, this was around the time that the Margaret Scott indictment had just gone up for auction and brought in about 30,000. Uh oh. They were like, we will find it, we will let you know. And i made a call. They were really ticked at me. We told you we would let you know. Every day that passes is not good. I pushed. I was home sick for a couple of days and made some phone calls. Sure enough, i went up the chain. I knew somebody that used to work there. By the end of the day, they had gone through and found them. She called me back. A couple of years later when you , heard about the rembrandt that had gone missing. This was the Boston Public Library. It made the front page of the boston globe. It was worth a half million dollars. The etchings and engravings were worth and they lost them. 30,000. I thought they had just mishelved them. They will find them. I knew that would

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