Margo burns discusses the documents in a book project she titled records of the salem witch hunt. This is part of a Salem University seminar on the legacy of the witch trials. Welcome back. Im tad baker and thrilled to see you all here for what should be an interesting session. I would like to introduce to you my good friend and partner in witchcraft studies, margo burns. Margo is one of the leading experts on the witch trials. One of the editors of the incredible records of the salem witch hunt. In some degrees she has probably forgotten more about the individual documents than ill ever know. We asked her today to speak specifically about those records and Amazing Things you can learn from a close read of the salem witch trials. I should also mention that margo absolute favorite articles on the witch trials and one of the issues of false confession. I strongly recommend to you as well. Margo burns. [ applause ] thank you. So you know, i have a completely different read on the coercion of false confessions than he gave you moments ago. So read my article and you will find out. Im here today to primarily talk about the actual documents and how do we know what we know . One of the things that tad was doing was quoting from here, there and everywhere and im going oh, i know where that came from. I know where that came from. Which document is that . So when i read and here anything about the salem witchcraft trials, i always go, lets go back to the primary source. This is records of the same lem salem witch hunt. It is about the size after ream of paper and hard cover. It now comes in paperback. You dont have to pay 150. You can pay about 50 in paper back. If youre serious about studying the salem witchcraft trials, i recommend getting one. There were some of us doing this, i dont get a penny in revenue from it because we had to split it 12 ways. The history of this book, you will see, bernard rosenthal. Tad mentioned his book, the salem story. He was head of the English Department at a university. When he discovered salem, he was also very interested in social justice. He thought it was a great injustice what happened here. As a literary critic, he started reading the primary sources. Thats what literary people do. What did they actually write. He also discovered there were a lot of mistakes in transcriptions of the documents. He got caught up in the middle after couple of them and said it would be nice to fix and change and thats when he embarked on it. He did not realize it would take as long, he was figuring two or three years. It took 12 of us ten years to do this. When i saw this book, as heavy and hefty as it is, i got it in my hands and i said, is that all it is . We had taken so long. Including bernie. His first project manager was supposed to be joe flibbert, long time professor here at salem state, who tragically passed away just as the project was starting. I dont know how it happened, but it happened. Bernie found me right when he was about to start working on this and he took a huge chance on me. Later on he would say, oh i knew what i was doing. No, he doesnt. But it worked out well. When you talk about the 12 people, the other 10 were six linguists from scandinavia. They can read old handwriting. They are used to dealing with primary sources that are handwritten. He didnt think he could find anybody here. He was in finland, and said, oh, i dont think i can find anybody. The first person he found was a linguist interested in reading the transcripts of the interrogations. He said, i know where they are. They are in helsinki. Next, another person from helsinki. Then his colleague and they each came on and brought a colleague. And they brought on the only swede among them. It was an interesting crowd to work with. I was very happy i have a masters in linguistics so i could interpret because people are interested in literature and people are interested in historical linguistics dont have a lot of common ground. We have some americans, Gretchen Adams who wrote the spector of salem, tracing witch hunt as an epithet. We also had benjamin ray. Who you probably know the website of the university of virginia. Also he has a book, i believe, the eversion gives you a portal into his website. Pretty nifty. Richard trasing who you probably already know. Our very own marylyn rae roach who i think you will see and hear. People say you know more than anybody. No, no, no. Marilyn roach is the person. She has been doing this longer than well, maybe not longer than dick. That didnt come out right. But marilyn, she knows so much and has looked at absolutely everything and is just invaluable because she would say oh, do you know about this document . And she ended up writing the thumbnail bios for everybody in the book. Just a herculean task. We are very indebted to her. And the whole team was just an amazing thing. And the fact we actually finished it in less than a decade was amazing. Tad has given us an overview of what has happened. I wont repeat that. What i would like to talk about is the actual documents. If we talk about what happened, if you have ever heard me talk before, i do go indepth into what it took documentary wise to do a whole case. This is my one slide summary. Basically, three phases to me case. First is an investigation. Thats when someone would complain, magistrates would send out a warrant. Have the person arrested and interrogate them. Sometimes in public, sometimes in private. If they decided that well yes there was grounds for holding them over, they hold them over and a jury of inquest, grand jury, called. They would look for facts so they would summons people. They would have dead bodies examined. Especially in witchcraft trials. They look for existence of very similar to other kinds of trials for instance there was a case in 1600s of a woman accused of having a bastard child and killing it and not in the witchcraft trials. But they empaneled a jury of woman who had given child. And they found this woman hadnt had a baby. This is the kind of thing they would typically do. Finders of fact. So in this case, especially looking for witches teets. The grand jury could decide whether the charges were true or not. This is when the actual charges were being made. They would write up an indictment specifying those things. And the grand jury would then look at it and say well we believe this is a true bill. Crime took place. We think there is good reason to go to trial, or say then no, and they would write on the back ignoramous, we do not know. You could be arraigned and plead guilty or not guilty. Most people dont know, but four people plead guilty. They did not have trials. They went straight to jury. You had to testify before god the country, the country being the jury. That sort of put things to a halt. It was all the steps that you would have to follow do this and he was throwing a Monkey Wrench in it. They found that very strange old torture that would end up in his death. That pressed him to death. If you were tried in this case, everybody was tried in the salem trials. Was found guilty. And within short order you would be executed unless you were pregnant or in case you plead guilty they would give you a little bit of time to make your peace with god and do all the things to clean up your act before they were going to execute you. This last one is the death warrant for bridgette bishop. The next is the seal. And set only one who signed it. Thats the basic thumbnail for a case. To learn about this we went to look at all the documents. The original manuscripts are in about 12 different archives. When we first started out, the one on the left is digitized from microfilm. If you go to look at mass documents, they point you to microfilm first. Before you get to look at anything. And great at making grants, he had all of the documents digitized. Immediately we had some things. That made my little heart go quiver. Oh, manuscripts. But within short order we are looking at these things and they are not great. Ben and i went to a lot of trouble to go back to the Phillips Library where most of the documents are and photograph and scan them. You can see a big difference. The one on the right, this is one of the indictments for Rebecca Nurse. Its nice and bright. Can you see the two colors of ink. That is something immediately apparent to us. That wouldnt have been from the microfilm version and sort of like whats going on there . Guess what . Even in those days, legal documents could be boilerplates. Then someone else filled it in. But it is all handwritten. This is what we can see when we look at actual manuscripts. Volume 135 when you look at mass archives is an actual book, bound book, of documents, all silked into the pages. Would you have a page with a cutout and they would put the manuscript in between two layers of silk. You could see both sides kind of through the silk, and you could actually page through them. And but the microfilm, they didnt even have the master any more. Just the one in circulation. You could see, it was horrible. Poor gretchen trying to transcribe from these. Finally i went down and got permission and i tell you, people in the archives of all these places were fabulous for us. And i photographed them all. That point, still in the book. And i had to shoot and shoot. Most recent time they had been in there and put it in its archival folder as they should be. They are still silk. They have wax seals. The silking goes over the wax seals. They are not optimal but they are preserved. We also in addition to original manuscripts, there were facsimiles of manuscripts that we did not know where they were. The one on the far left is a negative photo stat of the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs. Why do we have this . In the early 20s, people had interesting old documents. They would go to libraries that had photo static copier and say, i got this interesting document, you want a copy . The actual positive of this one is that the mass historical society. They have a mass collection of photo static records. The book at massachusetts state archives, when i opened it up to photograph these things, this fell out. It was tucked inside. And i went, i know exactly what this is. But who knew it was here . I was hoping it was something not found yet. But no. The middle is from a 1936 catalog selling this document for 85. If you remember the news a couple years ago there was another witchcraft trial document that came up for auction, it went like 30,000. An investment of 85 in 1936. What i could have gotten. On the end is an 1904 book. This is the only version we have of it. Kind of tattered. While working on it, dick trask somehow tracked it down and it was university of michigan. You never know in some cases where these are. We dont know where the document for Abigail Hobbs is. There is a little bit of providence at Massachusetts Historical Society but not much. We also discovered that we had handwritten contemporaneous copies of things. On the left we have one. On the right, basically an account of the same interrogation. Both in handwriting of Samuel Parris. We have no idea why there are two versions. Except he was taking things down in short hand then reconstituted them into his accounts. Shorthand was very, very useful for a young minister because they could listen to divines, cotton mather, increase mather, and use shorthand to take down absolutely everything. And reconstitute it. That is one reason why we know so much about Salem Village. Why we know so much about the pleas of innocence because Samuel Parris took it all down. There is a reason that Arthur Miller poached from him as it reads like a play. She says this. He says that. Oh, there is sound over here. Couldnt hear. Girls were flailing around. All those descriptions come from Samuel Parris because he was reconstituting it from his short hand. If i could find one of those documents, i would love the shorthand on that. But he sometimes made two copies. We had to figure out which one was actually used and we dont know why there is a second. If you look at the one on the left, clearly first draft, several different people crossing things out and adding things. We also have later handwritten copies. The one on the far left is a tracing of one of the documents that was out in public for a very long time. Original is now pretty tattered. I was looking at it saying, this is the same as the other. And i went, but its not fluent. Whats going on . Finally held them up. Someone went through the trouble to trace the documents. To make something new. This is in a different archive. So they thought they had original manuscript but who knows when the tracing was done. Second is a copy of Samuel Parris interrogation. It maintains the same line structure and same lay out on the page the two columns but it was done later. There were things oh boy, librarians and archivists like to include little tidbits to say when things are wrong. On the far right is just another copy of some of the old records. We had to tease these things out. There are also things we dont have manuscripts for. These are published transcriptions and we dont have any. The one on the far left, lawsons account for some of the days in april in 1692 when he went to visit and find out gee was his wife murdered by the specters. That came out quickly. There is a lot of information in that. Third one over is from the account from 1700. He is describing a lot of things and taking everything to task. Especially cotton mather. There are things in there we dont have original manuscripts. When you heard Rebecca Nurse was found not guilty, this is how we know. He has accounts in there and from the family accounting. Saying they were pressured to go back and bring her in guilty. Last one is page from thomas hutchinsons governor thomas hutchinsons, from the 18th century. He took them home and was writing this history of massachusetts. These are all kind of documents we dont have today. Three words, stamp, act, riot. His whole house was trampled and some of the, ive heard, you know one of those, maybe fake news. I dont know. But his library was trampled and some of the draft pages still have were dirty. They just trampled everything. A lot of the documents just disappeared. At one point in the 1900s, there was a man named poole who discovered they had a draft, earlier draft, and there were snippets of other documents we didnt have. We are slowly but surely putting together all these pieces because we dont have everything. In 1840, thomas gauge in massachusetts, he has nine documents in the case of Margaret Scott. Margaret scott is executed. I bet very few of you even know who she is. You might have seen her bench but there are only nine available to tell her case and two of them are in the Essex County Courthouse that the Philips Library holds. And two are ones in private collections. If you hear about an auction of one, those are the two indictments that pop up. But there are five more. And where are they . Four of them are in the Boston Public Library. After the book was published. We were pursuing some we were trying to figure out if we could identify more handwriting in these documents. We were archive hopping for two weeks. We went to Boston Public Library to go to rare books and manuscripts room to see if they had handwriting. We had been doing this in our book. At one point we were looking up all the towns because that might be helpful. Opening up one of the drawers of the card catalog, card catalog, okay, and this is march 2012. Five years ago. Card catalog. And he was looking up rowley. He said, what do you think this means . The card said four documents in the case against Margaret Scott. And my heart skipped a beat. I went we only have nine. Maybe we will go up to 13. Turns out, these are the 4 of the 5 that we didnt know where they were. Yeah, okay. We already knew the text. But we were looking at the manuscripts. Really nice to see the handwriting. See all the things. Quite often in older transcriptions, didnt look at absolutely every mark on manuscript. Sometimes on the back side they wouldnt copy that stuff. But we did. We looked at everything to try and figure out the date, who wrote it. One of the big things about the witch hunt is bernie was determined to set it up chronologically. And handwriting came second thing because when we are all transcribing, if you have a document with about this much of somebodys handwriting and you have an ambiguous area, dont know quite what that says. Would be helpful if you had a couple pages by someone in their handwriting and you could compare and resolve the ambiguity. So we started sorting early on so we could keep track of whose handwriting was where. We will be able to identify Samuel Parriss handwriting, Thomas Putnams. But we wanted more. And to see the handwriting this gave us a little bit more information. For a side note. Pedra went back about a week later and they couldnt find them. Very apologetic, but they couldnt find them. This is around the time the Margaret Scott indictment had just gone up for auction and brought in about 30,000. A month later i called, they were ticked at me. I told you we would call you. Everyday that passes is not good, i was home sick up a couple of days and i said im going to call. I went up the chain. I know somebody that used to work there. By the end of the day they had gone through and found them. And she called me back. A couple years later when you heard about the rembrandt that had gone missing. [ inaudible ] this is Boston Public Library. Worth over a half a million dollars. The couple had etchings or engravings. They were worth 30,000 and lost them . I sat there and went they just misshelved them. Theyre going to find them. Theyre just misshelved, and when it was, i went, yes, i knew that would happen. People say, why do they even have these things . Shouldnt they know more about their collection . Im thinking, card catalog. I doublechecked and they are going through inventory and making improvements. So closed until 2019. Happy to report they are responding to that. Oh, there is stuff i have to see. I have to wait how long . But anyone whos been around for the Phillips Library, how long did we have to wait to access the