S1 – 4: The Refugees

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human [Music] There were a lot of rumors about Abigail. Some were small as you might expect. She was rude. She was unseemly. She was irreverent. But there were other, more specific rumors. And those were the kinds that spread like fire in a dry barn. They whispered that she lay out alone in the woods at night. That she was disobedient at home. That she openly mock the traditions of the Puritan faith. Even going as far as to use the Lord's name and vein. That she made a pact with the devil. And all of it was true. Abigail's family lived in the village of Topsefield, roughly five miles north of Salem Village. They were part of that larger Salem community in which the same way Beverly and Overwendem and others were. But they hadn't always been in Topsefield. As far as I can tell, Abigail was born there. But at the age of four, ten years before the events of 1692. Her father William packed the family up and headed north to fall with Maine. Over the next seven years though, the community crashed against her family like ocean waves. The Native American attacks on those northern frontier communities were brutal and deadly. Abigail lost siblings. She lost her mother. And finally, her father lost their land, forcing them to return to Topsefield in defeat. But they didn't come alone. William had remarried, so his new wife deliverance came home with them. All of this is context. It's stage dressing. If we want to understand who Abigail was, these are stories that we need to hear because they help us see her experience. But the one thing they don't explain is why she leaned so hard into these rumors. You see, these stories of satanic packs and sleeping in the woods weren't rumors told about her. These were things she said about herself. Abigail Hobbs was a witch. And she was proud of it. This is Unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey. [Music] To take our next step forward into Salem, we need to travel somewhere else. Maine. Now I know what you're thinking. I'm here for the Salem Witch Trials, not the history of Maine. And I can understand. As often repeated, context is everything. No historical event takes place inside a vacuum. And if we're ever going to fully understand what happened in Salem, we need to cast a wider net. Believe me, we'll be better off for it. Maine was founded decades before as a separate colony from the Massachusetts Bay colony. And the two regions grew differently as well. Massachusetts expanded fast, allowing cities to form, and attracted better off families and people who were less adventurous. Early settlements in Maine, however, tended to stick to the rocky coast. They were less city-like, functioning more as outposts to gather materials needed in the more urban communities around Boston. Here's Mary Beth Norton, professor of American History at Cornell University. Maine in the 1670s and 1690s was really where the action was, as far as profit to be made in New England in Boston. People had bought land, they had set up sawmills. Boston had a very vigorous shipbuilding industry. That the sawmills in Maine were providing the timber for. The very well-developed pines were perfect for ship's mass. These early Maine communities, places like Falmouth up in Casco Bay, and Wells, York, and Sacco, all served as border land between the safer realm of Massachusetts and the evil of the frontier. Up north, more than anywhere else the settlers could think of, was darkness and danger. Around 1652, a group of settlers in Maine decided to petition Parliament back in England for the ability to rule themselves. But when word of their plans got out, the government and Massachusetts became worried. They were getting rich off of those Maine frontiersmen, and they didn't want to lose that. So they examined their own charter and somehow found a loophole that gave them authority over Maine. Convenience, I know. But don't go assuming that the government of Massachusetts rushed in to grab control of Maine because they loved the place. No, they loved the resources that float out of it, and the wealth that pumped into their economy. But Maine itself was something straight out of their Puritan nightmares. To the Puritans in Boston and Salem, Maine was a godless land. The settlers there rejected English communal order and were less interested in building the Puritan city on a hill that was so important to the folks in Salem. Abigail Hobbs, new stepmother, was a great example of this. Here was an adult woman living in Puritan New England, and she had never been baptized by the church. Maine came with another challenge as well. Proximity to the Native American tribes to the North. Not just proximity, but conflict. As you might imagine, the English settlers were spreading out, taking over more and more land that belonged to the people who already lived there. They justified it with law and religion, too, claiming that the crown had given them authority over every single person within their territory, whether they were English or not. So as the Native Americans watched their lands get swallowed up by a hungry colonial enterprise, they felt the need to do something. Some of them fell in line and accepted it, believing that being nice to the English would benefit them in the long run. Others went looking for powerful friends to help them, eventually connecting with the French settlers far to the North. But there was a third group that wanted none of that, and they lashed out in the only way they could think of. With violence. Now, of course, if Massachusetts hadn't rushed in and taken control of Maine, those frontier settlers would have had to defend themselves. But that's not how it happened. Massachusetts got greedy, and because of that, they were responsible for that defense. In 1675, war broke out between the English colonists and the Native Americans around them who were led by a man named Metacom. He preferred to call himself by a more English title, though, so he went by the name King Philip. The three-year conflict then became known as King Philip's War. It was a bloody, violent time, too. Both sides took hostages. Both sides went back on their promises that could have ended the fighting. There were stories of Native children having their head smashed in, and of pregnant English women being murdered and scumped. Both sides crossed the line of human decency, far too often. Mary Beth Norton, once again. The Indian War then finally came to an end, more or less, with a truce in 1678. It was devastating to the English who had settled in Maine and New Hampshire. They had abandoned their communities in that period. They moved back in, and then the Second War started in 1688, and it all happened all over again. So it was devastating. It was devastating war. Basically, the Indian War has devastated the economy of Maine, and Maine in a lot of ways never really recovered. People didn't come back until the 1720s, and when they did, a lot of the entrepreneurial energy was gone. So it was really very bad. Abigail Hobbs' family were some of the people displaced by that war. They'd left Hobbsfield in 1682 looking for a better life. Most of the land in and around Salem was owned by a small handful of wealthy families, like the Porters and Putnams. Maine had represented their chance to get out from under the thumb of the 1% and make a better life for themselves elsewhere. The Indian Wars, as they called them back then, ruined all of that. Another person affected by the war was George Burrows. Now, if that name sounds familiar, that's because Burrows served as minister of the Salem Village Church years before Samuel Paris, way back in 1681, but he started up in Falmouth, Maine, where he was the minister there. An attack on Falmouth back in August of 1676 left dozens of settlers dead and sent a wave of refugees south to safer territory. Burrows managed to escape, along with a three-year-old girl named Mercy Lewis, whose entire family had been killed. After living and working for a time in the town of Salisbury, he and Mercy traveled farther south, eventually arriving in Salem Village in 1681. After his time serving as the second minister of the church in Salem Village, Burrows actually returned to Maine. The war was over and many people were beginning the long journey back north to reclaim their lost land and try rebuilding, and George Burrows went along with them. Money flowed back north as well. Folks in the Salem area felt safe to reinvest money in Maine, including the Putnams. And here's the amazing part of it all. If you were to look at a list of the people settling in or working with those settlers up in Maine, a whole slew of Salem names would jump off the page at you. The heck when the conflict resurfaced in the late 1680s, it was the Salem magistrates, John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, who took a trip north to inspect the situation. People in Salem were fully aware of the danger lurking just beyond their borders. Mayor Mary Beth Norton once again. What happened was all the people who had been settling in Maine had to go somewhere if they weren't killed. And so they filtered down into Massachusetts. They filtered down especially into Essex County, which is the northernmost county of Massachusetts, the northeasternmost county. And so a lot of the people came to live in Marblehead or came to live in Salem or came indeed to live in Salem Village. All of that is context. They can't understand Salem Village in 1692 without understanding Maine and the decades leading up to it. They weren't two disparate places that never bumped into each other. These were sibling communities joined at the hip through family ties, military service, and economic needs. Every person inside Salem Village was acutely aware of what was happening to the folks in Maine. Even more so when those refugees began to flood back toward them. Oh, and one last thing I want to point out. On January 25th of 1692, just days before Betty Paris and Abigail Williams were about to fall into fits for the first time, a Native American raid destroyed another settlement in Maine. Not Falmouth far to the north though. No, this raid happened much closer in the southern town of York. From the perspective of the people in Salem, the conflict and danger was headed right toward them. So keep all of that in mind as we move forward, because the next events might very well take place in Salem, but that doesn't mean they're isolated. And some historians think that everything that was about to happen could be blamed on Abigail Hobbs, who thanks to the wild stories she was telling her friends, ended up being arrested on April 19th. Her examination happened a short time later, and it came with some interesting revelations. Seeing before the magistrates, Abigail Hobbs spoke before they could ask her any questions. "I will speak the truth," she said. "I have seen sights and have been scared. I have been very wicked. I hope I shall be better if God will help me." What sights did you see, Hawthorne asked? I have seen dogs and many creatures. What dogs do you mean, Hawthorne asked? Ordinary dogs? Abigail shook her head. "I mean the devil." The magistrates pressed on. "Where had she seen them?" they asked. Abigail replied that her encounter had taken place in the woods. In the middle of the day, years ago, back when she lived at Casco Bay. That was where she'd put her hand on his book. When they carried her off to jail a short while later, the name Casco Bay still hung in the air, like a neon sign pointing at the danger that lurked to the north. But Abigail had also made it clear that it was spreading south and might already be among them. She claimed that a shape-shifting man had visited her at her home here in Topsefield. He had alternated between the form of a cat, a dog, and a black man with a black hat. And this man, she claimed, had offered her fine clothes and the power to harm others in town. The power that she had readily accepted. If the news from the frontier was frightening to the people of Salem Village, it was made even more so by the actual presence in their homes of people who had lived through the horrors of it all. One of the most prominent of all of them was the little girl who George Burrows had rescued from Falmouth back in 1676, Mercy Lewis. My 1692 though, she was a 19 year old woman living in the home of Thomas and Ann Putnam, along with their violently afflicted daughter Annie. It's easy to believe that over their time together, Mercy had been filling Annie's head with horrifying tales of devils who attack in the night, but she had more to contribute than just tales. Mercy Lewis was having fits of her own. And one of the incidents that was recorded down, Mercy claimed the Putnam's house had become filled with the spirits of witches, and that they were trying to force her to partake of some twisted red communion. Suddenly, the figure of a white man appeared in the room, frightening off the witches and casting a brilliant light across her face. Ann Putnam, not one to be showed up, soon had a powerful vision of her own. In hers, the people around her heard her shout, "Oh, dreadful, dreadful, here is a minister. What are ministers which is two?" Obviously, this caught the attention of the people around her. A minister implicated in assisting the devil himself. Well it was unheard of. Then yet here it was, spelled out right in front of them. A moment later, the ministers' invisible spirit conveniently identified itself to them all as well. He was their former minister and hero of Maine, George Burrows. But George Burrows wasn't the spotless minister we might assume him to be. Here is Stacey Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author of several historical works, including the witches. Burrows is the ex-minister who leaves the community on bad terms, and is as much a hero in his new community in today's southern Maine as he had been a person in on grotta in Salem. He was clearly a very stubborn and difficult man, and possibly an abusive husband when he was in Salem. Stories of how he had mistreated his wives will trail him even when he moves to Maine. With Burrows, there's this terrific vexed history with the community. There seems to be a certain amount of getting back at him by women who may have been friends with his dead wives. The day after Annie Putnam's vision of George Burrows, original afflicted girl Abigail Williams and her friend Mary Walcott both had a frightening experience as they sat in Ingrosal's ordinary with a number of their neighbors. They claimed that the spirits of William and Deliverance Hobbs, parents to Abigail Hobbs, were there and attacking them. One of the men in the room, Benjamin Hutchinson, actually drew his sword and started swinging it at the empty air in an attempt to kill the spirits. As he did, the two afflicted girls recounted the blow by blow action that only they could see. Goody Hobbs had been injured, they claimed, and that was blood all over the floor. Think about this moment from a different perspective though. Salem feared that the warfare of the north would spread down to their own safe space. That before long, they too would be battling with the devil's forces, the Native Americans who plagued their borders. So when you find a scene in a public tavern where weapons are drawn and flashing through the air, it's their greatest fears come to life. Between this highly public display of panic and the new accusations brought up by Annie Putnam and her friends, the momentum of the witchcraft panic began to accelerate. Within ten days of Abigail Hobbs examination, fifteen new names were submitted as potential witches. Some seemed connected to past suspects, while others were more shocking to hear. Giles Corey and Mary Warren were taken from their homes and then examined and jailed. Their connections to Martha Corey and the Proctors, both of whom were already in jail, were just too close to overlook. Rebecca nurses two younger sisters, Mary Etsy and Sarah Cloice were also imprisoned. Daniel Putnam had his black slave, Mary, arrested and another woman who had been acquitted of witchcraft years before named Bridget Bishop was also arrested for a second time. After a brief examination, she was jailed for trial, along with two other members of her family. Bridget Bishop was married, so she's not alone in the world. That's Marilyn K. Roach, historian and author of Six Women of Salem. She's been suspected before, however, of witchcraft, but she has survived that. That's not as much paperwork on it as you'd like, surviving. She was confrontational. Some of the neighbors thought I'd say she stuck up for herself. This is the her third husband, the second husband would hit her now and then, but she hit him back. Then, the crisis burst beyond the Salem boundary. A rest were made throughout Essex County in the towns of Redding, Amesbury, Beverly and more. However, in Topsefield, both William and Deliverance Hobbes were arrested. The logic was simple. If their daughter had consorted with the devil, who could be more to blame than they? But their most dramatic arrest would be the most unexpected, rather than dismissing the accusations against George Burrows, the magistrates all agreed that it would be best to bring him in for questioning. But he was far to the north of them in Welles' main, and they feared that making a public declaration might tip him off and give him the chance to run. So instead, they gathered a group of men and gave them their assignment and secret. They were to ride north, capture him, and then bring him back for examination. George Burrows was a wanted man. Salem Village didn't sit around waiting for Burrows to arrive before making their minds up about him, and we have a number of the locals to thank for that. One was a young woman named Sarah Churchill, who worked as a servant in a local household. But she was also a refugee from Maine. For a while, Churchill experienced some of the same afflictions as the others, but her employer beat her until it stopped. That's how John Proctor had handled Mary Warren, but when her symptom stopped, the judges decided it was because she had given in to the demands of the devil. When Churchill's afflictions did the same, she stood at risk of the same assumption. To help her case, she played along with the magistrates and gave them whatever they wanted. In jail across town, Mary Warren was doing the same. She rolled on her employers, the Proctors, and said that they'd threaten to force red-hot fireplace tongs down her throat if she didn't sign the devil's book. Even Mercy Lewis got back into the spotlight. She claimed to have been attacked by the specter of Burrows, who she knew very well. She said that he tortured her, that he threatened to kill her, and that he carried her up to a high mountain and offered to give her everything she could see in exchange for her mark in the devil's book. Mercy claims she refused, echoing the willpower of Jesus in a similar situation in the Bible. One young woman, Sarah Morrell, seems to only have been arrested because she too was a refugee from Maine. It was ironic, really. Salem had been set up as a place of peace, a city on the hill as a beacon of hope, and yet it was quickly becoming a dangerous place to live. May 9th saw a number of arrivals in Salem Village. William Stoughton, the Massachusetts Chief Justice, and Samuel Suel, who was a young judge from the Massachusetts General Court and a dedicated record keeper. Together with John Hawthorne and Jonathan Corwin, these four brought the entire authority of the colony to bear on the next examination. Here's Emerson Baker, professor of American history at Salem State University, an author of A Storm of Witchcraft. Here's the problem. I really think the judges like Stoughton were filled with incredible self-loving. Stoughton had been a minister. He had been a minister in England. He's basically kicked out with a restoration because he was a puritan and he comes back to New England and he comes back and he's hailed as this wonderful leading figure of the colony. He's asked by several towns, "Please be our minister. Please, please, please be our minister." And he says, "No, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy of being a minister. I can't do it." Samuel Suel as well, too, you can see his struggles. He doesn't want to become a member of the church because it doesn't think he's worthy. My God, the guy was brilliant student at Harvard. He could recite the Bible backwards and forwards, read his two volume diary and you know he's an incredibly devout puritan, but he thinks he's not worthy. That examination was of the other new arrival in town. George Burrows. By the time he was escorted into the Salem Village meeting house, Stoughton, Hawthorne, Corwin and Suel had already questioned him privately. They had focused on the last time he had taken communion and where. George must have understood the seriousness of his situation when he answered that it had been such a long time that he couldn't remember. It didn't help his case, for sure. The afflicted girls appeared grievously tortured when Burrows stepped through the meeting house door. One girl shouted out that Burrows had killed his two wives and that their spirits had appeared right there in the room with them, wrapped in their winding sheets, and laying the blame for their death on their husband's head. Burrows was offered a chance to respond to the girls, but all he would say was that he understood nothing of it. After that, testimonies continued. Men who had known Burrows in Casco Bay reported that he had inhuman strength that he was able to hold a seven-foot rifle with one hand while other men struggled to hold it with two. He was able to lift barrels of molasses and cider by himself to unload the boats that supplied the coastal town. Of course, Burrows tried to defend himself, but his explanations and protests fell on deaf ears. The truth of the matter was a lot more simple. He had lost his case before he even entered the room, and the examination was for no other reason than to just go through the motions and make it official. When the examination was over, Burrows was walked out of the crowded meeting house and into an already crowded jail. He was their biggest catch of the season, so to speak, and represented a major victory. But all of that was about to change. The new day would bring a new tragedy, and I'm not sure anyone in Salem was prepared. On the day after Burrows arrest, the crisis claimed its first life. Sarah Osburn, already weak with an ongoing illness when she'd been jailed on March 1st, died in her Boston jail cell. She'd been held there in horrible conditions for nine weeks without ever getting a trial. The news had to have struck the people of Salem Village with a painful blow. Whatever you could say about how they were handling the situation, with all of their warrants and examinations and constables carting suspects off to jail, there were real people involved. Real lives, real neighbors, real people who they had known for a long time. But now, those people were being turned into something else, something less than human. That's something we're all very good at. We always have been, if we're honest about it. People have a knack for isolating certain individuals or cultures, and then stripping them of their humanity. When things get rough and a community faces a crisis, it's the dehumanized who are always the most vulnerable to violence. I know there's a lot about the events in Salem that are singular. They are special and unique and one-offs that don't repeat themselves again. But this, the dehumanizing of the other, to the point where lives are lost. This is something that's tragically commonplace to our modern world. Sarah Osburn was one of the first to step into a local jail to await a full hearing before a lawful court, but she was certainly not the last. Day after day, new members of the community were accused of allegiance to Satan. They were questioned by the wealthy, powerful men of the colony, and then torn from their lives and their families. The fits and accusations of the afflicted would continue. The jails in Boston, Salem, and Ipswich would continue to fill up, and the community would continue to wait. The man they had pinned their hopes on, Sir William Phipps, was rumored to be on his way. Phipps was the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts. He'd sailed to England to retrieve a newly approved colonial charter. It was that magical piece of paper that would help them fight off their enemies and establish true justice with the righteous hand. And so, they waited. But thankfully, they wouldn't have to wait long. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of What's in Store for next week. Next time on Unobscured. We might look on Alden's capture by the French with pity, and see his release and plans to return to his son to be noble. The magistrates though, saw it as a sign that he was in league with the devil. The French were Catholic, and they had allied themselves with the Native Americans. Two groups of people viewed as tools of Satan by the Puritans. John Alden wasn't the only suspect to leave the meeting house in shackles that day though. One of them was Martha Carrier, from nearby Andover. Accusations about her involvement in witchcraft began after she refused to leave town after her family contracted smallpox, which upset her neighbors. Nevermind the fact that the outbreak was really the fault of Fyps and his failed military expedition. Everyone was carted off the jail that afternoon, but unlike all the previous examinations that had taken place, these suspects could at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. With the Euler and Terminer announced, they knew their time in jail wouldn't go on for months. Finally, there was an end in sight. But that tunnel would be much more dark and dangerous than any of them could have imagined. "I'm not a child, I'm a child." "I'm not a child, I'm a child." [Music] Unabscored was created and written by me, Aaron Manky, and produced by Matt Friedrich and Alex Williams in partnership with How Stuff Works, with Research by Carl Nellis and Original Music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians, further reading material, a resource archive, and links to our other shows at historyunabscored.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.