Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal

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Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal | Examination of the Records of the Salem Witch Trials | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Examination of the Records of the Salem Witch Trials

THE legal records of the 1692 and 1693 witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts are central to the historical understanding of those events. A new edition of these records has been in preparation for more than a decade and will soon be in print. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt is more accurate, more comprehensive, and organized differently from all preceding collections of similar materials, emphasizing the chronological unfolding of the events and the legal procedures involved.¹ Aside from including more records than any previous collection—some newly discovered and some overlooked in previous editions—two features of the entries in this edition are unique: each document has been dated according to when the document was used and content added to it (some have as many as five dates), and each transcription notes where the handwriting in the manuscript changes, with twenty-four of the most prominent recorders identified by name across the entire collection. The discovery and printing of these identities open up worlds, enabling scholars now, for example, to investigate the patterns of participation of various individuals in the proceedings, to explicate the actual legal procedures used, and to articulate the sequence and concurrence of events with a degree of precision previously impossible.	1
Publications of the legal records in the past have essentially been organized as case-based collections. The first was by Cotton Mather, who transcribed the trial records of five selected cases and published them in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) at the request of Governor William Phips in defense of the actions of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Additional documents appeared in John Hale's A Modest Enquiry (1697) and Robert Calef 's More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), which reproduced Mather's Wonders and added transcriptions of the indictments for these cases. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson published several more documents in volume 2 of his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay (1767). All these books included the documents as examples to illustrate points in a narrative and discussion about what happened. The first attempt to present a comprehensive collection of the primary sources did not occur until 1864, when W. Elliot Woodward published all the documents he found in the Essex County Court Archives in his two-volume Records of Salem Witchcraft. This edition did not, however, include the records held in other county court archives. In 1938 the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) produced a typescript set of transcriptions specifically of the records of the witchcraft cases that included the records from the Essex County Court Archives already published by Woodward in addition to records in the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts State Archives, New York Public Library, and Peabody Essex Museum. In 1977 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published The Salem Witchcraft Papers, a slightly modernized version of the WPA typescript, adding transcriptions of sixteen manuscripts acquired by the Boston Public Library after the WPA project was completed and a few documents the WPA had overlooked at the Massachusetts State Archives as well as reproducing twenty-four texts that had been included by Mather, Hale, Calef, and Hutchinson.²	2
The first collection of the legal record of these trials should have been in an official court record book, which would have included the indictments on which the accused came to trial, the names of those on the juries, and the verdicts of the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692. None is known to exist today. The only possible copy from a record book of the Court of Oyer and Terminer is a brief text included in copies of the records of the trial of Abigail Faulkner Sr. when she petitioned the General Court in 1700 to redress her wrongful conviction. On that petition is the following notation: "Boston Jun 13: 1700 y^e Court orderd y^e Reading of hir tryall."³ Since she was tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692, this text strongly, though not conclusively, suggests that a no-longer-extant record book existed. The original record book of the 1693 Superior Court of Judicature had been missing for many years, and historians only knew of it through a nineteenthcentury copy until staff located the original while cleaning out a file cabinet in the Suffolk County Courthouse in 1996.	. . .

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