"No More Than the Specter of Evidence"

In the final entry of our Salem Witch Trials series, we delve into the aftermath of the trials and the broader impact on the future of the United States.

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Proctor’s Ledge Memorial in Salem, Massachusetts. Proctor’s Ledge sits at the bottom of Gallows Hill; it is here where the victims of the Salem Witch Trials were executed. The site was dedicated in 2017 after a team of researchers (including Emerson W. Baker) confirmed that this was the site of the hangings. Via Things To Do in Salem.

On November 11th, 1696, the Superior Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony heard the case of Thomas Maule. When the Quaker faced the Court, he did so knowing that several of the judges were participants in the Salem Witch Trials.

But Maule had not been accused of witchcraft. He was there to defend his defiance of Governor Phips’ censorship—under the governor’s leadership, publications that referenced the Salem trials were banned.

Several years had passed since the conclusion of the trials, and they remained a humiliating stain on the legacy of the colony’s leadership. Though Increase Mather had written a manuscript protesting the trials, he had been careful not to have it formally published, thus working around the ban.

Maule was made of tougher stock. Quakers were a religious minority, one that had suffered horrific abuse and discrimination, even death, at the hands of New England’s Puritans. Quakers were a fringe group who held radical beliefs for the time: they were committed pacifists, their views on gender were far more egalitarian, and they were among the earliest campaigners for the abolition of slavery. In 1688, Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which extended freedom of religion to all Protestants. This finally halted legal persecution of Quakers in New England, and it explains why no Quakers were executed for witchcraft in spite their ongoing notoriety—targeting Quakers would have brought the attention of the Crown on the colonists’ heads.

Maule was an outspoken character who courted controversy for defending his fellow Quakers, even as he maintained some respect in the broader community as a successful merchant who had come from humble origins. However, his vocal opposition to the trials proved a step too far. In the fall of 1695, he ignored the censors and published Truth Held Forth and Maintained According to the Testimony of the Holy Prophets Christ and His Apostles Recorded in the Holy Scriptures. In an astonishing show of courage, he published the book under his own name.