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The Governor's Machine: How Phips Built and Broke the Salem Court
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Governor William Phips didn't dissolve the Salem witch trials court out of conscience — he dissolved it because the political ground collapsed beneath him. This chapter traces how a legal vacuum, spectral evidence, and one chief judge's certainty turned a crisis into a killing machine.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you understand why Governor William Phips shut the court down, you have to understand what it looked like the moment he built it. May of sixteen ninety-two.
To understand Phips, you have to understand the Massachusetts he inherited. The colony had been in legal chaos for over a decade.
Bridget Bishop was hanged on the tenth of June, sixteen ninety-two. She was the first.
Corey refused to enter a plea. That was a calculated choice.
The religious establishment was not unanimously behind the trials. Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather occupied a complicated position.
Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October sixteen ninety-two. The official reasoning was that the court had been a temporary measure, and that a new charter meant new permanent courts should handle any remaining cases.
A Superior Court took over the remaining cases in January sixteen ninety-three. Without spectral evidence as an admissible standard, the prosecution essentially collapsed.
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