Did the Mathers disagree about the Salem witchcraft trials?

X H E QUESTION THAT I have posed may seem at first to be antiquarian in the narrowest sense. One of my colleagues suggested that I make the title more provocative by asking. Did the Mathers disagree about the Salem trials, and who cares? What could be more parochial than asking whether two embattled ministers, serving in the same congregation, disagreed toward the end of one of the most shameful episodes in early New England history? I could argue that this topic is worth thirty minutes of your time because the Salem trials have already held a disproportionately large place in American historical consciousness for nearly three centuries. Somehow we choose the historical topics that will become notorious. Everyone knows that twenty people were executed in Salem in 1692, whereas I had a doctorate in the History of American Civilization before I learned that in the city of New York, nearly half a century after the Salem trials, many black people were actually burned at the stake for an alleged conspiracy to revolt.^ The question that I shall pursue instead concerns fairness to historical characters, and it asks us, in examining these recondite materials, to reconsider how it is that historical villains, and especially historical heroes, are made. The documentary evidence is small enough to be examined carefully in a brief space.