The Man Who Would Not Judge Witches

Everyone knows the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, but that’s not the name he was born with. He was born Nathaniel Hathorne, a direct descendent of the notorious John Hathorne. John Hathorne was a judge at the Salem witch trials—the famous court cases in seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts that convicted and executed nineteen witches. (They were innocent.)

Hawthorne, who lived at a time when people neither feared nor hanged witches quite so much, was so ashamed of his ancestor that he added...