Colonial America’s Notorious Witch Hunt
Other than the American Revolution whose success ended America’s colonial status, perhaps no event in colonial American history is as famous – or infamous – as the Salem Witch Trials. They are also probably history’s best-known case of mass hysteria. The witch craze of 1692 – 1693 took place against a cultural and religious background that was predisposed to believe in the supernatural. Witchcraft might be laughable to most today. In seventeenth-century colonial America, however, and especially in Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was taken quite seriously.
The belief that the Devil could grant witches extraordinary powers in return for their loyalty, and that witchcraft could be used to inflict harm on the good and godly, was taken for granted. Witch hunts had swept through the Christian world starting in the fifteenth century and hit a peak of intensity in the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. By the second half of the seventeenth century, witch trials had begun to wane across much of Europe. They continued, however, in the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies.