SOURCE: "Witchcraft in the American Colonies, 1647–62," in American Quarterly, Vol. XX, No. 4, Winter, 1968, pp. 694–725.

In the following excerpt, Drake examines pre-1692 witchcraft cases in the American colonies and finds them to have followed a different pattern from what would later occur in Salem.

The witchcraft events that shattered Salem society in 1692 led directly to nineteen human executions by hanging, one by pressing with heavy weights, and the imprisonment of scores of people. Since that date they have also inspired a multitude of narrative accounts and stimulated at least three different controversies among historians.

The first of these controversies dealt with the role of Cotton and Increase Mather in the trials of 1692. Attacks upon the Mathers have varied from insinuations of responsibility for guiding the hysteria, in order to drive people back to church, to open condemnation for being slow to speak out against spectral evidence, a charge of...