A few extracts from colonial writings should make clear the attitude of the Puritan leaders toward these unfortunates accused of being in league with the devil.  Winthrop thus records a case in 1648:  “At the court one Margaret Jones of Charlestown was indicted and found guilty of witchcraft, and hanged for it.  The evidence against her was, that she was found to have such a malignant touch, as many persons, (men, women, and children), whom she stroked or touched with any affection or displeasure, etc., were taken with deafness ... or other violent pains or sickness....  Some things which she foretold came to pass....  Her behaviour at her trial was very intemperate, lying notoriously, and railing upon the jury and witnesses, etc., and in the like distemper she died.  The same day and hour, she was executed, there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many trees, etc."[19]

Whether in North or in South, whether among Protestants or Catholics, this belief in witchcraft existed.  In one of the annual letters of the “English Province of the Society of Jesus,” written in 1656, we find the following comment concerning the belief among emigrants to Maryland:  “The tempest lasted two months in all, whence the opinion arose, that it was not raised by the violence of the sea or atmosphere, but was occasioned by the malevolence of witches.  Forthwith they seize a little old woman suspected of sorcery; and after examining her with the strictest scrutiny, guilty or not guilty, they slay her, suspected of this very heinous sin.  The corpse, and whatever belonged to her, they cast into the sea.  But the winds did not thus remit their violence, or the raging sea its threatenings...."[20]

Even in Virginia, where less rigid religious authority existed, it was not uncommon to hear accusations of sorcery and witchcraft.  The form of hysteria at length reached at Salem was the result of no sudden burst of terror, but of a long evolution of ideas dealing with the power of Satan.  As early as 1638 Josselyn, a traveler in New England, wrote in New England’s Rareties Discovered:  “There are none that beg in the country, but there be witches too many ... that produce many strange apparitions if you will believe report, of a shallop at sea manned with women; of a ship and a great red horse standing by the main-mast, the ship being in a small cove to the eastward vanished of a sudden.  Of a witch that appeared aboard of a ship twenty leagues to sea to a mariner who took up the carpenter’s broad axe and cleft her head with it, the witch dying of the wound at home.”