The free market and rule of law - Is there anything it can't do? Witchcraft hysteria suppression edition.

From Defamation Takes A Holiday: Slander And The Salem Witch Trials by David Kluft

It was not until October 1692, seven months after the accusations began, that things finally started to calm down. What ended the madness? The simplest explanation is political. After Massachusetts finally got its new charter, it also got its new governor, William Phips, in May 1692. Phips’ first and only priority at the time was to fortify Maine against the French and their allies. Phips left Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, a puppet of the Mather clan, in charge of everything else. When Phips returned in late September, he found to his horror that Stoughton had presided over the execution of twenty fellow citizens on flimsy accusations of witchcraft, and that many more accusations were under consideration, including one against the Governor’s wife.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved by Phips on October 12, 1692. Nobody else was executed, and the ongoing proceedings eventually came to an end by early 1693, much to the disappointment of the odious Stoughton, who had already ordered a fresh set of graves dug for a new group of accused innocents even before they had been condemned.

But there is one more possible explanation of — or at least contributing factor to — the end of the Salem Witch Trials: the reemergence of the civil slander suit. Boston cloth merchant Robert Calef, critic of the proceedings in Salem, wrote a contemporaneous account of them in More Wonders of the Invisible World. Calef reports that in October 1692, a “worthy gentleman of Boston” was accused of witchcraft by a resident of Andover (the actual location of many of the “Salem” proceedings). The accused gentleman immediately responded by lodging a “thousand pound action for defamation” (a ruinous sum) and advising the accuser to get his evidence ready for trial. Not surprisingly, the gentleman’s accuser changed his mind, and shortly thereafter the accusations of witchcraft dried up altogether.