Everyone felt a sense of uneasiness and insecurity.

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 112.

He was a preeminent historian. This collection of essays, published and unpublished, is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Some pieces are inherently interesting. Others seem as if you need not only a deep interest in history but need to be steeped in the minutiae of the topic. The finer details of William Penn's arguments regarding Quakerism is an example of the latter.

The Courage of Giles Cory and Mary Easty is more than interesting, it is topical. One aspect of the essay is an exploration of injustice arising from adoption of faulty judicial processes which are known to be faulty but used anyway. The other aspect is an exploration of panicked leadership decision-making when the context of the decision is not understood.

So many good insights, I wanted to explore both. Probably in several posts.

The trials occurred at a time when the people of Massachusetts were passing through very difficult times. Cotton Mather, for whom those times were particularly difficult, called them “woeful”—and with reason. In 1685 Massachusetts had lost the royal charter that had given the colony virtual independence from England for fifty-five years, an independence that had made possible the Puritan experiment, an independence that had enabled Englishmen to create institutions that departed radically from those under which they had grown up in the mother country. In 1686 a Catholic king, James II, had sent Edmund Andros, a professional soldier, with absolute authority to govern Massachusetts and all the rest of New England, and without benefit of the representative assemblies that had hitherto been the supreme power of government in every New England colony.

Fortunately the people of England liked James II no better than the people of New England liked Andros. The people of Massachusetts sent Andros packing back to England in a bloodless revolution that accompanied the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. And they sent Cotton Mather’s distinguished father, Increase Mather, the minister of Boston’s Second Church, to recover the old charter and the freedom from English control that went with it.

In London, Mather was joined by William Phips, a Bostonian who had made a fortune by the very unpuritan method of raising sunken treasure from a Spanish galleon in the West Indies. Phips was not what people at the time would have called a proper Bostonian, even though he had attained a degree of respectability by marrying the widow of the town’s leading merchant. He was a rough-and-ready type, not very visibly a saint, and early in 1692 the people of Massachusetts learned that he and Mather had not succeeded in recovering the old charter. Instead, they had procured a new one, under which the king reserved to himself the appointment of the colony’s governor, and the first governor he appointed was William Phips.

The colony had been limping along under a provisional government of old-time leaders who had participated in the expulsion of Andros. The old-timers had followed the old-time ways, but now there was no telling what the character of the new government would be like. Everyone felt a sense of uneasiness and insecurity. To add to this feeling, the old ways seemed to be threatened also by new religious developments. Increase Mather and his aspiring son Cotton, who were the self-proclaimed defenders of everything the founding fathers had done, seemed to others to be moving away from New England’s traditional Congregationalism toward Presbyterianism; and the Reverend John Wise of Ipswich was arrayed against them on this issue, while in the West, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton was challenging them with a much more outright Presbyterianism than their own. What was troubling was not so much the substance of the challenges as the fact that the intellectual and religious leaders of the colony seemed to be at odds with one another.

At the same time the younger generation, as usual, was going to the proverbial dogs, frolicking in taverns instead of going to church. Women were wearing hoop skirts, which was shocking. Men were wearing wigs, which was equally shocking. Boston did not seem to be Boston any more. New England did not seem to be New England.

It was in this atmosphere that the Salem witch scare began.

Strict puritanism was an inspiring but hard to the point of almost inhuman cognitive and social strictness. I have always been puzzled by how Puritans are such a critical part of our founding and yet seem, in a century or slightly more after their arrival, to have effectively disappeared. There are lots of hints in this essay. One obvious reason is from a net benefits perspective. In cognitive, behavioral, and social regard, Puritanism was much harder than the relatively more tolerant and accommodating doctrines of Presbyterianism, Methodism, Baptists, etc.