To the awe inspired by the covenant with God was added the terror aroused by the dread power of Satan; and witchcraft inevitably took its place in the annals of New England Puritanism as it had done for a century in the annals of the older world. Not one of the colonies, except Rhode Island, was free from its manifestations. Plymouth had two cases which came to trial, but no executions; Connecticut and New Haven had many trials and a number of executions, beginning with that of Alse Young in Windsor in 1647, the first execution for witchcraft in New England. The witch panic, a fearful exhibition of human terror, appeared in Massachusetts as early as 1648, and ran its sinister course for more than forty years, involving high and low alike and disclosing an amazing amount of credulity and superstition. To the Puritan the power of Satan was ever imminent, working through friend or foe, and using the human form as an instrument of injury to the chosen of God. The great epidemic of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, the climax and close of the delusion, resulted in the imprisonment of over two hundred persons and the execution of nineteen. Some of those who sat in the court of trial later came to their senses and were heartily ashamed of their share in the proceedings.
The New Englander of the seventeenth century, courageous as he was and loyal to his religious convictions, was in a majority of cases gifted with but a meager mental outfit. The unknown world frightened and appalled him; Satan warring with the righteous was an ever-present menace to his soul; the will of God controlled the events of his daily life, whether for good or ill. The book of nature and the physiology and ailments of his own body he comprehended with the mind of a child. He believed that the planet upon which he lived was the center of the universe, that the stars were burning vapors, and the moon and comets agencies controlling human destinies. Strange portents presaged disaster or wrought evil works. Many a New Englander's life was governed according to the supposed influence of the heavenly bodies; Bradford believed that there was a connection between a cyclone and an eclipse; and Morton defined an earthquake as a movement of wind shut up in the pores and bowels of the earth.