Salem and the Salem Witch Trials

When two Massachusetts slave merchants joined with London slave raiders in a massacre of an African village in 1645, the colonial government registered as indignation. They said these people were guilty of the biblical crime of man stealing. In 1681 a Boston jury indicted a woman named Maria of arson and she was sentenced to be burned at the stake in Boston Common. Cotton Mather wrote described her end in his book Magnalia Christi Americana as a picture of hell.