SOURCE: "Cotton Mather," in The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692, Hippocrene Books, 1991, pp. 37-55.

In the following excerpt, Robinson compares the actions of Increase Mather to those of his son Cotton Mather during the witch trials.

… The year 1692 had opened as a particularly troubling one in New England. The winter was cruel;²⁶ taxes were intolerable; pirates were attacking commerce; smallpox was rife. The French were actively supporting the Indians on a bloody warpath.

The armies of the French and the Indians represented a lethal threat to the people of New England. King William's War had been going on for three and a half years. Morale was low, tension high, in the wake of periodic massacres by the Indians. While the heaviest fighting occurred in New Hampshire and Maine, raids had repeatedly been made on the northern towns of Essex County in Massachusetts, Andover, Billerica, and Haverhill, in particular. New...