SOURCE: "The Devil and Cotton Mather," in The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949, pp. 240-57.

In the excerpt below, Starkey explores Mather's role in the Salem witch trials.

1.

What had actually been accomplished on the spiritual plane by the wholesale jail delivery of 1693 was a point which at the time could only be described as moot. In spite of the relief which many communities felt at the lifting of the nightmare, the eagerness with which husbands welcomed back their witches, repenting that they had ever distrusted them, people farther removed from the scene could look on the whole process as a monstrous miscarriage of justice, boding no good to the future of Massachusetts. These agreed with Stoughton, "We were in a way to have cleared the land of the witches…. Who it is that obstructs the course of justice...