ew Haven,
flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow
at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made almost no impression; only
in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern Long Island did they
find a resting place.

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 earthqu