WITCHCRAFT IN THE COLONIAL TIMES

WITCHCRAFT IN THE COLONIAL TIMES

WITCHCRAFT IN THE COLONIAL TIMES

If someone saw girls dancing naked in the woods today, they probably wouldn't put them on trial. In early colonial times, it would have been considered a sign of witchcraft and a sin! In Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", a story of that kind of odd behavior is told about the now infamous Salem witch trials. In 1692, a group of young women were caught dancing in the woods and witchcraft hysteria went rampant through Salem, Massachusetts. The political, social, and environmental settings in the late seventeenth century Salem were instrumental in heightening the probability of the witch trials in this Puritan village. Puritans were not the only group with courageous leaders who felt that slavery was an affront to Christian doctrine. (Jacobs 2003)

John Woolman, sometimes referred to as the "Quaker Saint", developed a deep sense of conscience regarding slavery early in his life and thereafter worked to end what he termed an affliction. Woolman, a zealous member of the Society of Friends, lived in Burlington County, New Jersey and in 1749, married "a well inclined damsel" named Sarah Ellis. The owner of a successful mercantile business in Mount Holly, New Jersey, Woolman eventually simplified his life concentrating on his family, his farm and his work as a Quaker spokesman. (Franklin, 1999)

In 1754, Woolman's Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was published, which argued for the end to the practice of keeping slaves, and even brought up the question of reparations to the blacks. In it he wrote, "But the general disadvantage which these poor Africans lie under an enlightened Christian country having often filled me with real sadness, and been like undigested matter on my mind, I now think it my duty, through divine aid, to offer some thoughts thereon to the considerations of others". Woolman, demonstrating his revulsion toward the slave trade, refused to draw up wills transferring slaves, induced many of his friends to set their Negroes free, and in 1760 at Newport, Rhode Island, petitioned the Legislature to prohibit the buying and selling of slaves. Twenty years after Woolman's Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was published, a popular Baptist preacher and pamphleteer named John Allen, wrote a harsh condemnation of slave owners who professed Christianity.

In The Watchman's Alarm to Lord, Allen inferred that the "darkness of the night" the colonists experienced against the British was appropriate retribution for their "iniquitous and disgraceful practice of keeping African slaves, a custom so evidently contradictory to the laws of God, and in direct violation of the charter of this province, and the natural and unalienable rights of mankind." He was especially critical of those who kept slaves "with the idle pretence of christianizing them," and those who freed their slaves only after they turned 50 years old, "a period which is far beyond the meridian of man's natural life".

Allen longed for the day when "it never be told in the streets of America, ...