Witches and the devil

New England colonists faced spiritual challenges that can be traced directly to King Philip's War and subsequent frontier violence in Maine. The New England colonists were devout Puritans who saw themselves as God's chosen people. They usually interpreted their wars with Indians as a sign of God's displeasure. Many English refugees from these Indian wars sought safety in towns like Salem and Boston. Their fear of both American Indians and the Devil turned into hysteria during the infamous Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Pivotal individuals in the trials such as George Burroughs and Abigail Hobbs had been terrorized by wars with the Indians. Though they did not equate American Indians with witches, they and their neighbors did come to associate the visible assaults of Indians with the invisible attacks of the Devil. In their confessions, accused witches would describe the devil as resembling an American Indian. Their fear of Indians, having grown exponentially since the outbreak of King Philip's War, had heightened their fear of witches, which eventually led to the execution of twenty individuals. That American Indians and the Devil had become intimately entwined in the minds of many colonists indicates just how much King Philip's War had reinforced racial identity and the divide between English colonists and native peoples. This new mentality, this initial trauma, had a lasting impact on future colonists and even on the United States. The New England colonists wrote far more about King Philip's War than did other English colonists about their own conflicts with Indians. They waged a war with their pens that justified their actions and cast all American Indians as the enemy. All of the ink these colonists spilled created a lasting, however skewed, memory of the war that shaped American culture and subsequent American Indian-white relations.

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