ed out in a context of theocratic absolutism, between those accused of witchery and the state and religious power over them. That being so, the social structure of Salem and Massachusetts Bay Colony must be seen as relevant to the events.
When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was licensed in 1629, religious freedom--though not religious tolerance, a distinctly different concept--was uppermost in the minds of the founders. Colony Governor John Winthrop articulated the values that would govern the colonists' experience:
The Lord will make our name a praise and glory . . . we shall be like a City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are on us.
If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us . . . we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God.
Puritans believed that individual worldly experience was a function of whether and to what extent the individual was right with God. In 1620, when the Mayflower Pilgrims were sailing the Atlantic on their way to Plymouth, Governor William Bradford recorded in his diary that an abusive sailor who died felt "the just hand of God" (Bradford 94). New Englanders whose main preoccupation was with fusing human and divine experience were the first Puritan lawgivers. The Salem Covenant of 1629 and the Enlarged Covenant of 1636 were representative. The short 1629 document had participants "bynd our selves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies, according as he is pleased to reveale himselfe unto us in his Blessed word of truth." The Enlarged Covenant bound Salem residents "to carry our selves in all lawful obedience to those that are over us, in Church or Commonwealth."
Obedience was a serious Puritan concept. In 1638 John Winthrop sanctioned the expulsion from Massachusetts Bay of religious dissenters who he said "do adhere unto [seditious practices] and do endeavor to set forward this ...