Magic continued to flourish in Manhattan, for most New Yorkers looked the other way when faced with the unusual, be it magic or not. There was a freedom of spirit in the city that couldn’t be found in the other colonies, perhaps because of the settlement’s Dutch heritage. Respected Amsterdam minister Balthasar Bekker had published The Enchanted World, arguing that Calvinism was mistaken in stating that Satan walked through the human world. The devil was nothing more than a symbol of all the evil that resided inside mankind, and belief in witchcraft was the work of ignorant, superstitious men. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, agreed that the search for witches was far-fetched nonsense. He’d been schooled on this issue when his own sister-in-law Judith Varlet was accused in Hartford in the witch craze of the 1660s and rescued from Connecticut in the dead of night to avoid prison. That near-tragic incident was close enough to the governor to give him pause when it came to supernatural claims. He was a logical man who demanded proof; proving Satan’s existence was a fool’s errand, and he had declared so in his remarks concerning such arrests, stating that sentences for witchcraft should not end in execution, no matter how dark the accusations might be.

In Massachusetts scores of people had been arrested and held for preposterous reasons, with claims that they were in league with the devil and could torment people from miles away. Though not present in bodily form, those charged were said to be able to ruin crops, induce babies to fall ill, make loyal husbands go mad with lust. Serious men, including Cotton Mather, son of the illustrious Increase Mather, president of Harvard, believed that evil could be found in the personages of old women and fishwives and children, that it emerged from their mouths, that the dark world had encroached on everyday life so that the line dividing the two had vanished into thin air.