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witchcraft, and the association was especially acute for Quaker women. In 1656, the magistrates of Massachusetts suspected two Quaker missionaries of witchcraft and had their bodies searched for the tell-tale witches’ marks. The Salem minister John Higginson, dismayed that members of his congregation joined the Friends, compared the Quaker idea of the “inner light” to “the Devil’s Sacrifice.” Another cleric, the distinguished minister Increase Mather, wrote in a 1684 publication that Quakers practiced black magic and were likely to experience demonic possession. It is possible that Quakers may have been singled out as witches in Salem in 1692.121 Witchcraft accusations, however, could intersect with Quakerism in another way, encouraging disaffected people, whether those accused of witchcraft or those repelled by the whole enterprise, to join the Friends. Such was the case for Sarah Hood Bassett, who languished in prison for nine months during the Salem outbreak as an accused witch. After her release, her extended family joined the Salem Quaker meeting.122

While the oceanic murders of accused witches and depositions at colonial trials reveal the transmission of many elements of English witch beliefs to North America, the English were not the only Europeans to inhabit English colonies. One distinctive feature of English colonial settlements was authorities’ willingness to integrate continental Europeans, particularly Protestants from the Holy Roman Empire (mostly from the region we today call Germany), the Netherlands, and France. Many of these continental Europeans came from lands immersed in witch-hunting, especially those from the Holy Roman Empire, where about half of all prosecutions for witchcraft—perhaps as many as 45,000—took place. There was no territory in the Americas claimed or administered by German-speaking people, but many Germans did immigrate to the British colonies of North America. The migration started small—maybe only 300 migrated to Pennsylvania before 1709—but then the numbers picked up, and by 1775, as many as 84,500 German-speaking people had made the trip.123 The main German migration transpired well after the peak of the European witch hunts (in contrast to the migrations of the English and French to the Americas in the seventeenth century, which occurred during ongoing waves of witch hunts), but certainly the memory of the trials endured and so did the belief system and magical practices. Indeed, the tenacity of these beliefs is striking. But we do not find evidence of witch trials in Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of Germans settled (others went to North Carolina and, later, Georgia). A variety of factors explain this relative silence.

The colonial legal culture where continental Europeans settled did not support witch accusations. Although most English people, Puritan, Quaker, or orthodox Anglican, believed in witchcraft, the laws of England against witchcraft did not always make the trip across the Atlantic. Pennsylvania is a good case in point. The detailed laws devised by William Penn and the colony’s first settlers said nothing about witchcraft. Not until 1717 was the English witchcraft statute of James I added to the existing laws by the Pennsylvania assembly.124

Even when accusations made it to court, juries and judges were skeptical. One case that did end up in court involved English, Dutch, and Swedes, all meeting around maleficia. The colony of New Sweden (south of Pennsylvania, in what is now Delaware) was established by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1638. Inhabited mostly by Swedes and Finns and a motley assortment of Northern Europeans, the colony endured until 1654. When the English settled in Pennsylvania, there were still many inhabitants of the defunct colony living in the Delaware Valley. Two colonists, Margaret Mattson and Yeshro Hendrickson, were charged with witchcraft and brought before the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania in February 1684. A Swede acted as their interpreter in the trial, during which they were accused by English and Dutch witnesses of maleficia.