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but it was also divorced from those contexts and was generally not inconsistent with beliefs in Christianity. Hoodoo centers on specific procedures intended to alter one’s immediate circumstances, by removing a burden or grievance or punishing an enemy. (Voodoo, in contrast, is a full religious system, complete with deities and rituals, and fused together from different African religious practices.153) The hoodoo specialist known as the conjurer, for example, created charms and amulets that resembled the minkisi bags of Kongo or the gris-gris of the Louisiana poisoning case. The conjurer (also called a root doctor) drew on knowledge of plant medicines, combined with sacred rituals to give these medicines power; to heal the sick; to resolve conflicts; to punish malefactors, enemies, or rivals; and to appease spirits.154 One substance that was essential for amulets was “goofer dust,” or dirt gathered from a grave. The word derives from the kiKongo word, kufwa, which means “dead person.” Its use conveyed a belief—shared in Kongo and the U.S. South—that the spirits of the dead continued to dwell in the land of the living, and that conjure could link the two.155 Conjurers survived through the nineteenth century, and white observers in the nineteenth-century U.S. South thought they were so prevalent that each plantation had someone with such expertise.156 Belief in conjuring eroded over the course of the nineteenth century among African Americans.157

Outbreaks: Putting Salem in Context

North America experienced very few massive witch hunts, unlike Europe, where major outbreaks were all too common. Instead, witch beliefs wove themselves into the fabric of daily life, infrequently manifesting themselves in colonial legal systems as formal accusations and, more infrequently still, trials and executions. Occasionally, however, there were outbreaks, episodes when numerous people were accused of witchcraft and several executed. Some were small-scale events, like the scare at Hartford, Connecticut (1662–1663), in which 13 people were accused and 4 were hanged. Others were larger; in New Mexico in 1675, authorities accused 47 Indians of witchcraft and hanged 3; the outbreak at Salem in 1692 ended with 19 people executed and some 162 accused; at Abiquiu, New Mexico (1756–1763), 176 people were accused and none executed (although 5 died in prison). In comparison to major witch hunts in Europe, such as that in Scotland in 1661–1662, when 664 people were named, or two in Würzburg and Bamberg in the Holy Roman Empire between 1616 and 1630, when 2,100 people were executed, the North American outbreaks were modest affairs, although surely participants did not feel that way about them.158 Three North American outbreaks are represented in documents 18–29.

Historians seeking to explain witchcraft outbreaks tend to look at local circumstances—unrest, war, violence, drought, famine, epidemics, instability, the absence of secular authorities, or the presence of a charismatic minister or priest. In a colonial setting, many of these features were endemic to colonial life. Colonies were by definition distant from central authority. They were often established in perilous places where mortality rates could be high, wars were frequent occurrences, and people lived among those unlike themselves—either people of the same nation who might be from different regions with different habits and manners or people from different parts of the world with vastly different customs. Colonies were defined by the complex hierarchies of race and power within them and by the exploitation of people and of natural resources that justified their existence. Enslaved Africans lived involuntarily in European settlements, as did Indian laborers. These were worlds characterized by violence, by racial, ethnic, national, and religious differences, by conflict and tension, and by tenuously replicated church, family, and state structures.

The best-known North American outbreak is without doubt the witch hunt in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Compared to the large witch hunts in