Was Cotton Mather Justified The Salem Witch Trials?

The “Salem witch trials”, this was a period in America where the puritans persecuted people, mostly females for condoning in demonic acts. Now what may have started these proceedings? There were many factors that triggered this, the closure of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an outbreak of small pox and the possibility of an attack from the Indians caused so much discord among the puritans that they started to believe that they were being punished by God. With so much discord, anxiety and confusion the puritans believed that these misfortunes were the cause of witches. For these witch prosecutions to be justified the puritans gave them a trial, where they will be judged if they are guilty of witch craft or not. Cotton Mather was given the position as a historian and he documented the witch trials but how did he feel after being a witness to such trials. We first get to know Cotton Mather; he was born into a family of renowned and powerful ministers, so people had high expectations for him also and those were the expectations that he wanted to reach. He started to show a lot of promise from an early age, he quickly learnt other languages and went to Harvard at the age of twelve and

His interest in Satan and his position in the witch trials, although he was not fully involved, he had himself go to the lengths of taking one of the Goodwin children into his home to study their demonic possession. Which he took great lengths and passion to describe in Remarkable Providences, and the symptoms that he recorded of the Goodwin child has been used to check those brought up for the witch trials. Of course he took the opportunity to claim that his research with the Goodwin child was proof that New England was indeed at war with satanic