Part IV follows the Democratic-Republicans as the prosecutions widen and the question becomes practical as much as constitutional: who gets to decide if the Alien and Sedition Acts are unconstitutional when the federal courts and Congress are controlled by Federalists. With few options left, Jefferson and Madison turn to state power through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, triggering a national debate over the First Amendment, federal authority, and whether states can interpose or nullify federal law. From there, the story shifts into the endgame, with a second stage of enforcement tied to Fries’ Rebellion and Justice Samuel Chase’s aggressive courtroom posture, then a third wave of prosecutions aimed at editors and critics in the run up to the election of 1800, including the sustained campaign against the Aurora and high profile cases like Thomas Cooper and James Callender. The section closes with the Quasi-War ending, the Sedition Act prosecutions stopping and then sunsetting, Jefferson’s victory and pardons, and the longer aftermath in the judiciary, including the Midnight Judges, the impeachment battles, Marbury v. Madison, and how this crisis helped shape a more modern American understanding of freedom of speech and the press.

Part 2 follows Congress as the Quasi-War fears peak and the Federalists move a package of laws aimed at immigrants and political opposition: the Naturalization Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Alien Friends Act, and the Sedition Act. We break down what each law did, the penalties and sunset clauses, and the core constitutional fight over whether criminalizing criticism of the government could coexist with the First Amendment, including the competing Federalist and Democratic-Republican theories of seditious libel and federal court power.

Part 3 then moves from legislation to enforcement, as Jefferson warns of a coming "reign of witches" and the first wave of prosecutions begins, targeting opposition newspapers and loud political enemies. We track how the Federal court system and Federalist marshals shaped outcomes, and we follow early cases and flashpoints like the Aurora prosecutions, Congressman Matthew Lyon, the Wild Irishman cases, tavern-talk prosecutions, and the Liberty Pole cases that exposed how uneven justice could look in practice.

Part I sets the stage for the Alien and Sedition Act crisis by tracing the young republic’s first decade: the new Constitution and Bill of Rights, Washington’s cabinet, and the birth of political parties as Hamilton and Jefferson clash over finance and federal power. As the French, Haitian, and Irish revolutions convulse the Atlantic world and Britain responds with crackdowns on dissent, refugees flood into the United States, polarization hardens, and foreign policy flashpoints like the Jay Treaty, Citizen Genet, and the XYZ Affair push America toward the Quasi-War with France.

Part VIII follows the collapse of the witch trials and traces how Massachusetts tried to live with the knowledge that it had shed innocent blood. Competing narratives emerged right away, with Cotton Mather defending the proceedings in print and Boston merchant Robert Calef dismantling them in a meticulous critique that helped fix public judgment against the trials. Key participants stepped forward with formal apologies: Judge Samuel Sewall publicly confessed his guilt, the entire grand jury expressed sorrow for condemning the innocent, and years later Anne Putnam Jr. stood before the Salem Village church and admitted that her accusations, especially against Rebecca Nurse and her sisters, had been the product of a “great delusion.” Even as some leaders like Stoughton never apologized, gaps in official records and missing pages from diaries suggest a quiet attempt to erase parts of the story.

The aftermath also shows how Salem’s crisis reshaped New England’s religious and political culture over the long term. Puritan authority and the dream of a tight theocracy were badly damaged, yet Puritan legacies of literacy, covenant, and elected leadership flowed into later American reforms, abolitionism, and public education. Salem Village eventually reconciled under new minister Joseph Green and later rebranded itself as Danvers, while the Nurse family led a decades-long campaign that secured pardons, compensation, and memorials for Rebecca Nurse and other victims. Modern histories, along with works like The Crucible and PBS’s Three Sovereigns for Sarah, keep returning to these events, turning the trials into a lasting cautionary tale about fear, faction, and the misuse of law in a supposedly godly society.

Parts VI and VII trace the moment Salem's local panic becomes a legal machine, and then a colony-wide catastrophe. With the charter revoked and Massachusetts lacking a functioning high court, the early proceedings unfold through improvised inquests run by local magistrates, marked by public spectacle, presumption of guilt, and the dangerous absence of procedural restraints. Accusations multiply, and the evidentiary foundation is dangerously elastic: hearsay, gossip, and rumor flow into the record; defendants have no counsel; and spectral evidence is treated as proof, even though it can only be perceived by the afflicted. Written depositions, often recorded by deeply interested parties, become the backbone of the case file, and the process rewards confession and accusation while punishing denial. The episode follows the key early turning points, including Tituba's confession, the first executions, and the escalating controversy over whether invisible, supernatural testimony can justify a death sentence.

Against that backdrop, the trials begin targeting people whose arrests should have been unthinkable in a tight Puritan community. The accusation of Rebecca Nurse, a revered elderly church member with a large family and a reputation for piety, shocks Salem and exposes the factional and personal grievances beneath the prosecutions. Her case reveals how petitions, courtroom theatrics, and ambiguous testimony could be used to reverse an acquittal into a conviction, and how even a governor's pardon could be undone by judicial pressure. The episode then follows the expansion of the hunt to prominent men and ministers, including George Burroughs, a former Salem Village pastor whose trial relies heavily on spectral claims and insinuations of diabolical leadership. Executions, public doubt, and rising opposition begin to collide, but the machinery keeps moving, fueled by fear, coerced confessions, and an ever-widening list of enemies. By the end of these chapters, Salem is no longer prosecuting a handful of suspects. It is prosecuting a theory of Satanic conspiracy, and the law has been bent to fit it.

Parts IV and V move the story into Salem Village itself, a small farming community tethered to prosperous, merchant-driven Salem Town and increasingly at war with it. Geographic isolation, a stream of traumatized refugees from brutal frontier violence, and constant fear of nearby raids all sharpened the village’s anxiety. Inside the village, long-simmering factionalism hardened into a battle for power, status, and identity, with the Putnam family leading an independence faction and the Porter family defending continued union and commercial ties to the town. Land scarcity and inheritance disputes made Salem unusually litigious, turning neighbor against neighbor. That tension focused on the church, the closest thing to a governing institution, as the village cycled through ministers and fought over control. When Samuel Parris arrived, his unusually aggressive contract terms, including a disputed claim over the parsonage, deepened the split. As resistance to paying assessments grew and Parris’s household became cold and impoverished, his preaching turned more accusatory and apocalyptic, and the community’s cohesion frayed just as it could least afford it.

In January and February 1692, the crisis takes a sudden, intimate form when Betty Parris and Abigail Williams begin having violent “fits,” bizarre behavior, and complaints of being pinched and tormented. Dr. William Griggs finds no physical cause and concludes witchcraft, and a desperate parishioner turns to folk counter-magic, baking a “witch cake” from the girls’ urine and feeding it to a dog, a move that enrages Parris and prompts a sermon warning that such acts invite Satan further into the community. The first targets are the predictable outsiders and vulnerable women: Tituba, Parris’s enslaved servant from Barbados, and two local women already marked by poverty, scandal, illness, and social suspicion, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. As more girls join the afflictions, the pattern tightens, many are war survivors, servants, orphans, and close neighbors, clustered in households aligned with the Putnam faction. The episode follows the first inquests, held in chaotic public settings with little procedural restraint, no meaningful costs for false accusations, and a growing presumption of guilt. The girls’ collective performances and accusations, amplified by local politics and fear, turn private suffering into public proof, and push Salem from a divided village into the opening phase of a full-scale witch hunt.

Parts II and III introduce the Puritans who built Massachusetts Bay as a “city on a hill,” a model godly society meant to inspire the world. Their theology centered on covenant and predestination, with church, marriage, and community all understood as binding covenants before God. They rejected most secular amusements, saw the supernatural as ever present, and prized self-discipline and communal duty. At the same time, they created unusually democratic church structures, fostered high literacy for both men and women so that everyone could read scripture, and built institutions like Boston Latin School and Harvard to train an educated clergy and governing elite.Against that backdrop, Massachusetts slid into a profound crisis that touched religion, war, politics, and the law. The Halfway Covenant exposed deep anxieties about declining zeal in a prosperous, commercializing colony. Back-to-back Indian wars and frontier massacres, fought against Native peoples seen as Satan’s agents and their French Catholic allies, traumatized New England and flooded places like Salem with refugees. The revocation of the original charter, the unpopular Dominion of New England, and a legal vacuum after the Glorious Revolution left courts in disarray and revived a harsher English witchcraft statute just as fear and factionalism were peaking. Into this unstable landscape stepped towering ministers like Increase and Cotton Mather, whose authority and earlier involvement in suspected witchcraft cases helped frame a world where Satan’s presence felt immediate, and where a full-blown witch panic in 1692 became thinkable.

In 1692, the otherwise unremarkable town of Salem, Massachusetts became the site of one of the most notorious episodes in American legal history: the Salem Witch Trials. By the end of the trials, more than 20 people had been executed or died in prison and more than 200 imprisoned in an atmosphere of hysteria. This series will explore this episode and will discuss the course of the trials and the causes of the hysteria, including issues of gender, race, social class, petty jealousy, church politics, mental illness, and even the possible influence of rotten grain. We will also consider the aftermath of the trials and the recurrence of similar incidents in American legal history.

This is Part One of our series on the Salem Witch Trials, “The Great European Witch Hunt.” We begin in Christian Europe before the Reformation, where the popular position held that witches existed and were a genuine threat. At the same time, church and political elites insisted that only God could work miracles and that witchcraft did not exist. Those who tried to practice it were viewed as deluded, and those who accused others of witchcraft were often regarded as both deluded and malicious. Attacks on alleged witches took the form of lynchings, unsanctioned by either church or political leaders. In this early phase, the primary targets were older women on the margins of their communities, frequently poor, quarrelsome, and considered unattractive.