The Devil In New England Summary

“The Devil In New England” is a persuasive piece written by Cotton Mather. He advocated the belief that witchcraft was a wicked force that was growing within New England. He believed that this was the work of the Devil, and that the Devil was conjuring up an army of witches to destroy religion. According to Mather, the Devil “was exceedingly disturbed” by the presence of the Puritans. Knowing his audience were Puritans, he used the fear of the Devil and his workings to instill uneasiness in the readers. If his readers feared the witches and were against them, they were more likely to agree with the conduct of the Salem Witch Trials. Complex-compound sentence structure is the most frequently used sentence structure in Mather’s writing. Complex-compound sentences have at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent clause. The first sentence is an example of a complex-compound sentence, “The New-Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed…” Within Mather’s writing, he utilizes subject/verb progression. The subject comes before the verb in most of his sentences. For example, “We have been advised by some Credible Christians yet alive…” the subject, “We”, comes
Mather details evil’s uprising as “…an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprizing, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered…” He attributes the Devil’s work to “…Bewitching, and Ruining our Land…” When describing the afflicted people, he portrays them with words and phrases like “poor” and “Infected and Infested with these Daemons”. The Devil-stricken residents are illustrated as being sick and poisoned by the Devil’s work. He uses words with unfavorable connotations to illustrate his distaste of evil and the