COTTON MATHER
Mather was urging the community to protect their children against the Devil and his band. To exemplify just how terrible Devils were to his audience, he used a comparison to the worst thing the audience was familiar with—Indians. Although there were a few examples in Colonial America of Indians being perceived as benign or even people, they were few and far between, and tended to be in New York and Pennsylvania.
Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop
Cotton Mather /ˈmæðər/ FRS was a New England Puritan minister, prolific author, and pamphleteer. One of the most important intellectual figures in English-speaking colonial America, Mather is remembered today chiefly for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and other works of history, for his scientific contributions to plant hybridization and to the promotion of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox and other infectious diseases, and for his involvement in the events surrounding the Salem witch trials of 1692–3. He also promoted the new Newtonian science in America and sent many scientific reports to the Royal Society of London, which formally elected him as a fellow in 1723. A controversial figure in his own day, he sought unsuccessfully the presidency of Harvard College, which had been held by his father Increase, another important Puritan intellectual.
