[DiogenesLamp]: Must have missed it. Yeah, we know they hung them and drowned them and what not, but people generally think of "burning witches" when they think of "witch trials." The main point is that their "Holier than thou" attitude is real, and they used to kill "witches". Your point is trivial.
Re the "Holier than thou" attitude of Puritans. Here is what Texas Senator Wigfall said in Congress on March 2, 1861:
...then Cromwell had to run them [the Puritans] out of England; and then they went over to Holland, and the Dutch let them alone, but would not let them persecute anybody else; and then they got on that ill-fated ship called the Mayflower and landed on Plymouth Rock. And from that time to this, they have been kicking up a dust generally, and making a mess whenever they could put their fingers in the pie.
They confederated with the other states to save themselves from the power of old King George III; and no sooner than they had gotten rid of him than they turned to persecuting their neighbors. Having got rid of the Indians, and witches, and Baptists, and Quakers in their country; after selling us our negroes for the love of gold, they began stealing them back for the love of God.
That is the history as well as I understand it.
Wigfall was quite a character. Let's check some of his charges.
Indians? The Indian reference refers to things like King Philip's War where the Puritan colonists basically wiped out the Indians in much of New England and made slaves of the ones they captured.
Witches? "During the witchcraft hysteria that swept through Massachusetts in 1692, more than 400 persons underwent the horror of being accused of practicing witchcraft. Of these, nineteen were hanged, and one old man who refused to enter a plea at his trial was pressed to death as the sheriff and his men piled weights on him to force him to do so." [Source: "The Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692" by Leo Bonfanti. 1994, New England Historical Series]
Quakers? The Puritans in Massachusetts banned and hung Quakers. See: [Link]. Also "Quakers were whipped, had their ears shaved off, and their tongues bored through with a hot iron." [Link]
Baptists? The Puritans banned people like Roger Williams and excommunicated Obadiah Holmes for Baptist activity. The political/religious correctness in Massachusetts at the time reached Harvard College (big surprise). The Reverend Mr. Charles Chauncey "was invited to become President of Harvard College, on condition that he abandon, publicly at least, his views on baptism by total immersion." He agreed and replaced Harvard's "first president, Henry Dunster, who had been invited to leave for having embraced Baptist ideas on baptism." [Source: "Plymouth Colony: Its History & People 1620-1691" by Eugene Audrey Stratton. 1986, Ancestry Publishing.]. I remember reading somewhere that a Baptist woman had her hair shaved off by Puritans, and she fled Massachusetts as a result. [I can't find the source of that now.]
I think your one paragraph about quote/unquote Indians is a bit skimpy. My own ancestors who came here in 1623 had one whole large family massacred by "Indians". Except for the young daughter who they kidnapped. They also bashed the skull of the infant against a rock because they couldn't be bothered with it. But the amazing part was that not too many years later, the kidnapped daughter returned and reclaimed her fathers land. But, as far as I know, they weren't Puritans. They were from Scotland.
Did this Wigfall fella happen to mention anything about the actual, real live burned-alive "burning of Francis McIntosh? Francis' last words were, "shoot me, please! somebody shoot me, shoot me......"