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Re: the "intolerant Puritans" They didn't stay intolerant for-ever. My goodness we talk of them as though they formed Taliban like legislative structures that have since locked our country from its founding in an Islamic like embrace. The actual witch trials in Salem only lasted six months, at the end of which, their consciences were so pricked by the deaths(and the violation of the commandment"Thou shalt not bear false witness") that it broke the power of the extreme legalism of the Puritan faith and opened the way for real love and Holy spirit power. These churches, their off shoots and other denominations that arrived throughout the early 1700's to our shores would act in concert(especially the Great Awakening in 1756) to produce the moral character needed for the colonies to break away from Britain. It produced the 80 to 90 percent literacy rate(barely 50 percent now) that deToqueville discovered in the 1840's. Let's lay-off the Puritans, their history is a little more complex than Hawthorn's mean spirited writings (incidentally he had more than a personal axe to grind against religion himself). For a more balanced view of the religious life in early America please peruse Peter Marshall's "The Light and the Glory" where he presents both the warts and beauty of the bay colonies and their histories from the 1600's through the early 1700's.