Peruse each tab to learn about Puritan ideology and culture that is relevant to Colonial America’s reaction to the American Dream.
Puritans believed in a concept called predestination, which means that people are determined to heaven or hell (salvation or damnation) at birth. Because of this, there is nothing that Puritans can do in their lives to save themselves a spot in heaven. They must only live a life free of sin and hope that God has saved them. 
Puritans also believe that Satan manifests himself on Earth to harm God’s people and tempt them with sin. This allows them to believe in witches, people (typically women) who have signed themselves to Satan. 
The Salem Witch Trials occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The people of Salem accused many of their neighbors of witchcraft, culminating in twenty executions. 
“…and the Houses of the People there are fill’d with the doleful Shrieks of their Children…Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural.”
The American Dream began before America as we know it today.
While the United States as a country did not emerge until centuries later, the foundation of the Dream’s central idea of individualized self-salvation began with Puritans fleeing Europe in the name of religious freedom. Subsequently, in the early American Dream took the shape of a “pure” life lived for God.
This move to America was supposed to save the Puritans, not condemn them to harsh conditions. In order to quiet their minds and avoid questioning the faith they built their dream upon, they instead turned to explanations of suffering that lied within their dream.
Cotton Mather’s musings in “The Wonders of The Invisible World” defend the persecution and execution of innocent people in the Salem Witch Trials through biblical illusions. He compares the Puritan settlers of New England to Israelites, calling them “…a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories…” (Mather 201).
In his record of the trials, Mather emphasizes the importance that his testimony is truth, telling his audience “you are to take the Truth, just as it was; and the Truth will hurt no good man” (Mather 204). Mather’s invocation of a “good man” is the crux: if Puritans can believe themselves good and all who oppose them manifestations of evil, then they can do no wrong and can explain their world within the confines of their faith. And since their faith is so intrinsically connected to their conception of the American Dream, all these biblical mental gymnastics serve to uphold an ideal they desperately need to justify: their move from the modern, prosperous England to the bleak, desolate colonial America.