When we attempt to answer questions like this, we are forced to speculate. We cannot know for certain why these things happened in some places and not in others. We can only make educated guesses. We can speculate that witchcraft scares did not happen in the Chesapeake because there was less emphasis on religion there. We can speculate that rebellions like Bacon’s Rebellion did not happen in New England because that region was more egalitarian.
We can say that witchcraft scares happened in New England because it was a tight-knit community dominated by the Puritans. Because religion mattered so much, people suspected that people who were different in some way must be evil. Therefore, they accused them of being witches. In the Chesapeake, religion was much weaker and the communities were not as tightly knit. Therefore, they would not have cared as much if people were different and might not have thought people who were different were in some way evil.
We can say that Bacon’s Rebellion happened because of class differences. We can say that it was a rebellion of the poorer, backwoods people against the richer people living on the coast. These class differences did not exist as much in New England. New Englanders were much more similar to one another than those in the Chesapeake. Therefore, there would not have been class resentments in New England to nearly the same degree as in the Chesapeake.
Thus, we can speculate that these different events happened in different regions because of the regions’ different religious and social makeups.
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