In Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," there
are several mentions of the devil's influence or presence in America's "goings on."
When he and Tom Walker initially meet in the woods, the devil explains
that
...Since
the red men have been exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at
the persecutions of Quakers and Anabaptists; I am the great patron and prompter of slave
dealers, andn the grandmaster of the Salem
witches.
In this way, the
devil admits his involvement in well-known events such as the Salem witch
trials.
Later in the story, the reader is told that the
devil is anxious to recruit Walker as a usurer because the devil considers them to be
his "{special} people." In the economy of the time, working as a usurer was especially
lucrative, since
...money was particularly scarce. It was a time
of paper credit. The country had been deluged with government bills; the famous Land
bank had been established; there had been a rage for speculating; the people had run mad
with schemes for new settlements, for building cities in the wilderness; land jobbers
went about with maps of grants, and townships, and El Dorados, lying nobody knew where,
but which everybody was ready to purchase. In a word, the great speculating fever which
breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, and
everybody was dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual, the fever had
subsided; the dream had gone off, and the imaginary fortunes with it; the patients were
left in doleful plight, and the whole country resounded with the consequent cry of "hard
times."
Because of this, the
fact that the devil played a large role in American dealings is
clear.
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