Greylock's Fall

The most notable of these groups were the Puritans. Responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, the Puritans always believed that anything that couldn’t be explained in their limited understanding of the world was evil and should be destroyed. However, the Puritans didn’t come up to the conclusion that magical people existed on their own. They were influenced by witches and wizards called Scourers. Scourers were a vigilante group of magical mercenaries and bounty hunters that tracked down both wanted criminals and anyone for whom a reward was offered. The Scourers thrived in pre-magical government North America. With time, they became increasingly corrupt and brutal, resorting to torture and murder. Eventually, they engaged in outright wizard-trafficking, and even turned innocent No-Majs over to witch-hunting Puritans in exchange for gold. In fact, it is rumored that two of the judges during the Salem Witch Trials were actually Scourers posing as No-Majs. Eventually, the Magical Congress of the United States of America was formed to track down these criminals. However, many eluded capture and No-Maj relations continued to be rocky. With Rappaport’s Law in effect, total segregation of wizarding and No-Maj communities was created and continued.

In the 1920’s, the New Salem Philanthropic Society fought to expose magical people as freakish aberrations and turn all of No-Maj society against them. As the literature from the Second Salemers and other hate groups began to spread across the nation, cataloguing the strange happenings occurring across the nation, and world. As a result, more and more sects of Puritans began to pop up across the country.

Seeing the resurgence in the Puritan community, the families of the Scourers who were convicted by MACUSA began searching for retribution. At first, the attacks on MACUSA and other wizarding strong holds were disorganized and never gained any traction. However, as another world war and wizarding war loomed on the horizon, the Puritans and Scourers came to a groundbreaking, albeit shaky, agreement. Although the Scourers were magical, both parties had a similar goal in mind: take down organized magic. The Scourers were fueled by the need to avenge their ancestors and destroy the entity that forced them to hide from the world. In fact, they were kidnapping families of the most important people in the wizarding world and torturing them, to try and get information or to try and find a weakness to exploit.

The Puritans wanted magic gone for good and thought they could deal with the small number of Scourers after they used their combined man-power to destroy the rest of the wizarding community.

Over time, the Scourers became more and more corrupt, the lack of any form of governmental oversight allowing them to abuse their power and indulge in acts of cruelty, including torture and murder. By the late 17th century, the Scourers' ranks had grown substantially, and they were spread across America. They engaged in trafficking their fellow wizards, and even resorted to capturing innocent No-Majs and passing them off as wizards, so as to collect bounties from No-Maj witch hunters. Wizarding historians concur that at least two of the judges who presided over the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 were in fact Scourers seeking to settle personal vendettas. News of the Scourers' activities, and of persecution by Puritans, largely dissuaded pure-blood families on other continents from emigrating to North America.

Some Scourers managed to evade being brought to justice by marrying No-Majs and integrating into No-Maj society. Their descendants had a profound impact on No-Maj-wizard relations in the centuries that followed. In 1693, the prototypical incarnation of the Magical Congress of the United States of America was founded, establishing North America's first wizarding government. The first task the newly-minted MACUSA set itself to was rounding up the Scourers and bringing them to justice. Many Scourers were put on trial and convicted of crimes such as murder, torture, and wizard-trafficking, for which they were ultimately executed. However, a number of the most notorious Scourers managed to evade capture despite the international warrants out for their arrest, renouncing the wizarding world and integrating into No-Maj society. Some of them married No-Majs, "winnowing out" any magical children born of these unions, so as to maintain their cover. Now outcast from the wizarding world, these surviving Scourers sought vengeance by instilling an abiding conviction in their descendants that magic actually exists and that wizards and witches ought to be wiped out.

Theophilus Abbot, an American wizarding historian, identified several Scourer-founded families, each of them marked by a profound belief in the existence of magic and an equally deep hatred of it. The anti-magic beliefs and activism of the Scourer descendants have been credited as the reason North American No-Majs are often apparently "harder to fool and hoodwink on the subject of magic" than other non-magic populations. In the 18th century, Bartholomew Barebone, an American No-Maj of Scourer descent, managed to ply details about the wizarding world from the witch Dorcus Twelvetrees when he met her at a picnic. Stealing her wand, he showed it to as many newspaper reporters as he could, some of whom published stories describing it. He also printed and distributed leaflets listing wizarding addresses that Dorcus had revealed to him. This was the largest and most damaging breach of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in history and lead to the passage of Rappaport's Law in 1790.