Once the generation that witnessed and/or participated in the witch craze, you run into fairly universal disapprobation. The flavor of the condemnation changes over time and depends on the source. It runs from Salem becoming a byword for irrationality and the dangers of religious fervor in the later 18th century to being used as an example of human cruelty and a focus on the emotional experience of the falsely accused during the Transcendental and Romantic periods in the American 19th century.

Before getting into the later 18th and 19th centuries, however, we should note that the Salem witch craze was never universally approved by Puritan New England, even as it was happening. While Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan minister, wrote Wonders of the Invisible World and the Magnalia Christi Americana, largely defending the trials and the use of "spectral evidence," others, including his powerful father Increase Mather, the influential Boston minister Samuel Willard, and wealthy merchant Robert Calef, wrote against the trials either as they occurred or almost immediately after they ended. Famously, Samuel Sewell, a judge at the trials, wrote a lengthy "confession" shortly after the craze ended that was read during a religious service by Willard, in which he begged for the forgiveness of those harmed by the trials.

The quick recognition by most of Massachusetts that the trials had spun out of control meant that the Salem incident became a cautionary tale and something of an albatross around the necks of those who supported the trials and didn't immediately renounce their support. Cotton Mather became the most prominent supporter of variolation during the smallpox outbreak of 1721-22. His past support of the Salem trials was used against him during this public health crisis. Nathaniel Gardner wrote a series of articles for the New England Courant called "Dialogue between the Clergyman and Layman." In his second article he had the Layman argue, "I pray Sir, who have been the Instruments of Mischief and Trouble both in Church and State, from the Witchcraft to Inoculation? who is it that takes the Liberty to Vilify a whole Town, in Words too black to be repeated," (New England Courant, January 22, 1722).

Religious figures in New England likewise adjusted their approach following the trials. More, beyond Willard, spoke out against the use of spectral evidence. During the early stages of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards found young people in Northampton, MA receptive to a more personal and emotional brand of Puritan Christianity. This fervor included physical depictions of affliction and affectation that were usually out of place in Puritan service and may have been attributed to witchcraft in an earlier era. Edwards and others in his congregation instead focused on the "pouring out" of the spirit of God. This does not mean that Edwards (who read deeply of Newton and Descartes) did not believe in a spiritual world at war with the physical world. He believed in witches and referenced them frequently. Willard, in his writings that attacked the Salem trials, admitted both that witches existed and that they should be executed when found. The difference was a new reticence to accept claims of witchcraft at face value, and a recognition that such claims can quickly spin out of control.

The further you get from the trials, the more they pass into legend and shorthand for fanaticism. Arguments in the 1760s and 70s would occasionally note the "fanaticism" of the Puritans in Salem. John Adams, reminiscing on his defense of the British soldiers charged for the Boston Massacre, wrote that, "Judgement of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently." During the Revolution, authorities or communities who were too eager to support their side might get compared to the judges of Salem.

Poets and novelists used the Salem trials and Puritans in general to either demonstrate the progress of the modern age or the credulity of their characters. Washington Irving, to show Ichabod Crane's mix of "small shrewdness and simple credulity," in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, wrote that Crane was "a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed." Nathaniel Hawthorne is perhaps the most famous purveyor of Puritan fiction, in which the unyielding morality of the Puritan is a force that molds and breaks all human emotions and relationships. Hawthorne was ashamed of his own ancestors' participation in the witch craze. It's been suggested that he added the 'w' to his surname to distance himself from them. John Greenleaf Whittier, in an interesting turn, used Salem to emphasize the brutality and fanaticism of slavery's supporters. His 1859 poem, "The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall," used the repentance of the former judge to contrast the Puritan with the slaver. In short, the fanaticism of Sewall had limits. Even while judging witches to be hanged, he could see the inherent injustice of slavery.

Green forever the memory be
Of the Judge of the old Theocracy,
Whom even his errors glorified,
Like a far-seen, sunlit mountain-side
By the cloudy shadows which o’er it glide!
Honor and praise to the Puritan
Who the halting step of his age outran,
And, seeing the infinite worth of man
In the priceless gift the Father gave,
In the infinite love that stooped to save,
Dared not brand his brother a slave!
“Who doth such wrong,” he was wont to say,
In his own quaint, picture-loving way,
“Flings up to Heaven a hand-grenade
Which God shall cast down upon his head!”

Of course, Southern partisans were happy to use the Salem incident against abolitionists and New Englanders in general. They used it as an example of what they believed to be a constitutional fanaticism in the New England Yankee that caused them to ignore reason and embrace extremism, regardless of who was hurt. A New Orleans paper wrote in 1860, "'the North, who, having begun with burning witches, will end by burning us."

In short, recognizing Salem as an aberration, and a terrible one, began before the last victim had been executed, and it quickly entered the national consciousness as an extreme example of Puritan obsessions over morality and the battle between Satan and the Elect. I'm not sure you can find many defenders after the death of Cotton Mather.

For more information, including interesting comparisons between the Mormons and the Puritans, this is an excellent article: https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44539515.pdf