Authors: Eve LaPlante
Salem Witch Judge (2 page)
The Salem witch trials had other positive outcomes, in addition to making Samuel Sewall whole. They marked the end in America of hanging people as witches, a practice imported from Europe, where it was widespread. The failures of the Salem witch court led to the creation of America’s first independent judiciary, a judiciary separate from the legislative and administrative functions of government, with which it was previously intertwined. The new court, on which Sewall served for decades, still operates today as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, now the oldest independent court in the Western Hemisphere. The events at Salem in 1692 also ushered in an era of separation of church and state in Massachusetts, which in turn inspired the formal separation of church and state throughout the United States.
Much of this was lost on me as a child. The most memorable thing Aunt Charlotte said about our ancestor was that he wore sackcloth beneath his clothes from his public apology until his death. She said it rubbed against his skin to remind him of his sin. Aunt Charlotte called it sackcloth, but as an undergarment it was more like the traditionally Catholic hair shirt worn by monks, ascetics, and some pious laymen. In Hans Holbein’s 1527 portrait of the forty-nine-year-old English chancellor Sir Thomas More, whom King Henry VIII later beheaded for refusing to accede to his split from the Catholic Church, the edges of More’s hair shirt peek out at his neck and wrists.
My aunt’s depiction of our ancestor’s hair shirt conjured gruesome questions in a child’s mind. How often, if ever, did Sewall wash it? Why did he wear it to his grave? Most irreverently, what did it smell like? I never dared broach these questions with Aunt Charlotte, who might have dismissed them with a brusque “Tut tut.”
I wish Aunt Charlotte were still alive, as I have many more questions. The Puritans came to America to escape Catholic influences in the English Church, so why would a Puritan mortify himself in the manner of a Catholic ascetic? More broadly, how did a grown man transform himself from a witch judge into a public penitent? How did an extraordinarily prudent man like Samuel Sewall suddenly in middle age put aside the traits that underlay his worldly successes and abandon himself to faith? What aspects of his character enabled him to learn to see, as the apostle Paul required, with the eyes of the heart?
In recent years I’ve come back to Aunt Charlotte’s favorite ancestor, hoping to answer these questions. It was my good fortune that he wrote prodigiously and left behind extensive diaries, poems, essays, commonplace books, annotated almanacs, ledgers, and letters, many of which his descendants donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society. His diary, covering the years 1672 to 1729, was first published in the nineteenth century and is still in print. The historian Henry Cabot Lodge called it “the most important” and “most personal of all the historical documents of the time.” Sewall’s diary is the “most intimate” source of information available about English America during the century before the Revolution, according to the scholar Mark Van Doren, who noted Sewall’s “genius for self-revelation.” In addition to poring over Sewall’s lengthy private thoughts and feelings, I have visited all the sites of his life, from the tiny English village where he was born and baptized to the burying ground in downtown Boston where his body lies. In Hampshire, England, I traced the four-mile path from his childhood home to the market town where he learned to read and write and visited the secondary school he dreamed of attending. In North America I explored the remnants of his beloved Boston and saw his haunts in his adopted hometown of Newbury, Massachusetts—his favorite place on earth—much of which has miraculously been preserved. In these physical
and literary journeys I have come to know Samuel Sewall as a deeply gifted person who was plagued, as is so common, by self-doubt, insecurity, and ambivalence.
Samuel Sewall’s greatest act—his statement of sorrow for doing wrong and his simultaneous promise to improve, as depicted in the Massachusetts State House mural—seems emblematic of a dualism in the American spirit. How American it is to claim, “I can judge right from wrong,” and then to admit, “I was wrong”! Like most doubters, Samuel Sewall was most doubtful about himself. His self-criticism and self-reflection make him familiar to us now. In this book I aim to restore flesh to the bones of not only the witches, who are already heroes, but also my Salem witch judge.
I HAVE SINNED AGAINST THE LORD
At four in the morning on Monday, December 21, 1685, on the second floor of one of Boston’s largest houses, the “faint and moaning noise” of a two-week-old baby forced a father from his warm bed. Wishing to disturb neither his wife nor his child’s fitful sleep, he knelt beside the cradle. A bitter wind rattled the shuttered windowpanes of the bedchamber. Outside, snow blanketed the peninsula known to the settlers as Shawmut, an English corruption of an Algonquian word for “he goes by boat.”
Samuel Sewall, a thirty-three-year-old public official, bowed his head over his swaddled baby. The father wore a loose nightshirt. His shoulder-length hair was starting to thin at the crown. In a voice hardly audible, Samuel begged the Lord to extend his grace and favor unto his “weak and sick servant,” baby Henry. Reminding God that he loves not only the faithful but also their seed—“not only the sheep of Christ but even the tender lambs”—Samuel asked God “by thine Holy Spirit” to make good his gracious covenant with Sewall’s “poor little son.”
Samuel Sewall was used to talking freely with God. He had spent seven years at Harvard College studying for the ministry. He knew much of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in both ancient and
modern languages, from memory and was familiar with numerous devotional manuals. The words flowed, but still his feeble child moaned.
As Samuel prayed the sun rose as it always did over the Atlantic Ocean, the harbor islands, and the cosseted town. Noting the dawn, Samuel determined to seek help. He dressed quickly and descended the stairs to find a manservant to summon the midwife. Goodwife Elizabeth Weeden, who had attended at all his children’s births, soon arrived to examine the baby. As news of the child’s precarious state spread across town, a circle of prayer made up mostly of female friends and relatives grew inside the house.
Sewall’s wife, Hannah, who was twenty-seven, remained in their bed, where she had spent most of the fortnight since her sixth childbirth. Their firstborn, Johnny, had died seven years before at the age of seventeen months, but their subsequent five children had so far survived. This was a great blessing in a world in which roughly one in two children did not live to see their fifth birthdays.
Hannah Sewall was not by nature frail. When a horse that she and Samuel were riding together fell down abruptly on Roxbury Neck, she scrambled off, brushed the dust from her skirts, and gamely remounted the horse to continue the trip. Only six months before this lying-in, on June 20, Hannah rode pillion behind her husband for four miles from Shawmut Peninsula to Dorchester to visit her friend Esther Flint. After dining on just-picked cherries and raspberries, she and Esther “took the air” in the Flints’ orchard overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, leaving Samuel alone in “Mr. [Reverend Josiah] Flint’s study reading Calvin on the Psalms.” John Calvin (1509–1564), the great theologian of Puritanism, adored the psalms, the Old Testament songs in praise of God, which were essential to Puritan worship. Samuel shared with his spiritual forebear a love of religious music. He sang a psalm or two daily, at home by himself or with his family, with friends in his Bible study group, or at church with the entire congregation, an experience that he likened to “an introduction to our singing with the choir above.”
The bedchamber in which Hannah Sewall spent her lying-in was in her childhood home, built by her grandfather, the blacksmith Robert Hull, a half century before. Timber framed in oak and likely covered
with weatherboards, it had a central chimney and a thatched roof. The inside walls were either plastered or covered with wide, upright pine boards. The ground floor contained two large halls and a kitchen, which extended to one side beneath a lean-to roof, with a long hearth. The second floor had numerous bedchambers and closets. Beneath the rafters the loft provided more sleeping space. With additions and improvements made by Hannah’s father and husband, the house was more than sufficiently large to accommodate the Sewall and Hull families and their many servants and frequent houseguests. It occupied the southern corner of Washington and Summer streets in modern Boston that later hosted two twentieth-century department stores, first Jordan Marsh and then Macy’s. The ten thousand shoppers daily who visit Filene’s Basement in Boston’s Downtown Crossing enter a space that was once the cellar of Sewall’s mansion.
That house, on the town’s main street, lay a block east of Boston Common and three blocks south of the central market square, the First Church of Christ in Boston, and the governmental Town House. An iron fence surrounded Samuel’s land on the large, then-undivided block east of Washington Street (then Cornhill Road) between Summer and Bedford (then Pond) Streets. The mansion’s main gate was on Cornhill, but many of its rear and side windows afforded fine views of Boston Harbor. The house was furnished with oak and mahogany objects imported from England by Robert Hull and Edmund Quincy, fabrics from England and the Far East, and silver vases, beakers, platters, and even chamber pots. Outside there was a kitchen garden full of herbs as well as flower gardens, plots of vegetables, and orchards of apples and pears that Samuel tended with the help of a tenant farmer. In the distance, groves of elm and walnut trees shaded Wheeler’s Pond, which no longer exists. There were stables, a coach house, small abodes for the tenant farmer and some of the family’s servants, and a building containing the colonial treasury built three decades earlier when Hannah’s father became the colony’s mint master. Hannah’s mother, Judith Quincy Hull, a widow of fifty-nine, lived with the family and shared the management of the household with Hannah. A nanny and servants tended seven-year-old Samuel Jr.; five-year-old Hannah; Elizabeth (“Betty”), who was nearly four; and seventeen-month-old Hull, who had suffered from “convulsion fits” since March.
At supper on Sunday, December 6, during Hannah’s most recent labor, little Hull had had a seizure while seated on his grandmother’s lap, terrifying the family. That night, as the midwife and other women surrounded Hannah in the bedchamber, Samuel waited downstairs in a chair by the fireplace of the main room of the house, which they called the Great Hall. He was concerned about little Hull, about his wife, about their unborn baby, and about the state of his own soul. Samuel hoped he was saved—chosen by God to be one of his saints—but he did not feel confident that he was. Despite a deep faith in Jesus Christ, Samuel frequently suffered from doubt.
Nine years before, at his public confession of a personal conversion, which was required to join the Boston church, he felt intense anxiety over the adequacy of his faith. Unlike some early Congregationalists, who described a vivid flash of engagement with the divine that converted them to Christ, Samuel’s piety was the less dramatic but daily effort to pray sincerely and to understand religious texts. Still, he was often assailed internally by a sense of his own sinfulness. And he knew that full communion in the church was limited to “visible saints,” those who could convincingly testify to an experience of God’s saving grace. On that long-ago day, while standing in the meetinghouse waiting to receive for the first time the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which was reserved for church members, he became convinced that Jesus Christ would strike him dead at the moment the sacramental bread touched his tongue.
No such thing happened, but his powerful fear of God’s wrath persisted. He was a man given to reflection, tending to think too much and too long. While turning a thought over and over in his mind, he free-associated possible negative outcomes. This left him beset with worries, especially at moments of change.
During his wife’s first four labors, Samuel had been accompanied during this awful waiting period by his father-in-law, John Hull, who distracted him with cordials and conversation. Eight years before, as nineteen-year-old Hannah moaned in labor for the first time, the two men prayed together and shared the first sound of the firstborn: “Father and I sitting in the Great Hall [of their house] heard the child cry,” the new father exulted in his diary on April 2, 1677.
“Father Hull,” as Samuel called his father-in-law, accumulated vast cash and landholdings during a career as a merchant and as mint
master of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first colonial mint was built in 1652 on Hull’s land, where it still stood. Hull also served as the colony’s treasurer from 1676 and after 1680 on the governing General Court. Hannah was his sole surviving child—of the five babies born to his wife—so Samuel functioned as his only son. Father Hull had died two years before, on October 1, 1683, at fifty-eight, leaving the management of his enormous estate to his son-in-law. Thus Samuel was alone with his anxieties when Mother Hull emerged from the bedchamber an hour after midnight on December 7 to tell him the good news: Hannah lived, and they had a new baby boy.
