Authors: Eve LaPlante
Salem Witch Judge (5 page)
Fast days were the colony’s most important civic and spiritual events. The ruling court, one or more ministers, and even individuals
or small private groups, as in this case, could call a fast day. Along with occasional public days of thanksgiving, public fast days effectively replaced the “popish” saints’ and holy days that the Puritans had left behind in Old England. “Public fast days were held in response to dire agricultural and meteorological conditions, ecclesiastical, military, political, and social crises,” the historian Charles Hambrick-Stowe noted. Samuel’s group intended this fast day as a sacrifice to God, to show the colony’s eagerness to reform and repent so that God might cease punishing them.
Some years later Samuel described one of his own private fast days, providing what his diary’s editor considered “the most full and minute existing record of a private fast-day as kept by the devout of that time.” In preparing to pray and fast for “important matters,” Samuel retreated from family life. He went alone to the upper room at the northeast end of his house. He closed the door and fastened the shutters above Cornhill Street, the town’s nosiest thoroughfare. He may have prostrated himself on the floor, as Cotton Mather sometimes did in prayer, but he surely did not kneel, for Puritans considered kneeling a violation of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods besides me….”
“Dear God,” Samuel prayed, “perfect what is lacking in my faith and in the faith of” Hannah, “my dear yokefellow. Please convert and recover our children,” whom he named. “Requite the labor of love of my kinswoman Jane Tappan,” his thirty-three-year-old niece, who had boarded with the Sewalls for years, helping with child care and household duties. Hoping she might be settled in marriage, he said, “Give her health and find out rest for her.” He prayed for two of his servants: “Make David a man after thy own heart; let Susan live and be baptized with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”
Moving outside his household, he asked God to “steer the government in this difficult time…. Bless the company for the propagation of the Gospel” among the Indians. Through his life Samuel was committed to evangelism, in particular among the native tribes, which he referred to as “gospelizing the ungospelized places.” He personally planned and paid for the building of an Indian meetinghouse in Sandwich, on Cape Cod, in 1688 and arranged for the Reverend Thomas Tupper to be its first minister.
He prayed for his own church. “Bless the South [Third] Church in preserving and spiriting our pastor, in directing unto [us] suitable supply, and making the church unanimous.” Moving outward, he continued, “Save the town, the college [Harvard], [and Massachusetts] province from invasion of enemies, open and secret, and from false brethren. Defend the purity of worship. Save Connecticut and the New York government. Reform all the European plantations in America—Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch. Save this New World, that where sin hath abounded, grace may superabound, that Christ who is stronger would bind the strong man and spoil his house, and order the Word to be given, Babylon is fallen…. Save all Europe. Save Asia, Africa, Europe and America.” After this lengthy and roaming meditation he observed that “through the bounteous grace of God I had a comfortable day.”
Samuel and his peers were aware of the random nature of the natural world, yet they tended to see in frightening occurrences such as droughts, epidemics of smallpox, and children’s deaths a sign of divine vengeance—signs that God was displeased with human action. The reverse was generally accepted: good health and fine weather suggested God’s approval. Even as Samuel and his peers saw the world this way, they acknowledged that discerning the real meaning of natural events is difficult and not exact. Thus Samuel could pray heartily and feel that his prayers had been answered, but he could never be certain that he had even been heard. As a result the essential Christian virtues were accepting the will of God and preparing well for one’s own death. At death, at least, one could hope for security in union with Christ. The terrifying alternative was eternal damnation.
At the prayer meeting with his friends and neighbors, Samuel prayed to God to “prepare me and mine for the coming of our Lord, in whatsoever way it be.” He found the gathering surprisingly consoling until the late arrival of William Longfellow, his improvident brother-in-law from the North Shore, who appeared “so ill conditioned and outwardly shabby.” In a flash Samuel felt angry and embarrassed by his connection to this awkward man, who was married to his younger sister, Anne.
A moment later Samuel’s irritation at Longfellow turned to shame on his own account. His brother-in-law had come to the meeting to
pay his respects upon the loss of the baby, Samuel realized. He remembered Longfellow arriving in the same manner at much more formal occasions, such as “upon the funeral of my father,” John Hull, and Samuel’s firstborn, Johnny. Silently he begged the Lord to “Humble me.”
In thinking of his own sin, he envisioned not so much a certain evil action as a general turning away from God. More than a specific behavior such as pride, deceit, lack of faith, laziness, envy, or rage, sin was for him a broader sense of failure to love and serve God. In Calvinist theology, every man and woman is tempted to turn away from God because we are descendants of Adam and Eve, who did not obey God. Sin is unavoidable. In response to one’s sin, repentance offers a path back to God’s grace.
Baby Henry’s funeral was to be the next afternoon, following Samuel Willard’s regular Thursday lecture at the Third Church. During that service Scripture again addressed Samuel’s predicament, as it often seemed to. This time it happened during the singing of the Twenty-first Psalm, chosen by Willard, which describes God’s destruction of his enemies. Male and female voices gathered on the first note of the eighth verse, which begins, “The Lord shall find out all that are thine enemies….”
8 The Lord shall finde out all
that are thine enemies:
thy right hand also shall finde out
those that doe thee despise.
9 Thou setst as fiery oven
them in times of thine ire:
the Lord will swallow them in’s wrath
and them consume with fire.
10 Thou wilt destroy the fruit,
that doth proceed of them,
out of the earth: & their seed from
among the Sonnes of men.
11 Because they evill have
intended against thee:
a wicked plot they have devis’d,
but shall not able bee.
12 For thou wilt as a butt
them set; & thou wilt place
thine arrows ready on thy string,
full right against their face.
13 Lord, in thy fortitude
exalted bee on high:
and wee will sing; yea prayse with psalmes
thy mighty powr will wee.
The 1640 Bay Psalm Book, containing all the psalms in English verse, was open before Samuel, but he had no need of it. In the tenth verse, as he sang of God punishing his enemies and their descendants, his face flushed: “Thou wilt destroy the fruit that doth proceed of them out of the earth, and their seed from among the sons of men.”
The words stung. In taking Henry, God was punishing Samuel and Hannah. After the psalm singing Samuel prayed internally, “The Lord humble me kindly in respect of all my enmity against Him, and let His breaking my image in my son be a means of it.”
The cold ground that received the body of three-week-old Henry Sewall on that bitter December 24 is still marked. Near the rear of the Old Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street in Boston, between the tomb of Paul Revere and that of Ben Franklin’s parents and siblings, is a large, rectangular nineteenth-century monument marked SEWALL. (The Franklins were regular members of Samuel’s prayer group and attended his church.) Carved atop the great tomb are the words “Judge Sewell [sic] tomb / Now the property of his heirs.” Beneath this monument lie the remains of three-week-old Henry Sewall, fifty-eight-year-old John Hull, and forty other members of the family.
This burying ground, Boston’s third, was originally part of the common on which cows, bulls, and pigs grazed. Gravediggers deposited eight to ten thousand bodies on this two-acre plot in the hundred years after 1660, when the cemetery opened. In 1737 a digger complained of having to bury bodies four deep. The ground does not drain well, so bodies decomposed quickly. The cemetery’s modern name comes from its proximity to a wooden granary, a warehouse for up to twelve thousand bushels of grain for the poor, erected by the town around 1730 at the present site of the Park Street Church, which had previously been the site of an almshouse. In 1685 this cemetery was known as the New, Central, or South, Burying Ground, and this spot was the Hull and Quincy family tomb.
At the close of the lecture service, at around four in the afternoon of December 24, the funeral procession began. It started at the Third Church. According to a contemporary account, the meetinghouse was “large and spacious and fair,” with three large porches, or raised galleries, square pews, a side pulpit, a bell, and a steeple. Sheet lead covered the roof. It was on Boston’s main road in the same spot as today’s Old South Meeting House, which was erected in 1730 as a stone replacement for the cedar building.
Describing the short walk from here along a snow-covered road to the burying ground, Samuel wrote, “We follow little Henry to his grave: Governor and magistrates of the country here, 8 in all, beside myself, eight ministers, and several persons of note.” Samuel’s grief did not dull his awareness of social status. The governor, who still served in that post if only in name, was the esteemed eighty-two-year-old Simon Bradstreet, who had presided at the marriage of the deceased baby’s parents. Bradstreet was now one of only two survivors of the original twenty thousand English people who had settled Boston a half century before.
In acknowledgment of their central role in his baby’s short life, Samuel had asked two women to bear the tiny chestnut coffin to its final resting place. The coffin weighed so little that Elizabeth Weeden, the midwife, and Nurse Hill took turns carrying it. The nurse had wrapped the body in a linen pall, but she saw no need to add tansy, thyme, or other herbs, as she would have in summer.
Samuel followed the coffin. He held the hand of his oldest son and namesake, now age seven, whose three younger siblings stayed home. His mother-in-law, Judith Quincy Hull, came next, arm in arm with Ephraim Savage, the forty-year-old widower of her niece, Mary, a daughter of Judith’s only sibling, Edmund Quincy. “Cousin Savage,” as Samuel termed Ephraim because his late wife was Hannah’s first cousin, was a member of the Harvard class of 1662, a son of another Third Church founder, Colonel Thomas Savage, and a grandson of the banished heretic Anne Hutchinson. “Cousin” Jeremiah Dummer, a distant maternal relative of Samuel’s who had apprenticed to John Hull as a silversmith, came next, leading Ann Quincy, whose husband, Daniel, Judith Quincy Hull’s nephew, another silversmith, was ill. The term Cousin, which Samuel used frequently, was broader in meaning than it is now.
Although not himself of Boston’s elite, Samuel was intimate with the grandchildren of the wealthy, powerful first Bostonians, mostly because of his wife, a granddaughter of early settlers Edmund Quincy and Robert Hull. Beyond that marital connection, Samuel was close with grandsons of such founding figures as Governor John Winthrop, Governor Thomas Dudley, First Church minister John Cotton, and Anne Hutchinson. In this insular culture, the progeny of the founders, who had battled over control of the nascent country, took each other’s hands in friendship or marriage. It was also a tribal aristocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a self-perpetuating oligarchy: prominent men whose wives died looked for new wives among the widows of their deceased friends. Similarly, it was not uncommon for someone to marry his own stepsibling, as the Reverend Increase Mather did when he wed Mary Cotton, the daughter of his stepmother, Sarah Cotton Mather. Hannah Hull Sewall’s parents were also stepsiblings who lived in the same house before they married. One benefit of familial intermarriage of this sort was keeping wealth within a family.
More than a hundred mourners attended little Henry Sewall’s funeral that day, but the child’s mother and paternal grandparents were absent. Henry and Jane Dummer Sewall could not travel easily from Newbury in winter weather. Hannah was still lying in at home. A woman of a considerable estate could lie in indefinitely. Hannah’s mood, which her husband did not record, could not have been good.
At the cemetery the gravedigger had already dug the hole inside the Hull family tomb, a mausoleum enclosing a burial chamber that was now half-full of water despite the general freeze. As the coffin was placed in the ground, the Reverend Willard prayed for the souls of those left behind. Someone threw lime on the baby’s coffin. Samuel and Sam Jr. covered it with dirt and tears. At around five o’clock most of the mourners proceeded two by two along the dark and icy roads to the Hull-Sewall house, where they feasted on bread, meat, and cheese and drank beer, hard cider, and wine.
