Authors: Eve LaPlante
Salem Witch Judge (6 page)
Another foot of snow fell that night. While Samuel’s neighbors slept, the grieving father stayed up with Little Hull, who had “a sore convulsion fit” that continued “wave upon wave” into the morning. On Friday Samuel Phillips, a Harvard-educated minister from Rowley, the North Shore town where Sewall’s paternal grandfather had spent the
few years before his death in 1657, visited the family and went to “pray with Hullie.”
Friday was Christmas Day, which the Sewalls were careful not to observe. Puritans had left feast days behind in England, along with many other features of the state church they still reproached for its “popish injunctions,” in the words of Samuel’s father-in-law. Puritans, who were known in England as nonconformists, viewed the Bible with a strict and frequently literal eye. The Sabbath was the most important day. To honor other days, as Anglicans and Catholics did, profaned the Sabbath and violated God’s Fourth Commandment, to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” In 1659, in keeping with its goal of creating a Bible Commonwealth, the Massachusetts General Court banned all Christmas celebrations. The statute reads, “For preventing disorders…by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries to the great dishonor of God and offence of others…whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas and the like, either by forbearing labor, feasting, or any other way…shall pay for every such offence, five shillings as a fine….” The same week that Henry Sewall died, the Reverend James Allen of the First Church reminded his congregation yet again that Christmas celebrations are “anti-Christian heresy.”
Even as Samuel mourned his son, he could savor his town’s avoidance of holiday festivities. Carts bearing food, other goods, and firewood traveled into and out of Boston along the bumpy road before his house. Shops were “open as usual,” he noted on Christmas Day, as he would do every Christmas for decades. The few Bostonians who “somehow observe” the day “are vexed, I believe, that the body of the people profane it. Blessed be God” there is “no authority yet to compel them to keep” the holiday.
His yet is telling. The authority that would compel Bostonians to keep holidays they opposed was coming to New England in the form of English governors and laws. Christmas festivities and Anglican worship were on their way. The Puritan world that Samuel and his Puritan peers knew and loved was falling apart. “The symptoms of death are on us,” he observed in his diary in January 1686 as his peers in the Massachusetts General Court viciously debated their next move. The Puritan experiment of creating a New Canaan in the wil
derness of America, where they could worship as they believed God wanted, had begun “palpably to die.” Indeed, that death was not just beginning. The colony was already defunct.
That story begins in England more than half a century earlier, when John Winthrop and colleagues secured a royal charter from King Charles I to create a trading company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, which they used to found the colony of Massachusetts Bay. In a break with colonial tradition, they carried on board ship with them in 1630 the paper document that was the charter rather than leaving it with the English court. Today, almost four hundred years later, that paper document is the crown jewel of the collection at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts archives on the Boston waterfront.
Winthrop and other early colonial leaders used—even exploited—that charter to create their own government and militia and to build their own towns, schools, and churches. One of their central goals was to worship freely, but they did not seek religious freedom in the modern sense of permitting the expression of varying views. They wished to worship in their own way—without the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the cross at baptism, the surplice worn by clergy in the Church of England, and the requirement of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper and keeping holy days. They felt entitled to expel from their society not only nonconforming Puritans, such as Roger Williams, John Wheelwright, and Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s, but also people of other faiths, including Anglicans, Catholics, Quakers, and Baptists. The colonial leaders, who were called magistrates, also felt entitled to grant themselves and each other vast parcels of American soil.
Within a few years of arriving with their open-ended charter, most leading men held vast expanses of land, far more than they could have afforded or even imagined owning in England. At the same time, troubling reports of the colonists’ excessive freedoms as well as disloyalty to the Crown reached the court of King Charles I. The king sent an order for the return of the Massachusetts charter in 1635. Governor Winthrop ignored this and similar requests from the parent country, a tactic that would prove effective for nearly five decades.
In the minds of the colonists, the creation of Massachusetts was the will of God. Like the Jews in ancient Egypt, the Puritans in England
were enslaved by an idolatrous state church. The bishops and archbishops of the Church of England were the pharaohs, and the English Book of Common Prayer demanded they worship false gods. God had “moved the hearts of many” English nonconformists “to transport themselves far off beyond the seas into…New England,” Samuel’s father-in-law, John Hull, explained in 1649. “And [God] brought year after year such [people] as might be fit materials for a commonwealth…some of the choicest use, both for ministry and magistracy. Military men, seamen, tradesmen, etc., and of large estates and free spirits to spend and be spent for the advancement of this work that the Lord had to perform and to make this wilderness as Babylon was once to Israel, as a wine cellar for Christ to refresh his spouse in….” Just as the Jews were refreshed and purified in Babylon, so the Puritans were improved by their exodus to America. Christ’s spouse was their own Congregational Church, a covenanted community of “saints.”
In 1649 when John Hull wrote this, Boston was a thriving, nineteen-year-old mercantile town of about a thousand souls. The town was the heart of a much larger English settlement, reaching all the way from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to Connecticut, with a population of slightly more than twenty thousand English settlers, about 10 percent of them living in Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown. Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan-led Parliament, which beheaded King Charles I in London in 1649, felt no need to interfere with a Puritan colony. During the 1650s, according to the eighteenth-century historian Thomas Hutchinson, Massachusetts “approached very near to an independent commonwealth,” with a “system of laws of government” that “departed from their charter.”
This was Winthrop’s intent. As a trained lawyer he respected English common law, but he wished to create a new legal system in Massachusetts. Instead of making common law the ground of their legal code, as in England, the Puritan leaders relied on the law of Moses, as outlined in the Ten Commandments from the Hebrew Bible. These men created a governing body, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, which served as their legislature, administration, and judiciary—to use terminology of a later period, for they did not perceive these divisions. (As a precedent, the English parliament functioned as both high court and legislature.) The General Court initially limited
the vote in Massachusetts to male members of the Congregational Church, but the magistrates soon extended the franchise to all landowning men, or roughly half the English males. Women, Native Americans, Africans, and other nationalities could not vote. The author of the first draft of Massachusetts’s body of laws, in 1635, was none other than the Reverend John Cotton, the influential teacher of the First Church, formerly England’s most celebrated Puritan divine, who had no prior experience writing laws. Most colonial law came directly from the Bible, but Winthrop and his peers also borrowed from English common law. Winthrop admired the English principle of relying on legal precedent, for instance, as well as aspects of English statute law, which prohibited witchcraft. In 1604 under King James I, England’s parliament passed a statute that made witchcraft a felony, punishable by death. The General Court of Massachusetts enacted a similar statute in 1642. By the mid-seventeenth century the Massachusetts magistrates could take freely from both Scripture and the English legal system with little interference from England.
But their sense that they could freely govern themselves ended abruptly in 1660, when the English monarchy was restored. King Charles I’s son Charles II ascended the throne. Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic viewed Charles II with particular repugnance because of his links to Catholicism and France. Through his mother, Henrietta Maria of France, Charles II was a first cousin of the Catholic French king Louis XIV. This distrust was mutual. One of Charles II’s hopes was to fulfill his father’s 1635 order for the return of the colonial charter, but he was initially distracted by several colonial wars. He fought the Netherlands for control of New Amsterdam, which England took and renamed New York. He helped to finance New England’s bloody war with the Indians, King Philip’s War, in 1675. So it was not until the 1680s that Charles II finally had time to consider the defiance of Massachusetts Bay Colony, which behaved toward its mother country like a wayward adolescent flouting parental rules. Finally, from the king’s perspective, on October 23, 1684, England’s High Court of Chancery revoked the colony’s 1630 charter. From that day on Massachusetts Bay Colony was no more.
Slightly more than a year later, at the time of little Henry Sewall’s funeral, New England had no clear government. The charter that gave
Governor Simon Bradstreet his power had been vacated, but the new governor, who would be appointed by the Crown rather than elected by the freemen of the colony, had not yet arrived. The General Court of Massachusetts on which Samuel served continued stubbornly to meet four times a year, as it had since 1630. But it no longer had power to make or enforce laws. The former colony was now a province of England—province suggesting far more deference to the Crown—and all the rights and privileges enjoyed by men like Samuel were in question.
In the wake of these two traumatic deaths—of his colony and of his son—Samuel had several memorable dreams. In his diary, which he kept beside his bed, he recorded at dawn those he could remember. The most unusual dream occurred during the night of Friday, January 1, 1686, which for him was not the first day of the first month of a new year. Protestant England and its colonies still used the old Julian calendar, which begins each year on March 25, although much of Europe had followed Pope Gregory XIII in adopting the modern, or Gregorian, calendar in 1582.
In one of Samuel’s dreams Jesus Christ appeared in human form in colonial Boston. “Our Savior, in the days of His flesh when upon earth, came to Boston and abode here,” Samuel reported. Like countless friends, relatives, and servants of the Sewalls, Jesus Christ chose to stay at Father Hull’s house. While dreaming, Samuel “admired the goodness and wisdom of Christ in coming hither and spending some part of His short life here” in Congregational, nonconformist Boston, which was in fact under threat. Placing first-century Christ in seventeenth-century Boston, as Samuel did in his dream, may have suggested the mutual possibility of resurrection from death. This visitation was not Jesus Christ’s Second Coming, which Samuel and his peers often discussed, but his first incarnation, at the start of the Christian era. As Samuel observed later, the “chronological absurdity” of this appearance in Boston “never came into my mind.”
What did occur to him while dreaming was that if Jesus Christ were in Boston, “how much more Boston had to say than [Catholic] Rome boasting of Peter’s being there.” This idea, that true Christianity is American and Congregationalist, was a core New England belief. Boston’s first generation of nonconformist ministers, the men
who created the Congregational Church—the Reverends John Cotton, John Wilson, Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Shepard—considered themselves and their flocks a literal gathering of saints. It was Samuel’s dream to follow them in creating a Bible Commonwealth where their savior, Jesus Christ, might actually “wish to dwell.”
Samuel’s pleasure in this dream was tempered by his inborn sense of regret. Seeing Jesus in the flesh, he rued “the great respect that I ought to have showed Father Hull since Christ chose when in town to take up His quarters at his house.” This was natural for Samuel—to feel he had not done what was right.
Even without the charter that gave them the power to make and enforce laws, the magistrates of Massachusetts still needed to maintain order. Blasphemy, rape, murder, and other violations of the Ten Commandments did not end with the revocation of the charter, and may even have increased because of the general insecurity accompanying that loss. Samuel and his colleagues had no choice but to continue to enforce their law, even if its foundation was in doubt. As much as possible, they continued to wield power as they had before, in the vain hope that other matters might again distract the king.
Early on the morning of Thursday, March 11, a lecture (or sermon) day in Boston, Samuel could hear the multitudes gather in the market square. Boston was about to have its first public execution in years. The event, a hanging at the gallows on Boston Common for murder, was to be the subject of the compulsory lecture service that day at the First Church. The lecturer was the famed Reverend Increase Mather, forty-six, the senior minister of Boston’s Second (also North) Church. The guilty party, who would be displayed before the congregation in chains, was a thirty-year-old indentured servant, James Morgan. In a drunken fight the previous December Morgan had stabbed another man, James Johnson, in the abdomen with an iron spit. Johnson died.
At a Boston trial at which Samuel Sewall had presided, James Morgan confessed to the crime and showed a spirit of repentance. The
court convicted him of murder, a capital offense, and sent him to jail to await execution. During his imprisonment Morgan requested and was granted time for counsel and prayer with the young minister Cotton Mather, Increase’s son. Five days before Morgan’s scheduled hanging, Cotton Mather preached on Morgan’s sin at the Second Church on Sunday morning. The same afternoon, at the Third Church, the Reverend Joshua Moody took Morgan’s execution as his sermon text.
