Salem Witch Judge (10 page)

Samuel began his return trip as soon as the elections in Boston were over, stopping in Salem “for the sake of” hearing his old friend “Mr. Noyes’s lecture” on the virtue of humility. That Friday, in Boston, Samuel walked to the Town House for the meeting of the new council. Government chambers filled the second-floor gallery of the Town House, which rose on ten-foot-high pillars above a merchants’ exchange where vendors peddled their goods. The Town House cellar contained a small jail and a room for a bellman. He was charged with ringing the bells of the adjacent First Church for services and beating drums three times a day—to wake the town at five in the morning, to call merchants to work at eleven, and to send tavern-goers home by nine.

Unhappily, Samuel took the oath of allegiance to the new government. He demonstrated discontent by taking the oath in the “New
England fashion,” holding the Bible in his left hand and holding up his right hand to heaven. The “English fashion” of taking an oath, which entailed holding or kissing the Bible, seemed to violate the Second and Third Commandments. Samuel was again commissioned a captain in the militia. His close friend Captain Elisha Hutchinson, a grandson of the heretic Anne Hutchinson, refused to take any oath to the Crown, so he received no public role and no military commission. Samuel’s tenure as captain would not last long. In an argument over whether or not to include the cross of Saint George, a symbol of England, on the colonial flag, he would resign. New Englanders had left the “popish” cross out of their flag since 1634 with the exception of the flag flying over the castle on the harbor, which English ships could see. After wrestling with the question, Samuel concluded that to allow the cross on the flag could “hinder my entrance into the Holy Land.”

On Saturday, June 19, just before six in the morning, his brother-in-law Jacob Tappan arrived at the front door of the Sewall house. Tappan had left Newbury at dusk Friday and ridden through the night. He spoke to a servant, who relayed upstairs the awful news, which Samuel recorded in his diary: “My dear son, Hull Sewall, dies at Newbury about one o’clock” the previous day.

Within an hour Samuel was prepared to join his brother-in-law for the trip to Newbury for the boy’s funeral. The other children were too young for the trip. Hannah, again pregnant, stayed home. Samuel and John rode north all day and arrived as the sun set over the sultry hills of West Newbury. Relatives and friends, including the Harvard-educated ministers John Woodbridge, Joshua Moody, and John Richardson, awaited him at his parents’ house. Samuel asked two of their sons, John Moody and Johnny Richardson, his nine-year-old nephew John Tappan, and a local boy named Samuel Thompson to be Hullie’s pallbearers. The crowd moved “very quickly” to the meetinghouse for the evening burial, which began with the minister saying a prayer for Hullie. It was dusk before the four young pallbearers carefully laid the little coffin in the ground. Samuel had brought black kid gloves to give to mourners, but it seemed “too late”—perhaps he was just too heartbroken—to distribute them to anyone but pallbearers. Family members at seventeenth-century English funerals customar
ily handed out black scarves, gloves, or hatbands and sometimes black and gold enamel rings as reminders of not only the deceased but also our common end.

Early the next morning Samuel and his father and mother, who were seventy-two and about sixty-seven, returned to the cemetery for the burial of an old Newbury man, Richard Collicut. At this longer ceremony the Reverend Richardson preached from 1 Corinthians 3:21–23: “Therefore let no man glory in men, for all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.” (The italics are his.) Samuel observed that the minister seemed to go “something out of his order by reason of the occasion…singling out those words Or Death.”

The bereaved father headed home late Monday by way of Salem, where he slept at his brother’s and distributed the balance of his funeral gloves. At four on Tuesday morning, in the “flaming” heat, he headed south from Salem to Winnisimmet (now Chelsea), arriving even before the ferrymen. He was the only passenger on the ferry across the Mystic River to Charlestown. He crossed Charlestown on foot and took the ferry across the mouth of the Charles River to Shawmut. His house was only a mile farther, so he was home by eight. He found “all well” and thanked God.

Despite his gratitude, he was acutely aware that the past six months had been among the worst he had ever known, which he considered a sign from God. In just six months he had lost not only his country but also two of his children. In a moment of solitude later that day, he recorded the latest news in his diary, a litany of death and loss both intimate and communal.

Hullie was taken ill on Friday morn. Mr. Clark of Cambridge had a son of nine years old drowned the Tuesday before. Two women died suddenly in Boston. James Mirick that lived just by my father at Newbury had his house suddenly burnt down to the ground on Sabbath even[ing] before this Friday.

Betty Lane’s father dies suddenly…. Mistress Chauncy, widow, died having been sick a day or two, of a flux. Her body is carried in the night to Roxbury there to be buried. Mr. Richard Collicot
buried. Mr. Thomas Kellond [a neighbor in Newbury] dies, is to be buried….

He tried, finally, to explain the most personal loss. “The Lord sanctify this third bereavement.” By taking three of his babies, God was surely sending him a message. The challenge was to decipher it.

It was natural for Samuel and others of his time and place to see meaning—even divine purpose—in bad weather, house fires, and deaths. His usual response to bad news was to ask, Could this have happened by accident? David Hall of Harvard Divinity School, a renowned scholar of Puritanism, describes Samuel’s mental world as Elizabethan, medieval, and “very different from our own.” It was a “world of wonders” and “prodigies and portents.” Samuel tracked daily events and his spiritual reading in his diary in hopes of comprehending their meaning. In the book of Revelation thunder and trumpets herald the Second Coming of Christ, so he recorded these sounds. An eclipse of the moon, which Samuel observed in 1676 during King Philip’s War, seemed to him “metaphoric, dismal, dark and portentous, [like] some prodigy appearing in every corner of the skies.” A lunar eclipse on November 30, 1685—extremely late in Hannah’s pregnancy with Henry—drove Samuel into his house to read a chapter of Revelation. In his diary he wrote exactly what he saw in Boston’s hazy sky, hoping later to comprehend it: “In the total obscuration [the moon] was ruddy, but when [it] began to receive some light, the darkish ruddiness ceased.” Did this have some connection to him or to the child soon to be born to Hannah?

In a larger sense, were the events foretold in Revelation finally coming true? Would the darkness of the final days described in Revelation come as a cosmic phenomenon or a physical disaster? When and how would the symbolic actions of Revelation, such as pouring out of vials and unfolding of seals, occur? At any moment, he believed, the Second Coming could happen, bringing heavenly rapture to the elect and banishing the rest to hell. This worldview, shared by many of his peers, underlay the perfectionism, moral absolutism, and fatalism of Puritan culture.

Years before, about a month after the birth of his first baby, Samuel observed several “omens” at the Third Church. On June 21, 1677, in an early act of civil disobedience, a Quaker woman named Margaret
Brewster, naked except for a frock of penitential sackcloth, and several Quaker men ran through Samuel’s meetinghouse at sermon time. Quaker missionaries had since the late 1650s openly questioned Congregationalist authority. They believed in an “inner light” from God rather than divine election. They supported toleration of other faiths. They opposed the use of sung or instrumental music in services. Rejecting the need for ministers and formal church services, they believed women as well as men could lead worship. For all these reasons the General Court under Governor John Endicott banished Quakers as heretics upon pain of death in 1659. The court hanged several Quakers on Boston Common under this law. (Later, faced with a Quaker petition to fence in their martyrs’ graves, Samuel voted with the majority of the court to deny the request.) After 1660 the Crown revoked the 1659 law. Quakers continued their attacks on Puritan rule, marching through the town and calling for the magistrates to repent. In 1676 the General Court ordered constables to “search out and arrest all Quakers.”

The scene in the Third Church “occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that” twenty-five-year-old Samuel “ever saw.” It seemed to him “the Devil was amongst us.” He noted the woman’s “loosened hair” that “straggled wildly down her neck and shoulders,” uncovered by a standard bonnet, and her face “besmeared with soot,” a biblical symbol for repentance. This “apparition” reminded him of lines from the first chapter of Isaiah: “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; [it is] iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear [them].”

To Samuel’s amazement, Margaret Brewster shouted at the minister, “God is displeased at you! He will show his displeasure soon.” Church members seized her and dragged her out to jail. The next day she was tried, convicted of disturbing the peace, and whipped, tied to a cart, and dragged through town.

During another sermon that month, a man gave “a sudden and amazing cry which disturbed the whole assembly,” Samuel noted. “It seems he had the falling sickness. ’Tis to be feared the Quaker disturbance and this are ominous.”

Recording such events allowed Samuel to “perceive and profit from coincidences that in hindsight might become important,” according to David Hall. Seen through the lens of Scripture, “the rhythm of historical time” provided clues to “interventions of the supernatural.” News “from abroad fell in order as evidence that the sequence described in Revelation was rapidly unfolding. Historical time…was really prophetic time, and [Puritans] struggled to decipher the relationship between the two.” This urge explains the large number of diaries and memoirs of high-status Puritan men, including John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Hull.

Samuel Sewall’s diary in printed form takes up more than a thousand pages in two volumes. The original comprised fourteen volumes, which are now at the Massachusetts Historical Society, in Boston. They vary in size from tiny pocket almanacs to volumes twelve inches high. Some he carried in his waistcoat pocket. Others he kept at home. Many were thin blank books with leather covers in which he also recorded notes of sermons and negotiations and figures from his work as a merchant and judge of probate. His strong, legible handwriting quavers with age. His entries span fifty-six years, from December 1673 until October 1729, although a volume covering the years 1677 to 1684 is inexplicably missing. He often reread earlier notations and added notes of clarification for future rereadings. On the page describing December 1685, for instance, he added in the margin beside baby Henry’s birth the single word Natus, and he inscribed Mortus at the baby’s death. Now and then he turned over a used volume and began anew from the back. Some journals have a gap of empty pages at the end or, if he wrote from both ends, in the middle.

This diary, an internal record of his spiritual career, was truly a memoir in that he wished to remember and find meaning in his life. He left his accumulated diaries to his son Joseph, who saved them and passed them down the generations. Yet Samuel wrote mainly for himself, never imagining that anyone besides himself and perhaps his children and grandchildren might read his entries. He engaged in mild self-censorship, as is natural. He omitted things he considered unimportant or, in rare cases, so troubling as to be inexplicable. M. Halsey Thomas, an editor of the published diary, intuited that Samuel was basically honest in his entries because of his devout Calvinism: “Under
the eye of an all-seeing and all-knowing God it was useless to try to cheat.” The literary scholar Mark Van Doren has remarked on this diary’s “frankness, its simplicity of mind and heart, [and] its willingness to tell the truth even at the expense of the author’s dignity,” which “justify its comparison with the immortal diary of [Samuel] Pepys.”

Samuel’s drive to keep a diary for more than half a century flowed from his theology, according to his nineteenth-century biographer Nathan Chamberlain. “Protestantism at its core is the apotheosis of individualism, and the most relentless of democracies.” Its “enthronement and canonization of the individual, accepted gradually but infallibly by English Puritanism, rested upon a religious idea…that as an incarnate God, while wearing our flesh, had once died for every man, so no man thus redeemed could, without sacrilege, be abased by any tyranny of prelate or kings….” The individual conscience was the “supreme authority in religion,” Chamberlain concluded, and the “right of private judgment was, and remains, one of the root ideas of logical Protestantism.”

To a Puritan, the history of an individual or a people is a history of God’s providence. Everything that happens is from God, so everything matters. As David Hall explained, “The person who listened closely to the sounds of the universe could hear the spirit speak.” Yet diary keeping was complicated by the desire to create a compelling, meaningful narrative. The problem, as Kierkegaard noted, was that life is lived forward but understood only in reverse. “The grace of God, as most men experience it, is elusive,” observed Perry Miller, another scholar of early New England. Although “certainty is written in the tables of divine election,” that “book remains inaccessible to mortals. The creature lives inwardly a life of incessant fluctuation, ecstatically elevated this day, depressed into despair the next. The science of [auto]biography required clinical skill in narrating these surgings and sinkings, all the time trying to keep the line of the story clear.”