Salem Witch Judge (3 page)

The following Sunday, December 13, 1685, Samuel, his mother-in-law, and his children dressed in woolen cloaks and fur muffs for the one-block journey up the main road to the Sabbath service at the Third Church. Nurse Hill carried the six-day-old boy. Everyone in colonial Boston was expected to attend public worship on the Sabbath, which began at sundown Saturday and lasted until sundown Sunday. Colonial law, which was based on biblical injunctions as interpreted by colonial leaders, banned all work, recreation, frivolity, and loud noise during these twenty-four hours. Devout families like the Sewalls spent several hours worshipping at church and observed silence and Scripture study at home. For Samuel and Hannah and their family and servants, the Sabbath was devoted to God.

That day at the meetinghouse, the Reverend Samuel Willard was scheduled to baptize several older children and two infant boys. The meetinghouse was a large, square building of cedar planks with a thatched roof and a square steeple. It was the Third Church of Christ in Boston, built in 1669 by a group of wealthy members of the First Church, including John Hull, who opposed some actions of that congregation and desired a new church with slightly less rigid membership requirements than those of the First (1630) and Second (1650) churches. By virtue of Samuel’s high social status and his father-in-law’s role in founding the Third Church, the Sewall baby would be baptized first. For the same reason the Sewalls took seats on benches near the pulpit at the front. The congregation divided by gender as well as by class: women sat on the right side of the center aisle, men on the left. Servants, slaves, and young boys clustered in raised galleries to the rear and sides.

Samuel held his new baby before the congregation and named him Henry. This was the name of his father, a well-to-do farmer and erstwhile preacher of seventy who still lived in Newbury, thirty-five miles to the north. During the church service Samuel took pride in his baby’s deportment, noting that “Nurse Hill came in before the psalm was sung” to help with the infant “and yet the child was fine and quiet.”

The “first sermon my little son hath been present at” was based on John 15:8, “Herein is my father glorified, that you bear much fruit, so shall ye be my disciples,” which the Reverend Willard chose specially for the occasion. The Puritan, or Congregational, church had no lectionary, or set list of readings, so the minister could select any Scripture passage he wished on which to preach. Listening to the minister open up this text from John’s Gospel, Samuel was reminded of two seemingly opposite truths. On the one hand, his five living children were his fruits. On the other hand, they were not his. They belonged to God, who could at any time take them away.

Over the next few days Samuel watched his newest baby sicken. Little Henry looked and behaved so much like Johnny that at certain moments Samuel felt as though he were reliving the early life of his firstborn, eight years before. Henry was “very restless” Wednesday night. Unable to nurse, he appeared to lose weight. The same night, little Hull had another convulsion fit, waking his father, in whose bed the toddler was sleeping.

The next evening Samuel sang a psalm with his family. Together they finished reading aloud the last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, which describes the end of the world as we know it and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Like most of his educated peers, Sewall subscribed to millenarianism, the belief that, as suggested in the twentieth chapter of Revelation, Christ will soon return physically to earth and reign here for a thousand years, a millennium, after which the world as we know it will end. No one in the Sewall family or in other homes of Boston’s wealthy and powerful citizens doubted that Scripture revealed the imminence of Judgment Day. On that day, as a contemporary minister explained, “Jesus Christ himself will appear with all his holy angels in the clouds of heaven…. All the dead shall rise out of their graves and appear before him…and Christ
himself will give sentence to everyone according to what they have done in this life.” On Friday the Sewall family returned to the beginning of the Bible, which they read through “in course” again and again. By reading aloud several chapters every day, a devout family could complete the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in less than a year.

On Saturday, December 19, Samuel invited the Reverend Willard to the house to pray for baby Henry. Willard, a forty-five-year-old Concord native and Harvard graduate (class of 1659) who served in the frontier town of Groton before being called to Boston’s Third Church as its teacher in April 1678, was one of Samuel’s mentors. At the time of Willard’s installation at the Third Church, Samuel had been just twenty-six, a relatively new member of the congregation, with a sickly baby and a pregnant, twenty-year-old wife. Willard, who was fifteen years Samuel’s senior, had previously served twelve years in Groton, until 1676, when Indians destroyed that town and massacred most of its residents. Willard preached and wrote prodigiously. His collected lectures on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, published posthumously in 1726 under the title A Complete Body of Divinity, were “a magnificent summation of the Puritan intellect,” in the words of the historian Perry Miller. Known for his kindness, Willard spent what little spare time he had brewing an alcoholic drink, “Mr. Willard’s cordial,” which Samuel Sewall often brought as a gift on visits to friends, especially if they were ill. Of all the ministers in whom Samuel would confide over a long life, Willard was most influential.

Prayer was central to both men’s lives. During the gathering at church any man—all of them were “saints”—could rise from his bench to offer a “free prayer,” a relic of which can still be heard today in Congregational churches. Members could also nail notes to the meetinghouse door requesting public prayers. And there were innumerable set prayers for special needs or occasions, such as in this instance for a seriously ill child. “Lord God, unite this child thereby unto Jesus Christ,” begins one prayer in John Downame’s devotional manual, A Guide to Godliness, published in London in 1622. “That becoming a lively member of his body, he may be partaker of his righteousness, death and obedience, for his justification, and so he may stand righteous in thy sight. Free him from the guilt and punishment of all his
sins, and sanctify him in his soul and body, that either he may be fit to glorify thee on earth, or to be glorified by thee in heaven.”

As both Samuel and the Reverend Willard were aware, God’s support was required whether the child lived or died. “If it be thy blessed will, restore him,” the minister continued. “But if thou art purposed to put an end to his days, so fit and prepare him for thy Kingdom, as that he may live with thee in glory and immortality, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The next morning, on Henry’s second Sabbath, the infant appeared to slip away. Samuel knew from experience that his best option now was prayer. A seventeenth-century doctor could do little or nothing for a seriously ill newborn. Boston had few physicians, and those few men who had come from England with university degrees in “Physic”—the study of the ancient writings of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen—could offer no effective treatments for most illnesses the Sewalls faced: smallpox, influenza, other viruses, and dysentery. Prevailing treatments included bleedings, purgings, the ingestion of concoctions of lavender and other herbs or oil of amber, and for a sore throat the application of the inside of a crushed swallow’s nest. The medical profession in its modern sense did not exist.

Samuel was desperate. He wrote notes to the Reverends Samuel Willard and Joshua Moody—a minister in his fifties who had been ejected from England after 1660, settled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and now served at Boston’s First Church—asking for public and private prayers. A servant raced to deliver the notes. Several hours later, at the December 20 Sabbath service, which Samuel attended without his wife, the ministers mentioned his baby several times. The next evening, when the Reverend Moody called at the house, Samuel dispensed with formality and directed the senior minister right upstairs to “pray with my extreme sick son.”

Samuel Sewall was already, at thirty-three, one of New England’s most prominent men. He enjoyed both natural endowments and excellent placement in society, the latter due in large part to his prudent choice of a wife. Unlike most other powerful men of Boston, who were born in Massachusetts to the children of the colony’s founders, Samuel was born in Old England during the Puritan reign of Oliver Cromwell. (The term Puritan referred to Reformed, or nonconformist, Protestants
who wished to purify the English church by ridding it of Catholic practices, simplifying the service, vestments, and church ornamentation, and improving clerical education and the quality of sermons.) Samuel came to America with his family when he was nine, a year after the 1660 restoration of the anti-Puritan English monarchy. From childhood on, according to the historian David Hall, Samuel “believed in and defended the peculiar culture of New England.” He “inherited from his family a dislike of the Church of England and its ‘Hierarchy’”—priests, bishops, and archbishops—and anything else that resembled Roman Catholicism. In the mind of an English Puritan, the Church of Rome was the “whore of Babylon,” corrupt, anti-Christian, and idolatrous or, in the words of the Cambridge minister William Perkins, “mere magic.”

But Samuel was not the first in his family to cross the Atlantic to avoid offensive religious practices. His grandfather Henry Sewall, a member of England’s lesser gentry who was a son and nephew of Coventry mayors, had in 1635 helped settle the coastal farming town of Newbury. Henry Sewall and his son, Samuel’s father, Henry Sewall Jr., arrived in Boston on the Elizabeth Dorcas in 1634 with money, cattle, and provisions for a plantation. In May 1635, after a winter in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the Sewalls and other English planters rowed north to Plum Island Sound. They landed on the northern bank of the Parker River at a spot that is still marked in Newbury with a granite boulder: Landing Site of First Settlers.

While Samuel began his schooling as a boy in southern England—his parents and maternal grandparents had returned there in 1647, three years before he was born—it was here in Newbury, Massachusetts, that he learned to read and write in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. His teacher, a Cambridge-educated minister named Thomas Parker who gave up preaching in middle age when he lost his sight, was another early settler. Parker petitioned the Massachusetts court for permission to create a parish in Newbury in 1635. As the town’s schoolmaster, working from his house on modern-day Parker Street a stone’s throw from the Sewall house, he taught Samuel and other boys how to comprehend and anticipate the end of the world as outlined in the Bible’s original languages. The Reverend Parker sent fifteen-year-old Samuel off to Harvard, a training ground for ministers and Chris
tian gentlemen, in 1667. Over seven years Samuel earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in divinity. At twenty-three, following a year back in Newbury considering his options, Samuel married extremely well and moved into the home of his eighteen-year-old bride.

It was rare in English society for two couples to share one roof, but John Hull needed a male heir. Hannah and Samuel’s wedding, in the Great Hall on the ground floor of this house, was performed by the elderly governor Simon Bradstreet, Boston’s most esteemed citizen. After the governor and several ministers prayed for the health and happiness of the couple, the company enjoyed English “bride-cake,” pears and oranges and other fruit imported from the West Indies, and a variety of spirits: sack-posset (a warm custard of sweet cream and wine), ales, and fine Burgundy and Canary wines. A few months later Samuel abandoned his fledgling career as a preacher to become his father-in-law’s junior partner.

Samuel rapidly rose in Boston society. The General Court asked him in September 1681, when he was twenty-nine, to serve as the colony’s official printer. Samuel purchased a printing press and hired Samuel Green Jr., of the famous Cambridge printing family, to operate it. During his three-year tenure as printer Samuel learned to set type and oversaw the publication of John Bunyan’s Puritan classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as pamphlets of laws, reproductions of sermons by Samuel Willard, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, and The Assembly Catechism (The Shorter Catechism Composed by the Reverend Assembly of Divines with the Proofs Thereof out of the Scriptures). The press was owned and run by the state. A private property owner with his own press could publish anything he wished so long as he did not offend the government. America’s first newspaper, Public Occurrences, which appeared in Boston on September 25, 1690, was quickly halted by the governor and council. They banned a second issue of the newspaper because the first issue “contained…sundry doubtful and uncertain reports….” The concept of a free press was to be an invention of the next century.

Samuel became a freeman, or voter, in 1678, when he was twenty-six. Five years later he joined the government as an elected deputy (forerunner to a modern legislator) to the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, the most powerful ruling body in New England. For
his first term on the court he was a magistrate representing the frontier town of Westfield, nearly a hundred miles west of Boston, which his father-in-law, who had recently died, represented a decade before. After six months of service, Samuel became an assistant (forerunner of our senator) to the same court and was made an overseer of Harvard College. He accepted the largely honorary title of captain in the local militia and membership in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, he served in Boston’s volunteer police and fire departments, and he regularly took his turn at the night watch.

Describing Samuel Sewall as a merchant, as he is universally described, is as accurate as calling Thomas Jefferson a farmer. Sewall did, of course, engage in trade, manage large sums of money, collect vast tracts of real estate, and amass impressive wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. For his father-in-law and eventually himself he negotiated with merchants in London and Bristol, England, Bilbao on Spain’s northern coast, other English and French colonies in America, and the West Indies. He sold shiploads of salt fish, whale oil, lumber, beaver skins, and cranberries and purchased shiploads of sugar, rum, cotton, tobacco pipes, oranges, and books. “Some of his letters,” an editor of his diary noted, “read as if they had been dictated in State Street or Wall Street last week.” But Samuel was far more than a businessman. He was a civic leader and a public intellectual, one of the most educated Americans of his day, who brought to bear on his work his knowledge of at least four languages, the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and the writings of Horace and Virgil. Today he might be the sort of judge or attorney who is offered seats on the boards of hospitals, museums, and universities.