Salem Witch Judge (11 page)

Samuel never doubted that natural events had divine meaning, even if he could not discern it. Having lost three sons, he could not help but wonder, Are these events random? Is God punishing me for my sins? Are these trials intended to make me stronger? How shall I respond?

His wife shared this experience. She too was a pious Puritan who had endured the loss of three sons—Johnny, Henry, and now Hullie. Yet we have almost no information about her response. Her feelings were doubtless no less intense than her prolific husband’s, yet they were not documented and saved, in keeping with the practice of her place and time. In the written record of early New England, most women appear only at birth, marriage, and death. The few women whose thoughts survive include the dissident Margaret Brewster, the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, and the banished heretic Anne Hutchinson, who made history only because their behavior seemed witchlike and Satanic.

It is thus a measure of Hannah Hull Sewall’s extremely high social status that we have any information from her about her babies’ demise. Her descendants saved a letter she wrote from her desk at home on July 15, 1686, a week after the day on which the family would have celebrated Hullie’s second birthday had he lived.

A gift lost at sea occasioned Hannah’s unexpectedly lighthearted missive to a distant relative on Bermuda. Some months earlier the relative, Love Fowle, had sent fine foods to Hannah on a ship that was waylaid by pirates, who trolled the colonial seas. Not receiving a thank-you for the gift, Fowle had written to inquire if it had arrived.

“Good Cousin,” Hannah began in her strong hand. “On June the 10, I received your kind letter dated the 4
^th
of May upon which I made enquiry after the loving token you sent me, and the account I had was that they [the gifts] were half stolen before they came on board and the rest delivered to Mr. Prout, who told us he received so few, would but in a manner pay the freight, and knew not but they were for himself, and had eaten them up or near eaten them.”

Hannah, who may have smiled in considering the sea captain’s appetite, continued elegantly, “I am sorry for the frustration of your intended kindness to me; but your desire is kindness and that I have received and gratefully accepted and would entreat you to prevent the inconvenience of being so deceived for the future, by forbearing to give yourself the trouble of sending.”

Hannah’s wit, which must have appealed to the more heavy-handed Samuel, is evident, as are her fluency and manners. In reply to her
cousin’s mention of offspring, Hannah added, “I am glad to hear of God’s blessing you with children. I buried two sons lately…. I have one son and two daughters living. The Lord do me good by his various ways of Providence towards me.” Confident and pragmatic, she does not belabor her loss. As she knew, she and Samuel were more fortunate than many parents, including her own, who buried every baby save one.

In a time and place in which most women could not write their names, Hannah Hull Sewall could read and write in English and likely also in Latin. From the age of four or five she had studied with the “pious, prudent, and skillful” John Sanford, a private schoolmaster. She doubtless penned hundreds of letters to family and friends in England, America, and the West Indies, which had a population almost double that of New England. Still, Hannah’s arch comment on the nonarrival of an unidentified edible gift is our only record of her thoughts.

Nor is there any surviving painting or drawing of Hannah Hull Sewall, despite several of her husband and sons. She is not mentioned in her father’s lengthy diary except inferentially; her husband makes several appearances. In Samuel’s diary, which he kept regularly through their forty-two-year marriage, she is mentioned occasionally, sometimes with feeling. Yet she does not appear during her and Samuel’s eighteen-month courtship and first several months of marriage. During that period Samuel made entries every two or three days, frequently mentioning former classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends. He described pushing a nail into his brother John’s new house for good luck. He noted his mother’s tears after he felled an oak tree growing close to her house. He commented on Hannah’s father, with whom he was considering a career.

Samuel’s first mention of Hannah came with his first awareness, seven months after they wed, that she was pregnant. At dawn on Saturday, September 30, 1676, Samuel noted, “H. Sewall is called up by the flux, which it seems troubled her Friday in the afternoon, though unknown to me.” He had known her for at least two years and shared a bed with her for seven months, yet she remained “unknown.” He did not comment on her in his diary because he did not see her as worthy of mention. Women were secondary to men in his world. Men viewed
women’s bodies as vessels for reproduction. In heaven, it was thought, only male bodies would be resurrected.

This is not to say that Samuel failed to love his wife. Rather it suggests that, despite her birth to far greater wealth than Samuel, which greatly enhanced his access to power, Hannah was largely outside the world of power and meaning, which was male. The model seventeenth-century Englishwoman was obedient, submissive, virtuous, and kind. New England’s women were “the hidden ones,” Cotton Mather said. They ran households, raised and taught children, grew and harvested crops, did brewing and dairying and spinning, bargained with neighbors, birthed babies, and traveled about on foot, on horseback, and in canoes. Yet, as the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has pointed out, using a biblical metaphor, “women performed their work under a bushel,” whereas “men’s candles burned on the hill.” Books and complex discourse were thought to tax a woman’s mind. In 1645, commenting on a learned woman who suffered a breakdown, John Winthrop Sr. wrote in his journal, “If she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, she [would have] kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.”

The Sewalls’ world remained a patriarchy. Women were outside the thrust of life with the single exception of childbirth, the brief interval in which midwives and other women assumed power. During Hannah’s fourteen labors Samuel remained outside the bedchamber, which was filled with female friends and relations. Acknowledging this realm as feminine, he asked two women to serve as little Henry’s pallbearers in December 1685.

Samuel loved and admired both his parents. Nevertheless, the words he wrote and hired an engraver to carve on their gravestone in Newbury made his father prominent, other men worthy of mention, and his mother recede.

Mr. Henry Sewall (sent by Mr. Henry Sewall his father in the ship Elizabeth Dorcas, Captain Watts, commander) arrived at Boston 1634, wintered at Ipswich, helped begin his plantation
1635, furnishing English servants, neat cattle, and provisions, married Mrs. Jane Dummer March the 25, 1646, Died May the 16, 1700, Age 86, His fruitful vine being thus disjoined [she] fell to the ground January the 13 following Age 74.

As for the female pronoun, Samuel simply left it out.

6

ORIGINAL SIN

Women may have been invisible in colonial Massachusetts, but they still had eyes to see. Hannah Hull first saw Samuel Sewall on August 11, 1674, when she was sixteen years old. One of the most desirable catches in New England, she had come in a horse-drawn coach from Boston with her parents for the Harvard commencement. Harvard College was in a decline, its few buildings in ruins and its class size shrinking to single digits, but it was still the best place for Hannah Hull to scout a suitable spouse.

Harvard College, set on an open plain in today’s Harvard Square, was thirty-six years old, the first university in English North America. It opened in 1638 as a training ground for ministers, but its 1650 charter called for it also to educate future civic leaders “in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences.” The curriculum involved two years of Greek, Hebrew, and logic, a year of ethics, and a final year of metaphysics, math, rhetoric, oratory, and theology. The college in 1672 consisted of the president’s timber-framed house, a small, two-story brick Indian College (so named because the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Indians paid for it) that served as a printing house, and the main College Hall, in which the commencement was held. College Hall was a decrepit two-story wood building containing a library, recitation hall, dormitory, and study
hall. It would be replaced by a brick building, then under construction, called New Hall. None of these buildings stands today.

Hannah Hull felt at home at Harvard. Its president was practically her uncle. Leonard Hoar, who became the college’s third president in 1672, was the brother of her aunt, the late Joanna Hoar Quincy, wife of Edmund Quincy, Hannah’s mother’s only sibling. When Hannah visited Harvard she stayed at the president’s house.

That August morning, seated between her parents as the graduates read aloud their theses in College Hall, Hannah was doubtless aware of her unusual status as the sole child of the colony’s wealthiest man. Her parents could deny a match she might wish to make, but they would respect her wishes. They gained nothing if she chose poorly, for her husband would inherit the vast Hull estate. Had she had a brother, the family property and business would have been his. As it was, John Hull would pay a large dowry to his daughter’s husband, who would function as Hull’s only son. The man she had to convince of a suitor’s suitability was not so much the suitor as her father.

Harvard’s class of 1674 consisted of only three bachelor’s candidates: Edmund Davie, Thomas Sergeant, and Joseph Hawley. But there was a bonanza of candidates for the master’s degree. Ten of the eleven men of 1671 had stayed on for three more years to earn the advanced degree that qualified them for the ministry. They were Isaac Foster, Samuel Phipps, Samuel Danforth, Peter Thatcher (youngest son of the Reverend Thatcher of the Third Church), William Adams, Thomas Weld, John Bowles, John Norton, Edward Taylor (a poet as a well as a preacher), and Samuel Sewall.

These young men sat before President Leonard Hoar, who would hand them their degrees. Now in his early forties, Hoar had immigrated to Braintree, Massachusetts, as a boy. After graduating from Harvard in 1650 he returned to England, preached in Essex, and was ejected from the pulpit in 1662 after the restoration of the monarchy. The young Puritan studied medicine at Cambridge, earning a doctorate in physic in 1671. The following summer he and his wife sailed to Boston, where they stayed for several months with the Hulls. They joined the Third Church, where Leonard preached briefly as the Reverend Thatcher’s assistant. Harvard offered him the presidency in November 1672 after the death of its second president, Charles
Chauncy. Hoar soon moved to Cambridge with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.

Bridget Hoar, his wife, who sat alongside the Hulls at the 1674 commencement, had a flamboyant family. Her father, an aristocratic Puritan lawyer, was “the regicide” John Lisle. In 1649, as President of the High Court of Justice and Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal for Cromwell, John Lisle drew up the indictment and death sentence of King Charles I. Fifteen years later, while in exile in Switzerland, Lisle was shot and killed by two Irishmen hoping for a reward from Charles II. His widow, Lady Alice Lisle, was still alive in England, but she would also die violently. In southern England in the late summer of 1685, after the Battle of Sedgemoor, in which King James II defeated his illegitimate Protestant nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, Lady Lisle was accused of treason for having hidden some of Monmouth’s soldiers. Nearing seventy, Lady Lisle was beheaded in the Winchester marketplace.

In the summer of 1674, at the time of Samuel’s commencement, Harvard College was struggling to stay alive. The incoming class of 1678 had only four students. One of them, eleven-year-old Cotton Mather, would later remember Leonard Hoar as a scholarly, pious man who could not control disorderly students: “The young men in the college took advantage” of Hoar and “ruined his reputation.” Hoar’s goal as president, he told his friend the English chemist Robert Boyle, was to bring about Harvard’s “resuscitation from its ruins.”

When it was Samuel Sewall’s turn to receive his master’s degree in divinity, he rose from his seat and approached Hoar. A compact young man of middling height, Samuel had thick brown hair cut to his shoulders, ruddy cheeks, a Roman nose, and deep-set, intelligent eyes. His master’s thesis, part of which he read aloud in Latin, was on sin, a most compelling subject. No copy of the thesis, composed entirely in Latin, remains. But the question he addressed survives. “An Peccatum Originale sit & Peccatum & Poena?” Or, “Is original sin both sin and punishment?” His answer was a resounding yes. For him, as for most devout Calvinists, original sin was not a theoretical construct but a real force with which he grappled daily.

Hannah Hull listened to every word of the twenty-two-year-old scholar’s Latin peroration on damnation and “set her affection on”
him, he would learn. In a letter to one of their sons decades later, Samuel would recall, “Your honored Mother…saw me when I took my [master’s] degree and set her affection on me, though I knew nothing of it till after our marriage.”

A commencement party followed the granting of degrees. Cake and sliced meats, including cow’s tongue, were served, along with great quantities of rum from the West Indies and wine from the Portuguese island of Madeira. Whether or not Hannah or her parents spoke directly to Samuel is a fact lost to history. But there is no doubt that Samuel was aware of Hannah’s parents. Judith Quincy Hull, the only daughter of New England’s first Quincy, had arrived in the New World at age five in 1633 on the same ship as the renowned divine John Cotton. The Quincys settled on a large farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, part of which later assumed their family name. After the early death of Judith’s father, Edmund Sr., her mother, Judith Pares Quincy, married a widowed blacksmith named Robert Hull and moved with her two children into the Hull house on the Shawmut Peninsula. At the time of their parents’ marriage, Judith Quincy Jr. and her stepbrother John Hull, Hannah Hull Sewall’s future parents, were young teenagers.