Salem Witch Judge (12 page)

John Hull, born in December 1624 in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, had arrived in Massachusetts in November 1635 with his parents, his older half brother, Richard Storer, and his younger brother, Edward. Prior to this trip young John had twice nearly died, experiences that intensified his sense of God’s watchful protection. On one occasion he was careless with fire. Even earlier, at only two years old, he was run over “while playing in the street. A number of pack horses came along and the foremost horse stroke me down upon my back with his knee, and yet when I was down”—Hull later explained, seeing divine intervention in his own life—“God so ordered it that” the horse “held up his foot over my body and moved not, until some of my relations came out of the shop and took me out of his way.”

John Hull’s formal education, which had begun at an English grammar school, continued at Boston Latin, America’s first secondary school. An indifferent student, Hull left school in his early teens “to help my father plant corn” in Muddy River, a farming village just west of Boston. “By God’s good hand,” as he put it, “I fell to learning (by
the help of my brother) and to practice the trade of a goldsmith,” which his older brother had learned during a six-year apprenticeship in London. A silversmith—the term was used interchangeably with goldsmith—was “somewhat akin to the banker of today,” the historian Hermann Frederick Clarke wrote. “John Hull, in adopting the craft of a silversmith, took the first step toward his diversified career of silversmith, merchant, mint-master, and banker, as well as…honored public servant.”

The ambitious young goldsmith also courted his stepsister, who agreed to marry him when she was twenty and he was twenty-two. The wedding of John Hull and Judith Quincy, in the Old Hall of their late parents’ house on May 11, 1647, was performed by none other than the sixty-year-old founder of the colony. “Mr. John Winthrop married me and my wife, Judith, in my own house,” Hull noted. A year later Hull joined the First Church of Christ in Boston, where the Reverend John Cotton, founder of the Congregationalist Church, still preached.

Hull’s star continued to rise. He became a corporal in the militia in 1649 and four years later was promoted to sergeant. His biggest boost came in 1652, when the General Court asked the twenty-eight-year-old goldsmith to set up a colonial mint. Counterfeit coinage was damaging trade, so the court asked Hull to standardize the coin by “fineness” and weight. Hull requested that his friend, Robert Sanderson, an experienced, London-trained goldsmith in his midforties from Watertown, become his partner. The two men converted bullion, Spanish pieces, and imported silver plate into shillings that bore the stamp of a tree on one side to indicate denomination. Their best-known coin was the pine tree shilling. When King Charles II objected to the colony’s presumption in coining its own money, someone was said to placate him by pretending the pine tree was a royal oak, symbol of royal longevity.

Pine tree shillings made John Hull rich. The court allowed him to keep one of every twenty shillings he coined. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who based a short story in Grandfather’s Chair (1840) on Hull, explained, “The magistrates soon began to suspect that the mint master would have the best of the bargain. They offered him a large sum of money if he would but give up that twentieth shilling which he was
continually dropping into his own pocket. But Captain Hull declared himself perfectly satisfied with the shilling. And well he might be; for so diligently did he labor, that, in a few years, his pockets, his moneybags, and his strong box were overflowing with pine-tree shillings.” This generous allowance was later reduced, but not before Hull had raised what historian Thomas Hutchinson called “a large fortune by it.” Twenty-two years later, at Samuel’s commencement, Hull’s great wealth was widely known.

Throughout the day following his commencement, Samuel packed his books and clothes and prepared to leave College Hall, where he had studied and slept since he was fifteen. Three years before, with bachelor’s degree in hand, he had decided to stay on for the master’s. Since then he had served as a resident fellow, tutoring younger students, and as keeper of the college library, which included the volumes bequeathed by a dying John Harvard in 1638. In recent months Samuel had begun his diary. His first entry, made the previous December, concerned his teaching. “I read to the Junior Sophisters the 14
^th
chapter of Heereboord’s Physic,” or Philosophia Naturalis, published in 1663. “I went to the end, and then read it over from the beginning” over four months. He recorded haircuts, local news (such as the execution of a seventeen-year-old Roxbury boy for “bestiality with a mare”), visits with friends and family, purchases of pipe tobacco, wine, beer, and “an hourglass and penknife,” and a gift of money to a slave.

By August 14, three days after commencement, Samuel was back in Newbury. For several months he helped his parents with the farming chores he had done as a boy, moving and milking cows, feeding cattle and hogs, shearing sheep, and repairing fences. For a farm family on the North Shore, late summer brought long days of harvesting corn, root vegetables, and salt-marsh hay.

But Samuel did not abandon the town. He rode to Boston and Cambridge several times to answer questions from the General Court regarding Harvard College’s “languishing and decaying condition.” In October the court dismissed every salaried officer of the college except President Hoar, and the college closed temporarily. Every student but three left the college in November. The following March Hoar resigned the presidency. He developed consumption, died that November, and was buried among the Quincys in Braintree.

During these months Samuel did not have a firm sense of his future plans or any apparent eagerness to clarify them. In the fall of 1674 he received a letter from Woodbridge, New Jersey, asking him to serve as that town’s first minister. This was an inside offer. Newly incorporated Woodbridge was named for an ancient acquaintance of his. The “learned and ingenious” Reverend John Woodbridge, as Samuel described him, an Oxford-educated nephew of the Newbury minister Thomas Parker, had served on the Massachusetts General Court, returned to Puritan England until the Restoration, and comfortably retired in Newbury. In November Samuel wrote a letter declining the pulpit in New Jersey. The only time he is known to have preached was the following April, when his beloved schoolmaster, the Reverend Parker, whose health was declining, asked Samuel to fill in at the Newbury parish. During the sermon an hourglass rested on the pulpit for the minister’s use. Samuel was “afraid to look on the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly,” he noted with regret, so his preaching wandered for “two hours and a half.”

We do not know how often, if ever, he saw Hannah Hull during that fall, but we do know he contacted her father. John Hull first appears in Samuel’s diary on November 14, when Samuel needed to deliver letters he had written to relatives in London and Northampton, England. He asked his younger brother Stephen to take the packet of letters to Boston so that “Mr. Hull” might convey them on one of his ships crossing the Atlantic.

In considering Samuel as the future husband of their only child, John and Judith Hull did not have to struggle to discern virtues. He was evidently of fine character, well educated, and from a solid background. Perhaps most important, they shared religious views. Both the Hulls and the Sewalls were deeply committed to Puritan theology, Congregationalism, and the “New England way.”

As for Samuel’s thinking, his choice of a partner was even more prudent than his forebears’ had been. Hannah, an heiress, “brought her husband a powerful family connection,” the biographer Nathan Chamberlain observed, so that Samuel would live “off the higher rank all his life.” Hannah Hull’s dowry, which John Hull paid Samuel in installments, was five hundred pounds, a massive sum. (For contrast, a minister’s annual salary was sixty to eighty pounds, plus several cords
of firewood.) Dowries, popular in medieval and early modern Europe, maintained class divisions, helped to secure a wife’s future, and gave couples a solid start financially. They existed in civil law in most of the world until the nineteenth century and still exist in some countries. To some degree a family’s wealth determines the age of the bride: the more wealth, the younger the bride can be because a young woman with a healthy dowry need not delay marriage.

“The Pine-Tree Shillings,” chapter six of Grandfather’s Chair, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fanciful nineteenth-century account of early New England, concerns “the mint-master of Massachusetts” who “coined all the money….”

When the mint-master had grown very rich, a young man, Samuel Sewall by name, came a-courting to his only daughter, [whom] we will call…Betsey…[with whom] did Samuel Sewall fall in love. As he was a young man of good character, industrious in his business, and a member of the church, the mint-master very readily gave his consent.

Following a long aside about the imagined plumpness of the “fine, hearty” Hull daughter, whose actual first name does not concern Hawthorne, the story continues:

On the wedding day, we may suppose that honest John Hull dressed himself in a plum-colored coat, all the buttons of which were made of pine-tree shillings. The buttons of his waistcoat were sixpences; and the knees of his small-clothes were buttoned with silver threepences…. On the opposite side of the room…sat Miss Betsey…blushing with all her might….

There, too, was the bridegroom, dressed in a fine purple coat and gold-lace waistcoat, with as much other finery as the Puritan laws and customs would allow….

The mint-master also was pleased with his new Son-in-law; especially as he had courted Miss Betsey out of pure love, and had said nothing at all about her portion. So, when the marriage ceremony was over, Captain Hull whispered a word to two of his men-servants, who immediately went out, and soon returned,
lugging in a large pair of scales. They were such a pair as wholesale merchants use for weighing bulky commodities; and quite a bulky commodity was now to be weighed in them.

Hawthorne’s Hull orders his daughter “into one side of these scales.” She obeys. He orders his servant to bring in a “huge, square, iron-bound, oaken chest.”

Captain Hull then took a key from his girdle, unlocked the chest, and lifted its ponderous lid. Behold! It was full to the brim of bright pine-tree shillings, fresh from the mint; and Samuel Sewall began to think that his father-in-law had got possession of all the money in the Massachusetts treasury. But it was only the mint-master’s honest share of the coinage.

Then the servants, at Captain Hull’s command, heaped double handfuls of shillings into one side of the scales, while Betsey remained in the other. Jingle, jingle, went the shillings, as handful after handful was thrown in, till, plump and ponderous as she was, they fairly weighed the young lady from the floor.

“There, son Sewall!” cried the honest mint-master, resuming his seat in Grandfather’s chair, “take these shillings for my daughter’s portion. Use her kindly, and thank Heaven for her. It is not every wife that’s worth her weight in silver!”

7

MY CHILDREN WERE DEAD

During the six weeks following Samuel and Hannah’s actual wedding, on February 28, 1676, he found not a single free moment to sit quietly with his journal recording his thoughts. Samuel’s first postnuptial note in his diary referred to public, not personal, affairs. “Governor Winthrop dies,” he reported on April 5. The deceased was not the first John Winthrop, who had officiated at Hannah’s parents’ wedding, but his son John Winthrop Jr., first governor of colonial Connecticut and the father of Samuel’s close friend Wait Still Winthrop. Wait Still, as he was called, had been Samuel’s Harvard classmate, although he left after two years without a degree, and was a member of Samuel’s church. Samuel attended the funeral and saw John Winthrop Jr. interred beside his father in the Old Burying Ground.

Samuel’s former college classmates were becoming his intimate friends. This phenomenon, now common, was just beginning, according to Harvard’s historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison: “It was…in [President Henry] Dunster’s day [1640–54] that the Class became an organic unit of Harvard College, with consequences affecting both the social and scholastic aspects of American higher education.” On May 24, after a lecture by Samuel Willard at the Third Church, Samuel was touched to be joined in his pew by his classmates Sam
Phipps, Tom Weld, and Edward Taylor. “God grant we may sit together in heaven,” he said. Of his ten classmates, seven became ministers. Isaac Foster preached in Hartford, Connecticut, and Samuel Mather served in nearby Windsor. In Massachusetts, Thomas Weld preached in Dunstable, Peter Thatcher in Milton, William Adams in Dedham, John Norton in Hingham, and Edward Taylor in Westfield. Taylor became “one of the choice figures of American colonial literature,” the scholar M. Halsey Thomas noted. One of Taylor’s 1682 meditations on the Canticle of Canticles, or the Song of Solomon, begins,

My dear, dear, Lord I do thee Savior call:

Thou in my very soul art, as I deem,

So high, not high enough, so great; too small:

So dear, not dear enough in my esteem.

So noble, yet so base: too low, too tall:

Thou full, and empty art: nothing, yet all.

Winthrop and other founders of the Bay Colony had always intrigued Samuel. Nine years before his wedding, as a fifteen-year-old scholar new to Harvard, he had walked four miles from Cambridge to Boston to hear the Reverend Richard Mather’s 1667 funeral sermon for the Reverend John Wilson, the first minister of the First Church of Christ in Boston. Richard Mather, Increase’s father, another founding divine, was the primary author of the essential Bay Psalm Book. Decades later, in a 1706 letter to Salem’s elderly minister John Higginson, who had arrived in 1629, Samuel would write, “I account it a great favor of God that I have been privileged with the acquaintance and friendship of many of the first planters in New England; and the friendship of yourself has particularly obliged me.”