Salem Witch Judge (13 page)

Foreign affairs also affected Samuel, who felt himself a citizen of the world. News from Europe arrived eight weeks after the fact and was sometimes incorrect. One day in 1696 Samuel reveled in news from an English ship that Louis XIV, the powerful French king, was dead—an event that did not actually occur until 1715. The most significant political occurrence in the year he married Hannah was King Philip’s War, which had started the year before. “King Philip” was the
English name of the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, who battled the English for control of southern New England. Members of other native tribes fought on both sides.

Samuel tracked war news. On April 21, two weeks after the Winthrop funeral, “about fifty men” were “slain 3 miles off Sudbury.” Three days later at Braintree “a woman [was] taken, and a man knocked in the head.” On May 19 Captain William Turner of Boston killed “200 Indians” near the Connecticut River. Near Hatfield, Massachusetts, on June 7 “ninety Indians [were] killed and taken by [the] Connecticut ferry.” He learned on July 1 that Narragansett Indians had killed and scalped an Englishman, Hezekiah Willet, near Bristol, Rhode Island. “Jethro, his Negro [slave], was then taken” by Indians and then “retaken by Captain Bradbury.” Jethro “related that the Mount Hope Indians that knew Mr. Willet were sorry for his death, mourned, [and] combed his head.”

King Philip’s War ended in August 1676 when an Indian serving the English shot Metacomet in Bristol, Rhode Island. English troops beheaded and quartered Metacomet. Thousands of Native Americans and hundreds of English died in King Philip’s War, which had more casualties per capita than any other war on American soil, according to the historian Jill Lepore. Many frontier towns in Massachusetts, including Groton, Medfield, and Rehoboth, were burned to the ground. Fighting came within twenty miles of Boston, terrifying its people, many of whom lost relatives or friends. To the ministers, the war indicated God’s anger with New England for failing to keep to the covenant. As the Reverend Increase Mather reminded his congregation, the Lord afflicts those who do not obey.

Eventually, domestic matters demanded Samuel’s attention. Hannah was pregnant by late summer, and her subsequent episodes of flux became a recurring theme. At dawn on September 30, 1676, she rose from their bed to seek help from servants. That night she could not sleep. The next day, the Sabbath, she “had sundry stools.” Her mother was also ill, prompting Dr. Brackenbury to come to bleed Judith. The letting of blood, a standard treatment for various ills, was based on the Greek physician Galen’s theory that health results from a balance between bodily “humors,” which included phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood.

Two days later Samuel wrote, “Hannah S. had an extreme restless night. 8 or 10 stools. Dr. Brackenbury advises [her] to [take] diacodium…and approves pepper boiled in milk and water, alike of each.” Hannah received six ounces of diacodium, a syrup of boiled sugar and poppy heads. The next day she had “two stools. Considerable sleep. Six ounces diacodium.”

Samuel moved out of their room temporarily, choosing to sleep in “the chamber over the kitchen.” Dr. Brackenbury, who visited daily, “was loath to give an absolute purge unless necessity required.”

Hannah improved on October 5, so Samuel returned to their bedchamber. “Nurse Hurd watches [her]. But one stool…” He counted her stools until October 8, when he reported, “Last night no stool: and three sick persons”—Hannah, Judith, and a servant, Betty Lane—“had a very good night, praised be God.”

A few days later Hannah was feverish and “slept not so well as formerly.” He wrote to a relative, “My wife hath been dangerously ill, yet is now finely recovered and gaining strength. It has been a sick summer with us.”

Now that the couple expected a child, he had finally to decide on a career. During the fall of 1675 his father-in-law and several other prominent merchants of Boston had advised him, as he noted, “to acquaint myself with merchants, and invited me (courteously) to their cabals.” Samuel was deeply impressed by the advice of Hannah’s cousin-in-law the Reverend John Reyner, who advised him “not to keep over much within, but [to] go among men, and that thereby I should advantage myself.” Samuel was attracted to the businessmen and their ways, as well as to the challenge of burnishing a public image. After talking with Reyner, Samuel determined to begin his life as a merchant.

On January 10, 1677, while walking to Dorchester for a meeting of his prayer group, Samuel prayed fervently to God to “show me favor at the meeting” and “set home those things that were by You carved for me.”

The chosen text that day was the Canticle of Canticles, from the Old Testament, which the group considered a description of the marriage of Christ and his church, to which they belonged. In discussing Canticle 1:7—“Show me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou liest in the midday, lest I begin to wander after the
flocks of thy companions”—the Reverend Josiah Flint pressed each member “to look to your own souls.” Samuel did so earnestly. What work should I choose? he asked himself. More important, How can I be closer to Christ?

“Be sure not to deceive yourselves as to your union with Christ,” the Reverend Samuel Torrey warned the gathered souls.

Samuel felt that this “preaching and praying” was intended by God “for me.”

Three days later he went out to the chicken coop below the garden at the bottom of the property to feed his chickens. The birds gathered, clucking, at his feet as he did his twice-daily chore of mixing ground maize with water. Setting the porringer on the dirt, he thought to himself, “I give them nothing save Indian corn and water, yet they eat it and thrive very well. This food, however mean it may be, is necessary.”

He was convinced of his own need for “spiritual food,” something that would do for him what the maize did for his chickens. It occurred to him that his daily devotions—morning and evening prayers—lacked sufficient reverence and consistency. From now on he would pray more earnestly.

To a Puritan, prayer was essential. One reason was that human nature is sinful. Samuel may have sometimes doubted God, but he never doubted that we are born in sin, we die in sin, and the only escape from sin is God. However, as he often noted, sin can be difficult for the sinner to discern.

One chilly evening the previous month, he had been in the kitchen after supper. Through a window he could see an unfamiliar, bedraggled dog wandering by. It looked dangerous. “I am afraid we shall be troubled with that ugly dog,” he said to his father-in-law’s apprentice John Alcock, a man of nineteen who boarded with the family.

“Which way did he go?” Alcock asked.

“At the street door,” Samuel replied. The dog appeared to be near the front gate, on the main road. Alcock found a thick staff. He went out the front door. Seeing a low shape moving in the darkness, he sneaked toward it and swung the staff.

The “dog,” a nine-year-old boy who had just come to live in the Hull-Sewall house, dropped and screamed. A large weal rose on the boy’s
forehead. Samuel felt grief and shame. Only by “God’s mercy” did “the stick and manner of the blow” not spill the boy’s “brains on the ground,” Samuel realized. “The Devil (I think) seemed to be angry at the child’s coming to dwell here.” The boy, nine-year-old Seth Shove, son of a frontier minister, boarded with Samuel’s family while preparing for Harvard College. Several years hence Samuel, who paid for Shove’s education, would deliver him to Harvard. Financing the schooling of promising English and Indian boys was one of his many benefices, as was inviting young relatives and needy boys to live with his family.

Hannah, Samuel, and their families and servants spent much of January and February 1678 preparing for Hannah’s first birth. The Sewalls now needed their own maid, so Samuel hired his seventeen-year-old sister, Jane. She worked for him and Hannah until September, when she returned to Newbury to be married. In February, with help from servants, Samuel brewed the groaning beer to serve to guests who would visit during Hannah’s lying-in.

As he awaited the arrival of his first child, Samuel sought the counsel of Thomas Thatcher, minister of the Third Church and the father of his classmate. A minister’s son born in Salisbury, England, in 1620, Thomas Thatcher had studied medicine and theology with the Reverend Charles Chauncy, Leonard Hoar’s predecessor at Harvard, and become pastor of the new church in 1669. With Thatcher’s support, Samuel became a member of the Third Church on March 30, 1677, two days after he turned twenty-five. All that day he was overcome privately with his own “sinfulness and hypocrisy.” Before the congregation he and another man, Gilbert Cole, expounded on their personal experience of God’s saving grace. Following the testimony of the two men, a minister read aloud statements of two women who wished to join the church, Anne Gannett and Rebecca Hackett. This was the custom in a church that did not permit women to speak, following the apostle Paul’s rule, “A woman must be silent in church.” With a show of hands, the congregation voted to embrace the four new saints. Together they made a solemn covenant “to take the Lord Jehovah for our God, to walk in brotherly love, and to be watchful to edification.” The congregation joined them in prayer.

Three days later, on the evening of April 2, 1677, Hannah, who would not join the Third Church as a member until 1689, although
she regularly attended services, gave birth to a boy. Samuel did not observe her during labor and childbirth, but the process intrigued him. As he walked the midwife, Elizabeth Weeden, home at two in the morning, he was entranced by her portable stool, whose three detachable legs fit neatly into a bag, which he carried for her. He carefully recorded the names of the midwives who delivered his children and the women in addition to Hannah who suckled them. Several weeks postpartum he listed the treats that Hannah served her nurses and helpers in gratitude. One such menu included boiled pork and “fowls,” roast turkey and beef, minced pies, pastries, tarts, and cheese.

Hannah did not attend their baby’s baptism, which came within a few days of his birth. On Sunday, April 8, at the Third Church, Elizabeth Weeden carried the infant into the church halfway through the Reverend Thomas Thatcher’s afternoon sermon. At the close of the sermon Samuel held up his baby before the congregation. Thatcher prayed for him. “Then I named him John,” after the child’s maternal grandfather, “and Mr. [Thomas] Thatcher baptized him into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Samuel added a prayer that his son might be “washed from sin in the blood of Christ.”

Samuel’s new role as a father did not prevent him from feeling the need of God’s paternal protection. Early in May 1677 he made the mistake of going out one windy Friday morning “without private prayer.” Riding across Boston Common, where a company of soldiers was training, he tried to avoid the troops “because of my fearful horse.” But the soldiers “so transported” his horse that Samuel “could not govern him, but was fain to let him go full speed, and hold my hat under my arm. I took great cold in my ear thereby, and also by wearing a great thick coat of my father’s part of the day, because it rained, and then leaving it off.” He developed a sore throat and grew “very sick.” Only on Monday, after a prayerful visit from Increase Mather, was Samuel finally “mended.”

As he and Hannah adjusted to family life, he learned the ways of his father-in-law’s business. Samuel handled John Hull’s complicated accounts and much of his correspondence. Several merchants usually jointly invested in a ship, sharing the risk and the profit. They paid for and outfitted the fleet, hired captains, and purchased goods to export, such as dried and salted mackerel and codfish, hogsheads of alewives,
cedar shingles, barrel staves, wax candles, tar, beaver skins, cranberries, cattle, and horses. In addition, they purchased goods from Europe and the West Indies for sale here. These included dry goods—sieves, hooks, shot, nails, tobacco pipes, scythes, knives, needles, lead, chairs, books, cotton, and silk—as well as sugar, molasses, cotton, rum, salt, oranges, sweetmeats, and chocolate.

Samuel also helped his father-in-law manage his landholdings. Hull owned large tracts in Maine (then “the eastern part of Massachusetts Bay”), New Hampshire, Martha’s Vineyard, many parts of the Massachusetts mainland (including Boxford, Wilmington, Braintree, Winchester, Brookline, and Sherborn), and Rhode Island. During the 1680s Samuel purchased a sawmill in Salmon Falls, now Berwick, Maine, and a large interest in an iron works in Braintree, Massachusetts. Even today there is a lovely promontory in Narragansett, Rhode Island, called Point Judith, which Hull bought in 1657 for 151 pounds from Narragansett Indians and named after his wife.

Property claims were among Samuel’s greatest worldly concerns. “There was never a time in American history when land speculation had not been a major preoccupation of ambitious people,” the historian Bernard Bailyn noted. “Within a single generation of the first settlements, the acquisition of land had taken on a new form and a new purpose; speculation in land futures was fully launched as a universal business, and it developed quickly. By 1675, politically influential individuals in Massachusetts had been granted personal gifts by the legislature totaling 130,000 acres, in parcels far larger than any conceivable personal use could justify and beyond any possible personal use by their children and grandchildren.” Land was wealth, and land value could be expected to rise with the population. Men acquired land “not for its use but for its resale value as a commodity in a rising market.”

John Winthrop’s founding sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” almost seems to contradict this worldly aim. “If we break this covenant with God and seek for ourselves in this present world valuable and wealthy goods,” Winthrop cautioned, “the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, for that is the price of breaking the covenant.” He was trying to define the essential covenant between God and the Puritans. “Thus stands the cause between God and us…. We are entered into a covenant with him for this work and with each other…. He will
expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it….” Amassing possessions was allowed only in the service of God. This was a fine line, but a line nevertheless, which seemed to justify the accumulation of material wealth. Winthrop and his colleagues, the grandfathers of Sewall’s best friends, enjoyed vast estates that made them, in Old English terms, functional aristocrats, whereas in England their families were of the yeoman or gentry classes.