Salem Witch Judge (17 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
In 1659, during Samuel’s second or third year of study with Mr. Figes, Henry Sewall grew troubled by the “very little” rents he received
from his land in Newbury, Massachusetts. Leaving his wife and children in Baddesley, he sailed back to New England, where his father still lived, to try to improve his returns. In Baddesley that October, when Jane gave birth to a baby girl, also named Jane, Henry was not present. Seven-year-old Samuel was the oldest male in the house.
Puritan politics may have influenced the timing of Henry’s trip. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan leader, died in 1658. His son, Richard, succeeded him but lacked his father’s political skill. The Puritans lost power in 1660 when the decapitated king’s oldest son, Charles II, retook the throne. Learning of this, Henry Sewall decided to stay in Puritan America. He sent money and instructions to his wife, who once again began packing to move.
In late April of 1661, amid the “thunder and lightening” that accompanied the English coronation of King Charles II, nine-year-old Samuel and his older sister and three younger siblings and mother left Baddesley with two servants, John Nash and Mary Hobbes. They traveled to Winchester to await the pool wagons to London. Samuel never mentioned if he looked longingly at the handsome college where he might have been a ten-year-old scholar. He recalled a gaggle of Dummer relations taking leave of his family “with tears.” One man “treated us with raisins and almonds.” The Sewalls continued on to London and their ship, the Prudent Mary, which set sail from Gravesend in May.
In early July, after eight weeks at sea, Samuel grew anxious, he noted years later in his diary. The boy had tired of the ship’s cramped quarters, awful boredom, and horrendous smells. A hundred passengers and crew members slept on bunks hanging from rafters. Cattle and other beasts crowded the hold below. On deck there was “nothing to see but water and the sky.” Samuel “began to fear that I should never get to shore again.”
He did not discuss his fear with his mother, who had smaller children to manage. Quietly over several days he pondered it on his own. Suddenly he realized he need not be afraid. “The captain and the mariners would not have ventured themselves, if they had not hopes of getting to land again.” If the men in charge of the ship could hope for a safe landing, so too could the logical boy. Samuel eased into the final stretch.
On July 6, 1661, the Prudent Mary sailed into Boston harbor, which was dotted with islands. On first seeing the well-situated town that he would later call his home, Samuel observed a slender peninsula stretching several miles out to sea, almost entirely hemmed in by water. To the south lay the Bay of Roxbury. To the north flowed the Charles River, which Governor Winthrop’s crew had named for Charles I, whom they hated but hoped to mollify. To the west of the town lay a vast marsh and the tidal waters of the Back Bay. Several hundred timber-framed, thatched houses, two churches, a market square, and a Town House were perched on a square outcropping at the head of Boston’s “neck.”
The “greatest wants” of a town with such a setting, the explorer William Wood had noted in 1634, were wood and meadow lands. Bostonians had to fetch “building-timber and firewood from the [harbor] islands in boats, and their hay in loiters.” Yet there were benefits to Boston’s paucity of trees: its residents were “not troubled with three annoyances, of wolves, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes.”
What the town lacked in forest it made up for in hills. On its south side was “a great broad hill,” Wood observed, “whereon is planted a fort, which can command any ship as she sails into any harbor within the still bay. On the north side is another hill, equal in bigness, whereon stands a windmill.” Roughly between them to the northwest was “a high mountain with three little rising hills on the top of it,” which prompted John Winthrop to call Boston “Trimountaine.” From here a person could “overlook all the islands which lie before the bay, and descry such ships as are upon the seacoast.” William Wood concluded, “This town although it be neither the greatest, nor the richest, yet it is the most noted and frequented, being the center of the plantations where the monthly courts are kept. Here likewise dwells the governor: this place hath very good land, affording rich cornfields, and fruitful gardens; having likewise sweet and pleasant springs.” This was the region’s” chief place for shipping and merchandize.”
In the harbor on July 6, 1661, the boat carrying Samuel waited under anchor as the tide receded and the boat was finally grounded. The captain “kept aboard” Samuel’s mother and siblings. But Samuel, as the oldest boy, was “carried out in arms” by a man he did not know. He roamed the rocky shoreline, explored tidal pools, and picked berries. An
earlier arrival, Francis Higginson, had noted this coastland’s teeming edible wildlife: “Excellent…mulberries, plums, raspberries, currants, chestnuts, filberts, walnuts, smalnuts, hurtleberies and hawes of whitethorn near as good as our cherries in England, they grow in plenty here.” Samuel spent one more night on the ship with his mother and siblings. The next morning, at high tide, the crew rowed the Sewalls and their luggage to shore. Boston celebrated a Thanksgiving Day that week while Samuel’s father “hastened to Boston and carried his family to Newbury by water,” where Samuel was “carried ashore in [a] canoe.”
Twenty-eight years later, he again made the journey across the Atlantic, this time returning to his own wife and four children. The America left from Plymouth in Devon on October 10 and landed at Piscataqua, New Hampshire, on November 29 and Boston on December 2. Like the voyage to England, the return was difficult. In November Samuel composed an impromptu will. “If it should please God…to put an end to my life before I come to Boston,” he wished to leave volumes of books to friends, his watch to his wife “as a token of my love,” his new suit “with the chamlet cloak” to his brother Stephen, and his whole estate to “my dear Mother [Hull] and Wife.”
Samuel arrived home on the evening of December 2, 1689, laden with gifts. Among them were eight dozen silk stockings from Salisbury in three sizes (men’s, women’s, and youth); leather gloves and riding whips for his daughters, purchased at Romsey; linen from Oxford; nine gross of buttons (a gross is twelve dozen); silver spoons; small trunks marked with each of his children’s initials and year of birth; hooks and lines; hats, muffs, and mittens; biscuits and cheeses; maps of London, England, Scotland, and Ireland; and Bibles in Hebrew and Greek.
A few days later he took the oath of office as a magistrate of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. At a public house in Boston he drank toasts to the health of New England with fellow magistrates Wait Still Winthrop, William Stoughton, John Richards, and John Hathorne, all of whom would serve with him on the witchcraft court. In early February 1690 a ship departed Boston bearing the prisoners of the recent rebellion. Sir Edmund Andros, Edward Randolph, Joseph Dudley, and several other royalists were “sent home to the king.”
During his year abroad Samuel had done what he could to help Increase Mather restore the colonial rights and ways of New England. He had written letters to government officials who seemed likely to offer support. In April 1689 he had sent a missive to a Puritan member of Parliament, Thomas Papillon, who came from a Huguenot family that had escaped France’s persecution of Protestants. Explaining New England’s predicament in highly personal terms, Samuel wrote to Papillon, “Captain John Hull of Boston in New England…died in September 1683, leaving a widow and a daughter who is my wife, by whom I had an estate that might afford a comfortable subsistence according to our manner of living in New England.” This was polite understatement from such a wealthy man.
“But since the vacating of the charter…the title we have to our lands has been greatly defamed and undervalued; which has been greatly prejudicial to the inhabitants, because their lands, which were formerly the best part of their estate, became of very little value and consequently the owners of very little credit….” As a result, Samuel wrote, I “have little heart to go home before some comfortable settlement obtained whereby we might be secured in the possession of our religion, liberty and property.” Sewall’s final triplet echoes the “life, liberty, and property” coined by the English Puritan Samuel Rutherford in 1644 and copied by John Locke in his Second Treatise, and it predates by nearly a century Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The letter to Papillon continued, “I am informed some favorable votes have been passed in the House of Commons wherein New England was mentioned. I entreat your forwarding of such votes, as you have opportunity, in doing which you will be a partner with God who is wont to be concerned in relieving the oppressed….”
With such efforts Samuel had worked to secure his and others’ land titles. Now, back in Massachusetts, he was poised to lead.
The guest list for the party thrown by Samuel and Hannah Sewall on Monday, February 24, 1690, is a veritable who’s who of upper-crust devotees of the New England way. Simon Bradstreet, age eighty-six, “and Lady,” his younger second wife, Anne, were present at the long dinner table. There were daughters of the late John Cotton and the late Edmund Quincy Sr.—Mary Cotton Mather, whose husband, Increase, was still in London, and Samuel’s widowed mother-in-law. The Reverend Cotton Mather and his wife were present, along with the Reverends Samuel Willard and Joshua Moody with their wives—representatives of all three of Boston’s churches. Major Elisha Hutchinson and his wife sat next to the Reverend James Allen, who preached at the church that had cast out Hutchinson’s grandmother. Thomas Brattle, a merchant who had been in London on colonial business during Samuel’s time there, sat nearby. Brattle, a mathematician, astronomer, and member of the Harvard class of 1676, was serving with remarkable effectiveness as the treasurer of the still-troubled college. His father, of the same name, had been a founding member, with John Hull, of the Third Church. Brattle and Deputy Governor William Stoughton, who was also present, were both bachelors, a rare phenomenon in Puritan society. The common course for a high-status
gentleman was to marry in one’s early twenties and, following the death of that wife (likely in childbirth), to marry again and, if necessary, again.
During the party, a celebration of Samuel’s safe return from England, the Sewall children were elsewhere, unheard, in the care of servants. Most of the family’s servants were kept busy in the Great Hall, racing to prepare, deliver, and retrieve platters of delicacies for the guests. Wine bottles moved quickly around the long table. Samuel led the singing of portions of the sixth and fiftieth psalms to the Windsor tune. The mood was gay.
Or, rather, gay to a point. At some point—no one recorded whether at that moment they were enjoying roasted meats, stewed fruits, or cheeses—a servant delivered to Governor Bradstreet a dispatch just arrived from Albany in New York.
Simon Bradstreet scanned the dispatch with growing horror. To a stunned audience, he read aloud the “amazing” news, which Samuel called “bitterness in our cups.” Two weeks previous, around midnight, French and Indian forces raided Schenectady, twenty miles north of Albany, one of England’s northern frontiers in America. The French and Indians killed sixty English people—they “ripped up” children and “dashed out” their brains—and destroyed their village. Bradstreet was shocked. Only days earlier he had written with confidence to London that the winter cold “forbids the stirring of our Indian enemies.”
In the days following the doomed dinner party, Samuel learned that New England’s enemies, the allied French and Indians, planned more attacks. A large group of French and Indian soldiers was moving south from Quebec, the French stronghold, to New England. At dawn on March 19 the French and Abenaki Indians raided Salmon Falls in the eastern part of Massachusetts (now Berwick, Maine) and wreaked “dreadful destruction.” They burned twenty houses and the English fort there and killed or captured nearly a hundred people. This was “doleful news,” Samuel wrote. Even worse, the French and Indians appeared to be headed farther south, toward Boston.
The magistrates anxiously discussed the proper response. On the streets and in the Town House, they wondered, What can be done to stop these acts of terror? When will the French and Indians arrive in Boston to wreak destruction?
William Stoughton proposed “prosecuting vigorously the business against the Eastern French.” Stoughton, who is remembered now for his “cold-blooded” ferocity in prosecuting suspected witches, was a large man with small eyes, pursed lips, and straight hair parted in the center. Several years earlier, while serving as a councillor under Andros, he was considered too moderate toward the Crown, but he had gained Increase Mather’s favor by opposing Edmund Andros in 1689, prompting Mather to nominate him as deputy governor.
John Alden Jr. and Bartholomew Gedney also urged a strong response. They proposed to send English ships and soldiers to defeat the French at Quebec. This was an expensive proposition that the government could not afford. So the merchants and other wealthy men of Boston raised the money, largely among themselves, to pay for ships, supplies, and troops. Samuel donated hundreds of pounds and was one of the cabal that chose Sir William Phips, a forty-year-old sea captain from Maine, to lead the troops to Canada.
Phips was a colorful character. Born in 1651 on a farm alongside a saltwater tributary of the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers in what is now Woolwich, Maine, he was an unschooled son of Maine planters whose English ancestors had a sixteenth-century coat of arms. Following a five-year apprenticeship to a sea captain, Phips settled in Boston, where he gained a reputation for boldness. His “inclination,” Cotton Mather wrote, was “cutting rather like a hatchet than like a razor.” According to Edgar Bellefontaine, a legal librarian at the Social Law Library in Boston, “Phips was a pirate—with the management style and language skills of a pirate.” In the early 1680s, hoping to achieve wealth and social mobility, Phips sailed to the Caribbean in search of buried treasure. South of the Bahamas he discovered more than two hundred thousand English pounds of gold—“a great deal of money then,” Bellefontaine noted. Phips carried the treasure to England and turned it over to the government around the time of the ascension of King William and Queen Mary. In return the Crown knighted William Phips and gave him 10 percent of the bounty, transforming him into one of Massachusetts’s wealthiest men. Sir William Phips purchased a magnificent house in the North End of Boston, where he was an ally of the Mathers. Cotton Mather baptized Sir William, who had not been baptized as an infant, in March 1690 and
welcomed him into the Second Church. Increase Mather, who was then still in England, encouraged the Crown to make Phips the next governor of Massachusetts. That appointment would occur in London on January 26, 1692, after which the elder Mather and the new governor would sail back to Boston on the same ship.