Salem Witch Judge (26 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
At the Sewall mansion on Sunday, November 6, 1692, Samuel Sewall, whose tenure as a witch judge was over, was called to judge and punish his younger son. Four-year-old Joseph “threw a knob of brass and hit his [ten-year-old] sister Betty on the forehead so as to make it bleed and swell.” Their grandmother Hull, who observed the toss, called on Samuel to discipline the boy. Entering the room, Samuel noted that little Joseph “sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the cradle, which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of
Adam’s carriage,” referring to the first Adam’s awareness of original sin. Samuel “whipped” his son “pretty smartly” for hurting his sister “and for his playing at prayer-time” on the Sabbath, “and eating when [he was supposed to] return thanks.”
Throughout November the governor and members of the General Court discussed how to structure the new court system. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, November 22, Samuel observed a private day of prayer and fasting. The witch hunt troubled him. In addition, he worried that he might not be able to continue in his role as a judge.
“God, pardon all my sinful wandering, and direct me for the future,” he pleaded. “God, save New England as to enemies and witchcrafts, and vindicate the late judges [of the Court of Oyer and Terminer] with fasting [and] with your justice and holiness…. Bless the assembly [the Governor’s Council, formerly the General Court] in their debates, and that [they] would choose and assist our judges.” He knew he was under consideration for the new court.
Three days later, on November 25, 1692, Phips formally created the Superior Court of Judicature, America’s first independent judiciary—independent, that is, of other governmental bodies. The new charter, which made Massachusetts dependent on England, “with highly centralized executive power conferred upon an appointee of the Crown,” according to the legal scholar Arthur Ruggs, empowered Phips, as royal governor, to create a court system. He ordered a new court, the Superior Court of Judicature, to handle major civil and criminal matters, leaving smaller matters to local justices of the peace. While local justices’ opinions could be appealed to the Superior Court of Judicature, the latter’s decisions could be appealed only to the Privy Council, in England. The Superior Court was to meet at set times throughout the province, from Maine to Rhode Island, and to follow English common law. In fact, according to Russell Osgood, author of The History of the Law in Massachusetts, this court would operate “carefully within the ambit of colonial statues, while filling in blanks based on English common law practice and manuals, such as Dalton’s Countrey Justice.”
More than three hundred years later that new court, now referred to as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, is the “oldest court in continuous service in the hemisphere,” Osgood wrote. Its creation
as an independent court is now considered the first step in the separation of powers in American government. In 1780, decades after Phips formed the Superior Court of Judicature, the Massachusetts Constitution formalized this separation of powers by creating a representative government with three separate branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. While 1692 lives in infamy because of the witch hunt, it lives in legal history as the date of the birth of the oldest independent court in the land as well as of the separation of powers.
Governor Phips rewarded Samuel for his service to the colony with a seat on this court. On December 22, after the lecture service at the Third Church, the governor swore in Samuel Sewall, John Richards, Wait Still Winthrop, and Thomas Danforth as justices of the new court. William Stoughton took the oath of office as the court’s chief justice. For Samuel Sewall the witchcraft trials served as a steppingstone, even as they burdened his soul.
Phips may have been slow to start the new court, but once he did so he and the court collaborated in quelling the witchcraft crisis. The new court “dealt humanely” with accused and condemned witches, Russell Osgood noted. The first meeting of the Superior Court of Judicature was held despite bitter cold in early January 1693 in Salem, where the stream of witchcraft accusations still flowed. Samuel and his colleagues heard fifty indictments that day. They acquitted forty-seven people. They ordered that the three suspects they convicted of witchcraft not be executed. They ignored all spectral evidence.
The chief justice, Stoughton, had reservations about this new course. “He held on to spectral evidence” even after everyone else abandoned it, Charles Upham noted. “He would not admit that he, or anyone concerned, had been in error.” As long as he lived, “he never could bear to hear any persons express penitence or regret for the part they had taken in the proceedings.”
In mid-January, at a meeting of the Superior Court of Judicature in Charlestown, Stoughton ordered that several condemned witches who were still in the Salem jail should “be hanged as soon as possible.” Someone notified Governor Phips, who sent a reprieve to Salem. The executions were stopped.
Stoughton was enraged. “We were…to have cleared the land of them [witches],” he said. “Who it is that obstructs the cause of justice, I
know not. The Lord be merciful to the country!” He stormed off the bench. Stoughton’s anguish was genuine, according to the legal scholar Edgar Bellefontaine. “The members of the Court of Oyer and Terminer really believed the Devil influenced daily events, and they believed in spectral evidence, but now they could no longer consider spectral evidence. This meant they should not have condemned and hanged all those people. Spectral evidence, the legal basis for all those convictions, was cut out from under them. The judges’ strength of character is impressive. Phips told them the law did not permit them to consider evidence that they knew in their heart to be true.”
Cotton Mather’s wife gave birth to their first child in March 1693. The baby, Joseph, lived only three days due to the lack of “a postern for the voidance of excrements,” Samuel Sewall reported. Cotton Mather observed the autopsy of his infant son, noted rectal abnormalities, and concluded that there was “great reason to suspect a witchcraft in this preternatural accident.” The rumor arose that the infant was a monster with a cloven foot, suggesting the Devil was involved. People whispered that Cotton’s wife was a witch. That accusation came to nothing, though, because there was no longer a witchcraft court.
That spring Governor Phips granted a general pardon and signed an order to release all witchcraft suspects who were still alive. More than a hundred men and women flowed from the jails of Salem and Boston. “Such a jail-delivery has never been known in New England,” Thomas Hutchinson remarked a century later. However, jailers did not release prisoners until their families paid for their prison expenses, which included the cost of chains, fetters, food, and portions of the salaries of jailers, judges, and court officials. If a prisoner died in jail, the family had to pay for the body. The Reverend Samuel Parris would pay nothing for Tituba’s release, so the court sold her, as a slave, to someone else.
One positive effect of the witch hunt was a changed view of Satan. After 1692 Satan was seen as less physical and more psychological or spiritual. Sermons and conversion narratives described “a less proximate Satan, one who tempted sinners and physically presided over hell, rather than one who preyed on people and possessed souls in the immediate, living world,” the historian Elizabeth Reis wrote. Samuel’s
minister Samuel Willard said in a 1701 sermon that while Satan can assume a human shape, his temptations are incorporeal. “Men and angels are of two distinct kinds, and were not made for sensible communion ordinarily one with the other.” As a result, “apparitions” of Satan “are beside the order of ordinary providence.”
After the witch hunt, Reis added, people believed that Satan “could be conquered spiritually” rather than physically. Thus “Puritans took more responsibility for their own sins and their own souls.” Rather than blaming Satan for sins, the ministers emphasized the role of humanity’s essential depravity and focused on how someone might choose to change himself. As Reverend Willard preached at the Third Church in 1694, sin is “all voluntary; there is no outward force laid upon them to cause them thus to do, but [sin] is a fruit of the native corruption which is in them.”
In the months and years following the witch hunt, the situation in Massachusetts did not dramatically improve. King William’s War continued for several years, at the cost of many lives on both sides. In 1693 alone French privateers seized scores of fishing and commercial vessels from Salem, depleting its fleet.
As for the judges of the witch court, the temptation was to look ahead, try to forget what happened, and never look back. All but one of them appear to have taken this path. Samuel Sewall, according to the historian Mary Beth Norton, was “the only judge who ever changed his mind about the trials.”
Some years earlier, while approaching his native country on board the America, Samuel had been reading A Practical Commentary, with Notes, upon the Epistle of James by the Puritan theologian Dr. Thomas Manton. “Blessed be God who in my separation from my dear wife and family hath given me” Manton’s treatise, which was published in London in the year of Samuel’s birth. Wishing to leave the book on the ship as a gift to the captain, he jotted some notes in his diary. “Look then not to the earnestness of your motions, but the regularity of them; not at what you would, but at what you ought. Men think ’tis a disgrace to change their mind…. But there is not a greater piece of folly than not to give place to right reason.”
Samuel had often considered the biblical story of King David, who is at first unaware that he has sinned. He takes Bathsheba, a married woman, as his wife and then, to conceal his adultery, arranges for the murder of her husband, who is away fighting David’s war. Not until Nathan, the prophet, describes to him his actions in impersonal terms does David become aware that his behavior was wrong. Only then can he say, “I have sinned against the Lord,” repent, and live in a new way.
At forty, Samuel was aware of himself as a man of prudence and piety. Looking back on his life, he was conscious of having made many decisions that advanced himself and his family in the world. This may be true of many people, as we do our best on the playing field, at school or at work, and at home. But for Samuel, prudent striving had led him unjustly to condemn and execute twenty other human beings. It was now time to abandon prudence.
In looking back on his work on the witchcraft court, Samuel felt he had violated the laws of humanity and the laws of God. There was no question that in accepting spectral evidence the Court of Oyer and Terminer had violated the laws of England. Samuel may have lacked legal training, but he inherited from his Puritan forebears a deep respect for English common law. In Puritan-run England during the
1640s and 1650s Parliament forged close ties with the Inns of Court, England’s law schools. In general, Puritans promoted common law as against royal policy, which they considered “Papist” or Anglican.
Far worse, though, was Samuel’s violation of the law of God. In convicting and condemning suspects without solid evidence, he had broken God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” With his colleagues on the Court of Oyer and Terminer, Samuel had violated the covenant between New England and God.
Even after he recognized his sin, he did not know how to respond. His personal writings do not clarify the timing of his awareness, although the Reverend Samuel Willard, who had opposed the witch hunt in sermons and in writing as it occurred, was surely his Nathan. It appears to have taken Sewall months if not years of prayer and Scripture study to determine to repent. He felt increasing remorse. He became aware of his lack of discernment. He felt that his will was not in concert with God’s. Fitfully he moved toward a spiritual stance that had been brilliantly articulated a century and a half earlier by the Catholic Counter-Reformation leader Saint Ignatius of Loyola: “We should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life.” No longer would Samuel seek health, riches, and honor. He might enjoy all these things, but to seek them any longer would prevent him from honoring God.
Still, his family life continued as before. By the beginning of 1693 Hannah was again pregnant. (The average time between her pregnancies, which began when she was nineteen and ended just before she turned forty-four, was nineteen months.) On Monday, August 7, “about 4 mane I go for the midwife; about 4 p.m. my wife was brought to bed of a daughter. Thanks be to God.” Samuel Willard baptized the baby on August 13. Samuel named her Jane, after his mother and his sister and her daughter, his niece who lived with the family.
A month later, on September 9, Samuel returned from a two-week court trip to Rhode Island to “find little Jane not well.” The Reverend Willard and others came to pray with the month-old baby, but Samuel feared the worst. “Methinks she looks like [baby] Henry in his sickness.” He prayed, “Good Lord, prepare her and us for the issue, and help us to choose the things that please You.” He recorded that “Nurse Judd watches” the baby. Before one on the morning of September 14,
Little Jane expires, much as Henry did, in [next-door] neighbor [Matthias] Smith’s lap, Nurse Hill and I being by.” The next afternoon at four, Samuel delivered another child to the grave. The Reverend Willard’s teenage son John “carried the corpse” into the tomb. Samuel prayed, “Lord, teach me to profit” from this blow. Jane was the sixth child he had buried.
Meanwhile, he warmed to his new judicial responsibilities on the Superior Court of Judicature. This circuit court covered widely spaced New England towns including Plymouth, Massachusetts; Bristol, Rhode Island; York in Maine; and Springfield and Westfield in western Massachusetts. He enjoyed the regular journeys to these towns, which he made at first on horseback and in later years in horse-drawn chariots or coaches. He relished the meals and hospitality he encountered at the taverns and inns, whose proprietors came to be his friends over the years.