Salem Witch Judge (28 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
Was this another omen? Everywhere Samuel looked he saw signs of God’s anger at New England. Bad weather cut short the latest harvest. Never “was there…so great a scarcity of food” as in 1696, Thomas Hutchinson noted a century later, “nor was grain ever at a higher price.” Ship after ship was lost at sea. Indians and French continued to raid frontier towns. And always there was the memory of the “late tragedy raised among us by Satan,” as the General Court officially referred to the Salem witch hunt.
As always when faced with trouble, the General Court and the governor ordered a day of fasting and prayer. This fast day, to be held on January 14, 1697, was aimed specifically at the Salem tragedy. On December 11, 1696, Samuel wrote the statement announcing the fast.
By the Honorable Lieutenant Governor, Council & Assembly of his Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts Bay; in General Court Assembled.
Whereas the anger of God is not yet turned away; but His hand is still stretched out against His people, in manifold judgments; particularly in drawing out to such a length, the troubles of Europe, by a perplexing war. And more especially, respecting our selves in this Province, in that God is pleased still to go on in diminishing our substance, cutting short our harvest; blasting our most promising undertakings;…And although, considering the many sins prevailing in the midst of us, we cannot but wonder at the patience and mercy moderating these rebukes; yet we cannot but also fear, that there is something still wanting to accompany our supplications. And doubtless there are some particular sins, which God is angry with our Israel for, that have not been duly seen and resented by us, about which God expects to be sought….
Wherefore it’s commanded and appointed that Thursday the fourteenth of January next be observed as a day of prayer and fasting throughout the Province…so all God’s people may offer
up fervent supplications unto him for the preservation and prosperity of his Majesty’s royal person and government and success to attend his affairs both at home and abroad; that all iniquity may be put away, which hath stirred God’s holy jealousy against this land; that He would show us what we know not, and help us, wherein we have done amiss, to do so no more. And, especially, that whatever mistakes, on either hand, have been fallen into, either by the body of this people, or any orders of men, referring to the late tragedy raised amongst us by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God, He would humble us therefore, and pardon all the errors of His servants and people that desire to love his name; and be atoned to His land. That He would remove the rod of the wicked from off the lot of the righteous; that He would bring the American heathen, and cause them to hear and obey His voice.
William Stoughton, as chief justice of the superior court, agreed to the January fast day. He urged, however, that there be no public apologies for the actions of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
The general chaos and despair hit Samuel directly in mid-December 1696 when his two-year-old, Sarah, took to her bed. Like several of her older brothers, Sarah had suffered from convulsions since infancy. In the late summer Samuel and Hannah had sent her to Newbury in hopes of curing her fits. She had returned home in the fall, and her seizures had continued. Now she appeared to be dying. He called for a doctor, Thomas Oakes, but there was little he could do to help the child.
Samuel woke on December 21 to “a very great snow” on the ground. This would prove to be New England’s coldest winter since 1630, when the English record keepers arrived. The ice on the harbor was so deep and wide that sleighs could drive several miles out to the tip of Nantasket, a peninsula to the south of the town. Ships could not enter the harbor to dock and unload, so trade stopped.
Samuel was most worried about his daughter. He dressed warmly and walked out to his pastor’s house, where he asked Willard “to choose your own time to come and pray with little Sarah.” That evening Willard came and prayed “very fully and well,” Samuel noted. Increase Mather and Ezekiel Cheever both called at the house to pray with the child.
The next morning Samuel sent a note to Willard requesting public prayer. He brought Sarah to bed with him and Hannah that evening. Nurse Hannah Cowell ministered to the toddler through the night in the parents’ bedchamber. At dawn the next morning, while Samuel and Hannah slept, Sarah “gave up the ghost” in the nurse’s arms.
“Dear little Sarah dies,” Samuel reported. Thinking of his own inattention, he added, “I thought of Christ’s words” in the Garden of Gethsemane to Peter and his other disciples, “Could you not watch with me one hour?”
Later that morning as the family prayed together, his other children were anxious and upset. The reading was Deuteronomy 22, which begins, “Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his sheep go astray, and hide thyself from them: thou shalt in any case bring them again unto thy brother.” This made Samuel “sadly reflect that I had not been so thoroughly tender of my daughter, nor so effectually careful of her defense and preservation as I should have been.” He prayed that “the good Lord pity and pardon and help for the future as to those God has still left me.”
The next day it was Sam Jr.’s turn to recite from the Bible. The youth elected to read the Gospel of Matthew in Latin. Listening to the seventh verse—in English, “If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless”—Samuel was overcome with remorse. He had “condemned the guiltless.” He observed that this verse “did awfully bring to mind the Salem tragedy,” which he had been going over and over in his mind.
On December 25, before burying Sarah, the family gathered for prayers. Eight-year-old Joseph read aloud Ecclesiastes 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven….” Betty, now nearly fifteen, recited the twenty-second chapter of the book of Revelation, which begins, “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” Samuel asked Hannah Jr. and Sam Jr. each to read a psalm. He spoke to each child in turn, “to our mutual comfort I hope.” He asked four boys who were sons of his friends to “bear my little daughter to the tomb.”
After the funeral the Sewalls and many other mourners returned to the mansion for the usual meal. Samuel went back alone to the tomb
to see “in what order things were set.” The tomb, which extended several steps below ground, was lined with bricks and covered with slabs of brown stone. No one was present but a gravedigger, who adjusted some coffins at Samuel’s request.
Samuel stood in the tomb, meditating on death. He was “entertained with a view of, and convers[ation] with, the coffins of my dead Father Hull, Mother Hull, Cousin [Daniel] Quincy, and my six children”—Johnny, Hullie, Henry, Stephen, Judith, and the unnamed stillborn. The coffins were stacked so “the little posthumous” Sarah lay two tiers above her grandfather Hull. “My mother [Judith Hull] lies on a lower bench at the end, with [her] head to her husband’s head. And I ordered little Sarah to be set on her grandmother’s feet.”
Samuel found this experience of communion with his dead relatives “an awful yet pleasing treat.” The tomb contained so many people he loved that it seemed to him a second home. “The Lord knows who shall be brought hither next,” he thought, aware that he might be next. He was already comfortable here and sometimes felt so heavy on account of his sin that he might already be dead.
A few hours later, at his mansion, Samuel arranged to send mourning rings as gifts to the Reverend Increase Mather, who did not attend the funeral because of his gout, Sarah’s doctor, Governor Phips, and the Reverend Willard. His minister, Samuel noted, had “prayed with us the night before” but chose not to attend the funeral. In his private meditations, the grieving father noted, “God helped me to pray more than ordinarily, that He would make up our loss in the burial of our little daughter and other children, and that would give us a child to serve Him, pleading with Him as the institutor of marriage and the author of every good work.”
A week after the funeral, on January 1, 1697, Samuel and Hannah were again not included in the Reverend Willard’s prayer meeting at his home. “We had no invitation to be there as is usual,” Samuel observed ruefully. This was the second time the minister had excluded him, both times immediately following the death of a child.
Willard did not record his reasons for excluding the Sewalls and avoiding their baby’s funeral, but his sermons offer clues. Two years earlier at the Third Church, Willard had preached that “there is a great noise and cry that some make, the Devil, the Devil, he hath
tempted me, he was too sly and hard for me, and a great deal of anger seems to be vented upon him.”
At the Town House on September 16, 1696, at a special prayer service for government officials, “Mr. Willard preached” and then “spoke smartly at last about the Salem witchcrafts,” Samuel noted in his diary. The minister regretted “that no order had suffered to come forth by [public] authority to ask God’s pardon” for the witch hunt.
Looking back on the events of the summer of 1692, the Reverend Willard believed that the Devil’s true role was to delude the accusers, “as a fruit of the[ir] native corruptions,” rather than to influence those condemned and killed. In 1694 Willard had warned his congregation, which included Samuel Sewall, “The Devil shall bear his own blame, and God will punish him for all the malicious practices which he useth against his people. But you must bear your own blame, which is due you for yielding to the temptation.” The Devil can only “keep us from a due sense of and sorrow for our own folly which we have acted in it, and thereby hinder our true and soaking repentance.”
On the morning of Thursday, January 14, 1697, as the town crier beat the drum announcing the gathering of saints, thousands of Bostonians made their way through ice and snow to the town’s three churches for the obligatory day of fasting and prayer. At the Third Church the Sewalls walked to their benches at the front. Samuel, now forty-four, and his sons, ages eighteen and eight, sat to the left of the aisle, across from his wife, now thirty-eight, in her mourning clothes, and three daughters, ages sixteen, fifteen, and five.
The congregation sang a psalm as the Reverend Samuel Willard strode up the center aisle toward the side of the church where the pulpit was. As the fifty-six-year-old minister passed Samuel Sewall, the judge reached out his hand to him. Willard paused just long enough to receive the note in Sewall’s hand, continued the few steps to his pulpit, and opened the service with a prayer to acknowledge the fast day. Slightly later he took up the paper Sewall had given him and looked at Samuel, who rose to his feet. Everyone else remained seated. In the silence, before hundreds of other saints, Samuel Sewall bowed his head.
“Samuel Sewall,” the minister began, addressing the unusually large congregation, “sensible that as to the guilt contracted upon the
opening of the late Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem, to which the order for this day relates…”
All eyes were on Samuel. The minister continued, “He is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of,” a reference to the other Salem witch judges and perhaps some ministers and other leading men. “And he desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all other of his sins, personal and relative.”
Finally, Willard prayed that “God, according to his infinite benignity and sovereignty, not visit the sin of [Samuel Sewall] upon himself or any of his, nor upon the land, but that He would powerfully defend him against all temptations to sin, for the future, and vouchsafe him the efficacious, saving conduct of his word and spirit.”
It was done. Samuel bowed deeply before sitting down on his bench. His repentance had begun. He hoped now that the Lord might help him to see, as Paul wrote in opening his letter to the Ephesians, “with the eyes of the heart.”
Following the service he walked home in the snow with his family. That afternoon the Sewalls read Scripture and prayed together, as always. He excused himself to write in his diary. He had recorded his thoughts about the witchcraft court sparingly until now because the subject seemed so confusing and shadowy. Now, though, he felt utter clarity as to his behavior on that court. He inscribed clearly, once again, the text that he had handed to Willard.
Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the guilt contracted upon the opening of the late commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem (to which the order for this day relates) he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins, personal and relative, and according to his infinite benignity and sovereignty, not visit the sin of him, or of any other, upon himself or any of his, nor upon the Land. But that He would powerfully
defend him against all temptations to sin, for the future; and vouchsafe him the efficacious, saving conduct of his word and spirit.
He experienced spiritual relief within a week. On the night of January 26, while the new court met at Charlestown, he lodged in the Charlestown house of Anne Tyng Shepard. Mistress Shepard mentioned to Samuel that John Harvard had built and lived in her house. John Harvard, a new immigrant to Boston in 1636, had died a year later in his thirties, leaving his library and half his estate to the proposed colonial college. The board of overseers of the new college named it after him in acknowledgment of his bequest.
That night in bed in John Harvard’s house, Samuel lay awake for hours. He was struck by “how long ago God made provision for my comfortable lodging this night, seeing this is Mr. Harvard’s house.” This led him to meditate on heaven, “the house not made with hands, which God for many thousands of years has stored with the richest furniture: saints that are from time to time placed there.” It occurred to Samuel that he might now “have some hopes of being entertained in this magnificent, convenient palace, every way fitted and furnished.” He felt the consolation of a new intimacy with Christ.