Salem Witch Judge (31 page)

The dispute was whether Native Americans might, as a lost tribe of Israel, be another sign of Revelation. Samuel argued, “It is no heresy to say [that] Christ means the ten tribes [in] John 10:16.” This passage comes immediately after Christ says, “I lay down my life for the sheep.” He goes on, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, [and] one shepherd.” Proceeding logically, Samuel wrote, “If it be no heresy to say, the Ten Tribes are the sheep, why should it be accounted heresy to say, America is the distinct fold there implied? For Christ doth not affirm that there shall be one fold, but there shall be ONE FLOCK, ONE SHEPHERD!”

This argument suggested kinship between Native Americans and New England Puritans, who saw themselves as God’s covenanted people. To buttress the argument that the natives and the settlers were equal in God’s eyes, Samuel quoted a poem by the early Massachusetts divine Roger Williams. In 1636 the General Court had banished Williams from Massachusetts for his “dangerous” refusal to support the forced conversion and killing of Indians in the name of Christ. The Reverend Williams wrote:

Boast not, proud English, of thy birth and blood.

Thy brother Indian is by birth as good.

Make sure thy Second Birth, else thou shalt see

Heaven ope’ to Indians wild, but shut to thee.

Samuel admonished his fellow Englishmen to treat Indians better. “Instead of being branded for slaves with hot irons in the face, and arms, and driven by scores in mortal chains,” Indians should “wear the name of God in their foreheads, and…[be] delivered unto the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Describing the Indians as a lost tribe of Israel led Samuel back to the Jews, whose conversion to Christianity he and his peers considered another hopeful sign. “Now it is manifest to all that very considerable numbers of Jews are seated in the New World”—in Barbados, Jamaica, Port Royal, Suriname, and Curaçao. He anticipated that “these Jews will be converted before any great numbers of the Indians.” Some Catholics too were turning Protestant, he noted. After castigating Spanish colonists for their cruelty to Native Americans, he concluded, “What [evangelism] is done or prepared by Papists among Indians is not to be despised, but improved by Protestants. There may be some sincere laborers and converts among them….” Roaming over European history, he referred to Montezuma, Columbus, Pope Alexander VI (“that horrible monster” the second Borgia pope), Emperor Charles V, Calvin, and the English Puritan theologians Joseph Mede and William Twisse. His aim was to prove that America could be the New Jerusalem and its native people could be holy.

“Captain John Smith, in his History published anno 1624, affirms that he found New England well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well-proportioned people,” the native tribes. The newcomers from England “need not fear subsisting where ash, chestnut, hazel, oak and walnut do naturally and plentifully grow.” Samuel cited his own teacher, the Reverend Parker, stating that “the passengers [from England] came over upon good grounds, and that God would multiply them as He did the children of Israel. And as Mr. Nicholas Noyes, who was an auditor [to this] and is yet living, lately informed me, Mr. Parker was at this time (1634) principally concerned in beginning Newbury….”

This complex vision—of Captain John Smith, “Mr. Parker,” the Reverend Noyes, godly Indians, converted Jews, and even missionary Catholics—finally crystallized for Samuel in the body of an old Englishwoman whom he had known since he was a child. Mary Brown Godfrey, who was the first English baby born in Newbury after its settlement in 1635, was “yet alive, and is become the mother and grandmother of many children. And so many have been born after her in the town that they make two assemblies [meetinghouses], wherein God is solemnly worshiped every Sabbath day.” Decades later, in a second printing of this essay, Samuel would add a note on Godfrey: “She died April 14, 1716, in the 82 year of her age, having obtained a good repose as maid, and wife, and widow; and leaving a numerous posterity.” To him the physical presence of old Goodwife Godfrey and her large family was another sign, in addition to the magnificant landscape, of God’s affection for New England.

In its praise of the natural world, Samuel’s Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica is now considered a harbinger of the environmental movement. “Sewall’s aesthetic response…to the beauty of regular natural cycles and processes,” the literary scholar Timothy Sweet observed, “draws forth a hope of their continuance and of the covenanted community’s ‘privilege[d]’ relation to them. The interplay of social ecology and apocalypse thus links Sewall to later apocalyptic writers such as George Perkins Marsh and Rachel Carson.”

In the same vein many years later Samuel would compose a broadside poem, “On the Drying up of that Ancient River, the River Merrimac,” in which he would again connect “an image of environmental degradation with an apocalyptic text,” Timothy Sweet noted. This “bagatelle,” which Samuel published in January 1720, was prompted by a boundary dispute between New Hampshire and Massachusetts over the upper portion of the river. New Hampshire had won the dispute and proceeded to dam the river at its northern end, altering and reducing its flow to the south. As a boy Samuel had spent many happy hours on the Merrimac River, which ran less than a mile from his parents’ house. In his poem the river is an idealized embodiment of the Christian heaven, as Plum Island was in Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica.

Long did Euphrates make us glad,

Such pleasant, steady course he had:

Fight white, fight chestnut, all was one,

In peace profound our river run

From his remote and lofty head,

Until he with the ocean wed….

Dutiful salmon, once a year,

Still visited their parent dear:

And royal sturgeon saw it good

To sport in the renowned flood.

All sorts of geese, and ducks, and teal,

In their allotments fared well.

Many a moose, and thirsty deer

Drank to full satisfaction here.

The fox, the wolf, the angry bear,

Of drink were not denied their share….

At length, an ambushment was laid

Near Powwow Hill, when none afraid;

And unawares, at one hug sup,

Hydropic Hampshire drunk it up!

Look to thyself! Wachusett Hill;

And bold Monadnock, fear some ill!

Envied earth knows no certain bound;

In Heaven alone, content is found.

Powwow Hill, near where New Hampshire “ambushed” the river, was (and is) at 332 feet the highest elevation in Essex County. Its summit, on the northern side of the Merrimac River in the town of Amesbury, Massachusetts, just north of Newbury, affords views of coastal Cape Ann, New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and Mount Agamenticus in Maine. The hill and adjacent Powwow River, which was created by the damming of the Merrimac, were named for the Indian powwows once held there.

One of Samuel’s goals in writing Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, beyond locating the Second Coming, was to place Native Americans in God’s scheme. Preaching the gospel to the Indians was essential for two reasons. First, they were descendants of Israel. Second, their
conversion, like the conversion of the Jews and other Christians, would usher in the end of the world. Samuel had worried over this for years. He had funded a meetinghouse on Cape Cod and given money and time to the Society for the Preservation of the Gospel in New England. At the age of seventy-five he would send ten shillings per Sabbath to an Englishman named John Cleverly to preach to Indians at Arrowsic Island on the Kennebec River in Maine. In middle age, when he and Hannah had a house full of children, they hosted several gifted Indian boys, who lived with the Sewalls while preparing for Harvard. Samuel delivered the youths to college and paid for their educations.

In July 1714 he mourned the death of one of these teenagers, who was “an acute grammarian” and “an extraordinary Latin poet,” according to the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, who later became Harvard’s president. The youth, Benjamin Larnell of Taunton, had lived with the Sewalls for several years, during which he graduated from Boston Latin and began studies at the college. At the Sewall mansion during his summer vacation in 1714, Larnell developed a high fever. Samuel called for doctors and ministers to tend to his young Indian boarder. Then he put up a note at the Third Church requesting the community’s prayers. His son Joseph came to the house on July 20 to pray with Samuel, Hannah, and Hannah Jr. for the youth, who died the next day. The Sewalls held a funeral—“I and the president [of Harvard, John Leverett] went next [to] the corpse”—and buried Larnell in the New Burying Place. Samuel gave memorial scarves and gloves to the pallbearers. “God,” he asked, “graciously grant a suitable improvement of the death of Benjamin Larnell, student of Harvard College.”

Another Native American, John Neesnummin, knocked on the door of the Sewall mansion on the afternoon of January 30, 1708. Samuel had not previously met Neesnummin, a preacher to the Indians, who bore a letter of recommendation from the Reverend John Cotton III of Plymouth. Neesnummin was on his way to Natick and needed a place to stay overnight. Samuel suggested a nearby tavern run by Matthias Smith. The preacher departed for Smith’s tavern. An hour or so later a boy brought Samuel a note saying that Smith would not host an Indian, even one who preached the gospel.

“I was fain to lodge [Neesnummin] in my study” that night, Samuel noted. The next day “I send him on his way towards Natick, with a letter to John Trowbridge to take him in….”

Twenty years later Samuel wrote plaintively to the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, who was then the president of Harvard College, “Why isn’t New England a preface” to the New Jerusalem? “God will as readily tabernacle in our Indian wigwams as enter into them. What does signify the most sumptuous and magnificent buildings of Europe? I hold that He set his right foot in the New World and His left, in the Old.”

In a similar vein he wrote in April 1706 to the Reverend John Higginson of Salem to ask “Whether it be not for the honor of God and of New England to reserve entire and untouched the Indian plantation of Natick [Massachusetts] and other lands under the same circumstance?” His hope was “that the lying of those lands unoccupied by the English may be a valid and lasting evidence that we desire the conversion and welfare of the natives, and would by no means extirpate them as the Spaniards did.”

In 1721, after the court resolved to send an expedition to Maine to repell Indian uprisings, Samuel published a “Memorial to the Kennebeck Indians,” a journal of his two-week journey in the summer of 1717 to several Maine islands, then inhabited mostly by Indians, that the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel claimed for evangelical work. Setting sail from Boston on August 1, 1717, Samuel’s ship arrived in Casco Bay (now Portland, Maine) three days later. He stepped ashore on an unnamed island in Casco Bay and “desired the [other] gentlemen” with him, including the Massachusetts governor, Samuel Shute, “to take notice and bear witness that as attorney to the honorable Company for Propagating the Gospel in New England…I did enter upon and take possession of that island in the name and on the behalf of the company.” Samuel proceeded to cut a branch of a “thorntree” and “eat very good gooseberries and raspberries gathered there.” He gathered apples and “cut fresh and salt grass for the sheep aboard” their ship.

The ship continued north to the Kennebec River, turned inland, and “came to an anchor in the slack water of Arrowsic Head” around noon on August 7. “Many canoes of Indians came aboard,” among
them the Penobscot sachem, or leader, and “Caesar and August, the two sons of Moxis,” another sachem. On board the ship the English and Indian men shared an ox killed by the Indians and delivered by canoe. On the Sabbath, August 11, an English minister preached to the group beneath a tent on Arrowsic Island. The next day the Indians signed the Englishmen’s treaty. In response the English “gave them all to drink. The young men gave volleys, made a dance, and all was managed with great joy.”

During their negotiations, Samuel noted, the “Natives desired a line might be run” between the two cultures, “and [they] seemed to be against a [lot] more houses being built.” In considering the ongoing conflicts between English and Indians, Samuel felt the English bore more fault. Unlike many of his peers, he believed the Indians should manage their own lands and English settlers should respect the Indians’ rights. He had heard the Indians on Arrowsic express “a great reluctancy against erecting forts higher up the [Kennebeck] river.” In addition, they opposed “the arrival of a multitude of new inhabitants, lest they should prove unable heartily to embrace them…. But no proposals for fixing boundaries were offered to them” by the English. Samuel believed, “Boundaries are necessary for the preservation of honesty and peace among those that border one upon another.” It seemed “necessary to state and settle plain and lasting bounds between the English and the Indians, that so the natives may have a certain and established enjoyment of their own country, and that the English may have Deus Nobiscum”—“God is with us”—“legibly embroidered in their banners.”

Bit by bit over the summer and fall of 1697 Samuel delivered pages of his lengthy manuscript to the printers Bartholomew Green and John Allen, who set them in type and printed them. In dedicating this work, Samuel set aside his and William Stoughton’s differences over the witch hunt. The new court’s chief justice was now also the acting governor of the province, as he had been since Sir William Phips’s death in 1695 in London. Samuel dedicated Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica jointly “to William Stoughton, as Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of His Majesties’ Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, and to William Ashurst,” a leader in England of the “gospelizing” movement, “and the Company for the Propagation of
the Gospel in New England.” Samuel arranged with a Boston bookseller to sell the forthcoming book in his shop, where Sam Jr. was now working as an apprentice. Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica first appeared for sale in Boston on November 9, 1697.