Salem Witch Judge (32 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
Samuel exulted, “The epistle [dedication] to the Lieutenant Governor, which is the last half-sheet, is wrought off” the press, “and the book is set to sale in Mr. Wilkins’s shop. One is sold.” A little later, “Mr. Flint of Norwich came into the printing-room. I gave him a book stitched up, which is the first perfect book I have given away.” The next day, at the Council Chamber in the Town House, Samuel “took the opportunity to present the Lieutenant Governor [Stoughton] with seven Phaenomena!” Over the next few days he handed out copies to a Mistress Hillers, “my brother in Salem,” the father of Sheriff Bradford, and the eighty-one-year-old Salem minister, John Higginson.
Samuel’s sense of pride in this work grew over the years. Near the end of his life, in 1727, he paid for the publication of a second edition of Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, with no changes. Fourteen years before that he had published an “appendix” to it, “Proposals Touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies Humbly Offered,” in which he promoted even more evangelizing of Indians in order to hasten the coming of Christ.
Although America “stands fair for being made the seat of the divine metropolis,” he wrote in this appendix, Americans should not be complacent with God. “Do you so love…to say,…Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly!
“Are you in earnest?” Samuel demanded. “Desire then, pray that the Gospel may be preached in all the world; in this Indian end of it. For till then, Christ himself tells you, He will not, He cannot come. The door is, as it were, shut against Him…. For love, or shame, get up! And open the door!”
In the waning months of the seventeenth century, with the labor of Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica behind him, Samuel turned his attention to another social problem, the New England slave trade. By this time wealthy men of Boston and other New England towns routinely bought and sold Native Americans and Africans as slaves. Samuel regretted “the numerousness of slaves at this day in the Province, and the uneasiness of them under their slavery.” Doubting that “the foundation of [slavery] be firmly and well laid,” Samuel decided to attack slavery at its foundation. He would do so systematically, as in Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica. He would present a thesis, list all possible objections to it, and then, using the Bible and other ancient documents, attempt to counter each objection.
His thesis, composed in July 1700, was, “Forasmuch as liberty is in real value next unto life, none ought to part with it themselves, or deprive others of it, but upon most mature consideration. It is most certain that all men, as they are the sons of Adam,…have equal right unto liberty, and all other outward comforts of life.” And “through the indulgence of God to our first parents after the Fall, the outward estate of all and every of the children, remains the same, as to one another. So that originally, and naturally, there is no such thing as slavery.”
Samuel had been prompted to compose this thesis upon returning home from the June 19, 1700, funeral of John Eyre, a forty-four-year-old member of his private prayer group who owned slaves. (It was Eyre who had cried out “bitterly” after learning of his son’s drowning while skating in Cambridge.) Following the burial Samuel spoke warmly to the widow, Katharine Brattle Eyre, whom he would later woo after Hannah Sewall’s death. “I pray God to be favorably present with you,” he said to Madame Eyre, “and to comfort you in the absence of so near and dear a relation.”
Walking home from John Eyre’s funeral, Samuel fixed on a thought. “Having been long and much dissatisfied with the trade of fetching Negroes from Guinea, at last I had a strong inclination to write something about it.” Over several days, while reading a Puritan theologian’s 1618 Commentary upon the First Chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul, written to the Ephesians, “I began to be uneasy that I had so long neglected doing anything” about slavery. “When I was thus thinking, in came Brother [Joseph] Belknap to show me a petition he intended to present to the General Court for the freeing of a Negro and his wife, who were unjustly held in bondage. And there is a motion by a Boston committee to get a law that all importers of Negroes shall pay forty shillings per head, to discourage the bringing of them.” And so he began.
The year before, Samuel had attempted to adjudicate a conflict between two slave owners over slaves who wished to marry. Sebastian, a “Negro servant of John Wait,” became engaged to “Jane, Negro servant of Debora Thayer,” but their owners could not agree to terms. In September 1699, Sewall noted, “Mrs. Thayer insisted that Sebastian might have one day in six allowed him for the support of Jane, his intended wife and her children…. Mr. Wait now wholly declined that, but freely offered to allow ’Bastian five pounds in money per annum toward the support of his children by said Jane….” After many rounds of negotiation between the owners, Samuel “persuaded Jane and Mrs. Thayer to agree to it and so it was concluded; and Mrs. Thayer [gave] the note of publication [of banns] to Mr. Wait for him to carry it to” the town clerk. Still, the couple had to wait eighteen months before their owners finally permitted them to marry, on February 13, 1701. Judge Samuel Sewall officiated at the ceremony.
Samuel owned no slaves. His numerous household employees, who served for a term with a salary, included his relatives and many other people of various backgrounds. But roughly one in five families in late seventeenth-century New England did own slaves. For instance, in September 1714 Samuel’s nephew and namesake, his brother Stephen’s son Samuel, then a twenty-four-year-old Boston merchant, advertised in the Boston News-letter “several Irish maid servants’ time, most of them for five years [indenture], one Irish man servant’s time…[and] also four or five likely Negro boys.” Historians estimate that by 1750, just twenty years after the death of Judge Sewall, New England had more than 10,000 slaves. Of that number, Connecticut had an estimated 6,400 slaves. Rhode Island had 3,700, and New Hampshire had 650. Massachusetts and Maine together had about 500 slaves, most of them in Boston.
New England’s slave trade had begun soon after the first English settlement. In 1638 Emmanuel Downing, Governor John Winthrop’s brother-in-law, suggested that colonists trade Indian captives of war for West Indian “Moors.” Downing, who was in the West Indies, introduced slavery to Massachusetts, where many traders and entrepreneurs soon relied on slave labor. Even liberal-minded Rhode Island was not immune to slavery. The port of Bristol, Rhode Island, was a major arrival point for slave ships, which boosted the local economy. England ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly of the slave trade in 1697, allowing competitors to join the profitable business. From that year forward the number of slaves in New England grew rapidly. Most slaves worked as shipwrights, rope makers, cooks, gardeners, potters, and seamstresses.
“How horrible,” Samuel Sewall wrote in 1700, “is the uncleanness, mortality, if not murder, that the ships are guilty of that bring great crowds of these miserable men and women [whom we are] forcing…to become slaves amongst our selves.” Many of his landowning English peers considered slavery necessary. Contemporaneous death records for Boston-area “Negroes” include “William Cottle’s Negro” (1667), “Robin, belonging to Lt. Stephen Greenleaf” (1689), and “Jack, belonging to Capt. Edward Sargeant” (1708).
In considering slavery, Samuel started with the Bible, in which, he believed, “Man stealing is ranked amongst the most atrocious of
capital crimes. God hath said, ‘He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.’ Exodus 21:16. What louder cry can there be made of the celebrated warning, caveat emptor!” The Old Testament figure Joseph, son of Jacob, whose brothers sold to Ishmaelite traders for twenty pieces of silver, “was rightfully no more a slave to his brethren than they were to him, and they had no more authority to sell him than they had to slay him. Neither could Potiphar,” the Egyptian who purchased Joseph from the Ishmaelites, “have any better interest in him than the Ishmaelites had…. There is no proportion between twenty pieces of silver and liberty.” It was a “pity there should be more caution used in buying a horse, or a little lifeless dust, than there is in purchasing men and women, [who] are the offspring of God, and their liberty is auro pretiosior omni,” or “more precious than all gold.”
Before raising objections to his thesis, Samuel mused that it would be better for New England to have “white servants for a term of years than to have slaves for life. Few [masters] can endure to hear of a Negro’s being made free.” Moreover, slaves’ “continual aspiring after” freedom “renders them unwilling servants.” He added that it was “most lamentable to think, how in taking Negroes out of Africa and selling of them here, that which God has joined together men do boldly rend asunder—men from their country, husbands from their wives, parents from their children. Methinks, when we are bemoaning the barbarous usage of our friends and kinsfolk in Africa, it might not be unseasonable to enquire whether we are not culpable in forcing the Africans to become slaves amongst ourselves.” Throughout the previous century, to the horror of many Englishmen, North African pirates known as Barbary corsairs had seized hundreds of British and European ships and sold thousands of their sailors into slavery in Africa. Samuel, who had sent money to redeem friends from “Algerian captivity,” appreciated the hypocrisy of condemning the enslavement of English and Europeans but not that of Africans.
Logically, he presented the standard arguments in support of slavery. “Objection 1” to his thesis was that Africans “are of the posterity of Cham, and therefore are under the curse of slavery. Genesis 9:25–27.”
He replied that no one should wish “to be an executioner of the vindictive wrath of God.” In addition, the standard reading of “this text
may have been mistaken.” Correctly read, “Black men…are not descended of Canaan, but of Cush,” an ancient name of Ethiopia. He cited Psalm 68, Jerimiah 13:23, and Ovid to prove that Africa “shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”
Objection 2: “Negroes are brought out of a pagan country into places where the Gospel is preached.”
He dismissed this argument with the line, “Evil must not be done, that good may come of it.” He added an example. “The extraordinary and comprehensive benefit accruing to the Church of God, and to Joseph personally, did not rectify his brethren’s sale of him.”
Objection 3: “The Africans have wars with one another. Our ships bring lawful captives taken in those wars.”
Samuel’s response was, “An unlawful war cannot make lawful captives.” He offered another example, aimed at his well-to-do Boston peers. “I am sure, if some Gentlemen should go down to Brewster [on Cape Cod] to take the air and fish, and a stronger party from Hull should surprise them and sell them for slaves to a ship outward bound, they would think themselves unjustly dealt with, both by sellers and buyers.”
Samuel concluded with Matthew 7:12, “Quaecunque volueritis ut faciant vobis homines, ita & vos facite eis,” the Golden Rule, generally translated as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He added an excerpt from an English law text, Ames’s Cases of Conscience:
Perfecta servitus poenae, non potest jure locum habere, nisi ex delicto gravi quod ultimum supplicium aliquo modo meretur; quia Libertas ex naturali aestimatione proxime accedit ad vitam ipsam, & eidem a multis praeferri solet.
A servitude carried out as a penalty cannot have a place in law, unless from a serious crime because the greatest penalty is in some way deserved, because liberty from a natural valuation comes close to life itself and is normally preferred by many to the same degree.
The judge who had sent twenty innocent people to their deaths was well aware, by their example, that “liberty…comes close to life itself and is normally preferred by many to the same degree.”
He anticipated the standard objection to his thesis, from the Old Testament, that was often used to justify slavery: “Abraham had servants bought with his money, and born in his house.” Samuel replied, “Until the circumstances of Abraham’s purchase be recorded, no argument can be drawn from it.” He cited Leviticus 25, Jeremiah 34, and Deuteronomy 15 in pointing out that “the Israelites were strictly forbidden the buying or selling of one another for slaves.”
“God expects that Christians should be of a more ingenuous and benign frame of spirit,” the judge added. “For men obstinately to persist in holding their neighbors and brethren under the rigor of perpetual bondage seems to be no proper way of gaining assurance that God has given them spiritual freedom.” Using a musical metaphor, Samuel said, “Our Blessed Savior has altered the measures of the ancient love-song and set it to a most excellent new tune, which all ought to be ambitious of learning. Matthew 5:43–44, John 13:34. These Ethiopians, as black as they are, seeing they are the sons and daughters of the first Adam, the brethren and sisters of the last Adam [Jesus Christ], and the offspring of God, they ought to be treated with a respect agreeable.”
There is caution, perhaps even defensiveness, in Samuel’s tone. He was aware that his “defense of liberty” was out of time and place. Nevertheless, he presented it in public. He titled the pamphlet The Selling of Joseph, a Memorial, and paid Bartholomew Green and John Allen to print it. (The complete text of The Selling of Joseph begins on page 300.) Bartholomew Green, a son of Samuel Green, patriarch of the famous seventeenth-century printing family, was a deacon of the Third Church who later took as his second wife Samuel’s niece, Jane Tappan, who had spent many years in the Sewall home. The Greens lived a few blocks up the main road, above his printing house.
Samuel received many “frowns and hard words” in response to The Selling of Joseph, many copies of which he handed out in Boston during the fall of 1700. John Saffin, a magistrate, merchant, and slave trader in his late sixties, attacked Sewall’s pamphlet in writing. Saffin had personal as well as political reasons for opposing Judge Sewall, who was then trying to help one of Saffin’s slaves, a man named Adam, to gain his freedom through the courts. In his own pamphlet, A Brief and Candid Answer to A Late Printed Sheet, Entitled, The Selling of Joseph
(1701), Saffin rejected Sewall’s comparison of the biblical Joseph with African slaves. In Saffin’s view, Africans were suited to enslavement because they were “deceitful,” “cowardly and cruel,” and “prone to revenge,” with “mischief and murder in their very eyes….” Africans benefited from living “among Christians,” he added. Colonial and provincial laws against stealing men did not apply to “strangers.”