Authors: Eve LaPlante
Salem Witch Judge (33 page)
Saffin repeated the standard proslavery arguments that Sewall had dismissed. Abraham owned slaves, so “our imitation of him in his moral action is as warrantable as that of adopting his faith.” God intentionally set “different orders and degrees of men in the world.” Equality would “invert the order that God had set.” God ordained “some to be high and honorable, some to be low and despicable; some to be monarchs, kings, princes, and governors, masters and commanders, others to be subjects, and to be commanded; servants of sundry sorts and degrees, bound to obey; yea, some to be born slaves, and so to remain during their lives.”
Saffin’s reasoning disgusted Samuel. At first, though, Samuel made no public statement in response to Saffin’s attack. “I forbore troubling the province with any reply,” he explained. He continued in his judicial work to oppose chattel slavery and other racial inequities. And four years later, in 1705, when a bill to prohibit interracial marriage—an “Act for the Better Preventing of Spurious and Mixt Issue”—came before the court, Samuel revised The Selling of Joseph for publication in a London magazine, the Athenian Oracle. He also composed an opinion piece for a local newspaper, the Boston News-letter, in which he restated his earlier point that New England would fare better with servants than with slaves.
Samuel’s antislavery statements appeared seven decades before the Bill of Rights and a century and a half before the Civil War. The Selling of Joseph was in fact the first antislavery tract ever published in America. The historian David Brion Davis noted that Samuel’s “break with the traditional Christian acceptance of slavery as a necessary part of a sinful world would help to inspire…later radical opponents of slavery…. Despite the rarity and novelty of moral repudiations of slavery before the mid-eighteenth century,” Samuel’s essay was one of only “two early antislavery documents [that] serve as examples of the misgivings felt by a few Northern colonists before racial slavery
became both widely accepted and deeply entrenched.” The other document, written in 1688 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, was a petition against slavery that several Dutch-speaking Quakers sent to their local Quaker gathering. They stated that buying and selling humans contradicted their faith. The local meeting sent the petition to Quaker authorities, who “quietly buried it,” according to Davis. Both Puritans and Quakers engaged in the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic.
In a society that rejected racial equality—and had not yet conceived of civil rights—Samuel continued to work for these causes. In the summer of 1716 the Provincial Council passed a bill taxing Indians and Negroes at the same rate as cattle. Samuel voted against it. On June 16 of that year he wrote in his diary, “I essayed to prevent Indians and Negroes being rated with horses and hogs, but could not prevail.” A few years later, in a letter to another judge, he remarked, “The poorest boys and girls within this province, such as of the lowest condition, whether they be English or Indians or Ethiopians, they have the same right to religion and life, that the richest heirs have. And they who go about to deprive them of this right, they attempt the bombarding of Heaven; and the shells they throw shall fall down upon their own heads.”
The year 1700, in which Samuel composed The Selling of Joseph, also marked the end of a century. Despite Samuel’s loyalty to the Julian calendar, in this case he acknowledged January 1 as the start of a year. As the new century approached he sought to celebrate what seemed a harbinger of the Christian millennium that he hoped would soon arrive.
Well before dawn on the first day of the eighteenth century, Wednesday, January 1, 1701, four trumpet players hired by Samuel met on Boston Common, where cows still grazed. The brass band gave a blast before the sun showed over the ocean. The trumpeters walked the few blocks to the Town House, where they sounded their instruments until sunrise.
During the fanfare the bellman, who kept time for the town, declaimed a poem that Samuel had composed for the occasion. He may also have sung it, to the Old Hundredth tune, to which Samuel set it. In rhymed couplets, “My Verses upon [the] New Century” was addressed to God:
Once more! Our God, vouchsafe to shine:
Correct the coldness of our clime.
Make haste with Thy impartial light,
And terminate this long dark night.
Let the transplanted English vine
Spread further still: still call it thine.
Prune it with skill: for yield it can
More fruit to Thee the husbandman.
Give the poor Indians eyes to see
The light of life: and set them free;
That they religion may profess,
Denying all ungodliness….
So false religions shall decay,
And darkness fly before bright day:
So men shall God in Christ adore;
And worship idols vain, no more.
So Asia, and Africa,
Europa, with America;
All four, in consort joined, shall sing
New songs of praise to Christ our king.
One of the trumpeters, whom Samuel paid extra, rode to Cambridge to play a fanfare at the college. He delivered to its library a donation from Samuel, two volumes of Dr. John Owen’s Exercitations on the Epistle to the Hebrews, published in London in 1670. These volumes were destroyed in a fire in 1764, along with many other books donated to Harvard by Samuel.
After all the fanfares and the public reading of his verses on the new century, Samuel observed, “My mind was at quiet, and all seemed to run smooth.”
Samuel Sewall at age seventy-seven, painted by John Smibert in Boston in 1729.
As Samuel approached the age of fifty, his first family began passing away. His brother John died in his midforties in August 1699, and his older sister, Hannah Tappan, followed three months later. Samuel felt these losses deeply. “We [siblings] have lived, eight of us together, thirty years and were wont to speak of it (it may be too vainly). But now God begins to part us apace. Two are taken away in about a quarter of a year’s time. And methinks, now my dear brother and sister are laid in the grave I am as it were laid there in proxy. The Lord help me to carry it more suitably, more fruitfully, toward the five remaining; and put me in a preparedness for my own dissolution. And help me to live upon Him alone.”
Samuel learned of his father’s demise while on the legal circuit in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on May 16, 1700. This death, unlike those of his siblings, was expected. Two weeks earlier his father had told him, “I cannot go to meeting” at church “but I hope to go shortly to a greater assembly.”
Samuel rode south for the burial on May 19. He was pleased to hear the Reverend Christopher Tappan of Newbury call his father “a true Nathaniel”—a man without guile. “Lord,” Samuel prayed in private, “pardon all my sins of omission and commission toward my father and
help me to prepare to die. Accept of any little labor of love towards my dear parents.” To assuage his guilt over his perceived failures of attention to his father, he noted, “I had just sent [him] four pounds of raisins, which with the canary [wine] were very refreshing to him.” Samuel paid an engraver to record his father’s history on a gravestone carved with flowers and a winged skull.
Hardly six months later Samuel’s “dear mother” was dead. Due to extremely cold weather Samuel did not hear this news until the following day, January 14, when his nephew John Sewall arrived in Boston. That night, in a thick fog, Samuel and his oldest son set out for Newbury. They hired horses across the river, in Charlestown. They ate and lodged at a tavern in Ipswich.
In Newbury the family awaited its oldest son. As such Samuel “followed the bier” by himself. The January 16 funeral began around four at the meetinghouse across from the family house. The ministers prayed. The mourners wept. The grave digger began to cover the coffin with dirt.
”Forbear a little,” Samuel said to the grave digger. Turning to face the crowd, he went on, “Suffer me to say that, amidst our bereaving sorrows, we have the comfort of beholding this saint put into the rightful possession of the happiness of living desired and dying lamented.”
Everyone stopped, seeing that Jane Dummer Sewall’s oldest son, the forty-eight-year-old judge, had a speech. “She lived commendably four and fifty years with her dear husband, my dear father,” Samuel told the assembled people. “She was a true and constant lover of God’s work, worship, and saints; and she always with a patient cheerfulness submitted to the divine decree of providing bread for herself and others in the sweat of her brows. Now her infinitely gracious and bountiful master has promoted her to the honor of higher employments, fully and absolutely discharged from all manner of toil and sweat.
“My honored and beloved friends and neighbors!” he said, tears streaking his face. “My dear mother never thought much of doing the most frequent and homely offices of love for me, and she lavished away many thousands of words upon me before I could return one word in answer.” It occurred to him that his mother’s simple gifts were supe
rior to his sophisticated skills. “Therefore, I ask and hope that none will be offended that I have now ventured to speak one word in her behalf; when she herself is become speechless.”
He could not continue. As he noted later, “I could hardly speak for passion and tears.” He motioned with his hand for the grave digger to resume his work.
That evening at his parents’ home, “Mr. Tappan prayed with us,” Samuel noted. “The two brothers and four sisters being together, we took leave [of each other] by singing of the 90
th
Psalm, from the 8
th
to the 15
th
verses inclusively.”
8 Thou hast set our iniquityes
before thee in thy sight:
Our secret evills are within
thy countenances light.
9 Because in thine exceeding wrath
our dayes all passe away:
our years wee have consumed quite,
ev'n as a tale are they.
10 Threescore & ten yeares are the dayes
of our yeares which remaine,
& if through strength they fourscore be,
their strength is grief & paine:
For it's cut off soone, & wee flye
11 away: Who is't doth know
thine angers strength? according as thy feare
thy wrath is so.
12 Teach us to count our dayes: our hearts
so wee'l on wisdome set.
13 Turne Lord, how long? of thy servants
let it repent thee yet?
14 O give us satisfacti-on
betimes with thy mercee:
That so rejoyce, & be right glad,
through all our dayes may wee.
15 According to the dayes wherin
affliction wee have had,
and yeares wherin we have seen ill,
now also make us glad.
The next morning Samuel headed back to Boston on the rutted road he knew so well. Now that his mother was dead, “almost all my memory is dead with her.” As the familiar landscape receded, he felt he was leaving Newbury—and his early life—behind forever.
Several months later Samuel attended at the deathbed of the chief of the witchcraft court. Aware that seventy-one-year-old William Stoughton, who was both the province’s acting governor and chief justice of its highest court, was ill, Samuel had ridden to Stoughton’s house in Dorchester on court business on July 4, 1701. The old man lay on a couch in his parlor. “The court,” Samuel began, “is affected with the sense of your Honor’s affliction.”
Stoughton struggled to raise himself to a seated position but could not. He reached a hand to Samuel, who took it. “Pray for me!” Stoughton said. Samuel kissed his hand. Three days later Stoughton was dead.
A neighbor rushed into Samuel’s garden one day in September 1707 to announce that the Reverend Willard had taken ill. The sixty-seven-year-old minister was now the president of Harvard College, the symbolic leader of New England’s Congregationalist clergy.
Samuel raced to Willard’s bedside. The Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton was already there with a crowd, praying. At one point most people drifted away. Samuel stayed and so was with “my dear pastor” when he died. A “doleful cry rose throughout the house.” After
Willard’s grand funeral, his body lay in the Sewall tomb until his tomb could be built.