Salem Witch Judge (34 page)

So many of the older generation were passing away. Ninety-two-year-old Simon Bradstreet had died on March 27, 1697, in Salem, where he first set foot on American soil in 1630. More than eight ministers officiated at the funeral of a man who, in the words of Shelby Foote, “seemed to concentrate in himself the dignity and wisdom of the first century of Massachusetts life.” As a pallbearer Samuel proudly “bore the feet of the corpse into [the] tomb” at the Salem cemetery now known as the Charter Street Burying Ground.

But it was the stern Stoughton, not the humane Willard and Bradstreet, who reappeared in Samuel Sewall’s dreams. During the February after Stoughton’s death Samuel dreamed, “I was in company with Mr. Stoughton and Mr. N. Higginson.” Nathaniel Higginson, a son of the Salem minister John Higginson, was a member of the Harvard class of 1670, thus a classmate of the late Reverend George Burroughs. A merchant who had emigrated to England and then Madras, India, Higginson had been governor of the East India Trading Company since 1692. Now that Stoughton was dead, Samuel hoped that the younger Higginson, forty-nine, might return to New England as its royal governor. Samuel was eager to find someone other than the man who would actually be chosen, Joseph Dudley, who was soon to become Sam Jr.’s father-in-law.

Sam Jr., twenty-three, was courting twenty-year-old Rebecca Dudley. The couple wed at her parents’ elegant Roxbury home on September 15, 1702, with the Roxbury pastor, Nehemiah Walter, presiding. Samuel had even “played Cupid” for his son the previous year, sending the young lady a piece of silver embossed with the Latin motto plus ultra, which means, “beyond which there is none.” Samuel included this note:

The enclosed piece of silver…bespeaks your favor for a certain young man in town…. By your generous acceptance, you may make both it and the giver great.

Madam, I am

Your affectionate friend, SS

Nevertheless, Samuel disliked Rebecca’s father. Joseph Dudley, a son of Thomas Dudley, the colony’s overbearing second governor, had been born in 1647 in Roxbury, one of seventeenth-century Boston’s tonier addresses. If Dudley’s legendary arrogance did not offend Samuel, then his Anglicanism and his fashionably aristocratic white powder wigs did. Increase and Cotton Mather despised Dudley, with whom they had a long public feud. Samuel could find both sides disagreeable, but he usually sympathized with the Reverends Mather.

A member of Harvard’s class of 1663, Dudley had married Rebecca Tyng, with whom he had a large family. Elected to the General Court in 1673, he showed loyalty to the royal governor Edmund Andros, who made him president of the council in 1684. Five years later, when Samuel’s friends ousted Governor Andros, they put Dudley under house arrest and then shipped both men back to England. The English court appointed Dudley to high positions in colonial New York and on the Isle of Wight. Now, though, he was back in Massachusetts, eager once again to assume power.

In a few years, following the 1702 ascension to the throne of Queen Anne, Dudley would be named Massachusetts’s royal governor. Five years after that Boston merchants would petition for his removal, saying he consorted with smugglers and other illicit traders. Their published attack on him, The Deplorable State of New England by Reason of a Covetous and Treacherous Governor, appeared in London in 1708. In a letter to Sir Henry Ashurst in England, Samuel Sewall noted hopefully that “Dudley’s government is near its end. If he should indeed be removed, I apprehend you would do this province excellent service if you could procure that Mr. Nathaniel Higginson might be made our governor….” These efforts compromised Dudley’s power, but he did not actually leave office until 1715. The historian Thomas Hutchinson concluded that Dudley “had as many virtues as can consist with so great a thirst for honor and power.”

The marriage of the progeny of Dudley and Sewall was not happy. Most of Sam Jr. and Rebecca’s children died early. There were other strains, some detectable to Samuel and Hannah, who often worried about the young couple. Sam Jr. was a “practical, fallible, ordinary man…beset by earthly troubles,” the historian Judith Graham wrote. He
left school early, did not attend college, struggled to find a career, and now farmed the family land in Brookline. He was also a justice of the peace and the first town manager of Brookline, which was incorporated as a separate town, with fewer than two hundred residents, in 1705. Now his marriage was in trouble.

One day in February 1712, when Samuel was alone with his daughter-in-law, he took the opportunity to ask her, in private, “What is the cause of my son’s indisposition?”

Rebecca Dudley Sewall did not reply.

Samuel asked, more pointedly, “Are you so kindly affectioned towards [one] another as you should be?”

“I do my duty,” she said.

Samuel dropped the subject. The next week he learned that his son had discussed their marital troubles with the Reverend Nehemiah Walter. Not long after, Samuel returned home to find his daughter-in-law and his wife engaged in “very sharp discourse.” Rebecca had accused Sam Jr. of seducing their maids. She “wholly justified herself,” Samuel noted, “and said, if it were not for her, no maid could be able to dwell at their house…. At last Daughter Sewall burst out with tears, and called for the calash,” her coach, in which to depart. “My wife relented also, and said she did not design to grieve her.”

Not long afterward, Samuel rode to Brookline to visit his son’s family. He found Sam Jr. dining alone, which worried him. Eventually Rebecca arrived. “I propounded to her that Mr. Walter might be desired to come to them and pray with them. She seemed not to like the notion, and said she knew not wherefore she should be called before a minister.”

Samuel explained that the minister seemed “the fittest moderator” of their difficulties. “The Governor [her father] or I might be thought partial” to one side.

In reply Rebecca pleaded, “I perform my duty…. How much I have borne….” During the next year Rebecca took a lover, William Ilsly, who moved into her and Sam Jr.’s house in January 1714.

Sam Jr., who was now thirty-five years old, moved back into his parents’ house. His parents, particularly his mother, urged him never to return to his wife, who on December 19, 1716, gave birth to an illegitimate baby boy.

“Nobody knows whose it is,” Governor Dudley admitted to Samuel, who had said the infant “should not be chargeable to [Sam Jr.’s] estate.”

Samuel had often prayed “for good matches for my children as they grow up, that they may be yoked equally.” With the exception of Sam Jr. and Hannah Jr. (who remained single), his prayers appear to have been answered. His younger son, Joseph, was everything Sam Jr. was not. Joseph succeeded at school, attended Harvard (class of 1707), and earned a master’s degree in divinity, following the early path of his prudent father. Outdoing his father in pursuit of a religious career, Joseph was ordained a minister, serving for more than half a century at the church his grandfather Hull helped to found. Humble, pious, and “of a deliberate and cautious disposition,” according the historian Hamilton Andrews Hill, Joseph Sewall was eventually offered the presidency of Harvard College, the highest honor given a New England divine.

Joseph’s choice of a wife was equally perspicacious. His betrothed, Mistress Elizabeth Walley, a member since 1711 of the Third Church, was a daughter of Samuel’s good friend Major John Walley, a fellow magistrate and Third Church member. Samuel liked this daughter-in-law so much that he gave her his wife’s wedding ring two months after Hannah died. “I hope you will wear it with the same nobility as she did who was the first owner of it.”

Samuel’s oldest daughter, Hannah Jr., who was infirm by her thirties as a result of injuries to her legs that never healed, apparently had no suitors. His second daughter, Betty, whose spiritual crisis passed without comment by her father, was first courted by Captain Zechariah Tuthill in 1699. Samuel, who learned that Tuthill was without “blot” and worth six hundred pounds, encouraged the courtship. One afternoon before Tuthill was to call on her, Samuel took seventeen-year-old Betty alone into his chamber. He read aloud to her the biblical story of Adam and Eve “as a soothing and alluring preparation for the thought of matrimony,” he explained. To his regret, Betty was nowhere to be found by the time Tuthill arrived. Only after the disappointed captain departed did Samuel discover that she had been hiding outside in one of the stables. “At last she came in,” he reported, “and looked very wild.”

Betty, it turned out, was already acquainted with the young man she would marry, Grove Hirst, of Salem, from her sojourns there. The couple had a complex courtship, which in its later stages her father actively guided. He sometimes advised her in writing, although she lived in his house. “Elizabeth,” began one such missive, dated October 26, 1699, which is forceful yet respectful of his seventeen-year-old daughter:

Mr. Hirst waits on you once more to see if you can bid him welcome. It ought to be seriously considered, that your drawing back from him after all that has passed between you, will be to your prejudice; and will tend to discourage persons of worth from making their court to you. And you had need well to consider whether you be able to bear his final leaving of you, howsoever it may seem grateful to you at present.

When persons come toward us, we are apt to look upon their undesirable circumstances mostly; and thereupon to shun them. But when persons retire from us for good and ill, we are in danger of looking only on that which is desirable in them, to our woeful disquiet. Whereas ’tis the property of a good balance to turn where the most weight is, though there be some also in the other scale. I do not see but the match is well liked by judicious persons, and such as are your cordial friends, and mine also.

Yet notwithstanding, if you find in yourself an immovable, incurable aversion from him, and cannot love and honor and obey him, I shall say no more, nor give you any further trouble in this matter. It had better be off than on. So praying God to pardon us, and pity our undeserving, and to direct and strengthen and settle you in making a right judgment, I take leave, who am, dear child,

Your loving father

The Reverend Cotton Mather performed the wedding of Grove Hirst and Elizabeth Sewall on October 17, 1700. Samuel gave the couple a “house of wood” with a large garden on Cotton Hill (later Pemberton Hill) in Boston that he had purchased more than a decade earlier as a rental property. The Hirsts had five children at the time of Betty’s death, probably of consumption, on July 10, 1716.

“When my flesh and my heart faileth me,” Samuel said at this daughter’s deathbed, “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Thus I have parted with a very desirable child. She lived desired and died lamented. The Lord fit me to follow, and help me to prepare my wife and children for a dying hour.”

His next-youngest daughter Mary’s beau was Samuel Gerrish, a young man from the North Shore. Gerrish’s father, the Reverend Joseph Gerrish of Wenham, had been a classmate of Samuel Sewall’s in Newbury. Mary informed her parents of her intentions in January 1709. One evening Samuel and Hannah prayed with Mary, who displayed “considerable agony and importunity with many tears.” Samuel said, “The Lord hear and help.”

Two days later, feeling “uneasy” after learning from Grove Hirst that Gerrish courted another young lady, Samuel inquired about Gerrish of his cousin. The cousin “answered not directly, but said [Gerrish] would come [visit Mary] if he might have admittance. I told him I heard [gossip that Gerrish] went to [court] Mr. Coney’s daughter. He said he knew nothing of that. I desired him to enquire and tell me. I understood he undertook it; but he came no more.”

Samuel’s efforts continued. Returning from a funeral on February 4, he asked the Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton, of the Third Church, whether Samuel Gerrish “courted Mr. Coney’s daughter.”

“Not now,” the minister said. “Mr. Coney thought his daughter young.” Samuel, placated, asked Samuel Gerrish to take a letter regarding the courtship to his father. A week or so later Samuel received the senior Gerrish’s reply and assent.

Twenty-three-year-old Samuel Gerrish, a member of the Third Church, was a bookseller, the town clerk for Boston, and the register of deeds of Suffolk County. He and Mary Sewall were married by the Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton that August at her father’s house. Mary was not quite eighteen. A little more than a year later, on November 9, 1710, she gave birth to a girl, Hannah. Eight days later nineteen-year-old Mary Sewall Gerrish died as a result of complications of childbirth. The baby died a few months after that, and Mary’s widower later married Mr. Coney’s daughter.

Samuel’s youngest daughter, Judith, rejected two suitors—the Reverend Thomas Prince, of the Third Church, who was a classmate of
her brother Joseph, and Colonel William Dudley, a son of Joseph and brother of Rebecca—before accepting one. The man she married was the Reverend William Cooper of the Church in Brattle Square, which had gathered in 1698 as Boston’s fourth church. At the Sewall mansion on May 12, 1720, a few hours after Joseph Sewall’s lecture at the Third Church, Samuel prepared to “join the Reverend Mr. William Cooper and Mistress Judith Sewall in marriage.”

First the bride’s father addressed the groom’s widowed mother. “The great honor you have conferred on the bridegroom and bride, by being present at this solemnity, does very conveniently supersede any further enquiry after your consent. And the part I am desired to take in this wedding renders the way of my giving my consent very compendious. There’s no manner of room left for that previous question, Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

To his daughter Judith, who was twenty, he said, “Dear child, you give me your hand for one moment, and the bridegroom forever.” And to his new son, twenty-four-year-old William Cooper: “Spouse, you accept and receive this woman now given you.” After the ceremony Samuel set Psalm 115 to St. David’s tune while his servants passed around glasses of sack-posset and plates of bride-cake.

Judith’s wedding was the only one that Hannah Sewall missed. She had “taken very sick” in the summer of 1717, perhaps due to malaria, according to historians. She suffered “extraordinary” pain and fainting spells. Her condition improved somewhat in August and September, but she “relapsed” on October 15. Samuel had servants move her to the dining room, on the ground floor, where she could more easily be attended. Dr. Thomas Oakes came to the house that evening and stayed with her and Samuel all night.