Salem Witch Judge (38 page)

Amazed, he stopped, leaned on his cane, and watched the rainbow. It seemed to penetrate the cloud. The “eastern end” of the rainbow “stood upon Dorchester Neck, and the other foot stood upon the town” of Boston.

A rainbow was a biblical symbol of God’s covenant with Israel. As such it was a “cause for celebration,” according to David Hall. In the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis, after saving Noah from the flood, God tells Noah that he places a rainbow and clouds in the sky to show that he will send no more floods. “This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you…for perpetual generations: I do set my [rain]bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth…and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant….”

Samuel watched the rainbow for a long time so he could describe it in detail and try to discern its meaning. It was so bright that “the
reflection of it caused another faint rainbow to the westward of it. But the entire completeness of it, throughout the whole arch, and for its duration, the like has been rarely seen. It lasted about a quarter of an hour. The middle parts were discontinued for a while; but the former integrity and splendor were quickly recovered. I hope this is a sure token that Christ remembers His covenant for His beloved Jews under their captivity and dispersion; and that He will make haste to prepare for them a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

In referring to God’s “beloved Jews,” Samuel meant not only the Jewish people, whose conversion to Christianity he awaited, but also the saints of Boston, the members of his church.

Meanwhile, the physical structure of that church was crumbling. The male members of the Third Church had decided by a vote of forty-one to twenty to build a new church on the same spot as the old. Samuel opposed this decision. He preferred to renovate the cedar meetinghouse in which so much of his spiritual life, including his statement of repentance for the witch hunt, had occurred. In February 1729 he wrote a letter to the church’s pastors, his son and Joseph Prince:

That our meeting house needs repairing is apparent, and I apprehend that it ought to be done as soon as the season of the year will admit. But…the building of a new meeting house…is now unseemly. God in his holy providence preserving this, seems plainly to advise us to the contrary. This is a very good meeting house, and we have not convenient room to build a new one in, while this is standing. And considering the terrible earthquakes we have had, shaking all our foundations, it behooves us to walk humbly with our God and to observe the divine counsel given to Barach by the Prophet Jeremiah in the forty-fifth chapter, and to take care that we do not say in the pride and greatness of heart, “We will cut down the sycamores, and change them into cedars,” Isaiah 9:10.

This did not move the pastors. They proceeded with construction of a new church, during which the congregations of the Third and First Churches both worshipped at the First Church.

Samuel must have come round to this plan, for in the fall of 1729 he marked his initials on the granite cornerstone of the new Third Church. A stonemason carved the distinctive S’s into the stone, where they can still be found on the cornerstone of the Old South Meeting House, as the church is now known. Samuel was also asked to name that street, then Cornhill Road, which passed his church and his house on its way to Roxbury. Samuel chose to call it Newbury Street, after his hometown. In the nineteenth century, after that main road became Washington Street, “Newbury Street” moved about a mile northwest, into the Back Bay. Today Boston is a metropolitan area of several million people, but its population then was less than 15,000, according to John Bonner’s 1722 map, which indicates three hundred houses in Boston, Dorchester, Charlestown, and Roxbury. New England had only 30,000 inhabitants.

Many of Samuel’s best qualities—warmth, eagerness to solve problems, delight in making a good match—remained intact even as his body “mouldered down apace.” On October 13, 1729, seven weeks before he died, he wrote what was to be the final entry in his diary. The subject was the engagement of his granddaughter, Betty Hirst’s daughter Jane, who lived in his mansion. He enjoyed his power in such matters and tried to wield it wisely. That autumn morning, “Judge [Addington] Davenport,” one of his former colleagues on the Superior Court, “comes to me…and speaks to me on behalf of Mr. Addington Davenport, his eldest son, that he might have liberty to wait upon Jane Hirst, now at my house, in way of courtship.”

The elder Davenport, a member of Harvard’s class of 1689, told Samuel he would build a house for the couple if they married and give his son his pew at church. The son, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, had graduated from Harvard in 1719.

Judge Davenport’s generous offer pleased Samuel. He had spoken at length with his twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, as he had previously done with her mother and his other daughters. He knew she loved the young man.

At the conclusion of these pleasant negotiations Samuel would have liked to walk Judge Davenport to the gate, an obligatory gesture of courtesy to departing guests. Thirty years earlier he had paid a stonemason to carve and set up “cherubim’s heads” atop the two gateposts
at the street before his house. In Exodus 25:18–22, God asks Moses to make “two cherubims of gold,” with outstretched wings, “and their faces shall look one to another.” God promises Israel, “I will commune with thee from…between the two cherubims….” Over the decades—until January 1725, when a windstorm toppled the statuary—Samuel had enjoyed taking leave of guests between the stone cherubim with outstretched wings.

But now he was too feeble to walk outside. So “I gave [Davenport] my hand at his going away and acknowledged his respect to me and granted his desire.”

Soon afterward, Samuel’s maternal cousin, fifty-two-year-old William Dummer—“His Honor the Lieutenant Governor”—arrived at the mansion for a visit. Samuel “informed his Honor of what Mr. Davenport had been about; his Honor approved it much, commended the young man, and reckoned it a very good match.”

With this match Samuel Sewall’s diary concludes as a comedy. The Reverend Joseph Sewall joined Addington Davenport and Jane Hirst in marriage at the Sewall mansion on December 23, 1729, in the Great Hall in which the bride’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had exchanged vows.

Samuel Sewall went to bed for the last time a day or two after their wedding, which he was apparently too weak to attend. He spent his final short days and long nights in his bedchamber in the house that he and John Hull had each renovated, which Hannah’s grandfather had built almost a century before. He lay in the bed in which Hannah and all their children were born. He had prayed here at the deathbeds of his babies and his wives. Now it was his turn to die.

His son Joseph visited him on the day after Christmas. “My father seems to grow weaker,” he noted in his own diary, recording his father’s final days. Sensing the end was near, Joseph spent as much time as possible with his father.

Samuel could no longer sing a psalm, but he occasionally roused himself to pray. He repeated the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. His recitation of the Our Father was not flawless, like that of the Reverend George Burroughs on the gallows, but it too was heartfelt.

As Samuel pondered his final end and his just deserts, he said to Joseph, “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father.” Joseph
knew the reference, 1 John 2:1: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

“For what do you wish to pray?” Joseph asked him.

“That I might follow the captain of my salvation.” Father and son prayed together that Samuel would be saved and know God after death.

Every day he spoke less. Yet his mind remained keen. He listened attentively on December 29 as Joseph read to him John 11:23–27, in which Jesus tells Martha, a sister of the deceased Lazarus, “Thy brother shall rise again.”

Martha replies with faith. “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus says, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”

“Yea, Lord,” Martha says. “I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.”

Samuel considered this story, which he knew by heart, once more. He raised his head slightly to say something to his son. His long, white hair cascaded over his pillow. “We are beholden to Martha,” he said. Martha was one of the women around Jesus Christ whose examples had suggested that women’s bodies are as worthy of resurrection as men’s.

As so often happened to Samuel, his mind wandered back to sin. He could not forget the sinfulness that underlay his repentance as well as his continued effort to turn back to God. He murmured something about “the brazen serpent.”

Joseph knew that the serpent on a cruciform stake, resembling the cross of Christ, was a biblical image of saving faith. In Numbers 21 God sends a plague of serpents to punish his people for their lack of faith. Moses intercedes for Israel and offers that the people of Israel will repent. God tells Moses, “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.” The New Testament takes up this story in John 3:14: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

For a long time no one said anything. Samuel was praying. “Looking to Jesus,” he muttered. “He [is] the only remedy.”

Joseph stayed overnight at his father’s house on Wednesday, December 31, 1729. While the son slept for a few hours the servants kept a fire burning in Samuel’s room. Well before dawn on the first day of 1730, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s centennial, a servant summoned Joseph to his father’s bed.

Samuel’s breathing was labored. Still, he could pray with his son. Servants sent word through the dark town that the judge was near his earthly end. The Reverend William Cooper, husband of Samuel’s only surviving daughter, and the Reverend Charles Chauncy, the young First Church pastor who was married to Samuel’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hirst, arrived to join the circle of prayer. “Cousin Chauncy,” a namesake and great-grandson of Harvard’s second president, was doubly related to Samuel: his mother was a sister of Joseph’s wife. Chauncy, a member of the Harvard class of 1721, would preach at the First Church for more than half a century, become a patriot in the Revolutionary period, and die in 1787.

Three ministers attended Samuel at his deathbed—his twenty-five-year-old grandson-in-law; a son-in-law, thirty-three; and his forty-one-year-old son. Amid their many prayers Joseph observed that his father “seemed to enjoy the use of his reason.” This had almost always been true of Samuel.

“My honored father expired” at 5:35 in the morning on January 1, Joseph reported. The hour was “near the time in which 29 years ago he was so affected upon the beginning of the century, when he made those verses to usher in the New Year, once more our God vouchsafe to shine.” As the family and servants tended to Samuel’s body, the sun rose over the town that he once referred to, in a letter, as “our Boston peninsula, which I am a little fond of.”

At long last Samuel had completed his earthly career as a follower of Christ. Rather than “groaning under the heavy consequences of his cruelties,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne imaged his ancestor the Salem witch judge doing, Samuel had sought forgiveness and expiation of sin. As a result, Samuel freed his descendants from the guilt that Hawthorne apparently felt. In the preface to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne wrote of his ancestors, “I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby
take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them…may be now and henceforth removed.” Scholars interpret the A carved by the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale onto his own flesh as the author’s symbolic self-mortification for the sins of Judge John Hathorne.

Samuel Sewall’s servants wrapped his body in a linen pall for burial. They did not remove his hair shirt, my late great-aunt Charlotte May Wilson told me, because he had asked to be buried in it. Burial in a hair shirt was unusual for a Puritan, but it had precedents among devout Christians. Charlemagne, the ninth-century Holy Roman Emperor, and the twelfth-century martyr Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, were buried in their hair shirts. Decades earlier, during his memorable visit to the Winchester College library, Samuel had viewed Becket’s earliest-known portrait, in the early-thirteenth-century manuscript of the Life of St. Thomas Becket.

On Wednesday, January 7, a “fair cold day,” Samuel was interred in the family tomb. His body still lies there, in Boston’s Old Granary Burying Ground, alongside the remains of his wife Hannah, fourteen children, and more than twenty other relatives. Hundreds of people gathered for his funeral at the Third Church, of which he had been a member for fifty-three years.

At that church the next day the Reverend Thomas Prince, Joseph’s Harvard classmate, took as the text for his Thursday lecture 1 Samuel 7:15–17: “And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life; and he went from year to year in circuit to Bethel and Gilgal and Mispeh, and judged Israel in all those places: and his return was to Ramah, for there was his house, and there he judged Israel, and there he built an altar to the Lord.” This was an apt Scripture to honor a judge who rode from year to year in circuit to Bristol and Plymouth and York and always returned to Boston.

Scores of friends and family, including his widow, Madame Mary Sewall, who lived another sixteen years, his three surviving children, and their spouses and children, listened to Prince’s lecture. Prince, a fellow lover of the psalms, would later publish the Revisal of the New England Version of the Psalms.