Salem Witch Judge (4 page)

Sewall was, in fact, a judge. As a member of Massachusetts’s ruling body, the General Court, he was a magistrate, elected by the freemen to make and enforce laws. Yet he was not a lawyer. No law school existed in America in Sewall’s lifetime, and the day was past when men with formal training in English common law, such as John Winthrop, immigrated to the New World. The Great Migration of English Puritans to Massachusetts, which began in 1630 under Winthrop, lasted only a decade. During the 1640s England offered opportunities for Puritan reformation. It became a commonwealth, Parliament executed King Charles I, from whose Catholic leanings twenty thousand Puri
tans had run, and Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, came to power. These changes kept most English Puritans home. While the first generation of English settlers in Massachusetts included London-trained lawyers, the next several generations of Bostonians, including Samuel, did not.

Blessed with a warm heart and an inquisitive mind, Samuel knew practically everyone in Boston, from the rich and famous to the ordinary folk living in simple houses clustered near his mansion. Boston, with roughly five thousand inhabitants, was the largest town in the colony, which included most of New Hampshire and Maine and still had fewer than a hundred thousand English occupants. (The West Indies, a much smaller territory, had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants in 1692, making it far more thickly settled than New England.) Samuel somehow “managed to get along with everyone,” the editor of his diary remarked in a footnote near the end of that lengthy tome. His intimates included the father-and-son team of ministers, Cotton Mather and Increase Mather, who lived in the town’s North End, and even “Mother” Elizabeth Goose (1665–1757), who lived across the road. Mother Goose’s son-in-law, the Boston printer Thomas Fleet, purportedly published the clever rhymes she told her grandchildren as Mother Goose’s Melodies for Children in 1719, although no copies of the broadsheet exist. Besides his many outside contacts, Samuel was devoted to his large family—wife, children, parents, in-laws, siblings, and cousins. “Perhaps better than any one late seventeenth-century Puritan, Samuel Sewall combined worldly success and piety,” Charles Hambrick-Stowe, a professor of Christian history, wrote in the late twentieth century. The historian Mark Peterson added, “Sewall’s religious beliefs and practices remained constantly at the center of his busy engagement in worldly affairs.” A century earlier the biographer Nathan Chamberlain deemed Sewall “the very type of the Puritan,” whose life was “thoroughly colored by” his faith.

Samuel Sewall was also a poet and musician, a man who often had a tune in his head. “I am a lover of music to a fault,” he confessed in a letter. One of his favorite activities was to lead his family in singing a psalm or two after supper. His wife was musical too. She played a virginal, an instrument similar to a harpsichord, which he retrieved from a repair shop in Boston in December 1699. He noted every wedding party and event at which he encountered a “consort” of instruments or
even a single dulcimer, violin, flute, oboe, or harp. He often gave a friend or relative a gift of a Psalter, a book of musical psalms. At the death of the musician Jacob Eliot, a founding member of Samuel’s church, he rued the loss of “such a sweet singer.”

Music was a deeply felt aspect of Puritan life, and more so in a singer such as Samuel, who for years served as the precenter, or deacon, of his church, leading the congregation in song by “lining out” the melody of the chosen psalm. The members of the Boston churches could sing English translations of the hundred and fifty psalms of David, as the Hebrew psalms are known, to one or more suitable psalm tunes. (Even Jesus sang psalms, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.) Many of the psalm tunes that Samuel knew were named for places, such as Windsor, Oxford, Low Dutch, Litchfield, York (or Stilt), London, and Saint David’s. Puritan congregations memorized and sang by rote these tunes, which were fitted to the metrical verse of the psalm text. The first English settlers of America had brought with them a dozen or so tunes. The first book ever printed in the New World was the 1640 Bay Psalm Book (The Whole Book of Psalms, Faithfully Translated into English Meter), the first New England Psalter, which is the equivalent of today’s hymnbook although it included no musical notes. The musical notes first appeared in the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book, published in 1698. These melodies, which John Calvin and other sixteenth-century Protestants had commissioned from composers such as the great Louis Bourgeois, are eminently singable. Some are still familiar as hymn tunes, such as the well-known Old Hundredth (“All creatures who on earth do dwell…”). Rejecting the set liturgy of the Catholic and Anglican mass and lectionary, the Puritans pared down their worship service to only three elements: prayer, preaching, and psalm singing. The prayer was improvisational, or free, and the preaching and psalm singing were solely from the Bible. Lacking pipe organs and other musical instruments, they relied for their music on the human voice.

Few people today know the emotional depth of this sacred music—it contradicts the dreary image of the dour Puritan—and no book in print contains both the melodies and words in English meter. “It is difficult for us today,” the music historian Percy Scholes wrote, “to realize the intensely personal application which the Puritans, and…all
countries under Calvinist influence, made of the psalms.” The Puritans’ devotion to music may be forgotten now, but it was so well known then as to be mocked. In London in 1610, while composing A Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare had a clown describe the men in a chorus as “three-man-song men all,” meaning they could sing skillfully in three parts. Shakespeare’s clown continues, in act 4, scene 3, “and [they are] very good ones; but they are most of them means [tenors] and basses, but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.” The only man able to sing the melody, a countertenor, was also a Puritan, who would set a psalm even to a popular dance tune.

Samuel’s mornings almost always began with a psalm. Tuesday, December 22, 1685, broke even colder than the days before. Samuel woke early, anxious over little Henry. “The child makes no noise save by a kind of snoring as it breathed and, as it were, slept,” he wrote in his diary. The sky was still dark. Servants built a fire in the kitchen downstairs and began preparing the morning meal of oatmeal or cornmeal mush, with milk or molasses, and johnnycakes.

Leaving Hannah to rest, Samuel gathered with his children and their nanny at the long oak table near the hearth for their morning devotions, reading from and discussing the Bible. That day’s Old Testament reading was the sixteenth chapter of First Chronicles, which Sewall read aloud. The children and nanny repeated it silently. After the fifteenth verse, “Be ye mindful always of his covenant; the word which he commanded to a thousand generations,” Samuel reminded Sam Jr., Hannah, and Betty that God’s covenant included even little Henry.

For Samuel and his peers, their Bible Commonwealth was the contemporary equivalent of the Promised Land, a place specially chosen by God for his people on earth. It was a visible sign of the covenant that Massachusetts’s founder, John Winthrop, described to the thousand Puritans who had followed him to America in 1630: “Thus stands the cause between God and us; we are entered into a covenant with Him for this work….” Winthrop’s remarkable sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he delivered either on board the Arbella while crossing the Atlantic or on the dock before the ship set sail, states his spiritual aim in creating New England: We must “do justly,” “love mercy,” and
“walk humbly with our God,” he told the crowd. “We must entertain each other in brotherly affection; we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities…. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together: always having before our eyes our…community as members of the same body.” In this way “the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us…. He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

More than half a century later, in a warm kitchen in the heart of that same city upon a hill, Samuel read and “went to prayer” on the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. The first two verses related directly to his family’s experience. Jesus tells his followers, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Samuel told his little children that Jesus was preparing a place in heaven for each of them. They listened, amazed.

The room grew light as the sun rose over the steely sea, revealing a bank of clouds. After morning prayers Samuel went up to check on Henry, whose faint breaths were far less robust than he wished. Though he resisted his son’s decline as much as possible, he did not doubt it was the will of God. One challenge of his faith was to accept every event as the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. Puritan preachers found numerous ways of expressing this idea, which Jesus had encapsulated in his prayer to his divine father in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified: “Thy will be done.” Years before, on a trip to survey a herd of wild horses that Father Hull kept in the wilderness of Waquoit on Cape Cod, in October 1677, Samuel had noted the autumn beauty of the South Shore beaches, cliffs, and meadows: “Seeing the wonderful works of God in the journey, I was thereby more persuaded of his justice, and inability to do any wrong.” Whatever happened, whether for good or for ill, was the just work of God. God’s justice is, of course, easier to appreciate when nature pleases than when it hurts.

Little Henry Sewall died in Nurse Hill’s arms that Tuesday morning as she was rocking him. “About sunrise, or a little after,” Samuel wrote in his dairy, “he fell asleep, I hope in Jesus.”

Despite the confidence Samuel had displayed in describing to his other children the place Jesus prepared for baby Henry, he could not be sure that his innocent child’s soul was actually in heaven. In Calvinist theology—the foundation of Puritanism—the sin of Adam and Eve stains even a newborn baby, so an infant’s salvation is not assured. Calvinism is founded on the belief that humanity is totally depraved (Samuel and contemporaries often used the word vile), and God is omnipotent. As the Reverend Cotton Mather phrased this equation, “God is all, I am nothing.” Salvation comes from God alone, not from human efforts, and before birth every person is chosen, or elected, by God for salvation or damnation, a phenomenon called double predestination. This theological foundation gave Puritans and other Calvinists deep anxiety about their spiritual estate. Am I saved? they wondered. Did God choose me? How can I be assured of my salvation? What are true signs of God’s great and mysterious grace?

Despite Samuel’s worries over his spiritual estate, he felt hopeful that God embraced his innocent baby. He, the child’s father, was a full member in good standing of the Third Church of Christ in Boston, as he had been since Hannah’s first pregnancy. He and Hannah and many other saintly souls and godly ministers had prayed fervently for the child’s salvation during its brief life. Now, for themselves, all they could do was continue to pray.

Nurse Hill washed and laid out the baby’s body. The older children gathered around the five-pound corpse. Except for their grandfather Hull two years before, the children had little direct experience of death. By way of comforting them and himself, Samuel reminded them that “a mansion is ready for Henry in the Father’s house.”

That evening after the children were asleep, Samuel and Hannah and Nurse Hill prayed together. Samuel began with John 15, “out of which Mr. Willard took his text the day Henry was baptized.” The eighth verse, “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit,” seemed providential. His and Hannah’s fruit had died, so one or both of them must have failed in their duties to God. This was his conclusion. He noted that Hannah concurred.

The next reading, Matthew 3:8–10, filled Samuel with foreboding. It began, “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance.” These were the words of John the Baptist to prepare the “way of the Lord.” Both Jesus and John began their ministries with a call to repentance. John said, “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is near.” Then he warned the Pharisees and Sadducees, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.” As Samuel considered this Scripture, he felt increasing fear, not for his innocent baby, whom he had entrusted to God, but for the state of his own soul.

The next morning he attended a private prayer and Scripture study meeting at the home of a neighbor, as was his habit on alternate Wednesdays. This gathering, by invitation only, was Puritan Boston’s equivalent of today’s home-based book club, prayer group, or soiree. It included women and could be hosted by a woman, but the discussion was always led by a man. Noted men who attended this gathering regularly included the merchant and sea captain John Alden, who was the oldest son of the Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden, several ministers—Willard and James Allen—and Josiah Franklin, who in 1706 became Ben Franklin’s father. At each meeting one member chose a Scripture passage for reading and explication. Samuel had attended these meetings for almost ten years, since the summer after his wedding, often in the company of his father-in-law and sometimes with his mother-in-law or wife.

That Wednesday in December 1685 the group gathered at the nearby home of Nathaniel Williams, a forty-three-year-old deacon of the Third Church. Williams was married to a daughter of the Reverend John Wheelwright, whom the General Court banished from Massachusetts for sedition in 1637 just before it banished Wheelwright’s outspoken sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson, for heresy. (Wheelwright and Hutchinson’s crimes entailed questioning the judgment of ministers of the colony who were allied with John Winthrop.) As its first order of business, the prayer group agreed to observe a fast day on account of various losses, including the death of the Sewall baby.