Judge Sewall's Apology

by Francis, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780007163632
• ISBN10: 0007163630
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

The Salem witch hunt has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of injustice. Judge Samuel Sewall presided at these trials, passing harsh judgment on the condemned. But five years later, he publicly recanted his guilty verdicts and begged for forgiveness. This extraordinary act was a turning point not only for Sewall but also for America's nascent values and mores. In Judge Sewall's Apology, Richard Francis draws on the judge's own diaries, which enables us to see the early colonists not as grim ideologues, but as flesh-and-blood idealists, striving for a new society while coming to terms with the desires and imperfections of ordinary life. Through this unsung hero of the American conscience -- a Puritan, an antislavery agitator, a defender of Native American rights, and a Utopian theorist -- we are granted a fresh perspective on a familiar drama.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction	xiii
Part One AMERICAN TRAGEDY
The Shaggy Dog	3	(26)
``Our Hithertos of Mercy''	29	(24)
The First American Tourist	53	(24)
The Yellow Bird	77	(22)
``Vae, Vae, Vae, Witchcraft''	99	(16)
Oyer and Terminer	115	(18)
The King and Queen of Hell	133	(20)
Speaking Smartly About the Salem Witchcrafts	153	(26)
Judge Sewall's Apology	179	(28)
Part Two AMERICAN COMEDY
American Pastoral	207	(14)
The Selling of Joseph	221	(18)
``Wigg'd and Powder'd with Pretence''	239	(18)
``Impartial Light''	257	(26)
``The Concomitant Rain-bow''	283	(20)
``Wave after Wave, Wave after Wave''	303	(16)
Putting to Sea in Wintertime	319	(32)
``Rocqued Like a Cradle''	351	(6)
Notes	357	(28)
Bibliography	385	(12)
Index	397

Excerpts

Judge Sewall's Apology
The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience

Chapter One

The Shaggy Dog

During his adult life, Samuel Sewall would be haunted by an image in the book of Revelation: an angel, with a rainbow on his head, is standing with an open book in his hand. The angel plants one foot on the sea and the other on the earth. Sewall came to interpret that stance as meaning that the angel was straddling Europe (the earth) and America (the land discovered in the middle of the sea), and from that reading he derived a glorious vision of America's destiny. Perhaps one of the reasons why the picture had such imaginative power for him was that it seemed to sum up his own condition, from the moment of his birth, as someone with a foothold in both the Old World and the New.

Samuel Sewall was born on 28 March 1652, in the Hampshire villageof Bishop Stoke, a little north of Southampton, before dawn on aSunday. It gave him pleasure to reflect later that Sabbath light was thefirst to enter his eyes, as if it provided a spiritual basis to everything hesubsequently saw.

North America, as a European settlement, was less than half a centuryold, New England not much more than a quarter of a century, butalready this child born in Hampshire had roots there. The Pilgrim Fathershad crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620 and settled inPlymouth, just to the west of Cape Cod; ten years later, a fleet of shipsled by the Arbella brought a company of Puritans under the leadershipof John Winthrop to build a community in a natural harbor that theycalled Boston, and establish the Massachusetts Bay colony. Only five years after that, Sewall's father, Henry Sewall, arrived. He brought "Englishservants ... Cattel and Provisions sutable for a new Plantation"across the Atlantic with him, and took a grant of five hundred acres inthe settlement of Newbury, on the northern edge of Massachusetts Bay.

The immigrants had come across the ocean for reasons of conscience:the desire to practice their faith without harassment from authoritieswanting them to conform to orthodox Anglicanism. But theyalso had to make a living, and those who'd invested in their adventurewanted to make a profit -- mixed motives from the start, though bothelements reinforced community values and the need to make order outof chaos. John Winthrop gave a sermon as the Arbella made its way overthe ocean toward the New World. He didn't evoke the vast wildernessto which he and his party were heading but instead pictured the futureresult of their efforts, an exemplary city on a hill, which others wouldlook up to as an example of spirituality and civic harmony: "wee mustbe knit together in this worke as one man ... alwayes haveing beforeour eyes our Commission and Community in this worke, our Communityas members of the same body." As John Eliot, the great minister tothe Indians, would put it, "for as hell is a place of confusion, so heavenof order."

However, despite this need for cooperation on both spiritual andmaterial planes, certain other settlers were less orderly. It was a raw,challenging environment, attracting its share of adventurers and misfits.As early as 1627, one colonist had attempted to set up an alternativecommunity at Merry Mount, where members got drunk, danced rounda maypole, and hobnobbed with the Indians.

Henry Sewall was only twenty when he arrived in America, and thecattle and provisions represented a family investment. He'd been sent byhis father, Henry Sewall Sr., who joined him a year later. The latter'smotive in organizing this family upheaval seems to have been the standardblend of practical and spiritual reasons: farming on the one hand,a "dislike to the English Hierarchy" (that is, of the existence of bishopsin the Anglican church), on the other. But though the Sewalls were descendedfrom a long line of successful merchants and community leaders(several of them were mayors of Coventry), and though the prevailing culture among fellow Puritans in the early settlement was ofsobriety and austerity, Henry Sewall Sr. was immune to the civic respectabilitythat these combined traditions brought with them.

He was a rough, individualistic, cantankerous sort of settler, with anundercurrent of violence. His father left a will asking him to admit hismisbehavior toward his mother; his mother left one forgiving him butcutting him off with only a shilling. Almost as soon as he arrived inNewbury, he arranged a legal separation from his second wife, Ellen(Samuel Sewall was the grandson of her predecessor, Anne), and threeyears later he appeared before a grand jury on a charge of beating her.He got into trouble with the law for other reasons too, including contemptuousspeech and carriage to Richard Saltonstall, one of the leadersof the colony, and was bound over in the sum of £66 13s. 8d. Heseemed to have a problem with hierarchy in general, not just that of theEnglish church. After a row about whether the Newbury meetinghouseshould be moved from its site (conveniently near to his own house onNewbury's Lower Green), he moved out in high dudgeon, went acrossthe river, and settled in Rowley, where in due course he was in troubleagain, for disturbing worship and arguing with the pastor at the Rowleymeetinghouse. Rumor had it that he was slightly deranged. He was abrooding, difficult man of the frontier, while order was being assertedaround him in the face of the wilderness.

No such problems are evident with respect to Henry Sewall Jr.,though he was once fined a shilling for missing a town meeting. Hiscattle farming went well, and he accepted new grants of land as pastureover the years ...

Judge Sewall's Apology
The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience. Copyright © by Richard Francis. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience by Richard Francis
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