Salem Witch Judge (27 page)

The circuit court would enlarge his mental world, exposing him to new people and ideas. Some years later, on a September visit to Narragansett, Rhode Island, for the sitting of the court, Samuel happened upon a folio of Ben Jonson’s plays while his innkeeper prepared his dinner. He was struck by the language of The Poetaster, a “comical satire” that Johnson composed in 1601 soon after converting to Catholicism. Samuel was taken by the scene in the fourth act when characters dress up as Roman deities to praise wine, music, and “feasts of sense” such as “Delicious nectar for the taste; For the touch a lady’s waist.” He scribbled several passages in the traveling diary he carried in his waistcoat pocket:

Wake, our mirth begins to die,

Quicken it with tunes and wine.

Raise your notes; you’re out, fie, fie,

This drowsiness is an ill sign.

In the post-1692 years, though, such lighthearted abandon lay still in his future. Hannah nearly died at her next childbirth, in November 1694. “Mother [Hull] said that my wife was in great and more than ordinary extremity,” Samuel noted. He asked the Reverends Willard and Torrey to pray with Hannah in the bedchamber. Samuel struggled
uncharacteristically over this baby’s name. Should she be Sarah or Mehitabel?

At the baptism, which Samuel Willard performed on November 25, Samuel chose Sarah, which means “lady” in Hebrew. The Reverend Torrey had advised him, “Call her Sarah and make a Madame of her.”

Four months later, on March 17, 1695, amid a “great snowfall,” Samuel woke from a nightmare that “all my children were dead except Sarah.” Rising from bed in distress, he went to prayer. He reflected on “my omission of duty towards them.” Later that day he prayed, “The Lord help me thankfully and fruitfully to enjoy [my children], and let that be a means to awaken me” to Christ.

A few months later he was again roused in the night, but this time it was not a dream. At one in the morning on June 21 he heard the sound of his niece Jane Tappan’s “unusual gait” as she climbed the stairs to his and Hannah’s bedchamber. He saw Jane rush into the room and heard a flood of words. Hannah’s mother had taken ill. Judith Hull was unable to speak, probably due to a stroke, although the diagnosis was then unknown.

Samuel sent a servant to Cambridge to summon Dr. Oliver, the rare physician his mother-in-law trusted. Hannah stayed by her mother’s bed. After breakfast Judith gestured to Samuel as if she wished to pray. He asked her if she desired the Reverend Samuel Willard. She nodded. Willard came quickly and prayed. After his departure, Samuel and Judith were left alone. Observing her “great weakness,” Samuel “took the opportunity” to say to her, “Thank you for all your labors of love to me and mine.” Without addressing any particular misbehavior, he added, “I ask your pardon of our undutifulness.” Judith granted Samuel pardon without words.

Around noon someone in the room mentioned that Judith would need a constant “watcher.” Judith, who had said nothing since the day before, muttered, “I should need no watchers. I shall be above, at rest.”

Just before sunset, “to our very surprising grief and sorrow,” Judith Quincy Hull died, aged sixty-eight. Three days later her daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, and relatives and friends stood by as her body found its final rest in the family tomb.

The Hull property now belonged to the Sewalls. Within a month Samuel gave away a five-hundred-acre farm in Pettaquamscutt, in
Narragansett country, now Kingston, Rhode Island. This donation to Harvard College was for “the support and education at the said college of such youths whose parents may not be of sufficient ability to maintain them there, especially” those from Pettaquamscutt, “English or Indians, if any such there be.” As recently as the late twentieth century Harvard had a Sewall Scholarship Fund.

Even as Samuel helped to educate Indian boys, Indians remained among his enemies. In a letter to a relative in England in July 1695 Samuel observed, “We are grievously oppressed by our French and pagan [Native American] enemies by land and sea. Our blood and estates are running out apace. As several captives escaped inform us, our heads are set [priced] at a certain rate by the governor of Quebec, as foreskins of the Philistines were of old. God will in his time confound all the worshippers of graven images,” by which he meant Anglicans and Catholics.

Death affected Samuel’s children more deeply now. On December 23, 1695, Sam Jr. accompanied his father to the sunset burial of their longtime neighbor “Dame” Sarah Walker. She had been the widow of Robert Walker, who became a freeman of the colony in 1634. Samuel had prayed with the old woman on her deathbed, “insisting on God’s being a present help in time of need, and…that she might enter into His rest.” He meant to ask the Reverend Willard “to give her one lift more heavenward,” but Dame Walker died first. Samuel remarked, “God fulfilled his good word in her and kept her leaf from withering.” At home after the crowded funeral seventeen-year-old Sam Jr. “was exceedingly affected” by her death, “shed many tears, and is even overwhelmed with sorrow.” His father prayed for him. “The Lord grant that the removal of one of his best friends may put him upon seeking unto God betimes and making Him his hiding place.”

A week later Samuel kept a private fast day “with prayer for the conversion of my son,” Sam Jr., “and his settlement in a trade that might be good for soul and body.” Sam Jr. was apprenticed to a printer, which seemed a poor fit. He later worked for a Boston bookseller. While he ultimately chose farming as his career, bookselling was a practical choice for a wealthy young man not headed to Harvard. By 1719 Boston had five printing presses and many bookshops clustered around the Town House, according to a visiting minister, Daniel Neal,
author of History of the Puritans. This was the highest concentration of media in English America. “In the city of New York there is but one bookshop, and in the Plantations of Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, Barbados, and the Islands none at all.”

Sam Jr. was not the only Sewall child in distress. His thirteen-year-old sister, Betty, was undergoing a religious crisis. This was not unusual for a serious Puritan adolescent. Many of New England’s male founders experienced God’s grace for the first time at fourteen or fifteen. Betty had long shown spiritual sensitivity. At only eight she had burst into tears while reading aloud with her family the twenty-fourth chapter of Isaiah:

Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants…. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled…. Therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left…. Fear, and the pit, and the snare, [are] upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

“Sympathy with her draws tears from me as well,” her father had noted then. Many years later Joseph Sewall would write that Betty “was much [our father’s] delight.” She was “indeed very amiable, the flower and ornament of the family.”

In the fall of 1695, when Betty was thirteen, Samuel and Hannah sent her to Salem to spend several months visiting her uncle Stephen Sewall’s family. “Sending out” adolescent children to relatives or close friends was customary. In Betty’s case it may have contributed to her decision, several years later, to accept a proposal of marriage from the son of a wealthy Salem family.

Samuel never commented on the other Betty, the daughter of the Salem Village minister, who had preceded his daughter, during the summer of 1692, in staying at Stephen’s house. It is not even clear that Betty Sewall was aware of her predecessor or, if so, what she felt about her father’s central role in the witch hunt. We have no comment from Betty or her sisters on the witchcraft frenzy for the simple reason that we have no written record of any of their thoughts except those few utterances their father jotted in his diary.

Betty did needlework during her stay in Salem and was home again in Boston for her fourteenth birthday, on December 29, 1695. A few weeks later her anxiety about her spiritual estate spilled out before her whole family. At the family’s morning prayer session Samuel read aloud from a sermon by the Reverend John Norton on a passage in the Gospel of John—“Ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins; whither I go, ye cannot come”—that the sermon rendered as, “Ye shall seek me and shall not find me. Ye shall seek me and die in your sins.”

This terrified Betty. She would die in her sins. At first she said nothing. Her father went out to the Town House, and the rest of the family dispersed. Her terror stayed. To calm herself she took another religious text from a pile of her father’s papers. The sermon she happened upon was Cotton Mather’s “Why hath Satan filled thy heart?” This increased her fear.

Betty sat through dinner with her siblings and mother, who noticed she was “sad and dejected.” Finally unable to contain herself, Betty burst into an “amazing cry,” which “caused all the family”—from seventeen-year-old Sam Jr. to one-year-old Sarah—“to cry, too.”

Her mother asked Betty the reason for her distress. Betty would give none. Finally she admitted, “I am afraid I should go to Hell. My sins are not pardoned.”

Hannah asked her daughter whether she prayed.

“Yes, but I fear my prayers are not heard, because my sins are not pardoned.”

That evening after seven, when Samuel returned home, Hannah met him in the entryway and reported all that had happened. A month later he encountered Betty’s spiritual anguish directly. She came into his bedchamber one morning “almost as soon as I was up and tells me the disquiet she had when [she] waked.” She said, “I am afraid I should go to Hell…. I fear I am not elected” by God.

“What should I pray for?” Samuel asked his fourteen-year-old daughter.

“That God would pardon my sin and give me a new heart,” she replied. Samuel “answered her fears as well as I could, and [we] prayed with many tears on either part. [I] hope God heard us. I gave her solemnly to God.” Samuel of course shared Betty’s fear of damnation. More now than ever, he was aware of his own vileness.

He was exquisitely aware of the public nature of his shame. That summer, while chatting on the street with an old acquaintance named Jacob Melyen, he realized that Melyen was mocking him “very sharply about the Salem witchcraft.” Referring to the court’s presumption of the Reverend George Burroughs’s guilt on account of his physical strength, Melyen said to Samuel, “If a man should take Beacon Hill on his back and carry it away, I should not make any thing of it.”

A few months earlier, in May 1696, Samuel had been the only member of the General Court excluded from an elegant wedding. The merchant Samuel Shrimpton’s son was to marry his first cousin, Elizabeth Richardson, a daughter of Mistress Elizabeth Shrimpton’s sister. The Shrimptons invited “all of the Council in the town” and “many others,” Samuel lamented. “Only I was not spoken to.”

Feeling slighted, he defended himself in private. “I was glad not to be there,” he noted in his diary, “because [of] the [un]lawfulness of the intermarrying cousins….”

At the same time “it grieves me to be taken up in the lips of talkers and to be in such a condition that Colonel Shrimpton shall be under temptation in defense of himself to wound me, if any should happen to say [to him], Why was not such a one here?” To console himself Samuel prayed, “The Lord help me not to do or neglect anything that should prevent the dwelling of brethren together in unity. Oh, most bountiful and gracious God, who givest liberally and upbraidest not,” he begged, “admit me humbly to bespeak an invitation to the marriage of the Lamb.” This marriage—of Jesus Christ to the church of which Samuel was a part, thus in some sense a marriage between Samuel and Christ—was surely more worthy than the Shrimptons’ questionable nuptials.

“Let Thy Grace with me and in me be sufficient for me in making myself ready” for death. “Though I am beyond conception vile,” he went on, outdoing his human enemies in castigating himself, “out of Thy infinite and unaccountable compassions place me among those who shall not be left, but shall be accepted by Thee here and taken into glory hereafter.” Samuel did not record whether in the aftermath of the witch hunt he was brooding on the twenty innocent people he had sent to their deaths.

“And O Lord, forgive all my unsuitable deportment at Thy table the last Sabbath day, that wedding day,” a reference to his still wavering faith. “And if ever I be again invited…—Invite me once again!…help me entirely to give myself to Thy Son as to my most endeared Lord and Husband. And let my dear wife and all my children partake in this privilege and that not as umbras,” or as shadows of him, “but on their own account.”

Two weeks later Hannah delivered a stillborn son. Samuel did not name his “abortive son,” whom he buried on May 22, 1696. Making his private devotions he blamed his personal “sin, wandering, and neglect” for his son’s death.

It occurred to him later that on the very afternoon he had buried his dead baby he was excluded from a prayer meeting at the Reverend Willard’s house. Neither Samuel nor Hannah was “admitted of God to be there” at the Willards’ May 22 prayer meeting, he noted with regret. “And now the owners of the family admit us not. It may be I must never more hear a sermon there.”

Their daughter Betty’s troubles persisted. In May she told him she could not read the Bible without weeping. She “does not taste that sweetness in reading the Word that she once did,” he noted after praying alone with his daughter. That fall she spent three months with her Salem cousins at Stephen and Margaret Sewall’s house, working on needlepoint. Samuel visited her in November and “set” her to read Ezekiel 37, which begins,

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,…and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

Betty burst into tears. She could not continue. She told her father she was “a reprobate,” who “loved not God’s people as she should.” A few weeks later she returned home. The day she arrived in Boston two
Harvard students drowned while skating on Fresh Pond in Cambridge. One of them, John Eyre Jr., was the child of a longtime member of Samuel’s private prayer group, who “cried out bitterly” on learning of his son’s fate.