Salem Witch Judge (36 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
Indeed, seventeen months later, Samuel married Mary Shrimpton Gibbs, a widow of fifty-four. Samuel’s son-in-law William Cooper, Judith’s husband, performed the ceremony at the Sewall mansion on March 29, 1722. Madame Mary Sewall, as she was now known, was a daughter of Jonathan Shrimpton and Mary Oliver. Her first husband, Robert Gibbs, was a Boston selectman and Third Church member who had died suddenly of smallpox in December 1702, “much lamented,” Samuel noted. It was “a great stroke to our church and congregation.” As for Madame Winthrop, Samuel remained friendly with her. When she died at the age of sixty, in August 1725, he and his son Joseph were present, and Samuel was one of her pallbearers.
As Samuel set out to create a new life with his third wife, his house was filled with people from his past lives. Several of his Hirst grandchildren lived with him. His daughter Hannah, who was an invalid by her thirties, never moved away. She broke her right knee in the summer of 1714, when she was thirty-four, and the next summer she tumbled down stairs and broke the other knee. “Lord, sanctify this smarting rod to me and mine,” her father prayed. Not long afterward, on January 6, 1717, she became a member of the Third Church, where her younger brother now preached. Her sixty-five-year-old father petitioned God “that it may be in order to her being taken into Heaven!” Her health worsened after 1720. She could no longer walk, her injuries having never fully healed. She took a bedchamber on the first floor, where she received visitors and engaged in family life. For more than two years she did not leave the house. One of her legs became infected. In the summer of 1724, apparently, it became gangrenous.
Samuel did the only thing he could to help her. He frequently invited ministers, including her brother and brother-in-law, to come pray with her. At night, when Hannah Jr. was in too much pain to sleep, he and his wife, Mary, and her sister sat with her. To pass the time Samuel prayed with his daughter and read or sang psalms.
In the midst of this crisis, Harvard College invited Joseph Sewall, thirty-five, to be its president. This infuriated Cotton Mather, who
wanted the job, which his father had once held. Cotton Mather hissed that the college had chosen “a modest young man, of whose piety (and little else) everyone gives a laudable character.” Satan “has quarters at the College,” Mather added. Joseph, though not privy to Cotton Mather’s private thoughts as recorded in his diary, declined the offer because he preferred not to leave Boston and its Third Church.
Cotton Mather also kept private his feelings about Joseph’s father’s public acceptance of blame for the witch hunt. According to his diary entry on the day after Samuel’s public apology, the minister could not sleep. “Discouraging thoughts…afflicted me,” he confessed, “as if unavoidable marks of divine displeasure must overtake my family for [my] not appearing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the judges [of the witchcraft court], when the inextricable storm from the invisible world assaulted the country.” Unlike Samuel Sewall and Samuel Willard, Cotton Mather suspected that “wicked sorceries” and “Devils” were to blame for the crisis. But he lacked confidence in his view and feared God’s wrath. He continued to ponder and study witchcraft in a manner that had the flavor of incipient psychiatry. His sincere interest in medicine and science led Cotton Mather in the summer of 1721 to pioneer the use of inoculation against smallpox, for which he received much public ridicule. For most educated men of Boston, including Samuel Sewall, such medical advancements were almost as frightening as witchcraft.
In the Sewall mansion on Sunday, August 16, 1724, at two in the morning, Samuel heard his daughter Hannah “expostulate.” He rose from bed and went downstairs to her. She could not sleep and was afraid. He called his wife, who joined them at Hannah’s bedside. Samuel comforted Hannah by reading the Twenty-third Psalm. By dawn Joseph Sewall and William Cooper were in the room praying with Hannah. Samuel recited Psalms 34 and 27. He sent notes to be posted on the doors of the First and Third Churches: “Prayers desired for Hannah Sewall as drawing near her end.”
Samuel left the house to attend the morning service at his church. Upon his return a little more than an hour later, he found his oldest daughter already laid out. She had expired at half past ten, while he was at meeting. Sitting beside her body, now at rest, he found “her
pleasant countenance…very refreshing. I hope God has delivered her from all her fears!”
She had asked not to be disemboweled, as her mother had been. As a result of that, the warm weather, and her gangrene, she had to be buried quickly. Samuel noted that his servants “put her into her coffin in a good cere cloth, and bestow a convenient quantity of lime, whereby the noxious humor from her leg may be suppressed and absorbed.” One servant, a man named Boston, “will not have her put into the cellar,” which was relatively cool, “so she is only removed into the best room. And because the casements were opened for coolness, Boston [said he] would watch [her corpse] all night.”
Hannah Jr. was interred in the tomb with her mother, grandparents, and late siblings on August 18. Samuel handed the customary black gloves and rings to notable guests: “Twelve ministers of the town had rings, and two out of town.” At the house after the burial, the Reverend Joseph Sewall led family and friends in prayer for his sister. “Laus Deo,” his father said.
Two days later the family gathered yet again. The fourteen-month-old son that had been born to Sam Jr. and his wife after their reconciliation was dead. The baby’s body was brought to Samuel’s house in a coach and buried from the Third Church on August 20, with his uncle Joseph presiding. Less than a month later, fourteen-month-old Mehetabel Cooper, the “dear babe” of William and Judith Cooper, was interred in the family tomb.
During his daughter Hannah’s last few years, Samuel had spent long hours at her bedside. While “waiting on my dear child in her last sickness,” as he put it, he had worked through a stack of books. One book first struck his interest because it seemed a suitable antidote to long hours in or near a deathbed. Titled The British Apollo and published in London in 1711, it contained “about two thousand answers to curious questions in most arts & sciences, serious, comical & humorous,” approved of “by many of the most learned & ingenious of both universities & of the Royal Society.”
Samuel read several of these questions and answers to Hannah, by way of entertainment. On page 200 he came to a question that both captivated him and also seemed unsuitable for reading aloud on this occasion: “Is there now, or will there be at the resurrection, any females
in Heaven?” This was a relevant question, according to the text, “since there seems to be no need of them there.”
The British Apollo’s reply was, “Since sexes are corporal distinctions, it follows that there can be now no distinction of sex in Heaven, since the souls only of the saints (which are immaterial substances) are as yet in that happy place. And that our rising bodies will not be distinguished into sexes we may fairly gather from those expressions of our Lord’s—In the resurrection they neither give nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God”—that is, male.
This “malapert question” troubled Samuel. The embedded assumption—since there seems to be no need of them there—especially irritated him. In his view, “It is most certain there will be no needless impertinent persons or things in Heaven,” because “Heaven is a roomy” and “magnificent palace, furnished with the most rich and splendid entertainments, and the noblest guests are invited to partake of them.
“But why,” he wondered, “should there seem to be no need of women in Heaven!” So many of the women whom Samuel loved were dead—his wife Hannah, his brief wife Abigail, his daughter Mary, and his daughter Betty—and now his daughter Hannah. Thinking on them, he felt sure that “God is their father” and “therefore Heaven is their country.”
Samuel saw no convincing evidence that women’s bodies were less likely to be resurrected than men’s although this was the teaching of his church. Puritan theology envisioned heaven as masculine. Men’s physical bodies were resurrected as such, but women, once their reproductive function on earth was fulfilled, had no physical role in the afterlife. After death, according to Cotton Mather, the souls of male saints escape their worldly bodies but can still see and hear. They float with angels in a heavenly realm while awaiting the Second Coming. After Christ has destroyed the world and the Devil, he will rule the new world as king. In this Puritan vision the bodies and souls of resurrected saints live and join with Christ in a manner that defies earthly understanding. Cotton Mather conceived of Luther and Zwingli hugging each other and the prophets Moses and Abraham conversing. In the City of God, Mather wrote, the “self will be entirely dethroned,” and God’s love “will govern every motion.” Every body will be male.
Samuel, in his early seventies, desired to record his thoughts on this matter. He took up an old diary and commonplace book that he had bought nearly a half century before. It contained matters of decades past, such as his accounting of his wife Hannah’s dowry, paid to him in installments in 1676 by John Hull. It contained his list of accounts received for his father-in-law in the same year for bushels of wheat, barrels of salt, kegs of Madeira wine, and a chestnut mare. It also contained an early draft of Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica from March 1696.
In the summer of 1724, probably at the bedside of his dying daughter, Samuel began to address the issue of “whether the bodies of women deceased shall be again raised up, and remain in their own sex.” He titled his work, Talitha Cumi, or An Invitation to Women to Look After Their Inheritance in the Heavenly Mansions.” Talitha cumi, an Aramaic expression found in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, means, “Maiden, arise,” or “Damsel, arise.” He added the author’s name, “Samuel Sewall, M.A., sometime fellow of Harvard College in Cambridge in New England,” as if he might someday publish these pages. (The complete text of Talitha Cumi begins on page 304.) He jotted down two biblical quotes: 2 Corinthians 6:18, “Ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty,” and Galatians 3:28, “There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Samuel gathered additional texts he might need, including works of prominent Puritan divines, several “formularies” of the Churches of England and of Scotland, and Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose. Finally, he stated his thesis: “He that instituted both sexes will restore both” in heaven.
“Is there no need for a daughter to go and see her father when he sends for her?” he wrote. Is there no need for her “to see God, who, though He be a great king, yet is a most loving and tender hearted father?”
Need is not relevant, Samuel concluded. “God has no need of any creature,” he determined. “By the same argument there will be no angels nor men in Heaven, because there is no need of them there. God created all things for his pleasure that he might communicate of his goodness…and glory. And that this end may be attained, there is need of angels in Heaven and of men and women.” Erasmus and
Augustine provided “plain and undeniable proof” that “women have an equal share in the resurrection until eternal life and heavenly glory.” In heaven “there is no other change for women than for men. Both men and women shall be freed from sin….”
Samuel was convinced that three biblical women—Eve, Sarah, and Mary—“shall rise again.” If “these three rise again,” he reasoned, “without doubt all will.” Regarding “the blessed Mary, the Mother of our Lord,” he added, “for my part I had rather with the Roman Catholics believe that she is in Heaven already, than imagine that she shall never be there.” For a Puritan this was a surprising preference.
Elaborating on the mother of Jesus Christ, he wrote, “Never was there so great and honorable a wooing as Mary had…. That blessed womb of hers was the bride chamber wherein the Holy Ghost did knit that indissoluble knot betwixt our human nature and His deity. Our glorious Bridegroom will not demolish the chamber, which He made and dearly bought and paid for, from whence He proceeded, but will repair it with permanent and wonderful magnificence” for eternity. “In the heavenly choir she will indeed appear to be blessed among women.” Samuel cited several biblical stories of women cured or raised from the dead. “If the Lord had been minded to deny women a share in the general resurrection from the dead, He would not have provided and recorded for us these preambulatory resurrections.”
In the style learned at Harvard, Samuel stated the known objections to his theme. Some commentators had questioned whether “there will be any distinction of sexes” in heaven. Samuel responded by noting “the beautiful variety with which [God] has been pleased to adorn” his works. This prompted Samuel to conclude that “He will have sons and daughters as like Himself as can be.”
Another objection someone had raised was that “the ancients are divided” on this question. “That is a shrewd thing indeed!” he noted before dismissing it. “If we should wait till all the ancients are agreed in their opinions, neither men nor women would ever get to Heaven.” Finally, in expressing disgust at the British Apollo, he scribbled, “One might have thought that the translation of Augustine’s excellent book, De Civitate Dei [The City of God], into English one hundred years ago would have proved a sovereign sufficient antidote against this poison,
and would have prevented this wildfire of the British Apollo from being thrown about the streets of our great city.
“According to these authorities ’tis past dispute that in the resurrected world Mary shall enjoy her own body, and John shall enjoy his.”
Samuel remarked on the “right of women,” a most unusual phrase in the early eighteenth century. “If any controversy shall be moved injurious to the right of women before ancient or modern men, in my opinion their safest and surest way is to plead that they are Coram non judice,” a legal phrase that means “not before a judge or the proper tribunal,” and thus to be dismissed. “’Tis not what…men say concerning the freehold of the moiety of mankind, but what God says who is their creator and redeemer and sanctifier. To this their own Master they stand or fall…. And many [women] are such good lawyers, and are of such quick understanding in the fear of the Lord, and have entertained such an able, faithful, and successful an advocate, they have no reason to be afraid…seeing [that] all is to be tried and decided by the word of God….”
