Salem Witch Judge (9 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
In the quarter century since then Samuel’s parents had raised eight children, and they now helped with raising a growing brood of grandchildren, soon too numerous for Samuel to count. There were ultimately forty-three grandchildren, according to a modern genealogist, Eben Graves. Samuel had one brother besides Stephen. John Sewall had a wife and several children and ran a sawmill in Newbury Falls, now By field, on the North Shore. Every one of Samuel’s five sisters married a local man and stayed on the North Shore. The oldest, Hannah, now thirty-seven, was married to Jacob Tappan, of Newbury, with whom she had had eight children. Jane, twenty-six and married to Moses Gerrish of Newbury, had five children so far. Twenty-three-year-old Anne was married to William Longfellow, with four children.
Mehitabel, twenty, the wife of William Moody, of Newbury, had a baby girl. Samuel’s youngest sister, seventeen-year-old Dorothy, was not yet married, although she would wed Ezekiel Northend, of Rowley, in 1691.
Samuel and Hannah had packed for a week’s stay in Newbury, to ensure Hullie’s comfort with his grandparents, whom he had seen only a few times before. His grandmother, Jane Dummer Sewall, had come to Boston by boat to wean him—in an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to cure his seizures—but he seemed not to remember her. During the week that Samuel and Hannah spent with Hullie in Newbury, the child seemed to do well. He had no fits. God was answering their prayers, Samuel thought, “graciously” helping his family.
Samuel and Hannah left twenty-two-month-old Hullie in Newbury with his grandparents on May 6, breaking their trip home with another night in Salem. On May 7, during the trip’s final leg, Hannah became painfully ill with the “flux”—diarrhea and intestinal distress, probably due to a bacterial or viral infection or to spoiled food. She often suffered from flux, especially during pregnancy. That day she felt so poorly that they chose not to stop for a sermon in Lynn that both would have enjoyed. Arriving home, they learned of the “great wedding” three days earlier of the Reverend Cotton Mather to fifteen-year-old Abigail Phillips at the elegant Charlestown home of the bride’s parents. The judge who officiated, Major John Richards, had served with Samuel on Thomas Cheever’s church court and would join him on the witchcraft court.
Aside from the nuptials of the pedigreed minister, most news that May was bad. Every week, it seemed, another boat from England arrived with another powerful, unwelcome guest. The unpopular new governor of New England, Edmund Andros, whom locals knew from his earlier term in Boston as a royal emissary, had been appointed by a new and even more repugnant king, James II, who succeeded his childless older brother, Charles II, in February 1685. Whereas Charles II remained Anglican and only privately received the last rites of the Catholic Church, James II actually converted to Catholicism, provoking a crisis among Protestants in England and its colonies, who were already troubled by Catholic France’s mistreatment of the Huguenots under Louis XIV. James II, wishing to consolidate his
colonial holdings, decreed a new English province, the Dominion of New England, to oversee the chartered colony of Massachusetts Bay. The king’s ministries ruled this new dominion, which extended from northern Maine to New Jersey. Throughout this vast territory Edmund Andros had the power to seize land, levy taxes, and eliminate or alter local governments. Most irksome to Samuel, Andros and his cronies could impose Anglican services, even at Samuel’s church.
Andros’s assistant, Edward Randolph, was also unpleasantly familiar. In Boston on a royal mission in 1676, Randolph had earned the locals’ hatred for his support of the revocation of the charter. In May 1686 he returned again, as secretary and registrar for the Dominion of New England, carrying the royal commission for a new government. The town crier proclaimed this document from the balcony of the Town House in the market square. Massachusetts was now to be governed by a president and deputy president (replacing the colony’s governor and deputy governor) and sixteen counselors, who replaced the former “assistants,” a term used since 1630. Randolph and Andros offered the top positions to local judges who seemed capable of moderation, as they put it, and loyalty to the Crown. William Stoughton, fifty-four, was asked to become deputy president of Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard, class of 1650, Stoughton had studied for the ministry at Oxford, preached during the Cromwell years in England, and been ejected from the pulpit after the restoration of the monarchy. Returning to Massachusetts, he had served as a magistrate of the General Court and a colonial agent to London. The new president of Massachusetts was to be Joseph Dudley, the thirty-eight-year-old son of the colony’s second governor, Thomas Dudley. A member of the Harvard class of 1665, Dudley lived on a large farm in Roxbury, where he’d been born. He had spent several years in London working to maintain the old charter. In recent months, however, he had quietly changed course, recommending to the king that he revoke the charter and appoint Dudley president of Massachusetts.
Unaware of Dudley’s subversion, Samuel Sewall and the Reverend Willard urged Dudley on May 18 to refuse the presidency, to stall the offensive new government. Dudley and Willard were brothers-in-law; their wives were sisters. Sewall and Dudley would later be related
through the marriage of their children, Sam Jr. and Rebecca. Dudley ignored their advice and accepted the royal appointment.
To console himself, Samuel avoided the Town House, the seat of government. With friends he bewailed the colony’s losses over wine and spirits at public houses across Boston. He spent time alone singing psalms. “The foundations being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” he wondered. Still, he remembered to thank God for “our [colony’s] hithertos of mercy 56 years.”
On May 16 Samuel had been horrified to see Edward Randolph, a member of the Church of England, attend services at his own Third Church. That was only the beginning of the Anglican invasion. Two days later Randolph audaciously arranged for his personal chaplain, Robert Ratcliffe, to perform an Anglican wedding at the Third Church. Ratcliffe wore a surplice, the loose-fitting white ceremonial vestment used by Anglican and Catholic clergy, which Puritans rejected as a symbol of the Catholic mass and priestly role. On June 6, “in his surplice,” Samuel noted with regret, Ratcliffe publicly read the Book of Common Prayer liturgy. This was heresy in Massachusetts, whose founders opposed the Book of Common Prayer and all it signified—the mass, a liturgical calendar and set list of readings, requiems, evensong, and holy days such as Easter and Christmas. By mid-June, to Samuel’s great distress, Ratcliffe made plans to erect an Anglican church in Boston. That was to be King’s Chapel, which still stands today.
Samuel deplored the Anglican presence in Puritan Boston. He believed that God created the Bible Commonwealth and protected it from all evils, such as disease and hunger, and every enemy. Those enemies, as he saw them, were Indians (some were “Friend Indians,” but many were not), the French, the Catholic Church, Anglicans, and royalists. The list of enemies also included witches, antinomians (literally “against the law,” referring to heretical Puritans), Quakers, and Baptists. There were even more distant enemies, “Turks,” or Muslims, whose progress Samuel tracked. He feared the Turks would defeat Christian Europe and take over the world, a fear that lessened after the 1683 defeat of the Turks at Vienna, which ushered in more than three centuries of European dominance. Ultimately, as Samuel saw the world, all these enemies stood in for the true enemy of Samuel’s America: Satan, the prince of darkness, Antichrist.
One legacy of John Winthrop, John Cotton, and other Bay Colony founders is the myth of America as a land specially favored by God, a myth we still live with today regardless of political ideology. In the spring of 1686, to preserve the spirit of that America in the face of its dying, Samuel Sewall paid the printer Samuel Green to produce hundreds of copies of a pamphlet containing the farewell sermon that John Cotton delivered on the docks in Southampton, England, in April 1630 before Winthrop’s fleet set sail. The Scripture was 2 Samuel 7:10: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more….” By August of 1686 Samuel had donated copies of God’s Promise to His Plantation to every magistrate of the new provincial court and to every member of the local militia.
Not long after arranging for this printing, on the morning of May 25, he read the seventeenth psalm aloud to his family. It is a prayer for deliverance from persecutors:
O Lord, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer…. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O God: incline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech…. Keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings, from the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about…. Arise, O Lord, disappoint him, cast him down. Deliver my soul from the wicked….
This was “a precious, seasonable prayer,” he told Hannah, “exceedingly suited to this day.”
Sad affairs of state turned Samuel’s attention inward, to his children and their accomplishments. “My son,” seven-year-old Sam Jr., “reads to me Isaiah 22,” he noted proudly on May 19. Samuel, the oldest son of an oldest son, had high hopes for his own oldest boy. The expectation was partly cultural: an oldest son inherited all of a father’s wealth in England, whose system of primogeniture maintained large estates. A few days later, on Sunday, May 30, he heard Sam Jr. read the twenty-sixth chapter of Isaiah: “In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah: We have a strong city…. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation…may enter in.” Together they sang Psalm 141, which begins, “O God, my Lord, on thee I call, do thou make haste to me.” And then, “moved to sing” more, Samuel chose the seventeenth and eighteenth verses of chapter 3 of the book of Habakkuk.
Although the fig tree shall not bloss’m
neither shall fruit be in the vines;
the labour of the ol’ve shall fail,
and the fi-elds shall yield no meat;
the flock shall be cut off fro’ the fold,
and there shall be no herd in-th’ stalls:
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
Sam Jr. was to attend school for the first time the next September, at Ezekiel Cheever’s house on Schoolhouse Lane, now School Street, two short blocks away. Ezekiel Cheever, father of the unrepentant minister Thomas Cheever, was master of Boston Latin, a public secondary school founded in 1635. “Mr. Cheever received him gladly,” Samuel would report with pride that September. But the gladness did not last. Sam Jr. was not a gifted scholar. Within two years of admitting him Cheever would send him off to Eliezer Moody in hopes that someone else might teach him to write.
All the Sewall children, girls as well as boys, began to learn their letters at age three or four. A few years later they were expected to join the family’s daily readings from catechism and Scripture. In December 1697, when Joseph was nine, he began “to read the Psalm” with the family, “by the intercessions of his mother, and his brother’s concession.” Joseph had started school at the tender age of two and a half. His cousin Jane Tappan walked him to Mistress Townsend’s house and “carried his hornbook,” a small board marked with the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, and Roman numerals. Samuel’s daughters studied with Dame Walker and, after her death, Mistress Deborah Thayer, who taught knitting, embroidery, reading, and writing. Samuel noted that “Little Betty can read and spin passing well—things very desirable in a woman.” When Hannah Jr. was eight she was hit by a cart one autumn morning as she crossed a lane on her way to school. Though it knocked her to the ground, she was not seriously injured; her teeth “hurt a little.”
The children’s health constantly worried Samuel, who recorded far more than seizures. At six Hannah broke “her forehead grievously just above her left eye” while climbing a chair to reach atop a cupboard. A horse ran over Judith when she was three. One winter when the children were in a sleigh “the Indian who drove it struck [nine-year-old] Betty with his goad on the side of the head so as to make it bleed pretty much and swell.” In 1687 Sam Jr. contracted the measles, which spread to his sisters, to several servants, including Eliakim Mather and Betty Lane, and to Samuel and his brother Stephen. Smallpox ran periodically through the town and sometimes through the family. Hannah Jr., Sam Jr., and Betty had smallpox in May 1690. A week later their cousin Jane Tappan vomited and “brings up three great
worms, and much foul matter,” and then developed the pox. Tapeworms, roundworms, and other parasites grew in contaminated food and also in human waste, which servants emptied from chamber pots into a privy in the yard. “Betty vomits up a long worm,” he noted when his daughter was six. A few years later she “takes a vomit and brings up” three impressive worms, the longest “about eleven inches.”
Early on Saturday, June 5, 1686, one month after having left Hullie in Newbury, Samuel set out alone on his horse to visit “my little Hull.” He timed his trip “prudently” to avoid the Anglican takeover of his meetinghouse on the Sabbath and “to keep out of the way of the Artillery election.” On training day, usually one Saturday a month, the soldiers of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, the militia founded in 1638, marched around Boston Common with muskets, swords, and pikes. The men practiced shooting volleys, doublings, and facings. Following their drills they retired to a public house for a “treat” such as beer, bread, and a custard of sweet cream and wine called Syllabub. This military activity had pleased Samuel when it served the colony, but it was a burden now.
On Sunday, after attending meeting with his parents and his littlest boy, who seemed well, Samuel rode to West Newbury to visit his sister Anne. “Sister Longfellow” fed him “strawberries and cream” at “the Falls,” a waterfall on the Old Newbury River, now the Parker River. The Longfellows farmed five hundred acres that had been granted to Henry Sewall Sr. in the 1630s.
