SAMUEL SEWALL (1652 – 1730)

The diary of Samuel Sewall has long been recognized as providing an unparalleled window on the world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Boston. Scholars have regularly drawn on it to illustrate various aspects of religious, economic, and everyday life, perhaps no one as skillfully as David Hall in his explorations of the mental world of Sewall. Yet the very richness of the diary marks Sewall as exceptional and cautions us about generalizing too much from his experience.

 Both appropriate and ironic to describe Samuel Sewall as a defender of the rule of law. It is appropriate because Sewall embodied many of the qualities of a good judge for more than thirty years. He was an early advocate of equal rights for African Americans and Native Americans and a defender of the view that women, like men, had souls and would share heavenly joys. Moreover, Sewall represents the culture of Puritanism, which laid important foundations for American law by distinguishing between liberty and license and by valuing, though not always extending to others, liberty of conscience. To describe Sewall as a defender of the rule of law is ironic because although he was neither a lawyer nor formally trained in the law, he served as a judge in the notorious Salem witch trials, which led to the death of twenty innocent victims.

Sewall was a man of faith at a time when fellow citizens considered knowledge of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, more important than knowledge of contemporary books of law. Had Sewall been more skeptical of the wide-eyed claims of the young witnesses in the Salem witch trials or had he been trained in cross-examination and other trial techniques, he would have served the cause of justice better.

However, his belief in being accountable to God prodded him—alone among his fellow judges—to apologize publicly for his role in the trials. Fortunately, Sewall documented his life in diaries that cover the years from 1673 to 1729 (except for a gap from 1677 to 1684). The diaries reveal much about Sewall’s private and public life, and they reflect his considerable literary skills. Sewall’s story is a tale of law and life in Puritan Massachusetts and of the Salem trials, spawned by hysteria, which have become a watchword for unjust proceedings.

Sewall was born in Bishop Stoke, Hampshire, England, in 1652 to a family of relatively comfortable means. His father, Henry Sewall Jr., who served for a time as a minister, first arrived in Massachusetts at the age of twenty to set up a cattle farm. There he married Jane Dummer and, after returning to England, the family resettled in Massachusetts

when Samuel was nine years old.

In England and America, Sewall received a classical education, including instruction in Greek and Latin. He entered Harvard at the age of fifteen and studied there for seven years, earning both undergraduate and master’s degrees. He served as a teaching fellow as he pursued the latter degree, at a time when Harvard enrollments had decreased and

the school was in decline. His primary training at the graduate level was theological—he wrote his thesis on original sin—and he graduated with the apparent intention of becoming a pastor. Yet he turned down an offer of a ministerial position in Woodridge, New Jersey.

Soon after getting his master’s degree, Sewall married eighteen-yearold Hannah Hull, daughter of wealthy Boston merchant John Hull, who had established the colony’s first mint.

In 1679, Sewall was accepted as a freeman, a full citizen qualified to hold office, and he became a member in his father-in-law’s Third, or Old South, Church in Boston. In time Sewall assumed many of the public service positions that his father-in-law had occupied, serving in charge of the night watch in Boston and of the colony’s printing press, and later becoming one of Boston’s seven assessors, a deputy for Westfield, and one of eighteen men on the court of assistants, which combined legislative, executive, and judicial functions.

His diary is replete with reports of Indian massacres and ambushes and other military threats, or perceived threats, that weighed so heavily on the colony. During the 1680s, Sewall and his fellow citizens faced difficult challenges in addition to the continuing Indian conflicts. Though the colonists had enjoyed relative autonomy since settling in the New World, Massachusetts lost its royal charter in 1684. England then created the Dominion of New England, which included several colonies, and land titles were threatened. Sewall traveled to England in 1688 along with Increase Mather largely to protect property interests, including his own. In many respects, the charter revocation created a legal limbo in Massachusetts. The colonies also were experiencing what has been described as the dark ages of American law. Early colonial codes contained many provisions that were hostile to lawyers and legal practice, and as a result untrained laymen filled the courts. At the same time, the justice system was in flux, continually seeking to adapt English law and procedure to colonial circumstances.

Moreover, in the colonies there was more of a blending than a separation of church and state. Particularly in Puritan New England, legal codes were an important means for enforcing morality, as reflected by harsh laws prohibiting idolatry, adultery, and drunkenness, as well as special provisions such as Sunday blue laws. Of course, there were also laws against witchcraft, for Puritans believed in the devil and his devious ways, including his use of agents to wreak evil.  Betty Parris, the six-year-old daughter of Samuel Parris—the new minister in Salem village, who had arrived with a West Indian slave, Tituba, whom he had brought with his family from Barbados—began to experience a number of physical and psychological symptoms, including severe contortions. These frightening symptoms soon spread to six additional playmates Cotton Mather had recently published a book called Memorable Providences, which discussed witchcraft, and this seemed to be a logical explanation for what was happening.

Sewall was one of the nine men whom the governor appointed to a special court of oyer and terminer to look into the matter. Old Testament scriptures had declared that no witch should live, and the dramatic testimony of the accusing girls seemed to show that witchcraft was afoot. The court was willing to hold blameless those who accused others and to acquit those, like Tituba, who confessed that they  had fallen under the spells of others. But what about those who professed their innocence? A court led by more worldly men might have interpreted such reticence, and their outright denials, as a sign that the

charges were fabricated and the accused were innocent.  Of two hundred people accused

during the witchcraft trials, twenty-nine were found guilty and nineteen of those received death sentences. The execution of George Burroughs, a former minister at Salem village, proved particularly unnerving.

Although accused of having bewitched soldiers during a failed Indian campaign, he not only refused to admit guilt on his execution day—which would have invited eternal damnation if he were guilty—but he also recited the Lord’s Prayer without error, something then thought impossible for someone possessed by the devil. Eventually, the juvenile accusers began widening their nets to include so many respected persons that their claims were recognized as fabrications and illusions, but that could not revive the dead. (Some observers also believe the witchcraft trials were used as a means of transferring blame from judges who had leadership roles in the failing Indian wars to others.) In late October 1692, Governor William Phipps disbanded the court and put an end to the trials.

In late 1696, Sewall wrote a proclamation that called for a day of prayer and fasting for the sins of the trials and for government reparations to its victims. Sewall’s diary demonstrates that he may have feared that God had taken some of his own children as punishment for his role in the trials—of his fourteen children, only six survived to adulthood. Sewall was the only one of the trial’s nine presiding judges (one appointee

had quit after the first trial and was replaced) who then, or ever, publicly confessed his transgressions, although some jurors also did so. The event took place on January 14, 1697, a day of fasting and prayer.

An apology might seem small recompense to the memory of those who had been executed, but there are indications that Sewall’s apology was sincere and that he took the lessons from the witchcraft trials to heart. Sewall also set aside a day in each subsequent year to fast and pray for forgiveness for his role in the trials. Sewall’s diary indicates that he attended the funerals of almost everyone of consequence in Boston, held regular devotional exercises with his family, frequently visited and prayed with the sick, regularly attended church, and often recorded notes of sermons in his diary. Although he and other judges were responsible for fining persons for swearing, Sabbath breaking, and a variety of sexual offenses that today are beyond the scope of the law, his Puritan background gave him sympathy for those who asserted that, whatever their status, they were equal under the law.

A distinctive feature of Sewell’s career was his advocacy of positions that are today politically correct but were hardly popular in his day. One genesis of his advocacy for African Americans was a case involving John Saffin, who attempted to keep a slave beyond the agreed-upon term, Saffin alleging that the slave had not fully fulfilled his duties during

the time he served. Sewall crafted a pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph, in which he used the biblical story to argue against slavery at a time when samuel sewall fellow merchants were enriching themselves from the slave trade. The publication, which appeared in 1700, was the first antislavery tract in the colonies. He observed, “It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life.” Just as Joseph’s brothers had no authority to sell him to traders traveling to Egypt, so modern slave traders had no right to buy or sell African Americans.

Like Jefferson, Sewall feared that former slaves could not live at peace with their former masters. He proposed substituting a system of indentures for slavery and, somewhat less politically correctly, opined that “there is such a disparity in their Conditions, Colour & Hair, that they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land: but still remain in our Body Politick as a kind of extravasat Blood.” And like some later abolitionists, Sewall apparently favored sending slaves back to Africa.

Although Sewall opposed slavery on the basis that God had created all races, his concern for Native Americans stemmed at least in part from a somewhat quainter idea he had learned at Harvard.

At a time when Puritans were often warring with Indians, Sewall had a long-standing interest in their conversion. He served for more than twenty years as treasurer and then secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. He donated land to provide funds for Indian meeting houses and for Native Americans to attend Harvard. Sewall also argued for boundary lines between Puritans and Native Americans as a way to foreclose conflict and tried to dissuade his countrymen from sending military expeditions against the Indians in his tract A Memorial Relating to the Kennebunk Indians. In 1705 Sewall unsuccessfully opposed a bill that would have prohibited whites from marrying Native Americans or African Americans, but he was able to mitigate the harshness of the latter restriction by prohibiting masters from forbidding their slaves to marry.

In 1724, Sewall was reading The British Apollo, which questioned whether there would be any females in heaven. The book’s author reasoned that since Jesus had said there would be no marriage there, women would not be needed! Perhaps stirred to action in part because he was distraught over the plight of his invalid and terminally ill daughter, Hannah, Sewall penned an essay entitled Talitha Cumi, a title taken from words Jesus

had used in raising a girl to life. Sewall countered Apollo by arguing that God’s “Sons and Daughters” would be equally at home there and that God would resurrect males and females complete with their existing body parts, all of which God would redeem. Sewall also had a lifelong aversion to periwigs, which he associated with vanity, and he covered his own bald spot with a cap.  Sewall and his wife, Hannah, had fourteen children; only six survived to adulthood.  Sewall’s best-known child, and the one in whom he took the most pride, was Joseph, who became pastor of the Old South Church and president of Harvard.Sewall died in 1730 after a period of declining health.

Works Cited

Chamberlain, N. H. Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived In. 1897. 2nd ed.  New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the  Forming of an American Conscience. New York: Fourth Estate, 2005.

Hoffer, Peter C. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Sewall, Samuel. Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1624–1729. 3 vols. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878–82.

Winslow, Ola Elizabeth. Samuel Sewall of Boston. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

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