Samuel Sewall

English-born American jurist and theologian

• Born: March 28, 1652
• Birthplace: Bishopstoke, Hampshire, England
• Died: January 1, 1730
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Author of one of the first antislavery tracts in America and the only judge at the infamous Salem witchcraft trials to speak out against the proceedings, Sewall became a voice of social conscience in Puritan New England.

Early Life

Although Samuel Sewall was born in England, his father had begun a plantation in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1635. The family had enjoyed a fair degree of middle-class wealth for several generations. In the 1640’s and 1650’s, many New England Puritans returned to England because the Puritans were then in power; the Sewalls were one such family. Entering Baddesley “petty school” at about the age of five, young Samuel soon learned to read English, and he was then sent to nearby Rumsey grammar school to study Latin.

With the restoration of a Stuart (and non-Puritan) monarch in 1660, Puritans lost virtually all their political power in England, and a year later the Sewalls sailed for their New England estate on the Prudent Mary. Unlike the harsh voyages of the Plymouth pilgrims, that of the Sewalls was made in the comfort of the captain’s cabin and with the ministrations of servants. Arriving in the New World, nine-year-old Samuel continued his education at Newbury with the renowned scholar and minister Thomas Parker, who encouraged him in the writing of Latin verse, a pastime Sewall continued throughout his life. In 1667, at the age of fifteen, Sewall entered Harvard College, receiving an A.B. degree in 1671. The training was largely theological, preparing young men for the ministry, but when Sewall was offered a church in New Jersey upon graduation, he declined. Staying on as a tutor and the college librarian, Sewall completed his master’s degree in 1674. The following year, he married Hannah Hull, the only child of the treasurer of the Massachusetts colony. In an era when marriages were often like business mergers, this alliance made Sewall one of the most influential and wealthy men in New England. His real-estate and import-export business increased his wealth and importance over the next half century.

In 1681, the city of Boston named him manager of its printing press. Sewall thus took a personal hand in the production of all the books published in Boston until he stepped down in 1684, when he became a member of the city council. It was a crucial year for New England, for the Crown had revoked the Massachusetts charter, which meant that Sewall’s vast land holdings might be in jeopardy. Late in 1688, he sailed to England to aid the negotiations for a new charter; the work kept him nearly a full year, and he returned to Boston at the close of 1689. Two years later, a new charter was approved.

Life’s Work

The new charter of 1691 named Sewall a member of the city council, a position he already held, but now strengthened by royal approval. With the charter came a new governor, Sir William Phips, who chose Sewall as one of the judges to preside over the infamous Salem witchcraft trials in 1692 and 1693. Though it is clear that Sewall believed in witchcraft, and though he was the only one of the nine judges to denounce the trial later, there is no way to tell how Sewall felt about the trials at the time they took place. His diary, which was kept in great detail from 1673 to 1729, is virtually without comment on the trials, though it contains many details.

It could not have been easy, however, for a man of Sewall’s tender conscience to condemn several neighbors to death. Over the course of the summer of 1692, Sewall’s court ordered a dozen men and women executed; eleven by hanging and one by “pressing,” or being crushed by heavy stones. When the court recessed in October, Sewall visited with its most outspoken opponent, Thomas Danforth, and “discoursed… about witchcraft,” an indication that he was at least open to the criticism of the trials.

After several years, Sewall’s own minister, Samuel Willard of Old South Church, began preaching against the witchcraft trials, and many New Englanders began to consider them a mistake. Yet none of the judges said so until January 14, 1697, when Sewall stood up in his pew while the Reverend Willard read Sewall’s public recantation of his role in the trials. Sewall’s recantation was sweeping: He asked forgiveness of the community, as well as of God, and took the entire “blame and shame of it,” since he was “more concerned than any that he knows of” (that is, he believed that he was more to blame).

In November of that same year, Sewall published his first book, Phaenomena quondam Apolcalyptica (1697), a reading of the Book of Revelation that attempted to present the New England colonies as the fulfillment of the New Jerusalem promised in scripture. In addition to learned theological language, this short work also contains some of the most moving lyrical prose describing the natural beauty of New England, specifically Plum Island, the praises of which Sewall sings in the closing paragraph of the book.

Sewall’s second book, The Selling of Joseph (1700), is the first antislavery work in American literature. Already controversial for his recantation of his role in the witchcraft trials, Sewall wrote in his diary that he received “frowns and hard words” for his stand against slavery. The title refers to the events of Genesis 37, in which Joseph’s older brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt. This, argues Sewall, was a violation of God’s covenant with Adam and Eve: Since all men and women are the heirs of the first parents, they receive liberty as God’s deed of gift. No human law can take away this God-given liberty. Slavers in Sewall’s time and after attempted to find scriptural justification to counter this basic principle of human liberty and pointed to Noah’s curse of his son Ham in Genesis 9:25, “The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Ham was interpreted as the ancestor of all African races. Sewall countered this notion with the prohibition in Exodus 21:16 against kidnaping, since the ultimate source of all black slaves in America was capture by force.

Part of the “hard words” Sewall encountered for The Selling of Joseph were in print; one of his fellow judges, a slaveholder named John Saffin, published A Brief and Candid Answer to Sewall’s book in 1701. Saffin argued that bringing African slaves into Christian communities improved their lot. Sewall did not respond to this criticism, but he continued to write against slavery in the Boston News-Letter (June 12, 1706).

In 1707, the charter of Harvard College was renewed, and as a prominent judge of the day, Sewall became an overseer of his alma mater. A few years later, Sewall published his third book, Talitha Cumi: Or, An Invitation to Women to Look After Their Inheritance in the Heavenly Mansion (1711). Though no copy of this book survives, Sewall’s records show that he had it printed, and a surviving manuscript copy allowed the Massachusetts Historical Society to reprint it in the Proceedings for 1873. His next publication, Proposals Touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies (1713), continued the work of his first book in presenting New England as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. His last book was a 1721 treatise on the Kennebeck Indians.

In 1717, Sewall’s wife Hannah died. Fourteen children had been born to them. Two years later, he married Abigail Tilley, who had outlived two previous husbands, but she died seven months after their Thanksgiving Day marriage. Sewall’s diary records a touchingly unsuccessful courtship of Katherine Winthrop in 1720. Less than eighteen months after Winthrop’s final “no,” however, Sewall was married to another widow, Mary Gibbs. This merger was just as much a business deal as the others; it was contracted by letter, and much of the negotiations with Gibbs’s children involved their taking on her debt before Sewall would close the deal.

In 1728, Sewall retired from the superior court, thinking, at seventy-six, that his useful service to Boston was at an end. In June of the following year, just six months before his death, he sat for the portrait that still hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It shows a portly man with large placid eyes aimed steadily at the viewer; the shock of shoulder-length white hair does not look like a wig, as his censure of the vanity of wigs in his diary (June 10, 1701) confirms. His prominent nose is straight, and his mouth, while not smiling, is relaxed. In December, 1729, he took to his bed and never arose from it. Early New Year’s Day morning, 1730, he died.

Significance

Even if he had never gained prominence as the only judge to repent the Salem witchcraft trials or as an opponent of the slave trade, Samuel Sewall would have received posthumous note as one of the best diarists of colonial New England. Sewall’s diary, kept without a break (except for the disappearance of one volume, 1677-1684) from 1673 to 1729, is the most complete contemporary portrait of late seventeenth century New England. Because Sewall’s interests ranged wide, his observations of the life around him were equally various. In addition, his pen recorded the human element of events, not merely names and dates (though some entries are just that).

Moreover, business and the court took him throughout Massachusetts, so his scope was not limited to Boston. Events tend to be recorded as they affected Sewall, but are in no way self-aggrandizing. In recording the death of Dr. Samuel Alcock, for example (March 16, 1677), Sewall confesses to stopping in the kitchen for leisurely conversation when he had been sent for medical aid for Alcock.

As a writer, Sewall represents the manifold literary interests of New England Puritans. A “chum and bedfellow” of Edward Taylor at Harvard, Sewall shared with that best-known of American Puritan poets a passion for verse-making in Latin and English. Some sixty poems by Sewall survive. Though his poetry does not rival Taylor’s and is rarely anthologized, Sewall’s prose is as lyrical and engaging as any prose of his century. In the history of American jurisprudence, theology, and social thought, Samuel Sewall deserves a permanent place.

Bibliography

Graham, Judith S. Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. Graham analyzes Sewall’s diary to refute the traditional opinion that Puritan family life was joyless and repressive. She finds warmth, sympathy, and love in Sewall’s relationships with his wife and children.

Kagle, Steven E. American Diary Literature, 1620-1799. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. This general introduction to the genre of diary writing in America includes a brief but insightful analysis of Sewall’s diary (pp. 147-153) that disputes earlier assertions of Sewall’s preeminence as a colonial American diarist, faulting his work’s style but accepting it as “still a fine diary.”

Kaplan, Sidney, ed. The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969. The introduction to this edition of Sewall’s antislavery tract includes an essay on his role in the history of abolition (pp. 27-63). Kaplan refutes the charge of hypocrisy in Sewall’s attack on slavery.

Niebuhr, Gustav. “A Puritan Judge’s Antislavery Voice.” The New York Times, June 24, 2000, p. A-12. An analysis of the literary and historical value of Samuel’s writings, focusing on The Selling of Joseph. Includes information on Sewall’s diaries and assessments of his life and legacy by two contemporary clergymen.

Parrington, Vernon L. Main Currents in American Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. A standard reference work in American studies that, though dated in many areas, is still reliable for studying the Puritans. The section on Sewall is a good general assessment of his place in American thought.

“1696.” American Heritage 47, no. 8 (December, 1996): 104. Focuses on the many tragedies Sewall experienced in 1696, several years after the Salem witchcraft trials. In this year, Sewall’s family suffered from sickness, deaths, and accidents, including the birth of a stillborn son. Describes how the Massachusetts state legislature declared a day of fasting and repentance to atone for the witchcraft trials, and how Sewall recanted for his role in the proceedings.

Strandness, T. B. Samuel Sewall: A Puritan Portrait. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967. A thorough treatment of Sewall’s life, mostly based on the diary, though marshaling other primary sources detailed in the exhaustive bibliography. Strandness quotes liberally not only from the diary but also from letters and other primary sources.

Thomas, M. Halsey, ed. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, Newly Edited from the Manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. A scrupulous edition of the primary source of information about Sewall and his culture, well indexed and with an excellent preface by Thomas that places Sewall in the context of his era.