Salem witch judge : the life and repentance of Samuel Sewall /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:LaPlante, Eve.
Edition:1st ed.
Imprint:New York : HarperOne, c2007.
Description:xiv, 352 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Subject:Sewall, Samuel, -- 1652-1730.
Sewall, Samuel, -- 1652-1730 -- Ethics.
Sewall, Samuel, -- 1652-1730.
Puritans -- Massachusetts -- Biography.
Judges -- Massachusetts -- Biography.
Merchants -- Massachusetts -- Biography.
Trials (Witchcraft) -- Massachusetts -- Salem -- History -- 17th century.
Ethics.
Judges.
Merchants.
Puritans.
Trials (Witchcraft)
Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
Salem (Mass.) -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
Massachusetts.
Massachusetts -- Salem.
Biography.
History.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/6619378
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780060786618
0060786612
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (p. [319]-340) and index.
Review by New York Times Review

WHEN do leaders admit their mistakes? A rare event in any age, is it rarer still in ours? Kings could prostrate themselves before God, the putative source of their power, and pray for further guidance. When they did, word got around. Our presidents just run for reelection, or run out their terms. Democracy means never having to say you're sorry. "Salem Witch Judge," Eve LaPlante's touching biography of Samuel Sewall, who condemned 20 people to death on witchcraft charges, seems hauntingly timely. Beneath the sensational title is a figure more familiar than we may realize. Sewall has long been the most quotable of early New Englanders. Mark Van Doren compared his diaries, which he edited, to those of Samuel Pepys, his English contemporary. Sewall was clever, introspective, rich and powerful. He knew almost everyone worth knowing in Boston. But his own story has been buried beneath the quest for the Puritan Mind, which he certainly represented. LaPlante finds the ways in which Sewall was unusual fascinating, even redemptive. We meet him at 4 in the morning, watching over his dying newborn. This is not your textbook Puritan, damning the unconverted children for their sins. Four other young Sewall children died before 1692, a toll that made Sewall wonder, always, about his own particular sins. By taking us into the family tomb, LaPlante prepares us for the crisis that changed Samuel Sewall. As a judge at the 1692 Salem witch trials, Sewall faced matters of life and death and God's will. When the accusations spread and the process of incrimination spiraled out of control, Sewall does not seem to have been one of the doubters. He seems instead to have been shaken by the fingering of some of his own peers as witches, the eventual turn in public opinion against the accusers, and the disdain for the witch hunt expressed repeatedly (but not, as LaPlante implies, immediately) by his own minister, the highly respected Samuel Willard of Old South Church. Suddenly Sewall found himself disinvited from Willard's private prayer meetings, which included Benjamin Franklin's father, a candle and soap maker. Such meetings meant a lot to Samuel, who had not been born to the high status he occupied as a paterfamilias and Harvard graduate who had married exceptionally well. Being recognized as pious - as saved - justified the authority that godly magistrates exercised. What if he was damned? Something about the process of collective judgment, the community policing of the Puritan oligarchy of which he was a member in good standing, allowed Samuel Sewall to have second thoughts and to act on them. In 1697, at a public fast day service, he handed Willard a sheet of paper to read out in meeting. He asked "pardon of men" and God for his role in the trials, "sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family." After the confession he experienced "spiritual relief," in LaPlante's words, but nevertheless began to wear a makeshift hair shirt. Within a few years he showed a more pacific attitude toward the Indians and published an important early antislavery tract, the first to appear in print in North America. He was thinking big, despite having been humbled. LaPlante, a descendant of Sewall (and the biographer of another illustrious relative, Anne Hutchinson), tells us that the family genealogist, her Aunt Charlotte, loved "Samuel" because he had the capacity to change. We can only imagine which men in the family suffered by comparison. "Salem Witch Judge" upends popular stereotypes about Puritans; it also reminds us how quickly the conventional wisdom can shift, forcing even the powerful to move. LaPlante might have made more of the political contexts for the witch hunt and Sewall's repentance. She only briefly describes the crisis of imperial government or the devastating warfare with the French and the Indians. Both events involved the magistrate, and both set the stage for Salem. In 1691, Sewall's 3-year-old son Joseph (who would later become a minister) had spoken like an oracle: "News from Heaven. The French are coming. Canada." Salem villagers had reason to believe that they would be attacked by the devil's minions in the night. Perhaps Sewall realized that his fellow worshipers had projected political as well as spiritual concerns onto personal affairs. There is no other way to explain the intensity of his interest in Indian and black rights after Salem. In the wake of crisis and fear, at least one leader's admission of failure actually helped him expand the circle of grace. Sewall was not a textbook Puritan, damning unconverted children for their sins. David Waldstreicher teaches history at Temple University and is the author of "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

"Sewall (1652-1730) was an English-born American jurist who presided over the 1692 witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Nineteen innocent men and women were hanged, and one man was pressed to death with large stones, the result of trumped-up charges of witchcraft. Some suspects were strangers to Sewall, but others were his friends. For several years, he struggled with a growing sense of shame and remorse and later assumed in public the blame for the executions. He spent much of the remainder of his life trying to restore himself in the eyes of God. Sewall wrote prodigiously and left behind extensive diaries, poems, essays, books, annotated almanacs, ledgers, and letters. His diary, covering the years from 1672 to 1729, was first published in the nineteenth century and is still in print. LaPlante also chronicles the man's later life Sewall became the author of America's first antislavery tract and published an essay affirming the equality of the sexes. A fascinating account of the man and of daily life in colonial America."--"Cohen, George" Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1692, Salem magistrate Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), along with several others, presided over the conviction and execution of 20 people accused of witchcraft. Five years and much soul-searching later, Sewall publicly repented of his part in the witch trials. Much as she did in American Jezebel, the marvelous biography of her 12th-generation ancestor Anne Hutchinson, LaPlante, who counts Sewall as her sixth-great-grandfather, richly narrates his life in its cultural and religious setting. Drawing on Sewall's diaries and stories told by her Aunt Charlotte, LaPlante sketches a compelling portrait of a committed family man, a dedicated magistrate and a deeply religious Puritan confronting his own shortcomings and questioning the doctrines of his religion. After his public repentance, Sewall reconsidered many Puritan teachings and wrote controversial treatises arguing for the equality of Native Americans, women and slaves. LaPlante's splendid biography brings a personal touch to Sewall's story (also recently recounted by historian Richard Francis in Judge Sewall's Apology, 2005) and his efforts to take the difficult but righteous path. (Oct. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Historian LaPlante (American Jezebel) offers a biography of her controversial Colonial New England ancestor, and it is as well researched, readable, and engaging as her first about Anne Hutchinson. Here, LaPlante examines the radical religious, moral, and philosophical transformations experienced by Samuel Sewall, the only judge presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials who repented for sending more than 20 men and women to their deaths. A direct descendant of him, LaPlante discusses in fascinating detail how a condemned male "witch" convinced the judge of his innocence before being hanged. This spurred Sewall into reconsidering his baseless actions and publicly repenting. He spent his later years publishing a series of seminal essays that challenged Puritan beliefs and societal norms in 17th-century America. Regrettably, LaPlante does not examine the responses to Sewall's bold repentance and his liberal essays supporting gender equality, the abolition of slavery, and the reverent treatment of Native Americans. Instead, she focuses on her subject's internal struggles, as revealed or hinted at in his voluminous diaries. She includes a genealogy that traces her ancestry back to Sewall, a helpful chronology, a generous bibliography, a travelog, and excerpts from Sewall's essays. Recommended as a complement to Sewell's diaries in academic libraries.-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

LaPlante (American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, 2004, etc.) again plumbs her family lineage to reanimate the life of the only contrite Salem Witch Trial judge to make amends. As the author's sixth great-grandfather, Samuel Sewall was one of a number of merciless judges responsible for the executions of Salem women accused of witchcraft in the late 1600s. After emigrating to New England from his Hampshire, England, birthplace, the God-fearing family man and patient, loving father--sadly, a great majority of his children were stillborn--enjoyed societal prominence in his mid-30s as a powerful elected deputy magistrate on the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. Previously abandoning a ministry career, he pursued work in the printing business and then became fascinated with Colony politics. Well versed on Puritan religious protocol, Sewall concurred that "public punishment of a sinner was a public service," and this belief and many others like it followed suit as he and his fellow magistrates judged the fates of colony members accused of witchcraft in Salem, the largest town on the Colony's North Shore. LaPlante explains that as the French and Indian War began to erupt in the late 1690s and Sewall's newborns continued to perish inexplicably, blame for this succession of personal and political unrests fell to an omnipresent "evil" that was believed to have pervaded their township. Hundreds accused of devil worship perished at the hands of the Court, but it was Sewall who, at age 40, looked back with repentance since he'd personally had the blood of more than 20 people on his hands--all condemned with little or no proof of their witchery. Sewall, aging and increasingly liberal-minded, would marry twice more and go on to denounce slavery and advocate equality for women. LaPlante's insightful account is fortified with descriptions of conservative, puritanical New England and its history (including psalms recited by Sewall), creating a vivid sense of place and context. A reformative, assenting spin on Salem's hellfire and brimstone history. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review


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Review by Kirkus Book Review