Book Alert / Salem Witch Judge
Salem Witch Judge -- The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall by Eve Laplante, HarperOne '07, $25.95, 352 pages, ISBN #0060786612. Index, bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs," wrote Rudyard Kipling, "....yours is the Earth and everything that's in it." In 1697, many of his neighbors thought that 44-year-old Samuel Sewall indeed had the earth and everything in it. With the best education to be had, abundant success in business and a loving family, Sewall was without doubt a pillar of the Boston community.
But what caused him increasing inner torment was the fact that he hadn't kept his head while others were losing theirs. While his fellows set out to eradicate witchcraft from their community, Sewall had agreed to serve as a judge in the high-profile trials and had sent some 20 people, mostly women, to their deaths on the gallows. To fully appreciate the word "witchhunt" as used in such contexts as the Congressional McCarthy hearings, one must read this harrowing tale as spun out by author Eve LaPlante.
To gain perspective, it is necessary to understand what it was like to be a Massachusetts Puritan in the late 1600s. Everyone, they believed, was born steeped in sin and figuratively spent their lives on their knees, begging forgiveness from an angry God. LaPlante is at her best in limning the warp and woof of daily life, in which the quest for repentance was the central motivating force from dawn to dusk, not just on Sunday but everyday. The Devil was never very far away and lusted to trap the unwary.
Today, we recognize the inconstancy of the human mind mandates all sorts of emotional and mental deviancy, which is routinely treated now by therapy and drugs. But our forebears knew a small fraction of what we know and, given their religious orientation, pointed to the Devil to understand any aberrant behavior. Those exhibiting such anomalies must be possessed by an evil spirit. And allowing them to walk the streets risked their infecting others as well.
By the early 1690s, angry fingers pointed in many directions in what was to become a "twisted" form of justice in which neighbors turned on neighbors. Any accused who admitted she (few men were charged) was possessed by the Devil was given her freedom, it being felt that her self-awareness and repentance would allow her to be cured. The dangerous ones were those who proclaimed their innocence; they must be eradicated.
The witchcraft trials bore little resemblance to American civil trials today. Remember, this all happened nearly a century before adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Rules of evidence were primitive, at best. Stunningly, "spectral" evidence -- testimony of dreams or daydreams pointing to a victim's guilt -- was enlisted to help convict innocent people.
Within the community, those charged had to realize that a false confession would save their lives. What seems astounding in reading LaPlante's gripping narrative is the fact that the 20 people convicted by Sewall's tribunal chose to die instead of proferring false testimony.
Samuel Sewall attended the executions of many of those he convicted, as if to add an exclamation point to his judgment. But as the years passed, a festering boil of doubt rose gradually to the surface of his soul. In 1697, he could stand it no longer. On Jan. 14, 1697, he acted in a way that shook his community to its roots. At a Thursday church service, he stood in Boston's Third Church as his minister read a statement based on one Sewall had prepared.
"...he desires to take the blame and shame of it (the witchcraft convictions), asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all other of his sins, personal and relative." If George W. Bush were to go on national TV to apologize profusely for entangling America in the Iraq war, the reaction could hardly be more profound.
One might think Sewall's confession might have left him a defeated, beaten man. Quite to the contrary, it transformed him, as if his action had lifted the scales from his eyes. "Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored 'The Selling of Joseph,' America's first antislavery tract. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indian youths to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes."
LaPlante's book is prodigiously researched and compellingly written. That's important to know, so as not to underestimate the book just because Eve LaPlante happens to be the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaughter of Samuel Sewall. It would be shortsighted to consider her book a simple attempt to defend an ancestor. For in an age when public officials are privately counseled to deny any allegation of misbehavior that can't be proved, LaPlante's book is a powerful corrective -- one that demonstrates that confession is not only right but can be transformative as well.
