Samuel Sewall

Samuel Sewall , 1652-1730, American colonial jurist, b. England. He was taken as a child to Newbury, Mass., and was graduated from Harvard in 1671. He became a minister but gave up the cloth to assume management of a printing press in Boston and entered upon a public career. He was elected (1683) to the general court and was a member of the council. As one of the judges who tried the Salem witchcraft cases in 1692, he shared responsibility for the condemnation of 19 persons. However, he became convinced of the error of these convictions and in 1697 in Old South Church, Boston, publicly accepted the "blame and shame" for them; thereafter he annually spent a day of repentance in fasting and prayer. Sewall served (1692-1728) as judge of the superior court of the colony, being chief justice during the last 10 years. His diary (3 vol., 1878-82; repr. 1973) is very revealing of the man and of the period.

Bibliography: See biographies by O. E. Winslow (1964), T. B. Strandness (1967), and E. LaPlante (2007); N. H. Chamberlain, Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived In (1897, repr. 1967).

Sewall, Samuel (1652–1730), merchant, judicial magistrate, diarist.One of Boston's most influential men in his day, Judge Samuel Sewall provided a steadying influence as the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a royal province and as Puritan society was drawn into the English imperial orbit. Son of a prosperous yeoman from Newbury, Massachusetts, Sewall attended Harvard (M.A., 1674). He married Hannah Hull, the daughter of a well‐to‐do Boston merchant, in 1676, and entered upon a successful mercantile and public career. Elected to the General Court in 1683, he was appointed to the Council in 1691 and the Superior Court of Judicature in 1692, and was elevated to Chief Justice in 1718.

Although an active merchant, Sewall disliked worldly extravagance, worried about the growing secularization of Boston life, and applauded those merchants who resisted Anglicization by keeping their shops open on Christmas Day. As a commissioner of Oyer and Terminer he served on the panel of judges that heard the Salem witchcraft cases in 1692, but in 1697, his Puritan conscience led him publicly to repent his role in these events. He became increasingly uncomfortable with the enslavement of Africans and, in 1700, composed “The Selling of Joseph,” the first known published antislavery tract. His Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica ad Aspectum Novi Orbis Configurata (1697), a millennial treatise, argued that New England might literally be the seat of the New Jerusalem.

For all his prominence among his contemporaries, Sewall's principal historic legacy is his diary (1674–1729), which richly documents life in the late Puritan period, affording revealing glimpses into Boston's changing political and social milieu.
See also Colonial Era; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; Puritanism; Slavery.

Bibliography

Ola Elizabeth Winslow , Samuel Sewall of Boston, 1964.
M. Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, 2 vols., 1973.

Robert J. Wilson III