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Samuel Sewall (; March 28, 1652 – January 1, 1730) was a judge, businessman, and printer in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials,Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts 1949 Doubleday Edition pp.261-2 for which he later apologized, and his essay The Selling of Joseph (1700), which criticized slavery. He served for many years as the chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court.
Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the English throne the Sewalls again crossed the Atlantic, settling in Newbury, Massachusetts.Francis, pp. 6-7 Like other local boys, he attended school at the home of James Noyes, whose cousin, Reverend Thomas Parker, was the principal instructor. From Parker, Sewall acquired a lifelong love of poetry, which he wrote in both English and Latin.Francis, p. 9 In 1667 Sewall entered Harvard College, where his classmates included Edward Taylor and Daniel Gookin, with whom he formed enduring friendships. Sewall received his B.A. in 1671 and his M.A. in 1674.Francis, pp. 10-13 In 1674 he served as librarian of Harvard for nine months, the second person to hold that post. That year he began keeping a journal, which he maintained for most of his life; it is one of the major historical documents of the time. In 1679 he became a member of the Military Company of Massachusetts.
Sewall's oral examination for the MA was a public affair and was witnessed by Hannah Hull, daughter of colonial merchant and mintmaster, John Hull. She was apparently taken by the young man's charms and pursued him. They were married in February 1676. Her father, whose work as mintmaster had made him quite wealthy, gave the couple £500 in colonial currency as a wedding gift. Biographer Richard Francis notes that the weight of this amount of coin, , may have approximated the bride's weight, giving rise to Nathaniel Hawthorne's legend that the gift was her weight in coins.Francis, p. 23 Sewall moved into his in-laws' mansion in Boston and was soon involved in that family's business and political affairs. He and Hannah had fourteen children before her death in 1717, although only a few survived to adulthood.
Sewall's involvement in the political affairs of the colony began when he became a freeman of the colony, giving him the right to vote. In 1681 he was appointed the official printer of the colony. One of the first works he published was John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. After Hull died in 1683, Sewall was elected to replace him on the colony's council of assistants, a body that functioned both as the upper house of the legislature and as a court of appeals. He also became a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers.
Sewall entered local politics and was elevated to the position of assistant magistrate in the judiciary. In 1692 he was one of the nine judges appointed to the court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem, charged with trying those from Salem Town and elsewhere who were accused of witchcraft. His diary recounts many of the more famous episodes of the trials, such as the agonizing death under torture of Giles Corey, and reflects the growing public unease about the guilt of many of the accused. Sewall's brother Stephen had meanwhile opened up his home to one of the initially afflicted children, Betty Parris, daughter of Salem Village's minister Samuel Parris, and shortly afterward Betty's "afflictions" appear to have subsided.
Sewall was perhaps most remarkable among the justices involved in the trials in that he later regretted his role, going so far as to call for a public day of prayer, fasting, and reparations. Following the dissolution of the court, the Sewall family was blighted by what Sewall thought to be punishments from God. In the five years after the trials, two of Sewall's daughters and Hannah's mother died, and Hannah gave birth to a stillborn child. What convinced Sewall of his need for public repentance was a recitation of , "If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless".Heather E. Jones, "Salem Witch Trials in History and Literature," Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, last modified 2001, accessed October 24, 2016, http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/people/sewall.html. Not only had Sewall's home life been shaken, but in the years after the trials, the people of Massachusetts came to see them as the culmination of a generation-long series of setbacks and ordeals, notably the Navigation Acts, the declaration of the New England Dominion, and King Philip's War.Lovejoy, David S. “Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall and the Legacy of the Witches, 1692-97.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3, 1997, pp. 355–367. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/366758. Accessed 20 June 2021. He saw this as a sign not that witchcraft did not exist, but that he had ruled on insubstantial evidence. He records in his diary that on 14 January 1697, he stood up in the meeting house he attended while his minister read out his confession of guilt.Morgan, Edmund S. American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America, pp. 126-9, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2009. .
In 1693 Sewall was appointed an associate justice of the Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court, by Governor Sir William Phips. In 1717, he was appointed its chief justice by Governor Samuel Shute.
Sewall died in Boston on January 1, 1730, aged 77, and was interred in the family tomb at Boston's Granary Burying Ground. Sewall married three times. Hannah Hull, his first wife, died in 1717; two years later, in 1719, Sewall married Abigail (Melyen) Woodmansey Tilley, who died seven months later. In 1722, he married Mary (Shrimpton) Gibbs, who survived him.LaPlante, pp. 285–87 His nephew, Stephen Sewall, served as a Massachusetts chief justice, as did his great-grandson Samuel.
Sewall had published "Selling " in response to learning that Boston judge John Saffin had refused to release a Black indentured servant named Adam and intended to perpetually enslave Adam. After "Selling" was released, Saffin issued a rebuttal arguing that social hierarchies were necessary and that enslaving Black Americans was divinely ordained. Adam was set free after a lengthy trial, but Saffin's rebuttal held greater sway among Bostonians, and chattel slavery persisted in Massachusetts. "Selling" was only reprinted twice (one in the 1700s and again in 1863), and it became an obscure document. Sewall's own nephew, also named Samuel Sewall, rejected his uncle's arguments against chattel slavery and continued participating in it as a business.
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