Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of a Conscience - Softcover

Francis, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841156779 ISBN 13: 9781841156774

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

Review:

‘A marvellous book ... intelligent, funny and sympathetic.’ The Times

‘A timely and disturbing book. Francis draws no contemporary parallels but it is hard to ignore the implications of the early ingrained vision he explores here with such lucidity: a threat of nameless, invisible, omnipresent terror so menacing that it overrides the rule of law and legitimises extremes of violence or torture in the name of the invincibly righteous, pure, innocent American people.’ Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

‘Francis’s biography offers the most balanced and richly contextualised account of the Salem trials currently in print. And in following so closely the advances and turnings of Sewall’s innermost thoughts, he takes us on a real-life pilgrim’s progress that is both exhilarating and, at times, deeply moving.’ John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

From the Author:

An Interview with Richard Francis:

Sewall's idées fixes range from noble to trivial...what fascinates you most about this man?

I think the most fascinating thing about him is just that – he covers the whole gamut of human life from the noble to the trivial. This makes him unique among people of his period. He's the only one who comes down to us as a complete person.

It seems to me such a privilege that we can know what a seventeenth century man dreamed about, for example. In some respects his dreams – especially his nightmares – are very recognizable to us. He frequently dreams of the loss of his wife or children. It's very touching that he recounted some of those dreams in Latin, so that if his wife read his diary she wouldn't be able to understand those passages and become upset.

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable aspects of working on the diaries involved making connections that Sewall doesn't explicitly make for us. There's one entry when he describes taking his wife to Dorchester to eat strawberries in the orchard of some friends of theirs. Two or three weeks before that entry he describes a dream in which he hears that his wife has died while visiting Dorchester. Quite obviously, though he nowhere says so, he takes her to the same place in order to confront and exorcise that nightmare, though of course she would never have known that was his real motive. Moments like that made me feel really in touch with another human being across the gulf of time, a man with very recognizable strengths and weaknesses.

The point is, he always seemed to confront those weaknesses. That's the significance of his great apology. And even when he appears rather petty, he can come across as admirable too. There's one occasion when he gets very upset because he believes he's been snubbed - William Stoughton, the Deputy Governor, hasn't invited him to a party. That despondency at being left out is something most people can relate to. But at the same time it casts retrospective light on Sewall's courage in arousing Stoughton's wrath in the first place by publicly apologizing for the witchcraft trials (in which Stoughton had been the chief judge).

I love the fact that Sewall enjoyed picnics, good food and drink, and took such pleasure in his family. His battle against the fashion of periwigs is very endearing, and so is his enthusiastic and disaster-prone courtship of Boston ladies after the death of his beloved wife Hannah. He gives a human face to the Puritans.

Do you see your interpretation of the Salem witch crisis diverging far from the extant body of work on this subject?

What makes my perspective on the witchcraft different from that of previous authors is that I'm not primarily concerned with what actually caused the crisis. My interest is in what the authority figures in the community, and Sewall in particular, thought was happening. So I didn't deconstruct the testimony of the trials in hopes of discovering concealed motives, but rather tried to follow the story people were actually telling.

How did you shape your biography of Samuel Sewall?

Good question - with difficulty. There were two main problems. The first was that the most traumatic event in his life, the witch crisis, lasted a little over six months. But the story had to be told. I didn't know much about what had actually happened at Salem before I began writing the book, and realised most readers would be in the same boat. But there were moments when I wondered if it was even possible to do any sort of justice to that episode - it's such a complicated story, and involved so many people, such a bewildering array of points of view.

The other problem applies to all biographies. Life doesn't have to have much of a shape. Books, however, do. (And there's also the fact that most lives tail off into old-age and death, and that can be a bit of a downer.)

Insofar as he was known at all, Sewall had a reputation for two things. The first was his apology. The second was for his detailed accounts of his courtship of certain Boston ladies, late in his life, after his first wife had died. At a certain point in my research it began to dawn on me that these two episodes were related. In other words that his apology had made it possible for him to describe the courtships in the way he had.

The trials involved a simplistic way of viewing human behavior, as if people were puppets being operated on by the forces of good and evil. As the trials wore on that attitude became discredited. The key words, as far as I’m concerned, were uttered by Rebecca Nurse when she was accused of not weeping at the sufferings of the afflicted girls. She replied with simple dignity: 'You do not know my heart.'

What's remarkable about his accounts of his courtships is the way Sewall respects the mystery of the women he woos. In the past, commentators have seen these descriptions as quaint, or funny or just sad. They seem to me to have missed the most important point, missed it by a mile, as Mark Twain would say. Sewall, in the early eighteenth century, suddenly proved capable of writing about human relationships with all the psychological complexity of a late nineteenth century novelist. No one else in America would achieve this detailed and non-judgmental observation of people's behavior for many years. How come Sewall managed to? I believe that the experience of the trials, and his ultimate repudiation of the attitudes that underpinned them, gave him the necessary alertness and sensitivity to achieve it.

Making that connection gave Sewall's life a shape, and therefore gave my book a shape too. And of course as a story-teller I believe shape provides meaning.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1841156779
• ISBN 13: 9781841156774
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432