Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
characteristic are the following entries in the diary:
Sabbath, March 2d. I Pray’d in the Family, that might have an
interest in God, Signed, Sealed and Delivered, and that all that
tended to make it sure, might be perfected.
Febr. 6. [1718] This morning ... I had a sweet and very affectionat
Meditation Concerning the Lord Jesus; Nothing was to be objected
against his Person, Parentage, Relations, Estate, House, Home!
Why did I not resolutely, presently close with Him! And I cry’d
mightily to God that He would help me so to doe!
23. 5. [1721] Mr. Prince preaches the Lecture, from Gen. 22. 18
... A very seasonable Discourse. One Fly was discovered in his
Ointment: He asserted that the 1000. years Rev. 20. stood for Three
Hundred and Sixty Thousand years; taking every day of the 1000.
years for a year: as 365. days i.e. years. _Apage has nugas!_
[“Away with this nonsense!”][91]
No higher criticism for Samuel Sewall. If we quibble over the plain
words of Scripture, how shall we be certain of the terms of the
contract?
A man so cautious by nature, and with so large a stake in the existing
order, could not fail to be a conservative, content with a world that
justified itself by the prosperity which it brought him, and which
it would bring to others, he doubted not, if they governed their
conduct with equal prudence. He desired no innovations in church or
state; established forms answered his needs and filled the measure of
his ideal. The existing system was approved by all the respectable
people of the community; there was everything to gain in upholding
it, and likelihood of loss in suffering power to pass into the hands
of a royal governor or of the ignorant poor. And so, determined by
complex motives, by habit, by class ties, by economic interest, and
by honest liking, Samuel Sewall went with the stream of conventional
orthodoxy, strong for the old theocratic principles, seeing no need
for readjustments to meet changing conditions. The true principles of
church and state had been laid down by the fathers, to which the common
acceptance by the best people gave final sanction.
It is characteristic of the prosperous bourgeoisie, and the old Judge
walked the streets of Boston, or sat in his pew, or took his place
on the bench, as stubborn and unimaginative a conservative as any of
his fellows. If his persistent opposition to change, whether in the
matter of wigs, or Christmas keeping, or creed, or politics, was due
in part to a phlegmatic love of use and wont, it was prompted also by
an instinctive fear of innovation. The world doubtless is imperfect,
but it answers to God’s will and we understand its ways and can draw
our contracts with open eyes. Whereas change, however desirable it may
seem theoretically, entails too many disturbing uncertainties. Very
likely it was this subconscious concern for his material interests
that so often made the simple-minded Judge an unintelligent opponent
of all popular movements looking to a freer and more liberal society.
When his native kindliness was touched he spoke out frankly. His
anti-slavery tract (_The Selling of Joseph_), slight in extent and
somewhat overpraised by historians, was not only much in advance of
his time, but it contains one sentence that should not be forgotten,
“There is no proportion between twenty pieces of silver and liberty.”
Equally significant was his stand against capital punishment for
counterfeiting.[92] Such acts as the following must also be set down to
his credit: “I essay’d June 22 [1716], to prevent Indians and Negros
being Rated with Horses and Hogs; but could not prevail.”[93] His
native sense of justice was as strong as his kindliness. Who does not
know of his confession in regard to the witchcraft persecutions--an
act that set all Boston tongues wagging. When he was convinced that he
had made a grievous and sorrowful mistake, he rose in the congregation
while the minister read his public acknowledgment of that mistake,
and his repentance for his share in the unhappy business. Thereafter
in commemoration he kept an annual day of prayer and fasting. We can
forgive him much for that honest and manly act.
To the end of his life Sewall refused to go forward with the changing
times, and his voluntary assumption of the office of _praefectura
morum_ laid him under a heavy responsibility to see that the primitive
ways were upheld. He was magisterial in rebuke and few transgressors
of the strict New England code escaped a censure. One would like to
have James Franklin’s private opinion of the sharp-eyed old Judge. To
Franklin and other members of the Hell-fire Club--young fellows keenly
interested in domesticating the new wit literature in homespun Boston,
openly skeptical, inclining to Arianism and even to deism--he must
have seemed a prosy old reactionary, upholding a decadent orthodoxy
and an obsolete social order. No doubt many a sharp jibe was aimed at
his back, for there were many to whom the older ways began to seem
preposterous. It may very well have been that those who committed a
certain prank which Sewall records may have had him in mind.
Aug. 3. [1717] ... ’Tis sad it should be so, but a virulent Libel
was starch’d on the Three Doors of the Meeting House, containing
the following Words:
TO ALL TRUE-HEARTED CHRISTIANS
Good people, within this House, this very day,
A Canting Crew will meet to fast, and pray.
Just as a miser fasts with greedy mind to spare;
So the glutton fasts, to eat a greater share.
But the sower-headed Presbyterians fast to seem more holy,
And their Canting Ministers to punish sinfull foley.[94]
Happily there is another and pleasanter side to the character of Samuel
Sewall, and one that looked forward to the future instead of backward
to the past. Despite the harshness of the Puritan creed and the bigotry
of Puritan rule, the fields and meadows of New England, that sent a
breath of the countryside through the crooked streets of Boston, were
a wholesome influence in the lives of men and women. Magistrate and
money-lender though he was, Samuel Sewall was a countryman and farmer
also, a judge of milch cows and fat porkers as well as criminals, a
lover of robins and flowers and fruitful orchards, one who sat his
horse well, and when on circuit often drew up at a rail-fence to
discuss the crops with some gossipy farmer. Above all, a lover of
men, the most neighborly soul in the world, mingling freely with all
classes, and although quite properly proud of a visit from the Governor
or other great person, never above chatting with the carpenter, or
doing a kindness to an old nurse. It was the friendly heart of the man
that prompted so many little errands of helpfulness; and if sermons and
tracts and good advice flowed from him like a spring freshet, if he was
magisterial in petty rebuke, such little oddities of the man and the
time did not detract from his sympathy or lessen his helpfulness. Men
stood in awe of Cotton Mather, and children must have run from him, but
neither awe nor fear threw their shadow across Sewall’s path. We can
make too much of the countless funerals that dot his pages, with their
thrifty reckoning of gloves and scarfs and rings that were the queer
perquisites of pallbearers. It was not an unwholesome world despite the
smell of mortality that exudes from the old records, or the terrors of
little children smitten with the fear of hell; and the homely round of
Samuel Sewall’s activities was very far from unwholesome.
It was his neighborliness that made him so representative of the
leveling tendencies of a provincial village life--an easy comradeship
with men of all conditions, unknown to the rigid class divisions
of the old world. Going one day to visit the Jews’ burial place at
Mile-End, while on a visit to London, he invited the sexton to a pot
of beer and a quiet chat, remarking in friendly fashion, “wisht might
meet in Heaven: He answered, and drink a Glass of Beer together,
which we were then doing.”[95] His English friends would scarcely
have understood that homely little scene, so natural to the colonial.
Sewall is the first Yankee who reveals the native kindliness of the New
England village. He was zealous to do good and to deal generously with
others, because he had been generously dealt by. Growing more human
with the ripening years, yet instinctively conservative, stubbornly
intent on managing his own affairs in his own way and by his own
agents, provincial to the core and strong in local pride, he reveals
the special bent of the New England character, as it unconsciously
differentiated itself from its English original. Not American as yet
like Franklin, and no longer wholly English like Winthrop, far from
democratic and yet no Tory, he was the progenitor of a practical race
that was to spread the gospel of economic individualism across the
continent.
Footnotes
[79] Two of his three wives and eleven of his fourteen children he had
buried.
[80] Tyler, _History of American Literature during the Colonial
Period_, Chapter XIII, Part IV.
[81] _Diary_, in _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, Fifth
Series, Vol. I, p. xi.
[82] Compare his haggling over the terms of settlement upon a later
proposed marriage; see _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 205.
[83] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 168.
[84] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 32.
[85] The following is part of an obituary notice by his son:
In 1684, He was chosen a Magistrate of the _Massachusetts_ Colony....
In 1692, He was appointed by King William and Queen Mary in their
Royal Charter, one of the first Council for their Majesties in this
Province, into which He was annually chosen and sat till 1725, when
He resign’d his Election, having outlived all the others nominated in
that Fundamental Constitution. In 1692 He was made one of the Judges,
and in 1718, Chief Justice of our Superior Courts of Judicature thro’
the Province, in which He sat till 1728, when his Infirmities growing
on Him, He resign’d that Place also. In 1715, He was made Judge of
Probates for this County of _Suffolk_, and continued in that Office
till 1728, when He laid it down; it being the last Publick Post wherein
He served and honoured his Country. _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 409-410.
In addition to the above, he was at times an overseer of Harvard
College, censor of the press, and captain of the Ancient and Honourable
Artillery Company; a frequent moderator of Boston town meeting, member
of innumerable committees on church, parish and commonwealth matters,
and adviser at large to whoever was in difficulties.
[86] See _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 366; Vol. III, pp. 87 and 345.
[87] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 84-85.
[88] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 228.
[89] _Ibid._, p. 214.
[90] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 419.
[91] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 312; Vol. III, p. 165; Vol. III, pp. 281-282.
[92] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 277.
[93] _Ibid._, p. 87.
[94] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 116-117. Note the use of the word
Presbyterian in these lines.
[95] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 301.
Chapter II • The Mather Dynasty
I
For one who is not a loving student of the unamiable bickerings that
clutter the records of early New England, and who does not read them
by the gentle light of filial loyalty, it would seem presumptuous to
venture into the thorny fields tilled by the Mathers. He is certain to
get well scratched, and not at all certain to return with any fruit
gathered. The rancors of dead partisanships beset him on every side,
and the gossip of old wives’ tales fills his ears. He will encounter
many a slanderous hearsay, and the authentic documents to which he
would naturally turn are often inaccessible, and always inhospitable.