Book Review: Judge Sewall's Apology, by Richard Francis

Full title: Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience, by Richard Francis.

The Salem witch hunt started with a couple of girls playing games with fortune telling. They scared themselves into fits. The minister claimed the fits came from the devil. The girls could only clear themselves from the charge of being witches by claiming they were innocent victims of other witches. And so the accusations started.

In a six month period in 1692, a panel of five judges and a jury drawn from the community condemned more than 20 people to death for practicing witchcraft. The accused who claimed innocence were found guilty, and executed by hanging. The accused who confessed to being witches were spared. Those who died insisted on their innocence even as the executioner placed the ropes around their necks.

The community was deeply divided over the witch trials as soon as they began. One judge resigned in protest, rather than condemn people to death for witchcraft on the flimsy and ridiculous evidence being presented. Petitions were circulated; letters were written; higher courts sent advice that would have stopped the witch hunt in its tracks. But for six months, the judges continued to pass death sentences.

What sort of man would condemn men and women to death as witches based on the shenanigans of children? Judge Sewall, at least, was a good, decent Puritan man, caught by his prejudices and simplistic worldview, who spent the rest of his life regretting his role in the event that became the American catchphrase for injustice.

Two years before the witch trials, Judge Sewall condemned several men to death for piracy. Three of the pirates had friends in high places, and Sewall was persuaded to reprieve their death sentences. He regretted allowing himself to be browbeaten into pardoning men he knew to be guilty. He resolved to do his duty to God to enforce justice. This resolve would overshadow his mercy and good sense in the witch trials.

Sewall’s journal does not contain many entries from the time period when Sewall was involved in the witchcraft trials. But in the months and years following that fateful summer, Sewall writes his efforts to come to terms with what happened, and his responsibility for it.

Five years after the witch trials, the town fasted and prayed to ask God’s forgiveness for the witch hunt and other wickedness. During the fast, Judge Sewall stood up in the congregation while the minister read his formal written apology. “Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted, . . . [for his actions as a judge at the witch trials] he is, . . . more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame & Shame of it, Asking pardon of Men, And especially desiring prayers that God who has an Unlimited Authority, would pardon that Sin . . .”

No other judge apologized. The minister who first cried “witchcraft!” apologized, but shifted the blame from himself to the Devil for deceiving him. The apologies from the jury foreman and several members of the jury, and from one of the girls who made accusations, also shifted blame to Satan and to the general fervor of the community. (The culture of victimhood is apparently not new to our century.) Only Sewall accepted blame without trying to wiggle out from under it.

Sewall’s journal after the witch trials reflects a more complex view of good and evil. The witch trials relied heavily on the assumption that everything is either of God or the Devil. There was no allowance for confusion, mysteries, or garden variety mistakes. Sewall’s shift in perspective is a microcosm of the general societal shift in perspective as a young America settled into the second generation of Puritans and began to let go of its apocalyptic worldview. The fact that a cow stops giving milk is no longer proof that the Devil is invading and the prophecies in Revelation are being fulfilled.

I wish the author had spent more time talking about societal trends and how they changed. The book’s strength, which is the level of detail in Judge Sewall’s journal, also became its weakness. The author stuck to Sewall’s journal so carefully that it got distracting (he interrupted the witch trial descriptions to report that Sewall talked to someone about a business deal, and had dinner with a neighbor) and then boring (Sewall had dinner with lots of people, and recorded what the menu was, and the author made sure I knew about every one of them).

The most interesting thing about reading history and biographies is to see how similar the past is to the present. Our day worries about violent crime; Sewall’s day worried about Indian attacks. Our day worries about moral decay in the rising generation; Sewall’s day worried about moral decay in the rising generation. Our day worries about cancer, diabetes and heart disease; Sewall’s day worried about smallpox, measles and fevers.

I believe that people who look nostalgically back at the good old days just haven’t read enough history books. History repeats itself, both the good and the bad.

Several factors that contributed to the witch trials coincided again in Eldorado when the government took children from the FLDS. Again, the initial accusation came from a girl who invented her story. Drastic action was taken too quickly, based on flimsy evidence and wild stories. Once things finally calmed down and someone asked, “what really happened?” people started to realize that things weren’t as dire as they’d thought.

And, as in the witch trials, at least some people in the Eldorado disaster meant well, thought they were doing the right thing, and might spend the rest of their lives wondering how they could have been so wrong.