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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Francis brings Massachusetts in the late 17th century to life, December 25, 2005
This review is from: Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience (Hardcover)
This is a well-researched and revealing account of the inner experience of a wealthy and powerful member of the Boston community. Largely based on Samuel Sewall's voluminous diaries, it covers his life from birth to death. It goes into detail about all sorts of events in Boston and Newbury.
The cover blurb ("The Story of a Good Man and an Evil Event") and the title inflate the importance of the notorious Salem witch trials in the book. The publisher can be forgiven for this exaggeration: scandals grab public attention just as much now as then. If the witchcraft "angle" induces more people to take a look at this interesting book, the exaggeration will prove worthwhile.
The witchcraft angle made me pick it up. I live scarcely a mile from the homestead of one of the women accused in that terrible crisis, and I am quite interested in what happened.
Sewall was a Puritan magistrate. They sat in a panel over various trials, including the witchcraft trials. The nuances of Sewall's interior experience of those trials are revealing about the late Puritan age's issues of gender, social standing, and economic class that underlay the witchcraft panic: it started among women in run-down rural Salem Village (now Danvers) and was prosecuted by men in wealthly Salem Town. Both Sewall and his biographer convey an understanding of these struggles straightforwardly without polemic. Francis just tells the stories, and resists the temptation to draw simple moral lessons from what happened. By doing this he cuts through the illusion that Puritan culture was morally simple-minded and brings it to life.
The people of the Puritan Commonwealth felt the presence of God looming over them with a clarity and intensity that is very difficult for us to understand in the 21st century. Those people thought their culture was destined to be the fulfillment God's divine Providence. Everything that happened, from earthquakes to the birth of infants to the attacks of Native Americans, they understood as expression of God's approval or disapproval of their personal conduct. Sewall was a diligent student of meteorology. He repented and apologized for his role in the witch trials partially because he saw signs of divine disapproval in the elements, and believed that the trials were a sign of collective delusion.
Sewall's accounts of trying to persuade his contemporaries of this position are especially revealing about the complexity of the American attitude towards official mistakes and misconduct. He worked hard to declare a day of public fasting and repentance five years after the trials. He tried to get Minister Cotton Mather (that ghoul!) to write a declaration for the fast day specifically acknowleging the collective evils committed during the trials, but Mather would not go beyond broad generalities.
Sewall's acceptance of personal responsibility for official misconduct is as American as roast turkey and apple pie. Unfortunately, so is Mather's refusal to accept it. This fine biography presents clearly that contradiction in American character in all its complexity.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Puritan Worth Knowing, September 6, 2005
This review is from: Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience (Hardcover)
The Salem Witch Trials have been covered in academic works, plays, and movies; they are fascinating examples of mass religious delusion and judicial error, and it is commendable that we do not let them go. The trials didn't last long; the public quickly turned away from this mistaken view of religion and justice. The governmental and judicial officers responsible went on to other things, but they did not apologize, except in one instance. In _Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience_ (Fourth Estate), Richard Francis has not just told the story of the trials again, but has given a biography of a remarkable man based mostly on Sewall's diary. In doing so, he has illustrated the period and the styles of thought of the time, bringing colonial Puritanism into intimate focus with details that have previously been unavailable.
A respected member of the community, he was appointed to be one of nine judges at the witch trials which resulted in the judicial murder of twenty people. The witch craze was short-lived. The public quickly began to doubt that the community was handling Satan's evil in the right way. Officially, there was a call to ask pardon for the errors of 1692, and in 1696 Cotton Mather himself was called upon to draw up a proclamation for a fast to ask God's pardon. Mather, who had himself participated in the trials, made a long list of evils and errors, including a little insertion about how "Hardships were brought upon Innocent persons". During the next year, inspired by hearing his son read Matthew 12:7 ("But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless"), Sewall contemplated what he had done. There had been apologies for the witch trials from other officials, but they tended to seek contrition while blaming others, or to blame ignorance or "being under the power of a strong and general Delusion." Sewall's apology was different. It would be too much to ask that he took on our modern understanding of delusions; he knew that there was a Devil working among his neighbors, but he refused any longer to accept that Satan was trying to colonize the colonies, admitting only that Satan was whipping up widespread fear. His confession, written out and read aloud by his minister to their congregation, puts no blame on people, situations, or Satan. It admitted his own guilt, and that he desired "to take the Blame & Shame of it" upon himself.
Sewall emerges from these pages as a bit of a prig; what puritan wouldn't? He rejected the celebration of holy days, and was grumpy about such frivolity as April Fool's Day. It seems that in 1708 he had been a victim of a "Your shoes are unbuckled" prank (contemporary wits use the "shoelace untied" version), and wrote to a schoolmaster, "If you think it convenient, as I hope you will, Insinuat into your Scholars, the defiling and provoking nature of such a Foolish practice: and take them off from it." He was led by his religion to reject slavery, although many of his neighbors disagreed. While there is a chapter here on his anti-slavery campaign, there is also one on his campaign against periwigs, which horrified him. He railed against others "wigg'd and powder'd with pretence." He wrote a little obituary of a friend which praises his piety and strength, but concludes with the decisive tribute, "He abominated periwigs." There are so many comments in the diary that throw light upon how daily life was lived; one time he returns home to find that the chimney had caught fire, but this was so common an occurrence, he remarks that it "made a great Uproar, as usual." The final, funny chapters have to do with his becoming a widower and pursuing widows; he may have been a Puritan, but life was to be lived. This is a welcome portrait, full of quotations from the diary, which excels in demonstrating the Puritan philosophy as manifest in a remarkable individual who is well worth knowing.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good History and Good Writing, October 24, 2005
This review is from: Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience (Hardcover)
The author uses a biography of Samuel Sewall, affable community leader and judge, as a means to examine the evolution of the Puritan community and conscience. To his credit, the author neither worships nor vilifies the Puritan culture in general nor Samuel Sewall in particular; rather, as a good historian, he attempts to understand and translate their ideas for our consideration.
I thoroughly appreciated the anecdotes that revealed the humane and compassionate side of Judge Sewall - yes, the same man who took part in the tragic injustice of the Salem witchcraft trials. For example, consider this touching quote from page 48
Despite endless bereavement, Sewall never lost his capacity for sympathy and sorrow. He wrote a lovely letter to his aunt Dorothy Rider, who had "some eating thing" in her face: "And seeing neither I, nor you sister, nor any of your relations, can give any reason why God should measure out this suffering to you, and not to us: and why he hath not rather appointed this pain and affliction to us, and made you bear your part in sympathizing with us; we are the more engaged to this duty, which I pray God help us exercise and that more and more, and pardon us wherein we fall short."
Further, the author's shares sound and thoughtful observations and discussion of how the Puritan conscience gradually moved from a tendency towards black and white extreme to a more nuanced acceptance of the mixed motives and grey areas of the human heart.
This book is a wonderful example of the pros and cons of every culture. There were admirable things about Puritan New England. There were also deadly weaknesses that allowed a terrible tragedy to occur. How arrogant it would be to think of ourselves and our own times as having "arrived." Perhaps good history like this book can help us be more reflective about our own culture and nation.
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