The witch-trial judge with a conscience: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2005/08/21 > The witch-trial judge with a conscience

The witch-trial judge with a conscience
Sunday, August 21, 2005 - Reviewed by David O'Donoghue
Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials And The Forming Of A Conscience, by Richard Francis, Fourth Estate, London.

With this guided tour through Puritan New England at the end of the 1600s, Richard Francis has done his readers a favour.

Using the diary of Judge Samuel Sewall as the basis for the tour, we can witness the progress of first-generation settlers as they take over the levers of power in the new American colonies, amid a fierce war against native Indians and French troops.

Those bloody pre-independence years provide a fascinating backdrop for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials.

Judge Sewall was one of the nine judges who, in 1692, sent 19 innocent women to the gallows. It was the finale of an infamous witch-hunt that had been carefully orchestrated by the great and the good of Salem for the benefit of Salem.

Sewall was the only one of the nine judges to apologise publicly for having condemned innocent people to death.

His apology was made in his local church in 1697, five years after the hangings. According to the author: “None of the other witchcraft judges ever made a public recantation, which makes Sewall's insistence on taking the blame on his own shoulders even more remarkable.” But Francis may be somewhat wide of the mark in singling Sewall out as a lone, heroic figure with a conscience, as the book's title suggests.

On closer examination, it turns out that another judge, Nathaniel Saltonstall, resigned in protest at the conduct of the trial just after the first “witch'‘ was hanged on June 10, 1692.

In addition, some trial jurors issued a public apology in 1697, admitting that a miscarriage of justice had occurred.

Nine years after that, Ann Putnam Jr, one of the main accusers in the trials, confessed that her evidence had caused the death of people “whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons'‘.

Richard Francis pulls no punches in stating that “the essential issue of the Salem witch trials was religion, adding, “puppets were being operated by other puppets, who in turn were being controlled by the master puppeteer. . .”

According to the author, “one of the legacies of Salem was a critical attitude to religious enthusiasm'‘, along with a ban on the use of hearsay evidence in court trials.

Judge Sewall's diaries were last published in 1973,but this latest take on them goes some way towards broadening our view of events 300 years ago in Massachusetts, when witchcraft and slavery were part of everyday life.

In 1716, a new law “rated Indian and Negro slaves, for taxation purposes, in the same category as horses and hogs'‘. Sewall had unsuccessfully opposed the introduction of that law.

Some years earlier, in 1700, in what Francis describes as “one of the most surprising and courageous acts of his life'‘, Sewall penned The Selling of Joseph, one of the first anti-slavery tracts ever written in English.

According to the author's figures, there were at that time about 1,000 slaves in New England compared to a white population of 90,000.

The book also details Sewall's trip to England in 1688, a seven-week sea voyage, along with his campaign against gentlemen's wigs and, as a widower, his courtship of eligible Boston widows.

All in all, it's a fascinating picture of New England and Old England in another age.

David O'Donoghue's next book, The Irish Army in the Congo, 1960-1964: The Far Battalions, will be published by Irish Academic Press in October.