Colonist and judge, son of Henry Sewall and Jane, daughter of Stephen Drummer, was born at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, on 28 March 1652. Emigrating in childhood with his parents to Newbury, Massachusetts, he was educated at a private school and at Harvard, entering in 1667, and graduating B.A. in 1671 and M.A. in 1674. He was then ordained minister, but on his marriage in 1677 was induced to leave that calling, and, under the patronage of his father-in-law, started a printing-press at Boston. He soon became known in public life, and in 1684 was elected a member of the court of assistants for Massachusetts. In 1688 he came to England on business. In 1692 Sewall, as a justice of the peace, was concerned in adjudicating in the Salem witchcraft case, but afterwards bitterly repented of his share in the proceedings, and publicly announced the fact, henceforward spending one day annually in fasting and prayer. He afterwards became one of the regular judges of Massachusetts, and in 1718 chief justice. He retired in 1728, and died at Boston on 1 Jan. 1730. Sewall married, on 28 Feb. 1676, Hannah, daughter of John Hull and Judith Quincy. He left a long line of descendants, the “loyalist” branch of which changed the spelling of the name to “Sewell.” Sewall’s diary, an interesting and valuable source for the social history of the colony from 1674 to 1729, was first published in the “Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,” 5th Ser. vol. V. An engraving, from a supposed original portrait (date and artist unknown), forms the frontispiece. Sewall was also author of a pamphlet against slavery, entitled “The Selling of Joseph” (1700).

Personal

  A strong, gentle, and great man was Samuel Sewall, great by almost every measure of greatness,—moral courage, honor, benevolence, learning, eloquence, intellectual force and breadth and brightness.

  Sewall was a representative of the most devout English Puritans, but he was of a submissive, not an aggressive temper. He was honestly attached to the old church and state government of the early settlers. His political and religious principles were thoroughly Puritan, and he had an almost morbid dislike of innovations of all sorts…. The character and behavior of Sewall and men like him were the prevailing cause of the overthrow of the charter government.

  Judge Sewall is better known to us in both his outer and inner being, in all his elements, composition, and manifestation of character, in his whole personal, domestic, social, official, and religious life, than is any other individual in our local history of two hundred and fifty years. And this is true not only of himself, but through his pen, curiously active, faithful, candid, kind, impartial, and even just, his own times stand revealed and described to us, as if by thousands of daguerreotypes and repeating telephones.

  He was an amiable and honorable man, whose outer and inner life for fifty-six years, laid open upon the pages of his private Diary, bears the light as few men’s lives could do, but he had a leaning toward creature comforts and respect for shillings and pence prophetic of the Yankee constitution.

  Sewall, though he seems opinionated, narrow, mercenary, and over frugal, as seen by the light of to-day, should be judged by the ethics of historical criticism—that is, regarded in the environment of his age, in the atmosphere and circumstances of Puritan New England. Thus viewed, his was certainly a kindly, wise, thoughtful, prudent, helpful, honourable, and fruitful life. Even those dark days of his life, his brief but sad part in the Salem Witchcraft, are glorified by his noble public penitence therefor in later life.

Diary

  Throughout we find evidences that he was a devout Puritan, a worthy member of the Old South Church in Boston. His prayers and fasts were numerous, and doubtless genuine. His early training in theology gives a flavor, always apparent, to his reflections. It is, however, as difficult to make satisfactory selections from Sewall as it always has been from Pepys or Evelyn. The interest of the work lies not so much in any particular part as in the aggregation of the details of the whole record. In this volume we have the daily life of a Bostonian recorded for fifteen years. We enter imperceptibly into a knowledge of his surroundings, his joys and sorrows, his cares and his successes. We learn when his children are born, when they are ill, and when they die. We know, above all, about the daily occurrences of the town at a time when newspapers were not and the reporter was unimagined.

  Judge Sewall’s “Diary” is essentially a work of historical reference. It can never be a popular book, or even in considerable demand with general readers. There is too much uninteresting detail in it; nor is the subject in any aspect a large or inviting one. To the student of New England history, however, it is a mine of necessary information.

  In these many pages of Sewall we find traces of austerity, narrowness, bigotry, pettiness, and (in the witchcraft matter) fatal delusion; but we are still more impressed with the writer’s sincerity, constant endeavor to do right, and faithful adherence to those principles of duty which are the foundation of society. The little details of his life are no more trivial than would be those of most men, if written down as fully; the records of an old man’s courtships, melancholy—amusing as they are,—and it should be said that they ought not to have been printed,—reveal nothing morally discreditable; and even in the witchcraft error, let us not forget that Sewall shared his mistake with hundreds of the most learned and devout men of this time, in both hemispheres; that his part in the executions was no greater than that of others of high standing in England and America; and that, more fully than any of them, he publicly and privately recanted.

  It is perhaps the only book of the Colonial period that can be read through with pleasure.

  Has been compared with the more famous “Diary” of Samuel Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historical interest as “the petty province here” was inferior in political and social importance to “Britain far away.” For the most part it is a chronicle or small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiæ of his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps as this: “March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret.” But it also affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip’s War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc.

  We have no other book like it; perhaps no other storehouse of old ways and social life so abundant as it. Sewall never took the time or the pains, being too busy, to get himself a well-mannered style and fixed forms as a literary man. Perhaps the exacting, and even narrow, zeal of Puritanism, always unfavorable to art, dissuaded him. Yet there are not lacking passages in his Diary and Letter Book which show his ability to have written the strongest, well-ordered English had he willed it.

  Inferior in literary merit to Evelyn and Pepys, Sewall may yet be classed with his two contemporary diarists; resembling the former in the piety which tinges his journal, and the latter in the variety of his scope and the personal, even trivial, nature of much that he records…. Like many people who have launched into autobiography, this aged charmer does not know when to close his diary, and his biographer thinks it only right to punish him for his indiscretion by giving to the world some of his later entries along with the rest. Shall we regard his autumnal frivolity as one more proof that human nature will not be denied its rights, and, if forced to conform to a strait-laced Puritanism in its springtime, will kick up its heels in old age?

  On the whole, Judge Sewall’s diary is not cheerful reading, but the grayness of its atmosphere is mainly due to the unlovely aspect of colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement climate not yet subdued by the forces of a luxurious civilization, and by a too constant consideration of the probabilities of being eternally damned.

  His diary presents a vivid picture of the public and private life of the time, besides disclosing a singularly pure, manly, and gentle character.

  Gives very interesting and sometimes very amusing pictures of the man and the times—the harmless vanity, love of creature comforts, hatred of wigs, and mingled shrewdness and simplicity of the one; the political troubles, quaint customs, sympathetic piety, and abundance of human nature (regenerate and unregenerate) in the other.

General

  I have called Samuel Sewall “A Puritan Pepys,” and the description is by no means so fanciful as might be supposed. From the fact that they were in a measure contemporary, a comparison of the two diarists is obvious, but the first impression is of the strange contrast between them rather than of any similarity. Pepys was twenty years older than Sewall, and his diary ceases nearly six years before that of the latter begins. Pepys lived in London, the great metropolis of a great nation…. Between the gay politician of the Restoration and the grave Puritan judge there is a marked and interesting likeness. Possibly certain fixed qualities of mind and character must be common to all good diarists, but, however this may be, if Pepys had been brought up as a Puritan and lived in New England, one cannot help thinking that he would have been much like Sewall.

  Justice Sewall was a strong writer on many topics. He was one of the first to protest against African slavery. His little tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” a powerful and impassionate plea against this evil, is still readable.