Sewall, Samuel (sy

`əl), 1652–1730, American colonial jurist, b. England. He was taken as a child to Newbury, Mass., and was graduated from Harvard in 1671. He became a minister but gave up the cloth to assume management of a printing press in Boston and entered upon a public career. He was elected (1683) to the general court and was a member of the council. As one of the judges who tried the Salem witchcraft cases in 1692, he shared responsibility for the condemnation of 19 persons. However, he became convinced of the error of these convictions and in 1697 in Old South Church, Boston, publicly accepted the "blame and shame" for them; thereafter he annually spent a day of repentance in fasting and prayer. Sewall served (1692–1728) as judge of the superior court of the colony, being chief justice during the last 10 years. His diary (3 vol., 1878–82; repr. 1973) is very revealing of the man and of the period.

Bibliography

See biographies by O. E. Winslow (1964) and T. B. Strandness (1967); N. H. Chamberlain, Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived In (1897, repr. 1967).

Sewall, Samuel

(born March 28, 1652, Bishopstoke, Hampshire, Eng.—died Jan. 1, 1730, Boston, Mass.) British-American colonial merchant and jurist. He immigrated to America as a boy and became manager of the New England colonial printing press (1681–84) and a member of the governor's council (1684–1725). In 1692 he was appointed to preside at the Salem witch trials, in which 19 people were executed. Later admitting the error of the court's decision, he stood silently in the Old South Church in Boston in 1697 while his confession of error and guilt was read aloud. His three-volume Diary (published 1878–82) provides a view of New England Puritan life.

Sewall, Samuel (1652–1730) judge, merchant; born in Bishopstoke, England. He came to Boston in 1661, married the daughter of a wealthy shipowner, served as a superior court justice, and became the colony's chief justice in 1718. In 1697, he confessed his error in having been partly responsible for sending people to the gallows during the Salem witch trials (1692). He wrote one of the first antislavery tracts and left a diary (1674–77; 1685–1729) that remains an incomparable record of the life, mentality, and world of a Puritan of his era.