January 14 will mark the 325th anniversary of Judge Samuel Sewall’s apology for his conduct during the Salem Witch Trials. On this date in 1697, Sewall stood up before God and everybody in Boston’s Old South Church and bowed his head. The Rev. Samuel Willard read aloud Sewall’s statement of contrition, which was wordy and flowery and old-school and third-person-y. Here’s the abbreviated gist:
Samuel Sewall, sensible of the…strokes of God upon himself and his family; and being sensible, that as to the guilt contracted, upon the opening of [the court that conducted the witchcraft trials]…he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all his other sins…and…powerfully defend him against all temptations to sin, for the future.
Translation: “I, referring to myself in the third person, am aware that God is punishing me, and I’m also aware of my guilt in the Salem Witch Trials. I want to take responsibility. I ask forgiveness from God and my fellow humans, and I hope God will help me not screw up again.”
Samuel Sewall is Sorry, Sorry, Sorry
To non-1697 ears, this is not an impressive apology. Today, good apologies don’t ask for forgiveness. (As SorryWatch often says, forgiveness is a gift to be granted; it is bad manners to ask for a gift.) But back then, asking pardon was a linguistic convention: It showed that the speaker was putting himself in a humble position, being deferential and submissive. For a man of status, like Sewall, presenting oneself as a supplicant was a form of giving away power.
Sewall also notes that he’s apologizing at least in part because he feels he’s experiencing consequences for his actions [“strokes of God upon himself and his family”]. Again, a strategy we frown upon in modern apologies: letting everyone know you are suffering for your mistake is Bad Celebrity Apology Behavior. Think of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, after being accused of groping by multiple women, apologizing for “making anyone uncomfortable” but assuring us that this “has been an incredibly difficult situation for me as well as for other people.” Poor him! Or consider Chrissy Teigen’s response to the screenshots of vile messages she’d sent to then-teenaged Courtney Stodden, mocking Stodden’s appearance and telling Stodden to commit suicide. “Not a lot of people are lucky enough to be held accountable for all their past bullshit in front of the entire world,” Teigen said in her apology statement. The snark.
But back to Sewall: What did he have to apologize for? We think you know. You were probably in your high school’s production of The Crucible. You saw Hocus Pocus. (Aw, I love Hocus Pocus!) To refresh your memory: In 1692, 30 people, mostly women, were found guilty of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged, five died in jail, and one was pressed to death (by stones of increasing size being placed on his chest) for refusing to enter a plea. Supposedly, as the last stone was applied, that victim’s last words were “More weight!” which is pretty badass, if horrifying.
There were no public domain images of Hocus Pocus so here is a woodcut of a witch holding a plant.
Why did Sewall second-guess his actions four years later? Well, the “strokes of God” he referred to included the deaths of two of his daughters and his wife’s mother, and the birth of a stillborn child. Surely, he felt, this raft of horrors is no coincidence.
Thinking that God is punishing you doesn’t inherently mean your repentance is insincere. Sewall, a man of great religious faith, kept extensive diaries in which he discussed his doubts about his actions and the peer pressure he got from fellow judges to convict, presenting women’s moles and pimples as evidence. (PROOF of evil sorcery!) After the fact, Sewall tried to convince both Increase Mather and his son Cotton to apologize too. Those guys were actually responsible for promoting the witch hunts as well as judging and punishing the would-be witches. But they refused to listen to Sewall. Massachusetts governor William Phips opted to blame everything on his lieutenant governor, William Stoughton. In 1693, Phipps sent a letter to the British government saying that Stoughton “hath from the beginning hurried on these matters with great precipitancy” and had seized the property of those executed “without my knowledge or consent”! Channeling little Jeffy in the Family Circus cartoon chirping “Not Me!”
Here is a parody of The Family Circus called the Nietzsche Family Circus, an ancient meme generator that paired random Nietzche quotes with Family Circus panels.
Here is a parody of The Family Circus called The Dysfunctional Family Circus which was also a meme way back in the day.
But the day of Sewall’s speech was named an official fast day in Massachusetts, and 11 witch-trials jurors were enough influenced by Sewall’s apology to join him in public repentance. We wrote about their apology on SorryWatch back in 2014; at the time we were not impressed. “Meh,” we said then. “Doesn’t fully take responsibility. WE WERE DELUDED, WE HAD NO CLUE… whatever, Puritans.”
Perhaps in 2021 we have lower standards than we did in 2014? Because now we say, hey, at least they said they’d never do it again? Sure, they blame the devil as much as they do themselves, but they made an effort? Here’s what they said, btw.
We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and prince of the air… we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this people of the Lord, the guilt of innocent blood. We do, therefore, hereby signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of and sorrow for our errors in acting on such evidence to the condemning of any person….and do hereby declare that we justly fear that we were sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted and distressed in our minds, and do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this our error. And pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature.
We do heartily ask forgiveness of you all, whom we have justly offended and do declare, according to our present minds, we would none of us do such things again on such grounds for the whole world, praying you to accept of this in way of satisfaction for our offense, and that you would bless the inheritance of the Lord that He may be entreated for the land.
Whew. Wordy people. Points for noting that the public was “justly offended,” but too much “delusion” and “unwittingly.” A good apology takes responsibility.
Despite the jurors following Sewall’s suit, many prominent Massachusetts citizens were furious at Sewall for apologizing. In Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford University Press, 2014), linguist Edwin L. Battistella writes that Sewall was “ostracized” after his admission of wrongdoing, but “the apology was transformative for him, and he devoted much of his life from that point forward to making amends, writing in opposition to colonial treatment of Indians and slaves.” Sewall’s treatise The Selling of Joseph, published in 1700, used Biblical texts to prove that African slavery was a horrific crime. He wrote:
“Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his Brethren, then they were to him: and they had no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him …There is no proportion between Twenty Pieces of Silver, and LIBERTY.”
And:
“That which GOD has joyned together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their Country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their Children. How horrible is the Uncleanness, Mortality, if not Murder, that the Ships are guilty of that bring great Crouds of these miserable Men, and Women.”
Printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700.
Gradually, everyone came around to the notion that the Witch Trials were a bad and wrong idea. In 1942, the State House of Representatives commissioned a mural-sized painting by Albert Herder, called “The Dawn of Tolerance in Massachusetts,” depicting Sewall’s apology. And in 2001, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating, by name, everyone in the state who had been convicted of witchcraft. Still, despite the efforts of descendants of the victims, monetary reparations have not been forthcoming. Strange, that. Somehow governments have a really hard time putting their money where their mouth is. And where their paintings are.
Image Credits: Met Museum, public domain, British Library, public domain, Wellcome Library, London. images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Woodcut, ca. 1700-1720. Woodcut ca. 1700-1720 Published: – Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 , https://www.robotbutt.com/2014/06/19/things-you-should-know-about-the-nietzsche-family-circus/, Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Gift of Robert C. Winthrop, 1863.
I enjoyed this column and Sorrywatch’s reconsideration of the standards by which a historic apology should be judged.
The Talmud study cycle recently finished an entire chapter on when it is appropriate to call for a public fast, including questions about when community leaders, like the king or high priest, should publicly fast.
(It was riveting to me as a Californian, because a lot of it hinges on determining when and how much to freak out if it hasn’t rained yet, and how much rain has to fall before you should stop freaking out.)
The rabbis’ surprising judgment was that the king should hardly ever fast publicly, because it would be too disturbing for his subjects to witness — “The king is fasting! We have sinned so badly we are all going to be smitten!” — and it does seem as if Samuel Sewall’s fast and apology agitated his neighbors quite a bit.
I don’t know enough about Puritan theology to know if they had a similar concept of how to ward off otherwise inevitable communal doom brought on by collective guilt. But his apology does sound to me like a warding-off ritual, like a recognition that the community has fucked up so badly that the heavenly judge is going to start smiting on a mass level if someone doesn’t publicly atone for their wrongness.
I also wonder if confessing that he was unable “to withstand the mysterious delusions of the power of darkness” had a different vibe in an era where Satan was widely believed to be real and when, in fact, all those hanged women were believed to be guilty of giving in to Satan’s temptations. Instead of evading responsibility, Sewall might have been seen as confessing to one of the most serious crimes his community recognized.
I had a quibble, as I read, with the judgement that the Puritan apologies had “too much ‘delusion’ and ‘unwittingly.’ A good apology takes responsibility”. Can there not be room for both? After all, sometimes people ARE deluded or unwitting, even people who pride themselves (as the judges did) on their discernment. To the victim demanding “HOW could this happen” an explanation is owed. I think a person can find humility in admitting they were deluded, and still accept responsibility. The key thing is that delusion is explanation, not excuse.