Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall and the Legacy of the Witches, 1692-97
Authors(s): David S. Lovejoy
Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 355-367
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/366758
Accessed: 24-03-2016 18:26 UTC
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Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall
and the Legacy of the Witches, 1692-97
DAVID S. LOVEJOY
SAMUEL SEWALL'S tribute to the natural beauty and religious significance of Plum Island and Newbury, Massachu-
setts, comes as a surprise in an otherwise pedantic tract devoted
to New England's potential role in the millennium. A lone para-
graph on the penultimate page of Phaenomena quaedam Apoc-
alyptica, a prophetic exercise published in Boston in 1697, the
passage appears out of place, a bit of bravado or, perhaps, self-
indulgent nostalgia for the writer's childhood stamping ground.'
Appreciators of Sewall's brief prose-poem are usually silent
about the balance of the lengthy tract it so strikingly brings to a
close. But, of course, as with all great writing, the part loses
much of its power when divorced from the whole. Sewall's trea-
tise had a serious purpose. It was a strong reaction to English
theologian Joseph Mede's depressing forecast about the New
World's role in the prophetic drama of the millennium, about
which English theologians were increasingly excited as the Civil
War approached. Mede (1586-1638), of Cambridge University,
died sixteen years before Samuel Sewall was born. But no mat-
ter, his writings outlived him by many years and were still being
discussed in America far into the eighteenth century.2
'Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, Ad Aspectum NOVIS ORBIS
configurata. Or, some fetv Lines towoards a description of the Newt HEAVEN As It
makes to those wvho stand upon the NEW EARTH (Boston, 1697), p. 59.
2For Joseph Mede at Cambridge, see Dictionary of National Biography, 1917 ed.
(Oxford University), s.v. Mead, or Mede, Joseph; Christopher Hill, Milton and the En-
glish Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 33; William Kerrigan, The
Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), p. 118. Ezra
Stiles, President of Yale College, criticized Joseph Mede's ideas about the millennium
in 1781. See The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter, 3 vols. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), 2:46.5-67, 508-9.
355
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356 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
Joseph Mede's conjectures about the New World were tersely
stated. The native Indians, led to America by the devil, were
pledged to secure him and his kingdom from the "Sound of the
Gospel and Cross of Christ." The colonists' motives for settling
in America were wrong-headed from the outset and their efforts
to Christianize the pagan hordes residing there were doomed to
failure, for America was outside the limits of the millennium's
promises, which were reserved for the Old World alone. In-
deed, not only was America beyond salvation; it would supply
the evil battalions, the Gog and Magog, who in their prophetic
roles were destined to assault the New Jerusalem. The course of
history in the New World, unlike that of the Old, according to
Mede, had no effect on the shaping of its prophetic possibilities.
The "unprofitable servant" whom Christ had "cast into outer
darkness" remained-and would ever remain-hopelessly pok-
ing about in the shadows of the wilderness.
The dead hand of Joseph Mede's conjectures hung heavy
over several New Englanders who were trying to come to grips
with their own vibrant history, young as it was, and its relation-
ship to biblical prophecy, an exercise Mede and his followers
had popularized. To refute Mede's negative forecast Sewall
seems to be telling us, "Let's look at the record." And Phaenom-
ena is what Sewall believed was a candid look at New England's
record from the beginning.:3
Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica drew heavily, as one
would imagine, on the Bible, the Revelation in particular, on
3Joseph Mede, Clavis Apocalyptica (London, 1643); The Works of ... Joseph Mede,
2 vols. (London, 1664): Mr. Mede's answer to Dr. William Twisse his Fourth Letter,
2:280-81; Epistle LXIX, Mr. Mede's Fourth Letter to Mr. Estwick, 2:1034; Dr.
Twisse's Fifth Letter to Mr. Mede, 2:992; 2:980, 992, 993, 1034; Joseph Mede, The Key
of the Revelation, 2d ed. (London, 1650), sig. T, T+1 (English translation of Clavis
Apocalyptica); Sewall, Phaenomena, p. 26.
For the "unprofitable servant," see Matthew 25:30. John Warren, The Unprofitable
Servant: A Serrrumn (London, 1655), pp. 1, 11, 14, 19; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi
Americana, bks. 1 and 2, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1977), pp. 9.3-94. A good bit of Sewall's Phaenomena is aimed at refuting any
idea that New England was the "unprofitable servant." See Sacvan Bercovitch, The
American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 72n.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 357
other prophetic writings, on the author's wide reading of his-
tory, but also on his experiences as a New Englander. Although
an amateur scholar of the prophecies, Sewall believed firmly in
the interaction between prophetic conjecture and historical re-
ality. Therefore, in his arguments against Joseph Mede, he re-
hearsed the positive contributions colonists, particularly New
Englanders, had made to planting the Gospel in America, to
converting Indians, to living pious, productive lives, and to the
likelihood of the New Jerusalem appearing sometime, some-
where in the New World.4
But Sewall did not tell the whole story in Phaenomena. He
omitted a most critical juncture in his own life which reflected
as much upon the history of the colony as it did upon him and,
therefore, was part of the record.
It is hard to believe there's anything about Samuel Sewall
that we do not already know. His splendid Diary supposedly
catalogued his everyday doings and thoughts, as well as his spir-
itual biography, for some fifty years, from 1674 to within a few
weeks of his death on 1 January 1730.5 In 1661 Sewall's family
had migrated from Bishop Stoke, Hampshire, where he was
born, to Newbury, at the mouth of the Merrimac River, close to
Plum Island, which his tribute celebrates, all in northeastern
Massachusetts. As a child he attended the local school. From
Newbury he went on to study at Harvard College in Cam-
bridge, across the Charles River from Boston. Unlike a number
of his classmates, he avoided the ministry after graduation in
favor of "marchandizing." He married the daughter of the
colony's wealthy mintmaster and successfully followed a mer-
chant's career in Boston for the rest of his life, all the while ac-
cepting a variety of public offices, culminating with a seat on
the governor's council and appointment to the highest court in
the land. Judge Sewall was a public servant in one way or an-
other for most of his life. He contributed both materially and
through generous service to propagation of the Gospel among
New England's Indians, an activity he shared with both In-
4For Sewall's reading, see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 236-37.
5The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).
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358 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
crease and Cotton Mather, the colony's foremost clergymen
and scholars.6
Sewall was a late-seventeenth-century New England Puritan.
He was a Calvinist, a Congregationalist, and, consequently,
pretty much a conservative on issues pertaining to both these
religious conditions. He was generous, compassionate, a loving
husband and father, and a man of conscience whose family life
reflected these characteristics in a positive and constructive
way. At the same time he believed in the devil and in witches,
as did his contemporaries, and he believed in the devil's ability
to covenant with sinners likely to do his bidding. When the
witchcraft craze swept through Salem Village, Massachusetts, in
1692, Sewall was in the thick of it, for in that year he was ap-
pointed to the colony's special court that tried the alleged
witches and condemned nineteen of them to hang. For five
years after this horrendous event, Sewall lived with his con-
science, while public opinion shifted from punitive revenge
against the accused to a gradual realization that the colony had
perpetrated a tragic error in judgment and that the executed
colonists were victims of improper trials and wholesale injus-
tice.7
During the five years following the witch trials, Sewall suf-
fered humiliation and ignominy. There were consistent re-
minders of the witch hangings, including pointed discussion of
the very legality of the special court on which he had served.
Sad as these reminders were, however, what bore much more
heavily was his belated discovery that the suffering he and his
family were then undergoing, described in his Diary, was really
the wrath of God visited upon him, a sinner. His daughter Jane
died in 1693, "much as [son] Henry" had sometime earlier.
Beloved "Mother Hull," whose daughter Sewall had married,
died in their home in 1695. "Little Sarah," another daughter,
who had suffered a series of convulsive fits, died in her nurse's
arms, all too quickly for Sewall and his wife to be summoned
from an adjacent bedroom. Sarah's sudden death, he wrote to a
"See the outline of Sewall's life in Diary, 1:xxiii-xxviii.
7Sewall, Diary, esp. 1:xxiii-xxviii, 361-62n, 366-67.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 359
friend, was the "Eighth Trial of this kind that we have met
with." And then the same year, Mrs. Sewall was delivered of a
stillborn son, a shock that provoked Sewall to implore the Lord
to pardon his sins and sanctify to him "this singular Affliction."8
In those five years, when Sewall's personal and family distress
was almost more than he could bear, New England's public af-
flictions grew more severe, too. In fact, they had been intensify-
ing for a generation or more. Their history, it seemed to New
Englanders, was a series of assaults, all of which held godly
meaning: the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660; increasing im-
perial interference, the Navigation Acts in particular; the devas-
tating King Philip's War with the Indians in 1675-76; loss of
their original charter in 1684; the imposition of royal govern-
ment under Catholic James II in the form of the Dominion of
New England over them. Despite the supposed release of the
Glorious Revolution in 1688, this onslaught of threatening
events culminated, some thought, in the parade of witches at
Salem in 1692. The invasion was as much evidence of God's
anger as it was the devil's rage against a people who had at-
tempted to recover for Christ what had been the devil's king-
dom. From 1660 to the end of the century, then, God's displea-
sure for New England's declining piety and loss of direction
grew increasingly obvious.9
Between the witch scare of 1692 and Sewall's writing of
Phaenomena in 1697, "Political Animosities" arose in Massa-
chusetts surrounding the introduction of a new charter. For
several years after King Philip's War, Indian raids, with their at-
tendant scalpings and captivities, multiplied on the frontier not
many miles from Boston. The threat spread of a French inva-
"For Sewall's private afflictions, see Diary, 1:313, 334, 336, 337, 350, 363-64, 366.
For reminders of the witchcraft business, see Diary, 1:293, 301, 308-9n, 310, 317, 354,
356.
!Sewall, Phaenomena, "Dedicatory Letter," sig. A2+1, A2+3, and "Dedicatory Let-
ter" to William Stoughton, Governor; Cotton Mather, Magnalia, pp. 367-68; Increase
Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Man (Boston, 1693),
p. 30; Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New En-
gland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 90-91; Kenneth Silverman,
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985),
p. 108.
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360 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
sion both by sea from the West Indies and by land under Count
Frontenac, governor of Canada. And then drought, crop fail-
ures, shipwrecks-all added to the colonists' deep anxiety,
which came to a head in the winter months of 1696-97.10
Indeed, it was time for some kind of reckoning between New
Englanders and their God. In fact, the time was long overdue,
according to some. The "Animosities" that bedeviled the old
and then new governments, however, prevented the deputies,
the governor and council, and the ministers of Massachusetts
from publicly acknowledging the threatening circumstances in
due course. After much wrangling and many harsh words, all
sides finally agreed upon a Proclamation which reviewed the
sins that had provoked the "Anger of God," in particular the
"late Tragedie" at Salem. That "all Iniquity may be put away
which hath stirred Gods holy jealousie against this Land," a
colony-wide "Day of Prayer and Fasting" was set for 14 January
1697.1"
That day, at a church service in Boston, Samuel Sewall stood
in his pew with head bowed while his beloved minister, Samuel
Willard, read the judge's confession of "Guilt contracted" dur-
ing the Salem trials. Sewall enumerated the "reiterated strokes
of God upon himself and his family" and begged forgiveness; he
asked his fellow congregants to pray that God might cease visit-
ing his sins upon him, his family, and upon the land. That same
day the leaders of Massachusetts Bay, according to the colony's
proclamation, sought forgiveness through public humiliation.
At the center of both confessions was the grim reminder of the
hanging of innocent people.'12
"'Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1724, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick Unger, 1957),
1:211; Sewall, Diary, 1:300, 361, 362; David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History
of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 247. For troubles with French and Indians, see Sewall,
Diary, 1:319, 340, 353-54, 355. Samuel Sewall, Letter-Book, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachu-
setts Historical Society, 1886), p. 187; T. J. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of
His Works, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 2:493.
"See again, Cotton Mather, Diary, 1:211. Sewall, Diary, 1:361, 361n, 363; for the
Proclamation, pp. 361-62 and n. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, p. 247.
" For Sewall's confession, see Diary, 1:366-67.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 361
Sewall began writing Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica
within a week of his public confession and the colony's Fast
Day plea for reformation.:3 His sixty-page treatise does not
mention the witch trials, his public pleas for forgiveness, or the
colony's attempts to re-order its relationship with God. Given
the personal and historic context of the preceding five years,
however, Phaenomena, and particularly the celebrated Plum Is-
land paragraph, reveal, if indirectly, a hidden theme vital to our
appreciation of Sewall's spiritual condition at the time as well as
the shift in his understanding of both his and the colony's reli-
gious prospects.
Samuel Sewall had a way of incorporating other writers' ideas
into his texts and then building upon them for his own pur-
poses. This was particularly true of the writings of William
Strong, a well-known Civil War clergyman in England, whose
sermons Sewall read in late 1696, maybe for the first time, al-
though they had been published some forty years earlier. Sew-
all referred directly to Strong in both the Diary and Phaenom-
ena and expanded generously on several ideas he extracted
from what he read.14
Sewall's Fast Day confession is proof enough that he was
painfully aware of his own spiritual condition. William Strong's
sermon "The Two Covenants" no doubt held an ominous mean-
ing for him, given the circumstances. In twenty-four pages,
Strong had laid bare in no uncertain terms the perils of the sin-
ner who was not yet "translated" from Adam's covenant of
works to God's promise under the covenant of grace. Before
the Fall, Adam's covenant was based on God's law, on "doing."
But since man was woefully incapable of adhering to that law,
God compassionately held out a second covenant, one of grace,
'ISewall's progress in writing Phaenomena and its distribution can be followed in
Diary, 1:370, 372, 379, 380, 382, 387, 390, 395, 398, 401, 411, 442n; for Phaenomena's
second edition, 2:1052. See, too, Sewall, Letter-Book, 1:202-3, 263; 2:250.
'4Sewall, Diary, 1:363; Sewall, Phaenomena, p. 38.
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362 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
contingent upon "belief," which contained far "better prom-
ises." The contrast was sharp.15
Strong's advice that natural man strive to be "translated" out
of one covenant into the other was a desire Sewall expressed in
both the Diary and Phaenomena.'6 The five years between the
witch trials and the colony's Fast Day, during which he suffered
God's "reiterated strokes," had convinced Sewall of the mis-
taken ground on which he stood, of a desperate need for trans-
lation, for relief from the insupportable burden of sin. And so in
January 1697, as we have seen, he threw himself publicly upon
the mercy of God, begged for release, for forgiveness, and for a
translation to grace.
A second sermon by William Strong, "Spiritual Barrenness,"
Sewall also found pertinent. Sewall was struck with Strong's
image of the "living waters" which flowed out of the "throne of
God and of the Lambe," described in Revelation 22:1-2. Strong
had made good use of these "healing waters," which nurtured
man's spiritual needs. Unfortunately, he explained, the benefit
was limited, a point Sewall grasped and quoted verbatim in
Phaenomena. "Some men," Strong had warned, and Sewall re-
peated, who "live under the purest, and the most powerful Or-
dinances, are, in Judgment, given up unto a perpetual Barren-
ness.""' Given the recent course of events, both personal and
colonial, Sewall needed no reminder of what Strong meant by
"spiritual barrenness."
Most New Englanders, Sewall among them, were certain that
their church ordinances were the purest, most comprehensive,
and most powerful available. To establish godly churches was,
after all, a principal reason why many New Englanders had mi-
grated to the New World. Yet no matter how pure and power-
ful, ordinances could not guarantee salvation, Strong warned,
for some men lived unprofitably under the best of them. It was
15William Strong, "The Two Covenants," in XXXI Select Sermons, Preached on Spe-
cial Occasions (London, 1656), pp. 337-41, 344, 347-48, 352-54, 355-56; Hebrews 8:6.
"Strong, "The Two Covenants," pp. 338, 350, 353; Sewall, Diarj, 1:366-67; Sewall,
Phaenomena, p. 59.
'7William Strong, "Spiritual Barrenness," in XXXI Select Sermons, pp. 3, 5, 6, 8-9,
12, 23; Sewall, Phaenomena, p. 38.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 363
these poor souls whom God consigned to "perpetual barren-
ness," according to Strong, for "They are given to salt."'1
Other cautionary advice from Strong's sermons, which Sewall
did not quote, is also likely to have influenced his Fast Day ac-
tivity. In a list of the "several steps and degrees" marking spiri-
tual barrenness, a number must have caused Sewall to wince.
He would have been touched in particular by articles condemn-
ing men whose time was taken up in "getting an estate," who
busied themselves with the "great affairs of a Commonwealth,"
who made laws, saved kingdoms, and defeated enemies when,
all the while, they themselves were hopelessly lost. Although
useful to the civil state, they forgot about "being useful to the
people of God" and "saving their own souls." Consider, wrote
Strong, what "may be good among men" may not be "good to-
wards the Lord God of Israel."19
Sewall no doubt would have maintained that in Boston he
lived under the purest and most powerful ordinances in Amer-
ica. But at the same time, he would have had to agree that he
was a wealthy merchant, a large landowner, and a public ser-
vant extraordinaire. One has only to thumb the pages of his
Diary to be impressed with his secular duties and responsibili-
ties, many of which were for the good of mankind. This same
Diary is witness, too, to his devotion to things of the spirit, or so
the words tell us, and his loyalty to Church and ministry was ex-
emplary. But his woeful confession before the church is strong
evidence of his pitiful prospects, as he came to understand
them. Religious duties and performances "without a work of re-
generation," Strong had warned, without ever knowing what it
meant "to be translated," constituted a "building upon the
sand" and was "great ground for all barrenness." A man's life is
"as fair in a hypocrite," wrote Strong, "and as fruitful as in a
godly man." It was the inward frame of the heart which
counted.2"
L'Strong, "Spiritual Barrenness," p. 12.
'"Strong, "Spiritual Barrenness," p. 28.
20Strong, "The Two Covenants," p. 354; Strong, "Spiritual Barrenness," pp. 21,
25-26.
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364 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
In Phaenomena, as we have seen, Sewall latched on to
William Strong's biblical image of "living waters" and applied it
to the prophetic needs of his treatise. To believe, as Joseph
Mede had charged, that these waters flowed only in Asia,
Africa, and Europe could only destroy the universality of God's
grace symbolized by them. Waters from the throne of God,
Sewall was certain, were "running in the New World," too. And,
what is more, they would never cease, he went on, but would
rise higher and higher until they formed a long, broad, and
deep river. And why was this river of living and healing waters
by now such a formidable stream in America? Because the peo-
ple who are planted by it "begin to be placed under the influ-
ence of the New National covenant."2'
At this point, spiritual biography and the course of New En-
gland's religious history begin to intersect. Sewall's public con-
fession and the colony's Fast Day demonstration are interlaced.
Sewall's act is a pertinent element of his plea for forgiveness
and for the gift of God's grace, which he believed so far had
eluded him. At the same time, the colony's proclamation, a
kind of corporate confession of sins, issues a plea for renewal of
the national or federal covenant between a people and their
God.
From 1630 the Puritans of New England had believed they
were in covenant with God, a compact their first governor, John
Winthrop, so eloquently described in "A Modell of Christian
Charity." Although Puritanism was riddled with covenants, and
although most of these were related in one way or another, the
covenant of grace and the national covenant were particularly
correspondent, for the second grew out of the first. The
covenant of grace was a compact between God and the individ-
ual believer. The federal or national covenant was between
God, who agreed to minister, and a Christian community, not
all of its members necessarily saints, who agreed to serve. The
compact was patterned after God's bond with Israel, described
in Jeremiah and again in Hebrews. But like the Israelites, the
"2Sewall, Phaenomena, pp. 38-,39.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 365
people of Massachusetts had abused their covenant, for they
had failed all too often to walk in God's ways and so suffered
His wrath in the form of "afflictions," dutifully recorded in the
Fast Day Proclamation.22 Also like the Israelites, the Puritans
sought to atone for their sins and renew their covenant. Indeed
by 1697, the practice had achieved almost ritualistic propor-
tions following a history of broken pacts and repeated resump-
tions.
As Sewall fuses his personal guilt with the humiliating sins of
the colonists, an interesting shift in his argument begins to de-
velop. So far denied evidence of personal salvation, Sewall
takes refuge in the idea of community whose prospects ap-
peared more promising. He places his faith in the colony's
chance of renewal on everyone's behalf, in the "living waters"
along whose banks were planted a covenanted people. This
change, this transcendence, this shift from emphasis on indi-
vidual grace to trust in a commonalty, in a people and a place,
are deducible in an entry he jotted in his Diary a few months
earlier: "I had hope that seeing God pardon'd all Israel's iniqui-
ties, He would pardon me, as being part of Israel.""23 The "living
waters," first celebrated as metaphor by William Strong, were
now embraced more literally by Sewall, who found promise,
along the banks of the Merrimac River, in a bountiful land and
a fruitful people, which the Plum Island community repre-
sented. In a single paragraph, Sewall quietly celebrated a re-
stored faith in his own spiritual destiny with a new people in a
New World.
As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the commanded Post;
Notwithstanding all the hectoring Words, and hard Blows of the
proud and boisterous Ocean; As long as any Salmon, or Sturgeon shall
swim in the streams of Merrimack; or any Perch, or Pickeril, in Crane
Pond; As long as the Sea-Fowl shall know the Time of their coming,
"2Jeremiah 31:31; Hebrews 8:8; John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity, in
Winthrop Papers, ed. A. B. Forbes et al., 6 vols. to date (Boston: Massachusetts Histori-
cal Society, 1929-), 2:282-95. For covenant theology, see Perry Miller, The New En-
gland Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).
23Sewall, Diary, 1:344.
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366 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
and not neglect seasonably to visit the Places of their Acquaintance;
As long as any Cattel shall be fed with the Grass growing in the
Medows, which do humbly bow down themselves before Turkie-Hill;
As long as any Sheep shall walk upon Old Town Hills, and shall from
thence pleasantly look down upon the river Parker, and the fruitfull
Marishes lying beneath; As long as any free and harmless Doves shall
find a White Oak, or other Tree within the Township, to perch, or
feed, or build a careless Nest upon; and shall voluntarily present
themselves to perform the office of Gleaners after Barley-Harvest; As
long as Nature shall not grow Old and dote; but shall constantly re-
member to give the rows of Indian Corn their education, by Pairs; So
long shall Christians be born there; and being first made meet, shall
from thence be Translated, to be made partakers of the Inheritance of
the Saints in Light.24
Literary scholars have fallen all over themselves in their ef-
forts to extol the merits of Sewall's salute to Plum Island and
Newbury. According to Sacvan Bercovitch, Sewall's prose-
poem places him within a select group of New England writers,
along with Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
successfully pierced natural images to reveal supernatural
truths.25
On the next to the last page, then, of Phaenomena, Sewall of-
fered these God-given providences, so clearly part of New En-
gland's record, in defiance of Joseph Mede's Antipodean proph-
esies. In defiance, too, of the legacy of the witches, which had
earlier shattered his complacency, he identified his lot with the
covenanted community that Plum Island symbolized. Its his-
tory, its beauty, its fertility, and its faithful people laid out a nat-
ural, yet transcendent, reality which rescued Sewall from spiri-
tual despair. With the writing of Phaenomena, Sewall seems to
have put his spiritual crisis behind him, for he "found salvation
in surrender""26 to the land and its people. Plum Island was not
"2Sewall, Phaenomena, p. 59.
25Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1975), pp. 15.5-56, 171.
2iRobert Frost, "The Gift Outright" (1942), in Robert Frost: Selected Poems, ed. Ian
Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 202.
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BETWEEN HELL AND PLUM ISLAND 367
only a part of New England's record; it was a foretaste of the
New Jerusalem.
Unlike Henry David Thoreau, Sam Sewall preferred to be
saved in a community than go to hell by himself.
David S. Lovejoy was formerly a member of the History De-
partment of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Recently
he has been probing early American colonists' conceptions of
religion in the New World. Tentatively, and somewhat face-
tiously, his working title is "WAS GOD ABOARD THE MAY-
FLOWER?"
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