SAMUEL SEWALL: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

546 Pages·028.679 MB·English

by  STRANDNESS, THEODORE BENSON

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ANN ARBOR . M I C H I G A N

SAMUEL SEVALL: THE MAN AND HIS WORK
By
Theodore B# Str&ndnees
A THESIS
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of Michigan
State College of Agriculture and Applied Science
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English
1951
r* v Tr r\ ^ ^ t. r v t r: i o
A U ;•? ' ) *; !> i) v.r ] s. r- ; ! .1 O
.1
?esea^nh f o r t h is s tu d y vras c a r r ie s on a t the l i b r a r y
o f I.Tlohi ••■n 3ta te C o lle g e , too V /io^nor I f ir ri "v o f H o rv a rd
U n iv e r s ity , th e '-'ubl io 1 ib r a r ie s o f . os to n and Nov,' York. C ity ,
th ° T>o eton Athenaeum , th e Nev Ton - :land Hi « to v*ie-->l an 5 G-snea-
lo 'ic a l S o c ie ty , cissfr: I n s t i t u t e * th e II*issa ch u se tts H i s t o r i ­
c a l S o c ie ty , eno the New Y o rk HI s t o r ie n l S o c ie ty * as w e ll as
'o r i'D s o f f ic e s o f p u b lic re c o rd a t B oston and Salem . To
tee s t a f f s a t a l l o f th e se p la c e s J am **ra te fu l f o r much
h in a n e ^ ' and p e ne ro u r a s s is ta n c e . My o b lig a t io n is p a .r tic -
u l ° r l v p re u t to th e M a ssa ch u se tts H is t o r ic a l S o c ie ty , in
-?•■» 1 ib ra rv is th e g r e a te r p a r t o f th e S e w a ll nanus c r ip ts .
I re c o lle c t, w ith some amazement the \Tnf«-i l in " ana in te r e s te d
h e l" --iVH:i no ; .y th e s t a f f o f t.Viht i n s t i t u t i o n . F in a lly , I
mu? : e xp ress my in d e b te d n e ss to P ro fe s s o r C laude M. H e w lin o f
M ichl-'a n S ta te C o lie pe, a t whose su -n re sticn t h is stu d y was
u n d e rta ke n and. whoe® encouragem ent and a d v ic e 'nave done so
much to make p o s s ib le i t s c o m p le tio n .
T. E. S.
iii
Theodore B. Strandness
candidate for the decree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Final examine tion, November 15, 1951, 2:00 P. LI., 214 Llorlll
Hall
Dissertation: Samuel Sev/all: the Han and his V/ork
Major Field of Study: En ;lish
Bioo;raphlcal 11ems
Born, Uarch 23, 1915, St. Paul, Minnesota
Undergraduate Studies, Jamestown College, 1933-1937
Graduate Studies, Unlversit;. of Minnesota, 1959-1942 (inter­
mittent) ; LUchlaan State College, 1946-1951
Srv'rience: Teacher in public schools of North Dakota, a.nd
Hlnnesota, 1937-1942; United Sta-tes Navy, 1942-
1946; Instructor in th' Department of Written
a~nJ. Snoken English, LUc'-.l r-n State College,
1946-1951
T A B L E O F c o i: t e :: t s
Pa. 70
ACXHCY/LEDGLIEMTS..............................................................................................................i n
V I T A .......................................................... v
III THC DU C T10 IT .........................................................................................................................x l
Chapter One: FAMILY BACKGROUND ALL BARLY YEA RS............1
Chapter Two: HARVARD COLLEGE .uHD IMYELLE CDUAL LIFE . . . 55
Chreoter Three: UEACKAHY a MD LL-iM OF PROPERTY . . . . . . 81
C hapter F o u r: SERVANT OF COLONY AMD P R O V IIIC E.............................146
Chapter Five : THE Y/RITER ........................... 273
Chapter SI".* PRIVATE LIFE AMD LAST YEARS................ 525
Chapter Seven: CCMCLU3I0M ............................... 475
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................430
vll
I L L U S T B A T 1 0 U S
Samuel Sewell.................................... Frontispiece
GrGorp;e F. Dow, The Arts and Grafts in Hem EnpLand,
1704-1775 (Topps field, Mass., 1927), x::l, ettrib-
utes tills portrait to Hathaniel Emmons, a native
of Boston vf 10 died t lie re in 1740 at the <a;;e of
tliirty-si:' years* KIs obituary said of him that
he was "tie greatest Master of various Sorts of
Paintin'; that ever was born in this Country. And
his Excellent b'orhs were the pure Effects of his own
G-enius, without receiving any instructions from oth­
ers. . . . He was sober a.n: modest and minded accu­
racy more than profit.M
Title-Par:;o of PPhenomena guaedan Apocalvptlea............25
Two Popes from an Interleaved Almanac................... 116
A Pape from the Hill of Ladinp b o o h ..................... 127
Two Papes from the Diary durin.p the 7,'itchcraft......... 191
Papes fro:: a Circuit Court Journal.......................203
Probate Hotice ............................................. 222
First Pape of The Sell in;; of Joseph......................274
Title-Page of Proposals- Touchlnp the Accomul 1 sliment
of Prophecies.............................................. 296
First Pape of A Memorial Reintiny to the Kennebech
In dlans.....................................................303
Broadside Copy of "Wednesday, Janus.ry 1. 1701. A little
before Breah-a-day, at Eo-ton of the M a s s a c h u s e t t s . .306
Two Papes from Sewell's Old South Society Hotebooh . . .404
Two Papes from the English Journal........................431
All of the Illustrations are from materials at the
Massachusetts Historical Society
ix
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Few men, end eertclnly none in his generation in Arne rice.,
heve left so extensive, so detailed and Interestin ' a record
of the v.’orld they knew an., tr.e life, they lived as did Samuel
Se-Tll. This record, and pre-eminently, of course, the well
known diary, has long been recognised as an Invaluable con­
tribution to our knowledge of Puritan New England of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As such, it has
been dredged for materials about every conceivable aspect of
the New England of his day, religious, political, soci'l, aes­
thetic, economic, and moral. It has been used, indeed, to
provide everything except a detailed picture of the man whose
record it is, Samuel Sewall himself. The title of Mr. Cham­
berlain’ o book, Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived in (Boston,
1897), suggests that the job has here been done. Actually,
however, It hos not. Appearing at the end of the last century,
if shires the character of mo31 of the writing that his been
done on Sewall in Its delicacy of sentiment ana its inclination
to reverence for its subject, with the result that it succeeds
mainly in inducing: a pious— -or more recently, perhaps, an im­
pious--frame of mind. Furthermore, it does not explore the
Sewall. materials with the thoroughness they deserve. Not
appearing in any of the standard bibliographies but consider­
ably more valuable, both for facts and for critical evaluation,
xi
xll
ic the series of reviews by C. F. Adams, Jr., J. M. Hubbard,
and T,Y. H. Jhltmore vh.ich appeared in the Nation during the
years (1373-8?) of the public*'. t i ;n of the five volumes of the
Sewall Papers. Though tills series constitutes what is pos­
sibly tiie best introduction to Sev/all now in print, it does
not, needless to say, represent the larger study of the man
and bis work which Is the object of the present study.
A writer taking for his subject a man 7/hose narrative
accc/:ipl Is rime nt is as considerable as Sewall's, must feel some
hesitation in sett in; out to do wimt, In some ways at least,
has already been done better by the subject himself. The fact
is, however, that the diary is not an easy room to enter.
Do suite, for example, Farrington's statement that it is "the
,fAm
one asong all books of the time th t is still ouick with life,
or Murdock's that it is "one of those rare and precious works
O
1 i which appears a man as he lived, ,r' or James Truslow Adams'
that there is no other American diary "in which the journal-
ist's entire world is so vividly reproduced, " to give but
three among many such Judgments, the app1v i 3.nl of Charles
^The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800 (New dork, 1927), p. 83.
^A review of the Mark Van Doren abridgment of Sewall*s
Jinry (New York, 1927), New England Quarterly, I (Aoril, 1928),
957.
Dietlonary of American Biography, XVI, 611.
xlil
Francis Adams, Jr., macle when the die ry first nr^esrea In print,
is also valid. It seemed to him "essentially a work of histori­
cal reference, " a book that "can never be . . . pop\ilar, or
even in considerable denar.w. with general readers"; this despite
the fact that "it is a mine of necessary information, " a work
that brings the reader "face to face with the inmost life of
b e poo'le whose story it . . . narrate[sj. It is, to change
tie firrure once more, a very tangled skein. The fact that it
is tangled is, as with all rood diaries, an aspect of its ap­
peal; but it is also the thing which accounts in large degree
for its resistance to easy underste.nding ana which makes it
one in that category of works which earn from all but the most
industrious students of our 1 It e rati? re, respect— and neglect.
Another reason why it resists understanding is that on almost
every page there are entries which need explaining for all but
specialists In the period. Then too, extensive as it is, it
is not the complete record left by Sev/all. The letter-bcok par­
ticularly, together with a considerable amount of unpublished
material, supplies much information which needs coordinating
with It.
The writer's wish is generally to resist the impulse to
generalization about "the nature of Puritanism" on the basis
of evidence presented primarily in the record of a single man.
As Knanpen well remarks, "In strict accuracy there were many
Puritan spirits but there was no Puritan spirit. Like a
4 "Sewall's Diary. " Nation, XXXV (August 3, 1882), 97.
®I£. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), p. 339.