By undergoing seismic change, many men and women have repeatedly disproved F. Scott Fitzgerald's plainly empty assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. In the case of Samuel Sewall, his later years turned out to be an act of contrition.
Sewall, the devout and prosperous Puritan whose diligently kept and richly detailed diary gives us an unrivaled view of life in colonial New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, would be the first to agree that his role as a judge in the Salem witch trials called for heavy penance.
In her affectionate and affecting retelling of Sewall's story, Eve LaPlante, a direct descendant of the jurist, offers us a refreshing contrast to the recurrent political theater of our time, when public men caught in flagrant abuses of power trot out self-serving evasions. Instead of the selective amnesia of Alberto Gonzalez and the spread-the-blame-around passive voice of "Mistakes were made," we can contemplate the rewarding, if painful, process of a man assuming full and sole responsibility for a terrible mistake.
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Whatever the impulse that produced his plea for forgiveness, Sewall remained the only one of the trial judges to admit to the miscarriage of justice. The very act of open confession to his community seems to have had a catalytic effect. He remained a pillar of the establishment in colonial New England and he continued to work as a judge. But his attention and sympathies turned to those less fortunate — especially the victims of the thriving slave trade.
LaPlante deftly sketches the background to the publication of "The Selling of Joseph" in 1700, in which Sewall proposed religious arguments against the slave trade in the colonies. It was the first abolitionist tract printed in the New World. Sewall deepened his unpopularity with his peers by also championing the rights of women and American Indians.
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