Biographical Sketch

Merchant, colonial magistrate, member of the Governor's Council, and diarist, Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) played a major role in the activities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for 56 years.

As a merchant, private banker, and property holder in England and in the colonies, he did business with numerous "cousins" in the mother country, spending a year in England from 1688 to 1689, mainly on private business.

As a legislator, he served in the General Court and later the Governor's Council from 1683 to 1725. He was also successively a magistrate, a justice of the Superior Court, Judge of Probate for Suffolk County, and Chief Justice of the Superior Court. His most dramatic service was as a member of the Commission of Oyer and Terminer, appointed in 1692 to oversee the Salem witchcraft trials--a service for which he sought public forgiveness five years later.

In the civic life of the colony, he was manager of the printing press, an overseer of Harvard College, captain of the South Company of Militia in Boston, a pillar of Boston's Old South Church, and a commissioner of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel. Among his publications, Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica (1697) gives a New England Puritan's vision of the Apocalypse, and The Selling of Joseph (1700) is the earliest anti-slavery tract in the American colonies.

His marriage of 41 years to Hannah Hull produced 14 children, five of whom survived him. He subsequently married twice more, and unsuccessfully courted Katherine Winthrop, until her stipulations on his lifestyle and a marriage settlement caused him to break off negotiations.