Free Salem Witch Judge by Eve LaPlante Page A

so the congregation could “humble themselves by fasting and prayer before the Lord.”

4
    DEADLY ENEMIES
    Samuel “came home well” from the council meeting in Malden—thanking God in his usual way by noting in his diary “Laus Deo”—but all was not well at home. Little Hull’s seizures were worse. They had grown more frequent in recent weeks. One morning Samuel arose to discover that his now-youngest son had had “a sore fit in the night,” soiling himself and his parents’ bed.
    The exact cause of Hull’s convulsions is not clear, although children commonly contracted infections that led to diarrhea, vomiting, high fever, and sometimes seizures. Two of Samuel’s intimates, his brother Stephen and his friend Elisha Hutchinson, had recently lost infant sons who had suffered multiple convulsions, probably due to infections that spread to the brain. Samuel and Hannah’s first two sons had also had febrile convulsions. Baby John’s first two seizures occurred when he was two months old. Asleep in his cradle on Sunday, June 16, 1677, the child “suddenly started, trembled, his fingers contracted, his eyes starting and being distorted.” This prompted his twenty-five-year-old father to ride to Charlestown for the doctor. Two days later the baby had another seizure. Johnny died fifteen months later of unknown causes. Hoping to avoid this result with Sam Jr., in May 1680 Samuel “carried” his almost two-year-old namesake “to Newbury where his grandmother [Sewall] nurses him,…to see if [the] change of air would help him against convulsions.” It wasreasonable to remove a frail child from a crowded port town that received ships bearing sailors who might be infected with smallpox, malaria, typhus, influenza, dysentery, or other scourges. Sam Jr. experienced no seizures while with his grandparents, returned to his parents healthy a year later, and was now approaching his eighth birthday.
    Hullie, who still had a serious fit about once a week, nevertheless began to walk and talk. His first word was “apple,” which his grandmother Hull and a servant named Eliza Lane heard him utter in the kitchen on Sunday, February 1, 1686, when he was eighteen months old. This news filled Samuel with hope and joy. In late March, however, Samuel noted that while he was visiting the Reverend Increase Mather at home in the North End, Hull had a “very sore” seizure.
    The next week, hoping to cure his fits, Samuel and Hannah decided to send little Hull to stay with his paternal grandparents in Newbury, Samuel’s adopted hometown. Sewall did not set eyes on this region until he was nine, yet he considered himself a “Newbury man.” The region’s hold on him was due, in part, to its landscape. Horses and cattle grazed on fields of salt marsh dotted with haystacks that stretched to the sea. At the shore a slender barrier island, Plum Island, provided protection for mackerel, sea bass, and migratory birds. “Plum Island lies, like a whale aground, / A stone’s toss over the narrow sound,” the nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote. “Beyond are orchards and planting lands, / And great salt marshes and glimmering sands.” The hills of Newbury afforded magnificent views of Cape Ann, New Hampshire’s Isles of Shoals, Mount Agamenticus in Maine, and the vast Atlantic. This was a magical world to which Samuel delighted in bringing his children.
    Early on April 26, 1686, Samuel and Hannah and their smallest living son set out for Newbury. The driver of their coach was Samuel’s clerk, Eliakim Mather, the Reverend Increase Mather’s nineteen-year-old nephew, who lived with the Sewalls. As the coach headed north through Charlestown, the “chippering” sparrows “proclaimed” to Samuel the arrival of spring. The travelers met Samuel’s brother Stephen at the intersection of the Boston and Cambridge roads. On horseback, he accompanied them to his house in Salem, where they spent the night.

    New England c.