Description
The Salem witch hunt has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of injustice. Pass judgement on Samuel Sewall presided at these trials, passing harsh judgment at the condemned. But five years later, he publicly recanted his guilty verdicts and begged for forgiveness. This peculiar act was once a turning point not only for Sewall but in addition for The usa’s nascent values and mores.
In Judge Sewall’s Apology, Richard Francis draws at the Pass judgement on’s own diaries, which enables us to see the early colonists not as grim ideologues, but as flesh-and-blood idealists, striving for a new society even as coming to terms with the desires and imperfections of abnormal life. Through this unsung hero of the American judgment of right and wrong — a Puritan, an antislavery agitator, a defender of Native American rights, and a Utopian theorist — we are granted a fresh point of view on a familiar drama.