Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall

by Judith S. Graham

Historians have commonly characterized Puritan family life as joyless, repressive, even brutal. By such accounts, Puritan parents disciplined their children mercilessly, crushed their wills, responded callously to their deaths, and routinely sent them out of the home to be raised by cold-hearted surrogates. The diary of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) contradicts this grim portrait of the Puritan household.Although Sewall was an exceptional Puritan father and not a representative one, his judicial, civic, religious, and business activities projected him far beyond his own privileged and respectable circumstances. As a record of the family and social life of New England's third generation, his remarkable journal, which spans fifty-five years, is rivaled only by that of his friend Cotton Mather. Sewall provides rich details about the home where his and Hannah Sewall's fourteen children were born, and the six who survived infancy were raised. He takes the reader through the streets and byways of Boston, to the meetinghouse, to the places where his children were educated and apprenticed, and to the homes of friends, neighbors, and kin. Judith S. Graham's close reading of Sewall's diary and family papers reveals that warmth, sympathy, and love often marked the Puritan parent-child relationship. She suggests that the special nature of childhood was a concept that parents understood well, and that there was a practical and clear purpose for the "putting out" of children. Graham provides a much-needed balance to accepted scholarship on Puritan life and offers new insights into the history of both early New England and the family.

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 16, 2000

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the popular culture, and even among a great many academics, the Puritans suffer from being considered cosmic killjoys who had no sense of fun and who were truly monstrous parents obsessed with gloominess and original sin [1].  The author, through a very detailed discussion of the diary of Samuel Sewall as well as the writings of his family members and contemporaries, manages to provide a compelling case that Samuel Sewall was a moderate Puritan whose seriousness about moral issues and his encouragement of his offspring in their various callings was also accompanied by his being loving and compassionate with his wife and children, many of whom were afflicted by various physical illnesses and difficulties.  All in all, this book manages to succeed wonderfully in large part because the subject is such an appealing one.  Sewall comes off as a really decent guy, a person of incessant labors, an observant but generally sympathetic eye, and someone who was as reflective of himself as he was critical of the evil in the world around him, something that could inspire others to be like him even in our own present world.

This book, which is a bit over 200 pages, discusses Sewall's family life and his own personal writings--mostly his diary but also his letters--in a thematic fashion.  While the writing is generally very solid, there were some sections that were harder to get through than others because the research had to be read more carefully and slowly.  The author focuses on Sewall's first marriage, his views on birth, childrearing, the concept of children as miniature adults, the illness and death of children, education, the calling, the matter of children taken into the Sewall home, sending out and taking in, courtship and marriage, and the relationship between generations, before concluding on a generally favorable light.  The author takes a lot of fault with many biased looks at the Puritans that used very selective citation and failed to show a knowledge of the wide body of Puritan literature, a problem this author definitely does possess, as she freely quotes from not only the Sewalls and their descendants' writings but from the Winthrops and quarrelsome Mathers as well as the writings of historians like Bailyn.  The result is a book that shows powerful research and makes a point on the basic humanity of Sewall, who publicly apologized for his role in the Salem Witch Trials as a judge and managed to write the first antislavery tract in American history in the early 18th century.

Overall, while the author is herself a competent writer and a sound historian, the book itself largely shines because of its choice of a subject.  Samuel Sewall is an inspired choice as a rich and complex and exceptionally decent person, someone who combined a great deal of compassion for human frailty with incessant labors to make his own life and the lives of his children better.  His generosity, his focus on education, and his thoughtful and reflective writings, as well as the way that he was deeply involved in the lives of his fellow New Englanders all combine to make his life an interesting one, and it is the interest of the subject matter that makes it possible to read this with a great deal of enjoyment.  The book would not have been nearly as pleasant had it been about a less interesting and less worthwhile figure.  This book is a good example of what happens when someone takes a compelling figure and then writes about that person showing a great deal of familiarity with their life and their writing, along with a great deal of sympathy for their mindset.  The result is a book that can make the open-minded reader a lot less critical of the Puritans, and certainly aware that they were human beings too with the milk of human kindness inside of them.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

[Kayla Tornello · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a glimpse of Puritan family life by examining the extensive diaries of Samuel Sewall and comparing them to common theories about Puritan family life. This book was well organized and well researched. I really enjoyed learning about life in early American society.

[David L Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book was excellent at bebunking the myth of puritanical child upbring in 17th century as being cruel. Great insight into witch trials and 17th cent life in Boston