Salem Witch Judge Quotes

“Ten years after lending a man from Barbados ten pounds, he wrote to him in 1700, “Sir, I presume the old verity ‘If knocking thrice, no one comes, go off ’ is not to be understood of creditors in demanding their just debts. The tenth year is now current since I let you ten pounds, merely out of respect to you as a stranger and scholar…. I am come again to knock at your door to enquire if any ingenuity or honor dwell there….”
― Eve LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall

“One legacy of John Winthrop, John Cotton, and other Bay Colony founders is the myth of America as a land specially favored by God, a myth we still live with today regardless of political ideology. In the spring of 1686, to preserve the spirit of that America in the face of its dying, Samuel Sewall paid the printer Samuel Green to produce hundreds of copies of a pamphlet containing the farewell sermon that John Cotton delivered on the docks in Southampton, England, in April 1630 before Winthrop’s fleet set sail. The Scripture was 2 Samuel 7:10: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more….” By August of 1686 Samuel had donated copies of God’s Promise to His Plantation to every magistrate of the new provincial court and to every member of the local militia. Not long after arranging”
― Eve LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall