By Peter F. Stevens

In 1692, Judge William Stoughton frowned from the bench at the misfortunate Salem men and women accused of witchcraft. His long, white hair flowing beneath his black skullcap, he appeared the living embodiment of an Old Testament judge, and the justice he dispensed helped send Salem's "witches" to the gallows.

Unlike his colleague Judge Samuel Sewall, who later expressed publicly his contrition and regret for his role in the hysteria, Stoughton went to his Dorchester grave never made a public recantation &emdash; only, according to later sources , a tacit acknowledgement that he had done the best he could with the information available to him at the time of the witchcraft debacle.

William Stoughton was born on September 30, 1631, the son of Israel Stoughton, who was one of Dorchester's founders. Although it remains murky as to whether William was born in England or Dorchester, he went on to graduate from Harvard in1650 and boarded a ship for England, where he would continue his education at the New College, Oxford, studying for the ministry.

He received his M.A. from Oxford in June 1653 and would become curate of a Sussex church in 1659. Shortly afterward, with the Restoration stripping much of the Puritans' power and placing Charles II on the throne, Stoughton lost his post.

Believing his prospects in England bleak, he returned to Dorchester in 1662 and preached at the town's church for several years. He was paid for his services to the town's worshipers, but, when offered the pastorship, he declined. Politics and law were beckoning the ex-curate. He contended that his decision was compelled by "reasons within himself.'

His choice to step from the pulpit to politics notwithstanding, in 1668 Stoughton stood in front of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and delivered one of the "most powerful and impressive discourses" in the region's history to that point. Known as the"Election Sermon," Stoughton intoned that "God sifted a whole Nation that he might send Choice Grain over into this Wilderness." That Stoughton viewed himself as one of those "choice grains" appeared obvious.

By 1681, he was serving as one of the Massachusetts Bay Assistants, helping to run the colony. He would hold the post until 1686, but was hardly limited to that position. As a Commissioner of the United Colonies, his power increased, and he expanded his influence by serving as judge on a number of Massachusetts courts.

Stoughton's homeand land holdings in Dorchester testified to his status as one of the colony's most prominent figures. His spacious, well-built wood-frame home, perched at the corner of Pleasant Street and Savin Hill Avenue, was framed by two massive elms. When it came to the large tracts of land he amassed in Dorchester and beyond, the preacher, politician and judge proved a staunch proponent of property-owners' issues and rights.

Various historians would contend that Stoughton, deemed by contemporaries and Dorchester neighbors as often "hard, obstinate, narrow-minded… having a bull-dog stubbornness," did have two governing passions: his land holdings and Harvard.

A biographer asserts: "[Stoughton was] apparently a loyal servant of the King - except when the interests of the Crown conflicted with his own interests as a landholder or the interests of Harvard College, of which he was one of the most generous native benefactors." He gave the staggering sum of 1000 pounds to his alma mater for a new dormitory. In his will, he bequeathed valuable land to "Harvard College at Cambridge, the place of my first public education (which nursery of good learning hath been of inestimable blessing to the Church and people of God in this wilderness, and may ever continue to be so, if the people continue in the favor of God."

Stoughton was appointed lieutenant governor of the colony in 1692, and when Governor Sir William Phips sailed for England in 1694, Stoughton became Massachusetts' highest official and would govern, with the exception of May 1699 to July 1700, until his death.

Still, he would leave his chief imprint in the colony'shistory not as a governor, but as a jurist in one of the colony's mostcontroversial and infamous episodes - the Salem Witch Trials, in 1692.

As the furor over "Satan's Shadow" in the settlement north of Boston swept across the colonyin 1692, Stoughton stepped into the tragedy front and center as the Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer that conducted the explosive trials. Several of his fellow citizens and later generations of historians would condemn Stoughton as the arch-villain of the trials.

"His insistence on the admission of 'spectral evidence'" - with little basis inreasonable proof - "as well as by his overbearing attitude toward the accused, the witnesses, and the jury &emdash; was largely responsible for the tragic aspect they [the trials] assume," contends a historian whose view is shared by many scholars.

In his own day, the Dorchester judge's reputation did not suffer anywhere near as severely as after his death. "It is notable, however," writes one chronicler, "that his part in the witchcraft delusion did not damage him in the eyes of his contemporaries and that he died respected as one of the most eminent citizens of the colony."

Judge Samuel Sewall, who had also played a pivotal role in the executions of the convicted "witches," publicly recanted his decisions from the bench during the trials. Stoughton, however, refused to make a public apology, "saying that he had acted up to the enlightenment he had at the time [of the witch trials] although he had since been convinced that he had been in the wrong." In 1853, Putnam's Magazine claimed, "Chief Justice Stoughton, after the delusion was over, sent a note to the pulpit on Sunday desiring prayers for his pardon, if in any way he had sinned by his course in the trials; and as it was read he stood up in his pew, showing by his quivering lip the strong feeling within."

Stoughton died on July 1701 and was laid to rest in Dorchester's Old Burying Ground in Uphams Corner. While historians would generally rate him as an able governor, the Salem Witch Trials and his own difficult personality would tarnish him in the collective eyes of critics. Palfrey's History of New England brands Stoughton a "rich, atrabilious bachelor, one of those men to whom it seems to be a necessity of nature to favor oppressive and insolent pretensions, to resentevery movement for freedom and humanity as an impertinence and affront."

"Pudding-faced, sanctimonious, and unfeeling," harangued another writer.

Perhaps the most fitting epitaph, one that captures the Dorchester jurist and politician as the quintessential man of his times, rings in the words of Reverend Samuel Willard as he delivered Stoughton's funeral sermon, in July 1701. Justice William Stoughton, Willard said, died as "the last of the original Puritans."