Background
He was born on April 4, 1734 in York, Maine, United States, the youngest of ten children of Nicholas and Mehitable (Storer) Sewall, and a descendant of Henry Sewall of Newbury, Massachussets, who arrived at Boston in 1634.
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Stephen Sewall
Edit ProfileEducation
The extreme poverty of his father, a tanner, forced him to leave school and to learn the carpenter's trade at which he worked until he acquired the means to prepare himself for Harvard. At college he supported himself by teaching grammar school in Cambridge. He graduated in 1761.
Career
In 1761 he succeeded Judah Monis as the instructor in Hebrew at Harvard. During 1762-63 he was also librarian of the college library.
On October 2, 1764, he was made the first incumbent of the newly established Hancock professorship of Hebrew and other Oriental languages, and on June 19, 1765, he was publicly installed in this new office. Like other Harvard teachers at that time, he received occasional grants from the General Court of Massachusetts to supplement his insufficient salary. Trained both in Hebrew and in the classics, he retained his interest in both throughout his active life.
He himself wrote four odes in Latin, two in Greek, and one in English (numbers 3, 5, 12, 14, 15, 16, 23 in Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis apud Novanglos, 1761). His interests included politics and science as well. He represented Cambridge in the General Court as a Whig in 1777.
His "Magnetical Observations, Made at Cambridge" appeared in the first volume of Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1785). In September 1785, after having been for nearly three years incapable of performing his duties on account of physical and mental debility, from which there seemed to be no likelihood of his recovery, he was removed from his professorship by the concurring vote of the two governing boards of the college, but, "in consideration of his long and faithful services, " he was allowed by them thirty pounds.
After about nineteen years of retired life and gradual decay, he died in Cambridge.
Achievements
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Stephen Sewall was professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages at Harvard for twenty years. He was the first to promote there the classical learning, in which the most interesting feature is a recommendation to relieve students from compulsory composition of verse and to encourage this sort of exercise only among those who have "a genius and fondness" for it. His most famous publications: Hebrew Grammar (1763); A Funeral Oration in Latin on Edward Holyoke (1769); The Scripture Account of the Shechinah (1794); a manuscript Chaldee and English Dictionary.
Politics
He was an early supporter of the Revolution.
Membership
He was one of the sixty-two original members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
According to T. M. Harris (post), he was considered by his contemporaries the "finest classical scholar and the most learned in Hebrew and oriental languages" that Harvard had produced.
Connections
He is said to have been married twice. On August 9, 1763, he married Rebecca, daughter of Edward Wigglesworth, the first Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard; she died in December 1783. Their only child had died in infancy.
