Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_. Superscripts are indicated by
a caret ^ symbol; when a superscript is longer than one character, it
is enclosed in curly brackets, e.g., w^{th}.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
ESSAYS
IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
BY
HENRY FERGUSON, M. A.
_Northam Professor of History and Political Science in
Trinity College, Hartford._
NEW YORK
JAMES POTT AND COMPANY
114 FIFTH AVENUE.
COPYRIGHT, 1894,
BY
JAMES POTT & CO.
CONTENTS.
I.
THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND 9
II.
THE WITCHES 61
III.
SIR EDMUND ANDROS 111
IV.
THE LOYALISTS 161
PREFACE.
These essays are presented to the public in the belief that though what
they contain be old, it is worth telling again, and in the hope that
by viewing the early history of the country from a somewhat different
stand-point from that commonly taken, light may be thrown upon places
which have been sometimes left in shadow.
The time has been when it was considered a duty to praise every action
of the resolute men who were the early settlers of New England. In the
glow of an exultant patriotism which was unwilling to see anything but
beauty in the annals of their country, and in a spirit of reverence
which made them shrink from observing their fathers’ shortcomings, the
early historians of the United States dwelt lovingly on the bright
side of the colonial life, and passed over its shadows with filial
reticence. It is evident that no true conception of any period is
possible when so studied, and it is a matter for congratulation that at
the present day the subject can be treated with greater impartiality,
and that it is no longer necessary for American writers to make up for
the political and literary insignificance of their country by boasting
either of the vastness of their continent or of the Spartan virtue of
their forefathers.
In the same manner, in earlier days, when the recollection of the
struggle for independence was still vivid, patriotic Americans were
unable to recognize anything but arbitrary tyranny in the attempts
made from time to time by the English government to give unity and
organization to the group of discordant and feeble settlements, or
to see anything but what was base and servile in the sentiments that
inspired those whom they nicknamed Tories. Now, under the influence of
calmer consideration, men are beginning to admit that something may
be said for men like Andros, who strove against the separatist spirit
which seemed to New England to be the very essence of liberty, and even
for those unfortunates who valued the connection with Great Britain
more than they did the privileges of self-government, and who were
compelled in grief and sorrow, from their devotion to their principles,
to leave forever the homes they loved. The war of secession has taught
Americans to understand the term, and appreciate the sentiment, of
loyalty. It is no longer an unmeaning word, fit only to be ridiculed
in scurrilous doggerel by patriot rhymsters, as was the case a hundred
years ago, but appeals to an answering chord in the heart of every man
who remembers the quick heart-beats and the grand enthusiasm of those
four years of struggle, the true heroic age of American history.
The paper upon _The Quakers in New England_ is an enlargement and
revision of an article printed in the _American Church Review_, in
April 1889, and that upon _Sir Edmund Andros_ has been printed by the
_Historical Society of Westchester County, N. Y._, before whom it was
read in October 1892, but it has been revised and enlarged. Instead of
burdening the pages with notes and references, they have been placed
together after each essay, so that they may be readily used by those
who desire to do so, and yet may not affront the eyes of those who do
not desire them.
It is impossible to give credit for every statement to every historian
who may have made it; it has been the desire of the author to indicate
his principal sources of information, and he has not knowingly omitted
any work upon which he has relied for the historical facts presented.
TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD,
October 1894.
I.
THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND.
In the year 1656, in the midst of the period of the Commonwealth, the
good people of Massachusetts, who were enjoying a brief season of rest
after their troubles with the Baptists and the Antinomians, heard to
their horror that they were likely to be visited by certain fanatics of
whom they had heard from their brethren in England. These were known
to them by the invidious name of Quakers, and were confounded with
Adamites, Muggletonians, and Ranters, strangely named sects which the
confusion of the times had brought forth.[1]
This remarkable body of men, whose history has presented such strange
contrasts of wild enthusiasm and imperturbable stolidity, of fanaticism
and quietism, of contempt for the world and its rewards on the one
side, and of sordid love of peace and money-getting upon the other,
had recently come into being as one of the natural results of the
unsettling of religious faiths and practices which had accompanied the
political revolution in England. The Quaker movement was a revolt at
once from the enforced conformity of the Laudian establishment and from
the intolerable spiritual oppression of the Calvinistic divines, whose
little fingers, when they came into power, had been thicker than the
loins of their predecessors.
The great Anglican prelates of the reign of Charles I. were unfortunate
in the circumstances amidst which their lives were spent. They were
liberal and tolerant in theology, and they were pilloried as bigots;
they held an idea of what the Church of England should be, that was
utopian in its comprehensiveness, and they are described by every New
England writer of school histories or children’s story-books as narrow
minded enemies of freedom of thought. The system proposed by Andrewes
and Montague was essentially that of Sir Thomas More: liberality in
matters of belief, with uniformity in practice and in ritual. The
Puritan divines, on the other hand, were despotic in matters of faith
and doctrine to a degree rarely equalled in the history of the human
mind, while they insisted upon their right of refusing the system
of worship which was established by law in the Church of England,
and of choosing for themselves religious ordinances to suit their
own tastes and fancies. They did not plead for liberty on the ground
that the principle of compulsion in religious matters was wrong and
illegitimate, but because the services of the Church of England were,
in their opinion, unscriptural if not idolatrous. The one party was
tolerant in doctrine, and despotic, tyrannical at times, in matters
of ritual; the other claimed to be indifferent as to ritual, but was
despotic in opinions. The church, by attempting to regulate public
worship, was led in some instances to appear to be persecuting men for
doctrinal differences; the Puritans, from their zeal for orthodoxy
in doctrine, became, when the power was placed in their hands, the
strictest possible disciplinarians. The tendency of the one party was
to subject the church to the state, and thus make it an instrument of
political authority; the other tended to the subjection of the state
to the church, making the civil authority little more than the body
by which the edicts of the ministers should be registered and their
decrees should be enforced.
With the early history of Quakerism we have little to do. Its founder,
George Fox, was the son of a weaver at Fenny Drayton (or Drayton in
the Clay) in Leicestershire. He had been piously brought up by his
parents, who were members of the Church of England, and passed a
boyhood and youth of singular purity and innocence. When he was growing
up to manhood he passed through a period of deep religious depression,
and found no help from any of his friends or from the ministers of
the parish churches in his neighborhood (who at this time were mainly
Presbyterians) or from the newer lights of the rising separatist
bodies. One counselled him to have blood let, another to use tobacco
and sing psalms; and the poor distracted boy, whose soul was heavy
with a sense of the wrath of God, found no comfort from any of them.
A careful study of the Bible made him quick to see the weak points
in the systems that surrounded him, and at last he found the comfort
he sought in the sense of an immediate communion with God and an
indwelling of the Spirit of Christ within the soul. For a time he led a
solitary life, leaving home and friends and wandering over the country
on foot, clothed in garments of leather, sleeping wherever he could
find a lodging, and spending whole days sometimes in the hollows of
great trees. Soon it was “borne in upon him” that the presence of the
Spirit and the inner light was as good a qualification for the office
of preacher as that of being a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, and he
began his public ministry about the year 1646.[2]
With the externals of Quakerism we are all familiar: the morbid
conscientiousness that forbade the use of the common forms of courtesy,
the simple dress, the refusal to submit to the authority of magistrates
or of priests in matters concerning religion, and the unwillingness to
pay them the usual compliments due to their position. The true inner
nature of Quakerism, which gave it its strength, lay not merely in
its abhorrence of forms and formulas, its vigorous protest against
any compulsion in matters either of religious thought or religious
observance, but essentially in its consciousness of the need of the
Divine presence and its belief in the fulfilment of the Saviour’s
promise to send his Spirit into the world.
It was a faith for martyrs and enthusiasts, a faith which in its simple
earnestness had wonderful power of conviction, but which was especially
liable to counterfeits and pretenders, who could delude themselves or
others into a belief in their inspiration, and who substituted a wild
extravagance for the enthusiasm of the first believers. One cannot help
regretting that Fox’s fate placed him in so uncongenial a century as
the seventeenth and in so matter-of-fact a country as England. Had he
been born in Italy in the middle ages, his name might rank with that of
Francis of Assisi. But it was impossible to expect comprehensiveness
or liberality from the Puritans of the day, all the less because of
the abuses and fanatical actions by which Quakerism was parodied and
made ridiculous. It was essentially an esoteric religion, and had, in
consequence, the great disadvantage of being able to furnish no tests
by which the true could be distinguished from the false, those inspired
with a genuine religious enthusiasm from the fanatics and pretenders.
Their revolt from all established customs and usages, their disrespect
for authority, and the boldness with which they rebuked and disputed
with the preacher in the pulpit of the “steeple house” or with the
justice on the bench, brought them at once into difficulties with the
rulers in church and state, who showed themselves no more tolerant of
dissent from their own favorite way of thinking and acting than were
the most despotic of all the Anglican prelates. They were imprisoned,
fined, beaten, and exiled; in 1656 Fox computed that there were seldom
less than a thousand Quakers in prison at once. They seemed inspired
with a spirit of opposition; wherever they were not wanted, there were
they sure to go. They visited Scotland and Ireland, the West India
islands and the American colonies; one woman testified before the Grand
Turk at Adrianople, two others were imprisoned by the Inquisition at
Malta; one brother visited Jerusalem and bore his testimony against the
superstition of the monks, others made their way to Rome, Austria, and
Hungary, and a number of them preached their doctrines in Holland and
Germany.[3] Such enthusiasm, even in those in whom it was genuine, was
very nearly akin to insanity; and in many instances the dividing line
was crossed, and the votaries allowed themselves to commit grotesque
and indecent actions, or to speak most shocking blasphemies and to
receive an idolatrous veneration from the silly women who listened to
their ravings. The disturbances of the times produced many other bands
of fanatics who were frequently confounded with the Quakers, and gave
to them the odium of their misdeeds. The Ranters, the Adamites, the
Muggletonians, and the Fifth Monarchy Men were all akin to the Quakers
in being opposed to the order established by law, and in professing
to be guided by an inner light; they differed from them, however, in
making their religious fanaticism very often a cloak for secret vice
or for wild plots against the government. The temporary overthrow of
the comprehensive church establishment of the judicious statesmen and
reformers of Elizabeth’s reign had opened the gates to a flood of
irreligion and fanaticism. The ecclesiastical despotism established
by the Westminster Assembly was more repugnant to Englishmen than the
old church which had been suppressed, and the condition of England
in religious matters during the Commonwealth forms one of the best
apologies for the severe reactionary measures that were adopted when
the king and the bishops were restored in 1660.
It was in the middle of this period that the episode of the Quaker
troubles in New England occurred, an episode which has been given an
unpleasant prominence in the colonial history of New England, partly
from the bitterness of the feelings which were aroused on both sides,
but especially from the bearing that it had upon the question of
the people of Massachusetts for the powers and responsibilities of
self-government. The story is a sad one of misdirected earnestness
and zeal on the one side, of mistaken consistency and fidelity to
principle, however false, upon the other. We condemn while we admire;
we wonder at the steadiness and constancy of both judged and judges,
while we regret the tragic results that stained the new commonwealth
with innocent blood. It is not surprising, however, that such a
conflict took place, for as a recent writer of great learning and
ability has well said of the relations of the Quakers and their
opponents,--“the issue presented seemed to have a resemblance to the
mechanical problem of what will be the effect if an irresistible body
strikes an immovable body.”[4]
The colonial governments which had been established in New England in
the first half of the seventeenth century were not, as is frequently
assumed, homogeneous and similar, but differed from each other in their
political status and to some extent in their political institutions,
and very greatly in the spirit which governed and directed them.
Massachusetts had a charter obtained from the Crown for a trading
company, and transferred to the colony by a daring usurpation; Rhode
Island had a charter granted by the Long Parliament; Plymouth had
obtained its territory by purchase from the old Plymouth Company,
but its political existence was winked at rather than recognized;
Connecticut and New Haven were, to all intents and purposes,
independent republics, save for a somewhat doubtful acknowledgment
of the supremacy of the king and of the Commonwealth that was his
successor. All but Rhode Island were joined together in a federal
league for mutual defence against external and internal enemies.
The circumstances of the settlement of the various colonies had been
such as to render the colonists extremely tenacious of their own
privileges, and extremely jealous of any interference from the other
side of the ocean. The people of Massachusetts, especially, lived in
constant dread of their much-prized charter being taken away from them
by the king, from whom it had been obtained, or by the parliament,
which considered that it was its province to meddle with and to
regulate all things in heaven and on earth.
It is quite remarkable that the attitude of the colonies to the home
government, during the period of the Commonwealth, no less than in
the years which preceded it, was one of jealous suspicion. The charter
colonies feared that their privileges would be interfered with, the
self-organized colonies were in dread of a _quo warranto_ or a _scire
facias_, which would disclose the irregularity of their organizations
or the defectiveness of their titles.
The godly and judicious Winthrop, the statesmanlike founder and
governor of Massachusetts, had died, sorrowing on his death-bed for
the harshness in religious matters into which he had been forced; and
in his place was the severe and fanatical Endicott, a man of gloomy
intensity of nature, a stern logician, a man who neither asked nor
granted mercy. The clergy were fanatically devoted to their religious
and political peculiarities, and were inferior in wisdom and judgment
to the great leader who had come out from England with the early
settlers at the beginning of the colony. Cotton was dead, and was
succeeded in his office of teacher by John Norton, who differed from
his predecessor by the lack of the principal characteristics which had
so greatly distinguished him: “Profound judgment, eminent gravity,
Christian candor, and sweet temper of spirit, whereby he could very
placidly bear those who differed from him in other apprehensions.”[5]
Hooker had long since removed to Connecticut, where he had been largely
instrumental in founding a more genial commonwealth upon a broader and
more liberal basis. Wilson, the first pastor of the church at Boston,
was indeed still living, but was a worthy associate of Endicott and
Norton, and distinguished then, as he had always been, rather by zeal
than by either discretion or Christian charity.
By a process of successful exclusions and banishments the community
had been rendered tolerably homogeneous, or at least submissive to the
theocratical system which had been established. Those who had been
defeated in the struggle for existence had gone elsewhere to found new
commonwealths, all with a greater amount of religious liberty than that
of Massachusetts.
The first we hear of the Quakers in New England is in an order of the
General Court appointing May 14, 1656, as a public day of humiliation,
“to seek the face of God in behalf of our native country, in reference
to the abounding of errors, especially those of the Ranters and
Quakers.”[6]
About two months later a ship arrived from Barbadoes, bringing as
passengers two Quaker women, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin. As soon as
they arrived in the harbor, the Governor, the Deputy Governor, and
four assistants met and ordered that the captain of the ship should
be compelled to carry them back to Barbadoes; that in the mean time
they should be kept in jail, and the books which they had brought with
them should be burnt. During imprisonment they were subjected to great
indignities and insults at the hands of the brutal jailer, apparently
without warrant, being stripped naked and their bodies examined for
witch-marks, with attending circumstances of great indecency. They
were half-starved in prison, and then after a detention of about a
month they were sent away. No sooner had they gone when another vessel
arrived from England, bringing eight more, four men and four women,
besides one man from Long Island, who had been converted during the
voyage. Officers were sent on board the vessel, and the Quakers were
taken at once to the jail, where they were kept eleven weeks, and
then sent back to England, despite the protests of the shipmaster.[7]
During their detention they were examined before the magistrates, and
they increased the abhorrence in which they were held by their rude
and contemptuous answers, which gave the authorities a sufficient
excuse for keeping them in prison. Their books were burned; and though
some pains seems to have been taken to convince them of their errors
by argument, it was in vain. One of the women, Mary Prince by name,
made herself particularly obnoxious by the eloquence of her abuse.
She reviled the governor from the window of the prison, denouncing
the judgment of God upon him, wrote violent letters to him and to the
magistrates, and when the ministers attempted to argue with her, she
drove them from her as “hirelings, deceivers of the people, priests of
Baal, the seed of the serpent, the brood of Ishmael, etc.”
While this second batch of Quakers was in prison, the Federal
Commissioners were in session, and resolved to propose to the several
General Courts that all Quakers, Ranters, and other notorious heretics
should be prohibited coming into the United Colonies, and if any
should hereafter come or arise, that they should be forthwith secured
or removed out of all the jurisdictions.[8] These recommendations
were acted upon by all the General Courts at their next sessions: by
Connecticut, October 2, 1656; Massachusetts, October 14, 1656; New
Haven, May 27, 1657; Plymouth, June 3, 1657.
In Massachusetts the action of the General Court was most decided and
severe. Shipmasters who brought Quakers into the jurisdiction were to
be fined one hundred pounds, and to give security for the return of
such passengers to the port from which they came. Quakers coming to the
colony were to be “forthwith committed to the House of Correction, and
at their entrance to be severely whipped, and by the master thereof to
be kept constantly at work, and none suffered to converse or speak with
them during the time of their imprisonment.” A fine of five pounds was
imposed upon the importation, circulation, or concealment of Quaker
books; persons presuming to defend heretical opinions of the said
Quakers should be fined two pounds for the first offence, four pounds
for the second; for the third offence should be sent to the House of
Correction till they could be conveniently sent out of the colony; and
what person or persons soever should revile the officer or person of
magistrates or ministers, “as was usual with the Quakers,” should be
severely whipped, or pay the sum of five pounds.[9]
It was not long before the law was put into operation. The first cases
were Ann Burden and Mary Dyer. They were imprisoned for two or three
months, and then Burden, after having all of her little property taken
from her in fines and jail charges, was sent back to England, and Dyer
was delivered to her husband, the Secretary of Rhode Island, upon his
giving security not to lodge her in any town in the colony nor permit
any to speak with her.[10]
Mary Clarke, however, who had come from England “to warn these
persecutors to desist from their iniquity,” was whipped, receiving
twenty stripes with a whip of three cords, knotted at the ends. Charles
Holden and John Copeland, who had been sent away the year before,
returned to the colony, and were whipped thirty stripes apiece and
imprisoned, and Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick were imprisoned and
fined for harboring them. Richard Dowdney, who arrived from England to
bear his testimony, was scourged and imprisoned, and, together with
Holden and Copeland, was reshipped to England.[11]
The authorities now thought that their laws were too lenient, and in
October 1657 they were made more rigorous. The fine for entertaining
Quakers was increased to forty shillings an hour, and any Quaker
returning into the jurisdiction after being once punished, if a man,
was to lose one ear, and on a second appearance to lose the other.
If he appeared a third time, his tongue was to be bored through with
a red-hot iron. Women were to be whipped for the first and second
offences, and to have their tongues bored upon the third.[12] In May of
the following year, a penalty of ten shillings was laid upon every one
attending a Quaker meeting, and five pounds upon any one speaking at
such meeting.[13]
In spite of these severe enactments the Quakers returned; and the
more they were persecuted, the more they appeared to aspire to the
distinction of martyrdom. Holden, Copeland, and John Rouse, in 1658,
had their right ears cut off; but the magistrates were afraid of the
effect upon the people of a public execution of the law, and hence
inflicted the penalty in private, inside the walls of the prison, in
spite of the protest of the unfortunates, after which they were again
flogged and dismissed.[14] In October 1658 a further step was taken
in accordance with the advice of the Federal Commissioners, who met
in Boston in September, and the penalty of death was threatened upon
all who, after being banished from the jurisdiction under pain of
death if they returned, should again come back.[15] Massachusetts was
the only colony to take this step, which indeed was carried in the
meeting of the Commissioners by her influence against the protest of
Winthrop of Connecticut; and the measure was passed by a bare majority
of the General Court after long debate, and with the express proviso
that trial under this act should be by special jury, and not before
the magistrates alone. Captain Edward Hutchinson and Captain Thomas
Clark, men whose names should be remembered, desired leave to enter
their dissent from the law. The Court was urged on to this unfortunate
action by a petition from twenty-five of the citizens of Boston, among
whom we find the name of John Wilson, the pastor of the First Church.
These represented that the “incorrigibleness” of the Quakers after
all the means that had been taken was such “as by reason of their
malignant obdurities, daily increaseth rather than abateth our fear
of the Spirit of Muncer and John of Leyden renewed, and consequently
of some destructive evil impending,” and asked whether the law of
self-preservation did not require the adoption of a law to punish
these offenders with death.[16] In order to justify its action, the
Court ordered that there should be “a writing or declaration drawn up
and forthwith printed to manifest the evils of the teachings of the
Quakers and danger of their practices, as tending to the subversion
of religion, of church order, and civil government, and the necessity
that this government is put upon for the preservation of religion
and their own peace and safety, to exclude such persons from among
them, who after due means of conviction should remain obstinate and
pertinacious.”[17] This declaration was composed by John Norton, and
printed at public expense.[18]
The rulers of the colony had now committed themselves to a position
from which they could not recede without loss of dignity, and which
they could not enforce without great obloquy. They evidently were under
the impression that the mere passage of the law would be enough, and
that they would never be obliged to proceed to the last extremity. But
they miscalculated the perseverance and enthusiasm of the men with
whom they had to deal, and were soon involved in a conflict of will
from which there seemed to them to be no escape except by putting the
law into effect. It would have been better for them to have heeded
the wise advice that they had already received from Rhode Island,
whose magistrates had replied to one of the former communications of
Massachusetts requesting their co-operation in restrictive measures
against the Quakers, in these remarkable words:
“We have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring
by words, etc., their minds and understandings concerning the
things and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition.
And we, moreover, find that in those places where these people
aforesaid in this colony are most of all suffered to declare
themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse,
there they least of all desire to come. And we are informed that
they begin to loathe this place, for that they are not opposed
by the civil authority, but, with all patience and meekness, are
suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions.
Nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way. Surely,
we find that they delight to be persecuted by civil powers; and
when they are so, they are like to gain more adherents by the
conceit of their painful sufferings than by consent to their
pernicious sayings.”[19]
The law was passed in October 1658, and at first it seemed to have
accomplished its object. The first six Quakers who were banished after
it had been put in force went away and made no attempt to come back;
but in June 1659 four who were more resolute and determined appeared
in Boston with the avowed intention of defying the law. They were
William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, Nicholas Davis, and Mary Dyer.
They were arrested and sentenced to banishment (September 12th), with
the threat that they should suffer death if they remained or returned
to the colony. Nicholas Davis and Mary Dyer “found freedom to depart;
but the other two were constrained in the love and power of the Lord
not to depart, but to stay in the jurisdiction, and to try the bloody
law unto death.”[20] They withdrew to the New Hampshire settlements,
but in about four weeks returned to Boston prepared to die, and were
joined there by Mary Dyer, who had decided to share their fate. They
were arraigned before the General Court, which was then in session,
and admitting that they were the persons banished by the last Court
of Assistants, were sentenced to be hanged in a week from that time
(October 19th).[21] The authorities evidently were afraid of popular
sympathy, for they gave orders for a military guard of one hundred
men to conduct them to the gallows, while another military force
was charged to watch the rest of the town, and the selectmen were
instructed to “press ten or twelve able and faithful persons every
night to watch the town and guard the prison.”
Neither side would yield: the Quakers had come back with the declared
purpose of dying for their faith and for the principle of religious
liberty; the authorities did not dare to withdraw from the position in
which they had rashly placed themselves, and the leaders do not seem
to have had any desire to do so. They felt that the question of their
authority was at stake, and that if they yielded their power over
the people would be gone. They were willing to claim for themselves
and their institutions the protection of the laws of England, but
they would not admit any appeal to those laws when they conflicted
with the colonial regulations. They claimed to own the colony in full
sovereignty, in virtue of their charter on the one hand and their deeds
from the Indians on the other, and they argued that they had the same
right to exclude obnoxious and dangerous persons, and to destroy them
if they persistently thrust themselves upon them, that a householder
has of resisting a burglar, or a shepherd of killing the wolves that
break into his sheepfold.
It is a great mistake to say that they had come to the colony from a
zeal for religious liberty. What they had come for was to be in a
place where they could order religious affairs to suit themselves. As
Besse, the Quaker historian, shrewdly remarks: “They appear not so
inconsistent with themselves as some have thought, because when under
oppression they pleaded for liberty of conscience, they understood it
not as the natural and common right of all mankind, but as a peculiar
privilege of the orthodox.”[22]
The tragedy was performed on the twenty-seventh day of October 1659;
the prisoners, walking hand in hand, were brought to the gallows by
the soldiers. They were insulted in their last moments by the bigoted
Wilson, and when they tried to address the people their voices were
drowned by the beating of the drums. Robinson and Stevenson died
bravely, and Mary Dyer mounted the ladder to meet her fate; her skirts
were tied, the rope was about her neck, and she was on the point
of being “turned off,” when she was released by the magistrates in
consideration of the intercession of her son, who had come up from
Rhode Island to try to save his mother’s life. She unwillingly accepted
the grudging gift, and went back to Rhode Island.[23]
The popular feeling was so strong against the magistrates for their
severity, that they thought it best to put forth a declaration, in
which they argued that their proceedings were justified by the law
of self-defence, and by the precedent of the English laws against
the Jesuits; and they calmly stated that what they had done was
only to present the point of their sword in their own defence, that
the Quakers who had rushed upon it had become “_felons de se_,” and
that their former proceedings and their mercy to Mary Dyer upon the
“inconsiderable intercession” of her son “manifestly evinced that they
desired their lives absent rather than their death present.”[24]
The bodies of the unfortunate men were treated with indecent brutality,
and were buried naked beneath the gallows. Mrs. Dyer remained away for
six months, and then the spirit moved her to return once more and die.
Her husband wrote to Endicott to beg her life, but without avail. No
mercy could be shown her as long as she defied the law. It is said that
her life was offered her if she would promise to keep out of the colony
henceforth, but she declined to receive the favor.[25] “In obedience
to the will of the Lord I came,” said she, “and in his will I abide
faithful to the death.”
Meanwhile the prisons and the house of correction had been the fate
of other delinquents, and the jailer and executioner had had plenty
of employment with the scourge. The Southwicks, with their eldest son
Josiah, were whipped, fined, and imprisoned for withdrawing from the
public services and worshipping by themselves, and their two younger
children were ordered to be sold as slaves to the West Indies in
satisfaction of the fines imposed.[26] W. Shattuck was whipped, fined,
and imprisoned. Sarah Gibbons and Dorothy Waugh were whipped. Hored
Gardner, a woman with a sucking babe, and a young girl who came into
the colony with her, were scourged with the “three-fold knotted whip,
and during her tortures she prayed for her persecutors.”
William Brand was thrown into the House of Correction, and, refusing to
work, was beaten constantly by the brutal jailer with a tarred rope an
inch thick. The pathetic record says: “His back and arms were bruised
black, and the blood was hanging as in bags under his arms, and so into
one was his flesh beaten that the sign of a particular blow could not
be seen, for all became as a jelly.”[27]
William Leddra and Rouse, whose ears had been cut off, were ordered to
be whipped twice a week with increasing severity until they consented
to work, and were at last dismissed from the colony under pain of death
if they returned.
Patience Scott, a girl eleven years old, was imprisoned as a Quaker,
but discharged, after a period of detention, in consideration of her
youth; but her mother, Catherine Scott, for reproving the magistrates
for a deed of darkness, was whipped ten stripes, although she was
admitted by them to be otherwise of blameless life and conversation.
Christopher Holden, who, in spite of losing his ears in 1658, had
returned once more, was banished upon pain of death by the same court
that had hanged Robinson and Stevenson.[28] Seven or eight persons were
fined, some as high as ten pounds, for entertaining Quakers, and Edward
Wharton, for piloting them from one place to another, was ordered to be
whipped twenty stripes, and bound to his good behavior. Divers others
were then brought upon trial, “for adhering to the cursed sect of
Quakers, not disowning themselves to be such, refusing to give civil
respect, leaving their families and relations, and roaming from place
to place vagabonds like”; and Daniel Gold was sentenced to be whipped
thirty stripes, Robert Harper fifteen, and they, with Alice Courland,
Mary Scott, and Hope Clifton, banished upon pain of death; William
Kingswill whipped fifteen stripes; Margaret Smith, Mary Trask, and
Provided Southwick ten stripes each, and Hannah Phelps admonished.[29]
In November, William Leddra, who had been released, returned, and
was at once arrested. On his trial the opportunity of withdrawal was
again extended, but he refused to accept it, and was executed March 1,
1661. As he ascended the ladder he was heard to say: “All that will
be Christ’s disciples must take up the cross,” and just as he was
being thrown from its rounds, he cried in the words of Stephen, “Lord
Jesus, receive my spirit.” Wenlock Christison, who had been before this
sentenced to death, but allowed to leave the colony, had returned,
and during Leddra’s trial he came boldly before the Court and told
the astonished judges: “I am come here to warn you that ye shed no
more innocent blood.” He was at once arrested, and was brought up for
trial three months later. There was an unusual difference of opinion
in regard to the case, and the condemnation was only secured by the
violence of Endicott, who was able to browbeat the others into consent.
But the sentence they passed was never executed. The people were tired
of bloodshed, and the opposition which was shown in the General Court
to any further proceedings was so great as to make a change in the law
necessary.[30]
The humanity of the delegates to the Court was probably considerably
quickened by a sense of the dangerous position in which the colony
stood since the restoration of Charles II., who, they might naturally
fear, would call them to an account for their proceedings, especially
as the colony had allowed nearly a year to pass without any recognition
of the change in the political situation.
The General Court attempted to save its dignity by interposing a still
greater number of shameful and unusual punishments between the first
offence and the death penalty, and declared that, “being desirous to
try all means with as much lenity as might consist with safety to
prevent the intrusions of the Quakers, who had not been restrained
by the laws already provided, they would henceforth order that such
intruders should be tied to a cart’s tail and whipped from town to
town toward the borders of the jurisdiction. Should they return after
being dealt with thus thrice, they were to be branded with the letter
R on their left shoulder, and be severely whipped and sent away again
at the cart’s tail. Should they again return, they were to be liable to
the former law of banishment under pain of death.”[31]
It is quite possible that this appeared to be lenity to men like
Endicott and Norton, but it is very doubtful whether the Quakers so
considered it. It did not prevent, though it anticipated, an order from
the king directing that any Quakers imprisoned or under sentence should
be released and sent to England for trial.[32] To make this still more
galling to the pride of the colony, it was sent by Samuel Shattuck, a
Salem Quaker, who had been banished from the colony under pain of death
if he should return, and who, we cannot doubt, thoroughly enjoyed his
mission and the humiliation of Endicott. For a short time the order
was obeyed and then the “lenient” laws were put in force again; and,
as many delicately nurtured Quaker women found to their cost, the
“tender mercies” of the saints were cruel. Palfrey remarks, with great
gratification apparently, that “no hanging, no branding, ever took
place by force of this law,” but that “under its provisions for other
penalties the contest was carried on for a considerable time longer.”
It would be wearisome to cite all of the subsequent proceedings; a few
of them will suffice to show that the treatment of the Quakers still
continued to be extremely severe, and that in spite of it all they
persisted in braving the threats of the magistrates. It was not until
1679, when religious toleration was forced against their wills upon the
good Christians of Massachusetts, that the Quakers found any safety
within the boundaries of the colony.
In 1661, when the Quakers were set free at the command of the king,
some of them were whipped at the cart’s tail twenty stripes apiece, on
the ground that they were vagabonds.[33]
In 1662, Josiah Southwick, who had returned from his banishment,
was whipped at the cart’s tail in Boston, Roxbury, and Dedham, and
dismissed into the woods with a warning not to return. The magistrates
apparently had found that their old style of whipping was too humane;
for the whip used on this and several subsequent occasions was made,
not of cord, “but of dried guts like the bass strings of a bass viol,”
with three knots at each end--a weapon which, according to contemporary
testimony, made holes in the back that one could put pease into.[34]
In December 1662 Ann Coleman, Mary Tompkins, and Alice Ambrose were
stripped to the waist and whipped at the cart’s tail in Dover, Hampton,
and Salisbury, and were forced to walk the entire distance in slush
and snow up to their knees. The “lenient” sentence required indeed
that they should be whipped in each town in the jurisdiction, but the
constable at Newbury found in the warrant some flaw by which he was
able to release them. On their return to Dover, they were seized by
the constables by night, dragged face downwards over snow and stumps
to the river, one of them at least was doused in the stream and
dragged after a canoe, and they were only released because the storm
was too severe for their tormentors to brave.[35] Ann Coleman, again,
with four friends, was whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham.[36]
Elizabeth Hooton, a woman of over sixty years of age, Fox’s first
convert, was first imprisoned, and then carried two days’ journey into
the wilderness, “among wolves and bears,” and left there to shift for
herself. On returning, she was kept in a dungeon at Cambridge two
days without food, tied to the whipping-post and flogged there, then
taken to Watertown, where she was flogged with willow rods, flogged
again at Dedham, and then carried into the woods as before. Coming back
once more to fetch her clothes from Cambridge, she and a companion,
“an ancient woman,” and her daughter were whipped in private, in spite
of which we find her coming once more to Boston, and on that occasion
she was whipped again at the cart’s tail.[37] Mary Tompkins, Alice
Ambrose, and Ann Needham also appear again and again in the records of
suffering. One Edward Wharton, who was most resolute in defying the
authorities, was constantly under arrest, and even a bare enumeration
of his floggings would fill a page.
In 1665 Deborah Wilson, for going naked through the streets of Salem
“for a sign,” was whipped; but the constable executed his office
so mercifully that he was displaced. There is a pathetic incident
mentioned by Bishop, the Quaker historian, that “her tender husband,
though not altogether of her way, followed after,” as she underwent
her punishment, “clapping his hat sometimes between the whip and her
back.”[38]
Eliakim Wardwell, at Newbury, was fined heavily in 1665 for
entertaining Wenlock Christison; and this injustice in addition to the
other cruel acts, so affected his wife Lydia that, although a modest
and delicate woman, she came naked into the meeting at Newbury, as a
testimony against them. She was seized and hurried away to the court at
Ipswich, which sentenced her to be whipped at the nearest tavern post.
Bishop says:
Without _Law_ or _President_ _they_ condemned her to be tyed to
the fence Post of the tavern, where they sat, which is usually
their Court places, where they may serve their ears with Musick,
and their bellies with Wine and gluttony; whereunto _she_ was tyed
stript from the _Waste_ upwards, with her naked breasts to the
splinters of the _Posts_ and there sorely lashed, with _twenty_ or
_thirty_ cruel stripes, which though it miserably tore and bruised
_her_ tender body, yet to the joy of _her_ Husband and Friends
that were Spectators, _she_ was carried through all these inhumane
cruelties, quiet and chearful, and to the shame and confusion of
these unreasonable _bruit_ beasts, whose name shall rot, and their
memory perish.[39]
Eliakim, her husband, some time after, for vindicating her character,
was by order of the court at Hampton bound to a tree and whipped
fifteen lashes. In 1675 a law was passed which made it the duty of the
constables, under heavy penalties, to break up all Quaker meetings and
to commit those present to the House of Correction, there to have the
discipline of the house and be kept to work on bread and water, or else
to pay five pounds.
In 1677 an order was passed requiring an oath of fidelity to the
country, and legal liabilities were imposed upon all who refused the
oath. This struck directly at the Quakers, and was believed by them,
whether justly or not, to have been made for the purpose of vexing and
plundering them.[40] A vigorous protest against it was made in writing
by Margaret Brewster, who came from Barbadoes to bear her testimony
against the law and to declare the evils that were coming upon the
colony. Having, as she declared, “a foresight given of that grievous
calamity called the Black Pox, which afterwards spread there to the
cutting off of many of the People. Wherefore she was constrained in a
prophetic manner to warn them thereof, by entering into their publick
assembly clothed in sackcloth and ashes, and with her face made black.”
For this she and four of her friends were arrested and cast into prison
upon the charge of “making a horrible disturbance, and affrighting
the people in the South Church in Boston in the time of the public
dispensing of the Word, whereby several women ... are in danger of
miscarrying.” She was whipped at the cart’s tail twenty lashes, and the
young women who were with her were forced to accompany her during her
punishment. Twelve Quakers, who were arrested the same day at a Quaker
meeting, were whipped, and fifteen the week following.[41]
In the other colonies the sufferings of the Quakers were not so
severe, though in Plymouth they had to endure banishment, fines, and
whippings. In Connecticut, thanks probably to the wisdom of John
Winthrop, the only cases which occurred were met with banishment, and
the Quakers seem to have respected the jurisdiction where they were
mercifully treated. In New Haven there were several prosecutions;
Southold on Long Island seems to have been the place most frequented
by the Quakers, though they also appeared in Greenwich. The only case
of extreme severity was that of Humphrey Norton, who had already borne
his torturing in Massachusetts, where he had enraged the magistrates
by his appeal to the laws of England. He was arrested at Southold
and taken to New Haven, where he was “cast into Prison and chained
to a Post, and kept night and day for the space of twenty Days with
great Weights of Iron in an open Prison without Fire or Candles in
the bitter cold Winter (December 1657), enough (reasonably) to have
starved him,” as Bishop writes. When he attempted to reply to Davenport
in the Court, he was not suffered to speak, but was gagged with “a
great Iron Key, tied athwart his mouth.” After his trial was over he
was whipped thirty stripes and branded H in the hand.[42] Several
who sympathized with or who entertained Quakers were punished with
heavy fines. In New Netherlands they fared little better;[43] and in
Virginia the much-flogged Mary Tompkins and Alice Ambrose found little
mercy from the cavaliers, being put in the pillory and whipped with a
cat-of-nine-tails so severely that blood was drawn by the very first
stroke; and George Wilson, “in cruel irons that rotted his flesh,
and long imprisonment, departed this life for his testimony to the
Lord.”[44] In Maryland they were subjected to fine and imprisonment
for refusing to take an oath or to serve in the militia. Liberty of
conscience was granted in 1688.[45]
It was in New England, and especially in Massachusetts, that the
persecution was general and severe. The magistrates, as a rule,
defended their action, as necessary to the maintenance of their
authority and to the preservation of order and orthodoxy; and their
conduct has been extenuated and excused, if not actually defended, by
modern New England historians.