I.THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

Inthe 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 uponthe 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, whilethey 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 alodging, 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 ofdissent 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.3Such 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, andgave 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 fromthe 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 fromthe 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, duringthe 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 aquo warrantoor ascire 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.”5Hooker 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 arrivedfrom 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.7During their detention they were examined before the magistrates, and they increased the abhorrence in which they wereheld 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.8These 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 putinto 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 toforty 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.12In 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.14In 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, afterbeing banished from the jurisdiction under pain of death if they returned, should again come back.15Massachusetts 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 withdeath.16In 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.”17This 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 themto 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 Bostonwith 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.”20They 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).21The 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 everynight 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 religiousliberty. 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 againstthe 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.26W. 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.28Seven 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 vagabondslike”; 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.29In 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 bythe 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 fromtown 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.32To 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.35Ann Coleman, again, with four friends, was whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham.36Elizabeth 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. Onreturning, 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.37Mary 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:

WithoutLaworPresidenttheycondemned 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; whereuntoshewas tyed stript from theWasteupwards, with her naked breasts to the splinters of thePostsand there sorely lashed, withtwentyorthirtycruel stripes, which though it miserably tore and bruisedhertender body, yet to the joy ofherHusband and Friends that were Spectators,shewas carried through all these inhumane cruelties, quiet and chearful, and to the shame and confusion of these unreasonablebruitbeasts, 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 upall 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.40A 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 Bostonin 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 keptnight 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.42Several who sympathized with or who entertained Quakers were punished with heavy fines. In New Netherlands they fared little better;43and 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.”44In 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 arule, 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.

It is not a pleasant history, but there is something to be said upon the side of the authorities even by one who has no admiration for them or sympathy with them. The Puritans had not come to New England for liberty of thought, but for liberty of action. Having failed, as they thought at the time, to secure the triumph of their views in the church and state of England, they preferred to leave the struggle and come to New England, where they could live under their own system without being obliged to contend or suffer for their faith—a point upon which the Quaker controversialists make some very sharp remarks.46

They considered the territory which they held to be their ownpeculium, and claimed that by their charter they had acquired absolute sovereignty in its limits, subject to no appeal to England; and they realized that if appeal to England was granted, their absolute authority was at an end. One of the leading colonists is reported to have said:“If we admit appeal to the Parliament this year, next year they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government will be changed.” The settlement also had in their eyes a religious character; it was founded, as they boasted, for religion and not for trade, and they held that they had a right to dictate the religious usages and practices therein, as was shown by their treatment of Mrs. Hutchinson and Wheelwright, Roger Williams and Gorton, Child and Maverick, not to mention Morton of Merry Mount. They believed the Quakers to be a pernicious sect, confounding them with other fanatical bodies which they resembled, and they feared that the natural consequence of the claim which they made to immediate revelation would be communistic attempts at the overthrow of the established order, such as had been seen a hundred years before in Germany. From these premises the conclusion was a natural one, that their duty was to nip the evil in the bud, to crush the Quakers before they became strong enough to be dangerous to the state. Their action in banishing the first that arrived, before any overt acts were committed, was undoubtedly technically illegal; but if the Quakers had been in reality what they fanciedthem, no one would have blamed them for their prompt decision. Besides, they had a law by which they were accustomed to banish heretics, and the Quakers might very well come under that description.

As regards the compelling shipmasters to carry them back to the port from which they had come, such a custom had prevailed from a very early date in the case of undesirable immigrants. Winthrop, in his History mentions the reshipping to England of a crazy pauper woman whom the parish of Willesden had sent over to the colonists in Massachusetts. The Quakers came in spite of banishment, and the more they were imprisoned and beaten the more daring became their defiance, the more violent their abuse. They spared neither priest nor magistrate, and the floods of denunciation which they poured out were portentous. It is not to be wondered at that a stern and severe people, living a hard and cruel life of constant struggle with the elements, and in the constant dread lest their privileges should be assailed, should have been cruel in their treatment of these incorrigible offenders.

Judged by the common standard of the age, the cruelty of the treatment of the Quakers is not so remarkable as to be singledout above all other cruelties for reprobation. The Quakers themselves were cruel at times. George Fox himself is said to have been a witch-finder; and a son of the Samuel Shattuck who bore the king’s mandate to Endicott appears in the Salem witchcraft trials as a prominent witness against some of the unfortunates.47The folly and fatuity of the treatment adopted is more of a point to notice. In the colonies where the Quakers were let alone they caused no trouble. Palfrey’s sneer, that there was no order to disturb in Rhode Island, may be justified perhaps as regards that colony, but Connecticut certainly was a well-ordered commonwealth. In Massachusetts, on the contrary, the same persons kept coming again and again, and the severer the punishments the madder became their actions. It should be remembered that the acts usually mentioned as justifying the Puritans’ severity, such as the performances of the naked women at Salem and Newbury, of the men who broke bottles on the pulpit steps, and of the woman who smeared her face with black and frightened the matrons in the Old South church, were not committed until after the persecution had been carried on for years, until scores of women had beenstripped naked and flogged by the authorities, until men had had their ears cut off, and until three men and one woman had been put to death upon the gallows. The persecution was a blunder, and the details of it made it a blunder of the most atrocious description. Power was put into the hands of local and irresponsible magistrates to sentence men and women to these shameful and unusual punishments, and brutal constables and jailers were entrusted with the enforcement of the law without any due supervision. The most painful part of the whole history is the attitude of the Puritan clergy, in Massachusetts especially. They were bitter and bigoted, hounding on the magistrates to their cruel work, and insulting the unfortunate wretches when they came to suffer. Quaker instinct rightly, no doubt, fixed upon John Norton as the “Fountain and Principal unto whom most of the cruelty and bloodshed is to be imputed.”48

For the constancy of the Quakers themselves, their endurance and their fortitude, one can feel nothing but admiration. One remembers how, centuries before, men who like them were willing to die rather than to deny their faith had been called the enemies of mankind, and accused of a perverse and execrablesuperstition. It must be admitted, however, that their behavior was often of a kind that would not be allowed to-day any more than it was then, although it is to be hoped that our modern statecraft would find milder and more efficient means of repression than did our predecessors in New England; yet when one remembers how the Mormons were treated in Illinois and Missouri, and how the mob destroyed a Roman Catholic convent in Massachusetts, within the memories of living men, we may think it perhaps prudent not to be too sweeping in our condemnation.

The fundamental difficulty in the Puritans’ position was their illegal and unconstitutional government. To maintain that, they were led to deny to other Englishmen their rights, and to assert an independence of the home authorities which was little short of actual separation.

The second evil principle in their government was the union of church and state, or rather the subjection of the state to the church, a church moreover in which the people had no rights except by favor of the ministers, a church that was a close corporation and imbued with the spirit of the law of Moses rather than that of the gospel of Christ. In church, as well as in state, therewas a consciousness that their existence was illegal and illegitimate; that, in spite of their protests to the contrary, they had separated from their fellow-Christians in England and had formed a polity for themselves; hence, just as they felt it necessary to manifest their political authority by acts of severity upon any who questioned it, so they deemed it necessary to maintain their orthodoxy by persecuting those who differed from them in religion. They were ill at ease both politically and religiously, and they sought to disguise the fact from themselves, by making proof of all the power that they possessed. Hence it was that the conflict arose which has stained with innocent blood the early history of the land. It is not to be wondered that the Quakers should see, in the horrible death of Endicott and the miserable end of Norton,49the hand of an avenging Providence, or that they should believe that for a distance of twenty miles from Boston the ground was cursed so that no wheat could ripen because of a blood-red blight that fastened upon it.50But we, who live at a time when we can view the history of the struggle with calmness and impartiality, may respect the grim determination of the severe magistrates who felt it their duty, at whatever cost, tokeep that which was committed to their trust free from the poison of heresy and fanaticism, while we sorrow at the blindness which hid from their eyes the folly and the cruelty of their proceedings. We may sympathize with the tortured Quakers, whom we now know to be harmless enthusiasts, yet without approving or extenuating their mad actions, their abusive language, or their grotesque indecencies; and we may hope that, though at enmity in this life, yet, as Browning wrote of Strafford and Pym,

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