120. The End of the War and the Result.—Although the victory at Quebec practically ended the French and Indian War, it was not until 1763 that peace was declared. By the treaty France gave up to England the whole of Canada, together with all the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, except the city of New Orleans. She retained a few barren islands near Newfoundland as a shelter for her fishermen. The vast region spreading westward from the Mississippi towards the Pacific, under the name Louisiana, together with the city of New Orleans, was made over to Spain.
CHAPTER IX.
EVERYDAY LIFE IN COLONIAL TIMES.
121. Severe and Curious Punishments.—In the early colonial times the laws were for the most part rigid and the punishments severe. Criminals were occasionally branded with a hot iron. If a man shot a fowl on Sunday, he was often publicly whipped. Small offenses were punished in a way which would not be tolerated in our times. A woman who had been complained of as a scold was placed in front of her house with a stick tied in her mouth. Sometimes a common scold was fastened to what was known as a "ducking stool" at one end of a seesaw plank, and ducked in a pond or river!
Some crimes were punished by making the offender stand up on a stool in some public place, while fastened to his breast was a large placard on which his crime was printed in coarse letters, as LIAR or THIEF. There were in some colonies public whipping-posts for the special benefit of hardened offenders. In other cases the stocks were used, the culprit being seated on a bench in a public place, his feet projecting through holes in a plank; or the pillory, where he had to stand up with his neck and wrists painfully confined in a similar way. These last two modes of punishment were a source of no small amusement to the throng that gathered around, whose jeers and scorn must have been hard to bear. Once a couple of men in Plymouth county had a brisk little quarrel, and they were punished by being bound together for twenty-four hours, head to head and foot to foot.
Culprits in the Pillory and Stocks.
122. How Sunday was kept.—Sunday was rigidly observed in New England. In olden times, and almost to our own day, the Lord's Day was made to begin at sunset on Saturday evening. Sunday schools were not then known. But every person was compelled to attend religious service or be punished. If a man stayed away from church for a month without a good excuse, he might be put in the stocks or into a wooden cage. No word could be spoken with impunity against the church or the rulers. He who used his tongue too freely was placed in the pillory or stocks, or was fined, and in some extreme cases he lost his ears.
The minister was the great man of the village. He was looked up to and consulted about nearly everything, and he generally decided what punishment should be inflicted on evil-doers. In earliest times the people were called to meeting by drumbeat or by the blowing of a horn. The log meeting-house had oiled paper windows, or, if of glass, small diamond-shaped panes set in leaden frames made in England.