Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

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.”