Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

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]