Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

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.

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 own peculium, 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 fancied them, 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 singled out 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.[47] The 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 been stripped 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 execrable superstition. 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.