The most painful event connected with the harsh religious system of the Puritans was the execution in 1659 of two Quakers, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, of England, who had come to Massachusetts to preach their doctrines. The first two Quakers to arrive in Boston were Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, who landed here in 1656. They were forthwith arrested, and examined for witch-marks, but none being found and there being no excuse therefore for putting them to death as agents of Satan, they were kept in close imprisonment, and the jailer and citizens were forbidden to give them any food, the object apparently being to starve them to death. The windows of the jail were boarded up to prevent food from being handed into them and also to prevent the prisoners from exhorting passers-by. A citizen named Upshall, who gave money to the jailer to buy nourishment for the captives, was fined $100, and ordered to leave the colony within thirty days, and was sentenced to pay beside $15 for every day he should be absent from public worship before his departure—evidently that he might be compelled to listen to pulpit denunciations of his wickedness in saving from starvation two fellow-human beings who worshipped God in a different fashion from their persecutors. The exile was denied an asylum in Plymouth, and followed the example of Roger Williams by seeking a refuge among the Indians, who treated him kindly. The two Quaker women were transported to Barbadoes, and the captain of the vessel which had brought them to Boston was required to bear the charges of their imprisonment. The religious books which they had in their possession when arrested were burned by the common hangman.
The Quakers continued to come in considerable numbers to America, being welcomed in some of the colonies, and persecuted in others, but nowhere so severely as in Massachusetts. When Stephenson and Robinson were hanged at Boston, Mary Dyer, widow of William Dyer, late recorder of Providence plantations, was taken to the scaffold with them, but reprieved on condition that she should leave the colony in forty-eight hours. In the following year Mary Dyer returned to Boston, and was at once arrested and hanged. These proceedings excited general horror in the mother country, and Charles II. sent a letter stating it to be his pleasure that the Quakers should be sent to England for trial. The General Court of Massachusetts thereupon suspended the laws against Quakers, and those in prison were released and sent out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.
Next to the persecution of the Quakers no feature of Puritan history is so prominent as the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy, which, although it occurred near the close of the seventeenth century, so strikingly illustrates the intellectual and religious conditions of the Massachusetts colony that it may properly be described here. Belief in witchcraft was not by any means confined to Massachusetts. The statutes of England, as well as of the American colonies, dealt with the imaginary crime. Among the intelligent and educated classes, however, both in Europe and America, the subject was generally considered of too doubtful a nature to be dealt with by the infliction of the penalties which the law prescribed. In Massachusetts, where everybody had some education, the majority of the people, although deeply and almost fanatically religious, had their doubts about the reality of the diabolical art, and the belief, strangely enough, seems to have been most intense and aggressive in the highest intellectual quarters, among ministers and men of superior education and commensurate influence. It was this that gave the witchcraft delusion its awful power for evil, and enabled a few vicious children afflicted with hysteria or epilepsy to bring a score of mostly reputable persons to an ignominious death, to ruin more than that number of homes and to spread consternation throughout the commonwealth.
The Salem delusion began in the house of Mr. Parris, the minister at Danvers. Parris had two slaves, an Indian and his wife, Tituba, the latter half negro and half Indian. Tituba taught the children various tricks. While practicing these tricks, some of them became hysterical and acted in a peculiar manner. It was suggested that they were bewitched, and they were asked who had bewitched them. They indicated a woman named Sarah Goode, who was generally disliked. She was arrested and imprisoned. This seems to have gratified the children, who soon after had convulsions in the presence of another victim, one Giles Corey. Corey stood mute under the accusation, and was tortured to death by pressing. The cases attracted attention, and at the instance of Cotton Mather and others, Governor Phipps designated a special court to try persons accused of witchcraft. Malice, greed and craft promptly supplied more victims for the court and the hangman. Doctors discovered what they called witch-marks, such as moles or callosities of any kind, and after the children or others alleged to have been bewitched had performed the usual contortions, the accused were swiftly convicted. Francis Nourse and his wife, Rebecca, had a controversy about the occupation of a farm with a family named Endicott. The Endicott children went into hysterics and charged that Rebecca Nourse had bewitched them. Although as good and pure a woman as there was in the colour, Rebecca was convicted, hanged on Witches' Hill, and her body cast into a pit designed for those who should meet her fate. Mr. Parris, the minister, thought it necessary to preach a sermon fortifying the belief in witchcraft, and when Sarah Cloyse, a sister of Rebecca, got up and went out of the meeting-house, regarding the sermon as an insult to the memory of her murdered sister, she was also denounced and arrested. The Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather, one of the lights of Puritanism, and son of Dr. Increase Mather, president of Harvard University, was most active and violent in the prosecutions. Among the victims was the Rev. Stephen Burroughs, a learned minister of exemplary life, who was accused of possessing a witch's trumpet. Mather witnessed the hanging of Burroughs, and when the latter on the scaffold offered up a touching prayer, Mather cried out to the people that Satan often transformed himself into an angel of light to deceive men's souls. The Rev. Mr. Noyes, standing by at the execution of eight accused persons, exclaimed: "What a sad thing it is to see eight fire-brands of hell hanging there!" A committee was appointed to ferret out witches, and children were readily found to court the notoriety and interest which a share in the work attracted. When the accusers began to utter charges against the wife of Governor Phipps and relatives of the Mathers, the authorities took a different view of the monster which they had evolved out of their superstitious imaginings. Public opinion, which had been fettered by fear and amazement at the hideous proceedings, began to find expression in protest against any further sacrifice. Many of the accusers recanted their testimony, and said that they had given it in order to save their own lives, dreading to be accused of witchcraft themselves. The General Court of Massachusetts appointed a general fast and supplication "that God would pardon all the errors of His servants and people in a late tragedy raised among them by Satan and his instruments." Judge Sewall, who had presided at a number of the trials, stood up in his place in the church and begged the people to pray that the errors which he had committed "might not be visited by the judgment of an avenging God on his country, his family and himself." The Rev. Mr. Parris was compelled to leave the country. Cotton Mather, however, adhered steadfastly to his belief in witches. He said, among other things equally astounding to the common sense even of that day, that the devil allowed the victims of witchcraft to "read Quaker books, the Common Prayer and popish books," but not the Bible. At the instance of Cotton Mather, and that of his father, Increase Mather, the president of Harvard, a circular was sent out signed by Increase Mather and a number of other ministers in the name of Harvard College, inviting reports of "apparitions, possessions, enchantments and all extraordinary things wherein the existence and agency of the invisible world is more sensibly demonstrated," to be used "as some fit assembly of ministers might direct." But few replies to the circular were received. The people of Massachusetts had muzzled the monster, and did not care to turn it loose again. A monument was recently erected to Rebecca Nourse on the hill where she perished, and her descendants have an organization which holds annual meetings in commemoration of their hapless ancestor.
Notwithstanding harsh laws and their bitter enforcement, the habits of the people were probably not much better than to-day in well-ordered communities, and considerable depravity existed, especially in the remoter settlements. Comer's Diary, which has never been published, but which the writer of this work has examined in manuscript, shows a condition of society far from exemplary, and it also shows that persons whose position ought to have been respectable, sometimes took Indians either as wives or in a less honorable relation. There is, perhaps, more Indian blood in New England than is generally supposed, and the earlier inhabitants of that section were probably less exclusive toward the aborigines than is assumed in conventional history. Comer's Diary deals, it is true, with the early part of the eighteenth century, but the conditions it minutely and no doubt faithfully describes, must have existed substantially in the seventeenth.[1] ]
The laws of Rhode Island were founded on the Mosaic system, like those of Massachusetts, but entirely ignored the question of religion. The penalties for immoral conduct were not so merciless as in the Puritan colonies, and the Rhode Island colonial records indicate that the laws, such as they were, were not rigidly enforced. The remnants of the Indian tribes, having first been demoralized by unprincipled whites, became themselves a demoralizing element, and Indian dances were, the records show, a continual source of scandal and of vice, which the authorities sought vainly to suppress. In connection with the principle of entire separation of Church and State, on which Rhode Island was founded, it may be of interest to mention here that I learned, in my examination of Comer's Diary, that an attempt was made to establish a branch of the Anglican Church in Providence, in the colonial period, and that a minister was sent over under authority of the bishop of London. The minister had to depart, and the church was closed on account of some scandal. I wrote to the present bishop of London inquiring if there was any record of the incident in the Episcopal archives, and he answered me to the effect that nothing could be found relating to it.