The Rev. Mr. Saltonstall began his ministry in New London in 1688, at the age of twenty-two. This was about twelve years after the prosecutions against the Rogers family, for non-conformity, had commenced. In 1691, he was ordained, and continued to preach until 1708, when he was chosen governor of the State and abandoned the ministry altogether. Bred in the narrow school of ecclesiasticism, and of a proud and dominant spirit, the day-star of religious liberty seems not even to have dawned upon his mind.
He was virulent in his enmity to John Rogers from the beginning. The Furies have been said to relent; his rancor showed no abatement.
In 1694, he presented charges of blasphemy against John Rogers, without the knowledge of the latter, and while he was confined in New London jail. We copy the following extract, from a statement made by John Rogers, Jr., writing in defence of his father, which shows how closely he was watched by his adversaries, that they might find grounds of accusation against him.
Peter Pratt, of whom we shall say more hereafter, an author mainly quoted by historians on the subject we are discussing, in a pamphlet traducing the character of John Rogers, and written after his death, had said of his treatment in Hartford: “His whippings there were for most audacious contempt of authority; his sitting on the gallows was for blasphemous words.”
To which John Rogers, Jr., thus replies:—
First, he asserts that his whippings there—viz., at Hartford—“were for most audacious contempt of Authority”; but doth not inform the reader what the contempt was; making himself the judge, as well as the witness, whereas it was only his business to have proved what the contempt was, and to have left the judgment to the reader.
And forasmuch as his assertion is altogether unintelligible, so may it reasonably be expected that my answer must be by supposition, and is as follows:—
“I suppose he intends that barbarous cruelty which was acted on John Rogers, while he was a prisoner at Hartford, in the time of his long imprisonment above mentioned, which was so contrary to the laws of God and kingdom of England, that I never could find that they made a record of that matter, according to Christ’s words, John iii, 20, ‘For every one that doeth evil hateth the light,’ etc.
“But John Rogers has given a large relation about it, as may be seen in his book entitled, ‘A Midnight Cry.’ From pages 12-15, where he asserts that he was taken out of Prison, he knew not for what, and tied to the Carriage of a great gun, where he had seventy-six stripes on his naked body, with a whip much larger than the lines of a drum, with knots at the end as big as a walnut, and in that maimed condition was returned to prison again; and his bed, which he had hired at a dear rate, taken from him, and not so much as straw allowed him to lie on, it being on the eighteenth day of the eighth month, called October, and very cold weather.”
And although myself, with a multitude of spectators, who were present at Hartford and saw this cruel act, can testify to the truth of the account which he gives of it, yet I cannot inform the reader on what account it was that he suffered it, or what he was charged with; for, as I said before, I never could find a record of that matter.