Old Cape Cod

by Mary Rogers Bangs

At Barnstable, one Liza Towerhill, so called because her husband came from that region of London, was reputed to be a witch, able at will to transform herself into a cat, and having constant commerce with the devil even though to the casual eye she were industrious, hardworking, and pious.

The colony does not have so clean a slate in respect of the persecution of Quakers. As early as 1656 the trouble began at Massachusetts Bay; but Plymouth lagged in the enactment of prohibitive laws against heretics, the execution of which, in the end, were more often than not evaded. Yet Plymouth had drifted far from the teachings of old John Robinson, who had charged his flock to keep an open mind “ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you.” The First Comers, who had heard and followed his words, were succeeded by men less well disciplined in mind and spirit, who were the more inclined to the strait doctrine of Massachusetts Bay. Then Rhode Island, under Roger Williams, became the citadel of tolerance; but Quakers, exiled from the north, continued to stream into the colony, to the no small discomfiture of its officers. The visitors, maddened by their wrongs, were not too courteous with those of high estate, and Winslow, particularly, was irritated by their demeanor, “sometimes starting up and smiting the table with a stick, then with his hand, then stamping with his foot, saying he could not bear it.” “Let them have the strapado!” cried he. Norton, arraigned by the General Court, had, in his turn, arraigned the Governor, whose “countenance full of majesty” in this instance, at least, availed him nothing. “Thomas, thou liest,” cried the Quaker. “Prince, thou art a malicious man.”

But, for the most part, the Quakers did no more than describe, in Biblical terms as was the custom of the day, the soul-state of their persecutors. They had been bred Puritans, and spoke the Puritan language. If Mary Prince called Endicott, as he passed her Boston prison, “vile oppressor and tyrant,” she spoke the truth mildly. “There is but one god, and you do not worship that god which we worship,” fulminated Juggins, the magistrate, in the trial of Lydia Wright. “I believe thou speakest truth,” returned the accused calmly. “For if you worshipped that God which we worship, you would not persecute His people.” “Take her away!” cried the court. “Away with him, away with him,” had been the only recourse left an earlier tribunal.

It was natural that the seemly magistrates of Plymouth objected to these new citizens who, when summoned “for not taking the oath of fidelity to the government,” announced that they “held it unlawful to take the oath”; and they flatly refused to pay tithes for the support of a clergy they despised. Nor were they without sympathizers in that contention. “The law enacted about ministers’ maintenance was a wicked and devilish law,” declared Doctor Fuller, of Barnstable. “The devil sat at the stern when it was enacted.” And for his vehemence, though a true believer, he was fined fifty shillings by the General Court, which at the same term had the even mind to elect him, for his ability, one of the war council, and later to appoint him surgeon-general of the colony’s troops.

Quakers held parsons in light esteem, yet not one of the Cape clergy could have conceived such a plan as Cotton Mather, in 1682, spread before Higginson of Salem. “There be now at sea a skipper,” wrote he, “which has aboard a hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants called Quakers, with William Penn, who is ye scamp at ye head of them.” Mather went on to recount that secret orders had gone out to waylay the ship “as near ye coast of Codde as may be and make captives of ye Penn and his ungodly crew, so that ye Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on ye soil of this new country with ye heathen worship of these people.” Then the astounding proposition: “Much spoil can be made by selling ye whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rumme and sugar. We shall not only do ye Lord great service by punishing the Wicked, but shall make gayne for his ministers and people.” The precious scheme somehow miscarried, the threatened engagement off “Codde” did not take place, and Philadelphia was founded.

When the Quakers Holden and Copeland, driven from Boston and whipped at Plymouth, came to Sandwich, they found soil ready tilled for their planting. The church there, said to have been “the most bigoted in the county,” had been wrecked by the bitter feud between liberals and “hard shells,” and its minister, a graduate of Emmanuel, Cambridge, “a man of great piety and meekness,” had retired to the more congenial atmosphere of Oyster Bay, Long Island. But the churchmen of Sandwich, as was the custom of their race, thirsted for religion, and in reaction against the old doctrines, the liberals there went over in a body to the simple tenets of the Quakers. In a year no less than eighteen families professed the new faith; but in the meantime authority had not slept.

The marshal of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, was one George Barlow, a renegade Anglican priest; nor had his colonial record been a savory one. At Boston, in 1637, he had been “censured to be whipped” for idleness; at Saco, on complaint that he was “a disturber to the peace,” he was forbidden “any more publickly to preach or prophesy”; and later when he turned lawyer at Plymouth, it was affirmed in open court “that he is such an one that he is a shame and reproach to all his masters; and that he, the said Barlow, stands convicted and recorded of a lye att Newbury.” When Copeland and Holden arrived at Sandwich, Barlow had been prompt to hale them before the selectmen, to be duly whipped. But the village fathers, “entertaining no desire to sanction measures so severe towards those who differed from them in religion, declined to act in the case.” Nothing daunted, Barlow presented his prisoners at Barnstable before Thomas Hinckley, then assistant to Governor Prince and later to succeed him in office.

Hinckley was the best-read lawyer in the colony, just and honorable some held, others that he was apt at running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He had his enemies, Otis admits, and adds: “Barren trees are not pelted.” All are agreed that his second wife who was his helpmeet for more than forty years, was a beautiful and accomplished woman, and possessed, moreover, of “a character excellently suited to correct the occasional impetuosity of his own.” Whether or not that impetuosity had been galled by the Quakers, Hinckley permitted Holden and Copeland to be whipped, and in his presence. The scene, described by Bishop with simple eloquence, is typical of many a Quaker punishment by the magistrates in the presence of a more compassionate people. “They being tied to an old post, had thirty-three cruel stripes laid upon them with a new tormenting whip, with three cords, and knots at the end, made by the marshal, and brought with him. At the sight of which cruel and bloody execution, one of the spectators (for there were many who witnessed against it) cried out in the grief and anguish of her spirit, saying: ‘How long, Lord, shall it be ere thou avenge the blood of the elect?’ And afterwards bewailing herself, and lamenting her loss, said: ‘Did I forsake father and mother, and all my dear relations, to come to New England for this? Did I ever think New England would come to this? Who would have thought it?’ And this Thomas Hinckley saw done, to whom the marshal repaired for that purpose.”

Barlow was a ready tool for the hand of the reactionaries. Sent by the Court to Manomet to apprehend any refugees who might come there by sea—it was a law of the colonies that any captain bringing heretics should deport them at his own expense—Barlow included the more lucrative affair of raiding well-to-do farms. At East Sandwich a man was mulcted eighty-six pounds, and in default of payment, eighteen head of cattle, a mare, and two colts: in effect, all his property save his house, his land, one cow and a little corn, “left out of pity for his family.” But on a second visit Barlow, being warm with liquor, regretted his leniency, and took the corn, the cow, and the only remaining copper kettle. “Now, Priscilla, how will thee cook for thyself and thy family?” jeered he. “George,” she retorted, “that God who hears the young ravens when they cry will provide for them. I trust in that God and verily believe that the time will come when thy necessities will be greater than mine.” The event proved her right, and in his old age, brought low with drink and evil ways, Barlow often craved charity of Priscilla Allen, and was never refused.

As in the old days, the “blood of martyrs was the seed of the church,” and persecutions, petty or great, did but serve to increase the number of heretics, who as time went on not always practised the pacifism they preached. Two women were sentenced to be publicly whipped for “disturbance of public worship, and for abusing the minister”; there were fines for “tumultuous carriage at a meeting of Quakers.” There were fines, also, for sheltering Quakers; Nicholas Davis, of Barnstable, and others, were banished on pain of death. A Cape man, chancing to be at Plymouth when Nicholas Upsall, the aged Boston Puritan who had been outlawed for protesting against the persecutions, was driven thence, took compassion on him and brought him to Sandwich only to be ordered to “take him out of the government.” In no long time, however, reaction set in; the fair-minded of the community were roused to protest at the senseless persecution; and men were beginning to say that such intolerance was not in accord with the spirit of their faith. Mr. Walley, the parson, and Cudworth, driven from Scituate for his liberalism, and Isaac, the third son of old John Robinson of Leyden, spoke up for the oppressed. Edmund Freeman and others, of Sandwich, were fined for refusing aid to the marshal in his work. And later, when Quakers resisted the payment of tithes, it even became the custom to make up the required sum by levying an additional tax upon churchmen. Nor were the Quakers, for the most part, strangers, though refugees were harbored: for converts were many among the first settlers of the region, and we are told that after the laws against them were relaxed they were “the most peaceful, industrious, and moral of all the religious sects.” And in 1661, when King Charles sent his injunction against the persecutions by the hand of Samuel Shattuck, the Quaker who had been banished from Massachusetts Bay on pain of death, Plymouth welcomed the occasion to restore those whom she had disfranchised, and returned to the milder government that better suited her temper.