The law also prohibited that any ministry or Church administration should be entertained or attended by the inhabitants of any plantation in the Colony, distinct and separate from, and in opposition to, that which was openly and publicly observed and dispensed by the approved minister of the place; except it was by the approbation of the Court and neighboring churches. The penalty for every breach of this act was 5l.--Ed. Note.
[39] The following will show that a Connecticut mob of Sober Dissenters is not inferior to a London mob of drunken Conformists, either in point of ingenuity, low humour, or religious mockery. The stamp-master was declared by the mob at Hertford to be dead. The mob at Lebanon undertook to send Ingersoll to his own place. They made their effigies, one to represent Mr. Grenville, another Ingersoll, and a third the devil. The last was dressed with a wig, hat, and black coat, given by parson Solomon Williams, of Lebanon. Mr. Grenville was honoured with a hat, wig, and coat, a present from Mr. Jonathan Trumbull, who was afterwards chosen Governor, (and who afterwards wrote the letter to General Gage, as appears in a preceding note.) Mr. Ingersoll was dressed in red, with a lawyer’s wig, a wooden sword, and his hat under his arm, by the generosity of Joseph Trumbull. Thus equipped, the effigies were put into a cart, with ropes about their necks, and drawn towards the gallows. A dialogue ensued between the criminals. Some friendship seemed to subsist between Mr. Grenville and the devil, while nothing but sneers and frowns passed the devil to Ingersoll; and the fawning reverence of the latter gave his infernal Highness such offence, that he turned up his breech and discharged fire, brimstone, and tar in Ingersoll’s face, setting him all in a blaze; which, however, Mr. Grenville generously extinguished with a squirt. This was many times repeated. As the procession advanced, the mob exclaimed, “Behold the just reward of our agent, who sold himself to Grenville, like Judas, at a price!” In this manner the farce was continued till midnight, at which time they arrived at the gallows; where a person in a long shirt, in derision of the surplice of a Church clergyman, addressed the criminals with republican Atticisms, railleries, &c., concluding thus: “May your deaths be tedious and intolerable, and may your souls sink quick down to hell, the residence of tyrants, traitors, and devils!” The effigies were then turned off, and, after hanging some time, were hoisted upon a huge pile of wood and burnt, that their bodies might share a similar fate with their souls. This pious transaction exalted the character of Mr. Trumbull, and facilitated his election to the office of Governor; and, what was of further advantage to him, his mob judged that the bones of Ingersoll’s effigy merited christian burial according to the rites of the Church of England, though he had been brought up a Sober Dissenter, and resolved, therefore, to bury his bones in Hebron. Accordingly, thither they repaired, and, after having made a coffin, dug a grave in a cross-street, and made every other preparation for the interment, they sent for the episcopal clergyman there to attend the funeral of the bones of Ingersoll the traitor.
The clergyman[40] told the messengers that neither his office nor his person were to be sported with, nor was it his business to bury Sober Dissenters who abuse the Church while living. The mob, enraged at this answer, ordered a party to bring the clergyman by force, or send him to hell after Ingersoll. This alarmed the people of the town, who instantly loaded their muskets in defence of the clergyman. Thus checked in their mad career, the mob contented themselves with a solemn funeral procession, drums beating and horns blowing, and buried the coffin in the cross-street, one of the pantomimes bawling out, “We commit this traitor’s bones to the earth—ashes to dust and dust to ashes—in sure and certain hope that his soul is in hell with all tories and enemies in Zion.” Then, having driven a stake through the coffin, and each cast a stone upon the grave, they broke a few windows, cursed such clergymen as rode in chaises and were above the control of God’s people, and went off with a witless saying, viz. “It is better to live with the Church militant than with the Church triumphant.”
[40] The Episcopal clergyman was the Rev. Samuel Peters.—Ed. Note.
[41] This Mr. Dyer had been in England, had petitioned for, and, through Dr. Franklin’s interest, obtained a new office at the port of New-London, viz. that of Comptroller, but afterwards had thought proper to resign that office, in order to be made a Judge of the Superior Court and one of the Council; and, forsooth, that a stranger only might serve the King of Great Britain in the character of a publican in Connecticut.
APPENDIX.
The preceding sheets bring the “History of Connecticut” to its latest period of amity with Great Britain, agreeable to the plan upon which it was begun. I propose laying before my readers, in an Appendix, a summary account of the proceedings of the people of Connecticut immediately leading to their open hostilities against the Mother Country, not only because some events are not at all, or erroneously, known here, but also because they will form a supplement necessary in several instances to what has been already related. Another reason that induces me to make the proposed addition is, the contradictions that have so frequently appeared regarding the statements made by the author of the “History,” as to acts and laws that were in force in the colony of Connecticut during its early settlement, and which had been handed down to their posterity by the Sober Dissenters, as they called themselves, many of which laws remained in force up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Mr. James Hammond Trumbull, a descendant of Governor Trumbull, so frequently spoken of in this work and notes, in a book lately published by him, entitled “The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and Newhaven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters,” has taken unnecessary pains to show that the Blue Laws represented in the “History” were never published in the colony, and consequently must be factitious. The author of the “History” himself mentions that they never were published; and had Mr. Trumbull referred to the action of the meeting of the planters in Quinnipiack, the 4th of June, 1639,