# The Founding of New England/XI

CHAPTER XI
THE DEFEAT OF THE THEOCRACY
THE same decade and a half, the political events of which we traced in the last chapter, was to witness also religious movements of utmost importance. The firm establishment of the government of Rhode Island, based upon religious liberty, and the preservation of the independence of that colony and of its democratic neighbor, Connecticut, were matters of profound import in the political and intellectual life of America. Not less so was the struggle between the leaders of the theocracy and the growing liberalism of the people of Massachusetts. As usual, the political and religious movements were inextricably intertwined, and the same conditions that brought forth the political disturbance over the petition of Dr. Child and his associates, in 1645, were responsible for the most important step taken in the ecclesiastical organization of the theocracy some months later.
That petition had called attention to undoubted evils and injustices in the political and religious regime in Massachusetts; and however effectually the government might silence the protesting leaders, the underlying causes were so widespread as to necessitate some action in regard to them. Owing to the church-membership test for the franchise, the unenfranchised class was so large, and the disadvantage under which it labored was so palpably unjust, that the demand for reform was growing steadily louder. Not only had there been from the very beginning a considerable element in the population which, under no circumstances, cared to join the New England churches, but there was also a large one which would have been glad to do so, had the process not been made so difficult for them. It was not enough that a person should believe in the doctrines of the Church, that he should desire to live a godly life and be in communion with it, but he was also required to have experienced some special motion of God in his heart, by which he had been convicted of his sin, and become regenerate. Of that conversion, he was further obliged to make a public declaration before the congregation, describing the particular manner in which he had thus felt the workings of the spirit within him. Many blameless Christian men and women did not feel that they could discover any such extraordinary change in their lives as their rulers demanded; and modesty and a natural reticence prevented many more from attempting the trying ordeal of publicly detailing such an intimate spiritual experience. Failing that, however, they were debarred from Christian communion and from all voice in the civil government, and their children were also denied baptism and participation in the life of the Church. As in Massachusetts no churches were allowed except such as partook of the “New England way,” it followed that those who could not join them were politically disfranchised, and that they and their children were cut off from the advantages of Christian fellowship and discipline.
In so far as the resultant political disabilities were concerned, there were two ways in which the situation might have been remedied The first and, according to modern ideas, the natural one would have been to do away with the religious qualification for the franchise. This was, theoretically at least, the method of Plymouth and Connecticut and Rhode Island, and of the Bay Colony in so far as its possessions in Maine were concerned. Nevertheless, it did not commend itself to the Massachusetts leaders, and for that reason, and also to meet the religious features of the case, a second method was favored by many, of making less rigid the requirements for admission to the church. Of the two methods, the latter would, of course, be more acceptable to the clergy, not as a step forward, but as the lesser of two evils. They were, in fact, at that very time planning a more formal organization of all the churches, and the establishment of a uniform practice among them. The creation of such a standard can hardly be considered as consistent with the principles in which Congregationalism had originated; but the Church in Massachusetts had become as completely a state church as the Anglican had ever been in England.
In 1646, soon after the presentation of the Child petition, some of the Elders presented a bill to the General Court, asking that body to call a synod at the end of the summer, to consider these various problems. The bill was promptly passed by the magistrates; but the deputies demurred, denying that the civil authorities had power over the ecclesiastical. It was conceded, however, that the call might go out as a request and not as a command. According to the notice, the synod was to agree “upon one forme of government and discipline,” and to consider whether “more liberty and latitude” might be yielded in the matters of church membership and baptism.
When their labors should be finished, the result was to be submitted to the General Court, to receive “such approbation as is meete.” When the synod met, the churches of Boston and Salem refused to join, partly because they believed that it was intended to bind the liberty of churches by the passage of ecclesiastical laws by the General Court, “whereby men should be forced under penalty to submit to them.” In view of a point to be discussed later in the chapter, Winthrop’s account of the origin of the objections is interesting. The principal men who raised them, he wrote, were some “who came lately from England, where such a vast liberty was allowed, and sought for by all that went under the name of Independents, not only the anabaptists, antinomians, familists, seekers, etc., but even the most godly and orthodox, as Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Burrows, etc., who in the assembly there had stood in opposition to the presbytery, and also the greater part of the house of commons, who by their commissioners had sent order to all English plantations in the West Indies and Summers Islands, that all men should enjoy their liberty of conscience, and had by letters intimated the same to us.” Some weeks were consumed in endeavors to change the opinions of the two churches, and when, after much difficulty, that was finally accomplished, there was little time left for the work of the synod, which adjourned in September, to meet the following June. It was not until midsummer, 1648, however, that, after another adjournment, it finally completed its labors.
During the two years which it had been in session, Cromwell and the Independents in England had removed all fear for Massachusetts of Presbyterian or other interference from that country, and the temporary alarm of the leaders had subsided. The question of a more liberal policy, therefore, fell into the background, and the synod occupied itself with the formulation of a strict polity by which innovation might be resisted. Agreement with the recent declaration of Parliament in matters of doctrine was voted by adopting, with certain reservations, the Westminster Confession of Faith; but the suggested religious toleration was, of course, denied. Quite on the contrary, in fact, the Cambridge Platform, as the order of discipline adopted has always been called, provided that the full power of the state should be used to enforce obedience and conformity to the rule and decisions of the priesthood. “Idolatry, Blasphemy, Heresy, Venting corrupt and pernicious opinions,” the Platform read, “are to be restrayned and punished by civil authority. If any church one or more shall grow schismaticall, rending it self from the communion of other churches, or shall walke incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own, contrary to the rule of the word; in such case, the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive power, as the matter shall require.” What these early American persecutors, drunk with their own conceit, were to think the “matter shall require,” when other men refused to accept their personal interpretation of the mind and ways of Almighty God as infallible, will be only too clearly shown in the course of this chapter. When the Platform was presented for ratification by the General Court, through the towns, it seems to have met with considerable opposition on the part of the deputies. The magistrates, owing to their customary close working agreement with the ministers, approved of it unanimously; but the deputies, representing public opinion rather than the oligarchy, repeated their opposition of several years earlier. When, in 1645, new laws had been proposed for the punishment of heretics, a brief entry in the records tells of the struggle at that time. “The Howse of Deputies,” so it reads, “cannot concur with our honored magistrates in their bill to punish excommunicate persons.” They were defeated, however, and the next year a long act was passed for the purpose. Although the Cambridge Platform had been adopted by the synod in 1648, and had been considered several times by the General Court, the deputies of many of the towns, even three years later, still professed themselves unable to “see light to impose any forms as necessary to be observed by the churches as a bindinge rule.” When it was finally passed by the Court, in October, 1651, fourteen of the deputies still refused to concur, and their names, an honored roll, are inscribed in the margin of the records. The towns they represented were Boston, Salem, Braintree, Watertown, Roxbury, Wenham, Reading, Sudbury, Weymouth, and Hingham, in Massachusetts, and Hampton in New Hampshire.
The Platform represented no mere abstract doctrine. The whole history of the oligarchy, thus far, indicated that the clauses regarding heresy and schism were not intended to remain dead letters. The new relations of the churches to one another, and the strengthened combination of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, mark the high point attained by the theocracy in its organized opposition to liberty of thought. It had been growing steadily narrower and more intolerant, more insistent upon the extirpation of every idea, religious or political, that disturbed its own control over the minds and lives of men. Unfortunately, at the very time when new power for evil was thus being placed in its hands by the action of the synod and the General Court, the more conservative leaders, both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, were lost to their communities by death, and the dangerous weapons were to be wielded by two of the most bigoted and blood-thirsty fanatics whom either Old or New England had produced.
Thomas Hooker died in 1647, as the work of the synod was beginning, and John Winthrop in 1649, as it was ending. There is no comparison in the debt that the political thought of America owes to the two men, whose ideas have already been contrasted on an earlier page. Hooker led the way along which the people of the United States were to follow, while Winthrop was engaged in the attempt to found a state in a politically impossible form. In spite of his inestimable services in the beginnings of the colony, there was no originality in his contribution to thought, and his subservience to the demands of the theocracy had been foreshadowed by his statement in early manhood that he so honored a faithful minister that he “could have kissed his feet.” Of high nobility of character, gentle, forgiving, frequently kindest to those from whom he differed most, there was little in his nature of the born persecutor. Led into acts of intolerant zeal by the ministers whom he so devoutly followed, there is considerable probability in the story related by Hutchinson, that when on his death-bed, being pressed by Dudley to sign a warrant for the banishment of a heretic, he refused, saying that “he had done too much of that work already.” His portrait depicts a face of gentleness rather than of strength. His unquestioned integrity, his modesty, and his self-sacrificing devotion to the interests of the colony as he saw them, amply fulfilled the high opinion which the original undertakers of the enterprise had formed of him, although, as in the case of most of the leaders, the effect upon mind and character of the transplanting to America was not wholly a happy one. “He was of a more catholic spirit than some of his brethren before he left England,” wrote Hutchinson; “but afterward he grew more contracted, and was disposed to lay too great stress upon indifferent matters.”
The same effect had been felt in the case of John Cotton. The most tolerant, as he was one of the ablest, of the Massachusetts divines, we have already seen how he had started upon the true path when, dismayed by the universal ecclesiastical clamor raised by the Antinomian controversy, he drew back, like Winthrop, and ever after submitted to smaller men. Nevertheless, his death, some months after the final adoption of the Cambridge Platform, removed the last of the three men who by inclination and influence might have done something to stay the theocracy from the course into which it was soon to throw itself headlong. In place of Winthrop and Cotton, its leaders became Endicott and Norton. Able, stern, fiercely bigoted, absolutely convinced of their own infallibility in interpreting the word of God, undeterred by doubt, and unrestrained by pity, they were unwittingly to water the seeds of liberty with the blood of their victims.
In the midsummer of the year in which the Platform was finally adopted by the Court, John Clark, one of the ablest citizens of Rhode Island, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, as representatives of the Baptist church of Newport, arrived at Lynn to visit an aged member of that church, who was too infirm to make a journey himself. In 1644, a law had been passed punishing with banishment anyone who should openly or secretly speak against the orthodox Massachusetts doctrine regarding baptism; and the three Baptists were at once arrested. Clark was fined £20,, Holmes £30, and Crandall £5, in default of which they were to be whipped. The spirit of the court that tried them is vividly shown by two incidents as told by the prisoners themselves. Clark, having asked by what law he was punished, the penalty not being that prescribed by the ordinance of 1644, relates that Endicott “stept up to us, and told us we had denyed Infants Baptism, and being somewhat transported broke forth, and told me I had deserved death, and said he would not have such trash brought into this jurisdiction.” Holmes, describing his own trial, wrote that, when receiving sentence, “I exprest myself in these words; I blesse God I am counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus; whereupon John Wilson (their pastor as they call him) strook me before the judgment Seat, and cursed me, saying, the Curse of God, or Jesus goe with thee.”
Crandall, who had figured but little in the proceedings, was released on bail; while, without his knowledge, some unknown well-wishes paid Clark’s fine. Holmes, however, refused to pay his fine or allow others to pay it for him, and insisted upon the sentence being executed in its full barbarity. Thirty strokes, with a three-corded whip, were laid upon his bare back. Two bystanders who, moved by pity, had the temerity to take the prisoner by the hand as he left the whipping-post, were themselves arrested and sentenced to pay forty shillings or be whipped. To one of them, who affirmed to Endicott that he believed Holmes was a godly man and “carried himself as did become a Christian,” the Governor threatened that “we will deal with you as we have dealt with him.” “I am in the hands of God,” the prisoner replied.
The following year, Clark went to England with Williams in regard to the Coddington matter in Rhode Island, and, while there, published his account of the treatment the Baptists had met with in Massachusetts. As so often before, the intolerance of the new country was severely criticized by its friends in the old. “It doth not a little grieve my spirit,” wrote Saltonstall to Cotton and Wilson, “what sadd things are reported dayly of your tyranny and persecution in New England. . . . These rigid wayse have layd you very lowe in the hearts of the saynts. I doe assure I have heard them pray in the publique assemblies that the Lord would give you meeke and humble spirits, not to stryve soe much for uniformity as to keepe the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” He warns them “not to practice those courses in a wilderness, which you went so farre to prevent”; and adds, “I hope you doe not assume to yourselves in fall ibillities of judgment, when the most learned of the Apostles confesseth he knew but in parte.”
In Cotton’s reply, the ministers defended the acts of the Court, and, speaking of the victims’ imprisonment, Cotton even descended so low as to write, “I believe they neither of them fared better at home, and I am sure Holmes had not been so well clad of many years before.”
More interesting, however, is his plain enunciation of the doctrine that they alone knew the will of God and should lay it down for the community, which we noted in an earlier chapter as one of the outstanding characteristics of Puritanism in every age. “There is a vast difference,” he wrote, “between men’s inventions and God’s institutions; we fled from men’s inventions, to which we else should have been compelled; we compel none to men’s inventions.” The inference was, of course, that, whatever the rest of mankind might think, any institution decreed by the Massachusetts ministers was, ipso facto, God’s. Therefore, “if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian duty.” Four fifths of their fellow citizens might refuse to join their churches; the noblest spirits among the Puritan element in England might plead with them; but in vain. The theocracy had now reached such a height of intellectual pride, of intolerable belief in themselves as the sole possessors of the knowledge of God, and as the only legitimate interpreters of his will to the world, that either all freedom of thought in Massachusetts must die, or their power must be destroyed. In that struggle, the ministers and the magistrates were willing to shed unlimited blood. Fortunately, noble men and women were not lacking to offer themselves as victims that the liberty of God might be made manifest.
The two who had dared to take Obadiah Holmes by the hand, as, streaming with blood, he left the stake, were the silent witnesses of a great body of liberal opinion. While the ministers and magistrates were, of course, supported everywhere by very considerable numbers among the narrower and more zealous members of the churches, many causes were at work to reduce their proportion in relation to the community at large. Not only had the body of non-church members always constituted the great majority of the population, but even among the members themselves a new generation was growing up, which had known nothing of the spiritual experiences in England, and the struggle there against the established Church. Such a struggle, as the Massachusetts authorities were soon to find in the case of the Quakers, serves to intensify the zeal of the innovators. But in Massachusetts, the former innovators had become transformed into thoroughly orthodox members of a state church, supported by the arm of the civil power, enjoying all the comfortable, safe, and deadening results of an “establishment.” Their faith being no longer tried by opposition, the inevitable consequence was a decline in interest and in zeal. This was recognized by the ministers, and the rather curious situation resulted, in which we find them adopting an apparently more liberal attitude than the lay members themselves toward the question of admission to membership. If, however, in the ministerial convention of 1657 and the synod of 1662, the clergy were rather the more anxious of the two to effect a compromise on that point, the cause is not far to seek. Their power and influence—and it must always be remembered that they thought they were using both for the work of the Lord—were dependent upon the maintenance of the numbers of the Church, quite as much as upon that of strict conformity and discipline. The theocracy was, in fact, in very unstable equilibrium, and was equally in danger from an increase in toleration or from a decrease in church-membership. It was the preservation of their influence, from high motives as well as from low, which was leading the clergy on the path to the “Half-Way Covenant”; and the fact that they felt the need of lowering the requirements for admission to the church is the strongest sort of evidence as to the extent to which liberal opinion had developed among the mass of laymen.
If, however, the clergy were to make the attempt, on the one hand, to prevent the numbers of their followers from declining, by no longer requiring them to have passed through the experience of conversion, on the other, they were about to engage in the most determined effort yet made to enforce conformity in matters of doctrine.
Of all the sects that had arisen during the religious ferment following the Reformation, none seems to have been more misunderstood or to have encountered greater opposition than the Quakers. In the middle of the seventeenth century, both the beliefs and the practices of the sect were in an inchoate state, and the vagaries of many of its adherents from the lower walks of life seem not only to have called forth unparallelled torrents of abuse from all quarters, but to have made men fear that these inoffensive people were to repeat the excesses of some of the frenzied sects of a century earlier. These fears and prejudices were largely increased by the writings of various ministers, many of whom were closely connected with New England.
Both the ideas and the carriage of the Quakers were such as to be especially repugnant to the leaders of the theocracy in Massachusetts. Their democratic tendency and peculiarities of social usage were extremely offensive to persons who regarded themselves as an aristocracy of the Saints of God, and who looked upon any lack of respect offered to magistrates or ministers as little short of blasphemy. Moreover, religion as professed by the Quakers was at the opposite pole of thought and experience from that professed by the Puritans. The latter looked upon the Bible as the only complete and final revelation of God to man, of which the minister was the official expounder. To them, the covenant between man and God, the preaching of the word, the scrupulous observance of the Sabbath and of the letter of the Judaic laws, the hard-won privilege of receiving the Sacrament, were all of the essence of religion. On the other hand, the Quakers laid special stress upon the divine illumination in the individual heart, and upon a continuing revelation of Himself by God to man. They denied to the Bible the position assigned to it by the Puritans, and were bitter in their denunciations of “a hireling ministry.” To them the sacraments were shadows, while their lives were saturated with the spirit of the New Testament, not the Old. It was in this antithesis that lay the real answer to George Bishop’s question to the Massachusetts magistrates, when he asked: “Why was it that the coming of two women so shook ye, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders?”
Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, the two women in question, arrived at Boston, from Barbadoes, in July, 1656, a few weeks after Ann Hibbens had been hung as a witch. Governor Endicott was away at the time, but the Deputy Governor, Bellingham, took charge of the proceedings which were immediately begun against them. Their baggage was searched, and a hundred volumes, considered heretical, were confiscated and burned, without compensation. Although there was nothing about their case to suggest witchcraft, the authorities had them stripped stark naked and examined for evidences, with unnecessary indignities.
They were imprisoned, deprived of light in their cell, and refused communication with anyone. Finally, after five weeks of this illegal punishment, they were shipped back to Barbadoes, fortunate in having escaped before Endicott’s return.
Within a few days of their leaving, eight more Quakers arrived on a ship from London, and were promptly accorded similar treatment, except that witchcraft was not charged. Endicott’s attitude was shown at once. “Take heed you break not our Ecclesiastical Laws,” he said to them, “for then ye are sure to stretch by a Halter.” At the trial, when they asked for a copy of the laws against them, he refused to allow them to see one—“to the grieving of the People then present,”
wrote our contemporary authority, “who said openly in the Court—How shall they know then when they Transgress?” After some weeks’ confinement, they were shipped back to England, and the Massachusetts authorities addressed a letter to the United Colonies, asking for the passage of a general regulation against allowing “such pests” as Quakers to be admitted to any of the colonies. In October, the Massachusetts General Court passed the first law specifically directed against the sect, which provided that any master of a ship bringing a known Quaker to Massachusetts should be fined £100, and be required to give bonds for taking such out of the colony again, in default of which he was to be imprisoned. The Quaker was to be committed to the “house of correction,” to be severely whipped,
“kept constantly to worke,” and not permitted to speak with anyone. If any resident of the colony defended any Quaker opinion, he was to be fined or, on the third offense, banished; while any person “reviling” a magistrate or minister, which meant criticizing them, was to be fined or whipped. Few bits of legislation can be more complete than this, which thus provided punishment for an offender, denied, anyone the right to speak in his behalf, and made it a crime to criticize the men who had passed the law. One voice, nevertheless, was publicly raised on behalf of liberty. Nicholas Upshall, “a weakly old man,” who, when the two Quakeresses were being starved in prison, had bribed the jailer to give them food, heard the new law being proclaimed in the streets. He protested against it, and for his temerity in daring to criticize the magistrates, he was fined £20, and banished at the beginning of winter. On his way to free Rhode Island, he was offered a home by an Indian who took pity upon him, and who, after hearing of his misfortune, exclaimed, “What a God have the English who deal so with one another about the worship of their God!” a Upshall, however, continued his journey to Gorton’s settlement, where he was welcomed and cared for.
The following year, a band of Quaker missionaries from England landed at Newport, and were kindly received by the Rhode Islanders. This at once aroused the other colonies, whose Commissioners wrote to the Rhode Island government of the “prudent care” that Massachusetts had taken when Quakers had sought her hospitality, and requested that government to banish such Quakers as were already on the Island, and to prohibit any more from coming, so that the “contagion” might not spread. The letter ended with the threat that, if the little colony did not take such action, “wee apprehend that it will be our duty seriously to consider what further provision God may call us to make to prevent the aforesaid mischiefe.”
To this bullying letter, Rhode Island sent an answer as wise as it was dignified. After stating their desire to live in loving correspondence with all the colonies, they wrote: — “As concerning these quakers (so called), which are now among us, we have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, &c., theire mindes and understandings concerning the things and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition. And we, moreover, finde, that in those places where these people aforesaid, in this colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come, and we are informed that they begin to loath this place for that they are not opposed by the civill authority, but with all patience and meekness are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions, nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way; surely we find that they delight to be persecuted by civill powers, and when they are soe, they are like to gain more adherents by the conseyte of their patient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious sayings: And yet we conceive, that theire doctrines tend to very absolute cuttinge downe and overturninge relations and civill government among men, if generally received.”
The General Assembly sent a similar reply, some months later, in which they stated that freedom of conscience was the principal ground of their charter, “which freedom we still prize as the greatest hapiness that men can possess in this world”; and added that Quakers were “suffered to live in England; yea even in the heart of the nation.” Apparently the only answer the United Colonies could make to the worldly wisdom and nobility of their little neighbor, was to threaten to cut off her trade and to deprive her of the necessities of life. Nor has the letter, which is one of the landmarks in the struggle for religious liberty in America, fared better at the hands of New England’s clerical historians. Palfrey, who devotes thirty-five pages to an extenuating account of the Massachusetts persecution, conceals Rhode Island’s stand in a footnote; and Dr. Ellis speaks of that colony’s protest as “a quaint letter,” in which, incredibly, he finds only “naivete and humor.” Meanwhile, the other four colonies proceeded to pass more stringent laws themselves, though those of Plymouth and Connecticut were less severe than those of New Haven, where the penalties rose to branding the letter H on the hands of male Quakers, and boring the tongues of Quakeresses with a red-hot iron. This latter punishment, as well as the cutting off of ears, was likewise added to the Massachusetts laws. In 1658, the Commissioners of the United Colonies “seriously comended”
to the several colonies that they pass legislation declaring that, if any Quaker, once banished, returned, the offender should suffer death. Massachusetts, however, which was clearly behind the suggestion, was the only colony that did so. Connecticut, which was lenient in its treatment, had but little trouble, and Governor Winthrop of that colony told the Massachusetts magistrates that he would go down on his bare knees to beg that they would not execute the death-penalty. Plymouth was more influenced by its powerful neighbor, and one of the magistrates, deposed for his toleration of the sect, wrote of the persecution in Massachusetts, “we expect that we must do the like, we must dance after their Pipe; now Plymouth-Saddle is upon the Bay-Horse.”
In spite of a petition signed by twenty-five names, which was presented to the General Court in Boston, asking for severer laws against the Quakers, and which was probably inspired by the Reverend John Norton, there was a strong sentiment in the colony against such action. The cruel sufferings that the authorities by this time had inflicted upon Mary Dyer, Mary Clark, Christopher Holden, the Southwicks, Richard Dowdney, and many others, and their patience under affliction, were telling heavily in favor of the Quakers and against the clergy. In the case of William Brend, the people became so aroused as temporarily to frighten the authorities in their mad course. He had been put “into Irons, Neck and Heels, lockt so close together, as there was no more room between each, than for the Horse-Lock that fastened them on”; and was kept in that way for sixteen hours, without food, after having been whipped. The next day he was whipped again with a tarred rope, so severely that the rope untwisted; but a new one was procured, and he was given ninety-seven more blows. “His Flesh was beaten Black, and as into a Gelly; and under his Arms the bruised Flesh and Blood hung down, clodded as it were in Baggs.” The next morning, after threatening to give him more, the Puritan jailer went to church. Brend, who had then been some days without food, finally became unconscious. The people, learning the facts, protested loudly, and a tumult was raised. Endicott sent “his Chyrurgion, to see what might be done (such Fear was fallen upon you,” writes our authority, “lest ye should suffer for his Blood) who thought it impossible according unto Men that he should live, but that his Flesh would Rot from off his Bones, ere that bruised Flesh could be brought to digest (this was the judgment of your Governors Chirurgion), and such a cry was made by the People that came in to see him, that ye were constrained, for the satisfaction of them, to set up a Paper at your Meeting-House-Door, and up and down the Streets, That the Jaylor should be dealt withal the next Court; but it was soon taken down again, upon the instigation of John Norton (your High-Priest unto whom, as the Fountain or Principal, most of the Cruelty and Bloodshed herein rehearsed, is to be imputed) and the Jaylor let alone: For, said John Norton (but how Cruelly let the Sober judge)—W. Brend endeavored to beat our Gospel-Ordinances black and blue; and if he was beaten black and blue, it was just upon him; and said he would appear in the Jaylor’s behalf.”
It is not intended to go into all the details of the many other and, happily, somewhat less terrible cases of the persecution; and the above extract from a contemporary has been given because the grim realities of the past are apt to be blurred by our easy modern phrases.
The Reverend John Norton, the Reverend Charles Chauncey, and other divines, as well as the Governor and other leading laymen, continued to press for a law allowing them to execute the death-penalty legally. The struggle, as usual, ranged the people against the theocratical leaders, and the deputies refused to pass the law prepared by the clergy and voted by the magistrates, which not only imposed death upon any Quaker who should return after banishment, but denied the right of trial by jury, and relegated the cases to a court composed of three magistrates, a majority of whom could impose the penalty. The House of Deputies, which contained twenty-six members, finally consented to the passage of the law, somewhat amended, by a majority of one, owing to the absence, on account of illness, of one of those who had opposed the bill. In view of the severe penalties imposed upon all who might speak in defense of Quaker doctrines, the thirteen who stood out to the end deserve all praise.
Immediate steps were taken to influence public opinion in favor of the new law, and Norton was appointed by the Court to write a treatise in support of it, which was published the following year. Meanwhile, the persecution continued unabated. At the same court at which the law was passed, six Quakers were banished on pain of death, and four months later, the children of two of them, Daniel and Provided Southwick, were ordered sold into bondage in Virginia or the West Indies, by the County Treasurer, to pay the accumulated fines imposed upon them for not attending a Puritan church. No ship’s captain, however, sufficiently hardened in the religion of New England could be found to share in the guilt of this transaction. There is no need of going into the details of the other cases, which were soon overshadowed by those of the martyrs who voluntarily suffered the extreme penalty, in order to testify to the truth as they saw it, and to die for liberty of opinion.
There is no doubt that Mary Dyer, William Robinson, and Marmaduke Stevenson had counted the full cost when they returned from banishment to face certain death, in the autumn of 1659. Sentence was pronounced on the eighteenth of October, and the execution took place a few days later. On the petition of her son, Mary Dyer had been reprieved, and was once more banished; but with a fiendish ingenuity of cruelty, she was not to know of it, and was to be led to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to wait while the two men were being hung. As they were led to execution, the three walked hand in hand. “Are you not ashamed to walk between two young men?” asked the Puritan marshal, with characteristic coarseness. “It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world,” answered the pure-hearted woman. “No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshing of the spirit of the Lord which I now enjoy.” After the others had died, her hands and legs were bound, her face covered, and the rope adjusted around her neck. At that moment her reprieve was announced to her. She refused to accept her life, but was taken to Rhode Island by her family. The following spring, however, she returned and told the General Court that she was to bear witness against the unjust law, which this time was allowed to take its course. A few months later, another Quaker, William Leddra, suffered the same penalty. So far, in the Puritan colonies, mainly in Massachusetts, over forty had been whipped, sixty-four imprisoned, over forty banished, one branded, three had had their ears cut off, five had had the right of appeal to England denied them, four had been put to death, while many others had suffered in diverse ways.
There are many contemporary evidences, however, to show that the sympathy of the people went out more and more to the victims. At the time of the execution of Robinson and Stevenson, a heavy guard had been necessary to allow the sentence to be carried out, and the Court had found it needful to prepare a long defense of their action against such as might feel “pitty and comiseration,” and others who might look upon the magistrates as “bloody persecutors.” Apologetic broadsides were printed to the same effect.
While the trial of Leddra was in progress, a banished Quaker, Wenlock Christison, suddenly appeared in court, and after declaring his identity, looked into the stern face of Endicott, and solemnly said to him, “I am come here to warn you that you should shed no more innocent blood, for the blood that you have shed already, cries to the Lord for vengeance to come upon you.” He was immediately arrested, and at his trial protested that the colony had no authority to make laws repugnant to the laws of England, and that there was no law there providing for capital punishment against Quakers. But by this time even the magistrates had begun to hesitate in their course, and several refused to vote for his death. Endicott, in a fury, pounded the table, and ordered another vote, thundering out, “You that will not consent, record it: I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment.” It is said that the result was uncertain, and that the Governor himself precipitately passed the sentence of death. The sentence, however, was never executed. Not only had the people of Massachusetts now risen in revolt against the persecuting tyranny of the ministers and magistrates, but the colony was to be stayed in its course by a stronger power. The English monarchy had been restored a year before, and the relations of Massachusetts to the mother-country were about to undergo a marked change.
Complaints had been made to King Charles of the persecutions in New England, and word of this had been received privately in Massachusetts. Partly from fear of his possible action, and partly in deference to the evident opposition of the people, a new law was passed, which, while still preserving the death-penalty, evidently intended to make it less necessary of enforcement. Under this new act, Christison and twenty-seven others were released from prison, though two were stripped to the waist, and whipped through the town.
On receiving news of Leddra’s death, Edward Burroughs an English Quaker, had secured an audience with the King, and told him that “there was a vein of innocent blood opened in his dominions, which if it were not stopped would overrun all”; to which the monarch answered, “but I will stop that vein.” His secretary was called, and an order at once prepared to be sent to the Massachusetts government. As no royal ship was then sailing, the Quakers hired one and dispatched the “king’s missive,” by Samuel Shattuck, a banished Massachusetts Quaker. In six weeks, the condemned man, now a King’s messenger, confronted Endicott, and delivered the letter, ordering that no further proceedings be taken against Quakers, and that such as were under charges be sent to England. Endicott read it, and with what must have been the most painful emotion of his life, he looked at the hated heretic and said,
“We shall obey his Majesty’s commands.” Orders were issued for the release of all Quakers, and Shattuck, speaking of the colonists, said that “many mouths are now opened, which were before shuts, and some of them now say, Its the welcomest ship that ever came into the land.”
Though no more of the sect were put to death, their persecution was by no means ended. The new law had provided that every Quaker should be apprehended, stripped from the waist up, tied to a cart’s tail, and whipped through every town to the boundary of the colony. This was to be repeated if they returned, and on the fourth offense they were to be branded, and, on the fifth, banished on pain of death. This law was modified by limiting the whippings to three towns only, in 1662, although an answer to the address of Massachusetts to the King had been received some months earlier, withdrawing much of the royal protection formerly offered to the Quakers. The change was evidently due, therefore, to public sentiment in the colony. Of the barbarous treatment accorded the victims under the act, it is unnecessary to speak in detail. To mention one of the worst cases, we may note that three women were stripped to the waist, tied to the cart’s tail, and, in the end of December, forced to tramp through deep snow, receiving ten lashes on their bare backs in eleven successive towns. The end, however, was not far off. In 1665, Endicott died, and the Royal Commissioners also commanded the Massachusetts General Court not to molest Quakers in their secular business.
Although a considerable body of opinion had, undoubtedly, been throughout in favor of the course taken by the ministers and magistrates, all the evidence points to a large and increasing body against it. The facts that the deputies were opposed to it, that the Court, usually somewhat arrogant in the assertion of its authority, had to stoop to public explanations and propaganda, that even the magistrates finally revolted, and that in the last case, the death-penalty could not be enforced even when passed, all indicate clearly enough the refusal of the people to follow their ministers in their frantic efforts to maintain orthodoxy at any cost.
It is needless to say that the seventeenth century cannot be judged by the standards of the nineteenth, but the second half of the earlier one was by no means as intolerant as many would have us believe. Opinion in England and in all of the colonies, although naturally bigoted as yet, on the part of many, was, beyond question, becoming far more liberal. We have already noted the frequent remonstrances addressed to Massachusetts by her friends at home. We have seen the consistent stand of Rhode Island from the start, and noted the tolerant tendencies in Plymouth and Connecticut. In England, Vane was raising his voice in Parliament for religious liberty in its most extreme form. In the same body, Cromwell was asking, “Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? What greater hypocrisy than for those who were opposed by the Bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, as soon as their yoke was removed.” Maryland had possessed religious freedom for all professing Christ, since 1649, and in 1665 the New Jersey Concession provided for complete liberty of conscience, as did the charter of South Carolina four years later.$^1$ In Jamaica, toleration, with full civil liberties to all Christians, including Quakers, was proclaimed in 1662. Public opinion notoriously outruns legislation, yet in addition to the above examples and others, Pennsylvania, in 1682, provided in its laws for equal liberty for all who believed in God; while the Toleration Act, a landmark in the struggle in England, was passed seven years later.
The progress made in the generation since Bradford and his little band had tried to flee secretly from England had been great. A large section of the people, however, both at home and in the colonies, was undoubtedly as bigoted and intolerant as ever; and, unfortunately, the leaders in charge of the destinies of the largest of the New England colonies at the critical period we have been describing were numbered among them. They had made a desperate stand, and hesitated at nothing,—not even inflicting torture and taking human life,—in order to maintain their position; and, happily for America, they had been defeated, though not until they had set an indelible stain on the pages of American history.
The struggle we have been describing has not been related at length because of its antiquarian or dramatic interest. In toleration of opinions lies the one hope for the advancement of the human race. If the earthly end of man “is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole,” free scope must be provided for differing opinion, and varieties in the experiment of living. The contest in Massachusetts happened to be fought out on religious lines, because it was an age of religious interests. It happened to be fought against the ministers and magistrates because, in that time and place, they represented the forces opposed to freedom and to change. But there are other elements in man’s nature than religion; and tyranny and opposition to all innovation may be as securely enthroned in the public opinion of a democracy as in the leaders of a theocracy. So far as experience has shown, they are certain to be, in a socialistic or communistic state; and the battle for toleration of opinion, for the liberty of the individual personality to expand along its own unique lines, for the chance of any further development in the possibilities for the advancement of the race, may have to be fought out again upon a grander scale than any the world has yet seen.
That the course which the Massachusetts authorities took was wholly unnecessary was proved by the events in the other colonies. What happened was largely the consequence of their own acts. Rhode Island had shown the just, and, at the same time, the wise course to pursue. As she pointed out, wherever Quakers were not persecuted, they gave no trouble. One of the glories of the present nation is its complete toleration, in so far, at least, as religion is concerned; and its hard-won liberty is in no small measure due to the people of its smallest state, and to the noble men and women who suffered and gave their lives that the power of the Massachusetts theocracy might be broken, and the human mind unshackled. The debt which, in other ways, America owes to the largest of the Puritan colonies is too great to require that aught but the truth be told. It is not necessary to exalt erring and fallible men to the rank of saints in order to show our gratitude to them or our loyalty to our country. But the leaders and citizens of Rhode Island, the martyred Quakers, and the men and women of Massachusetts and the other colonies, who so lived and wrought and died that the glory of an heritage of intellectual freedom might be ours, are the Americans whom, in the struggle we have been reciting, it should be our duty to honor.

## Notes

* ↑ Lechford, Plain Dealing, pp. 66 f.
* ↑ J. Winthrop, History, vol. ii, p. 323.
* ↑ Cf. Walker, Creeds, pp. 166 f.
* ↑ J. Winthrop, History, vol. ii, pp. 323 f.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iii, pp. 71 f.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 72.
* ↑ J. Winthrop, History, vol. ii, p. 329.
* ↑ “Cambridge Platform,” in Walker, Creeds, p. 195.
* ↑ Sections 8 and 9 of chap. xvii, of “Cambridge Platform”; Ibid., p. 237.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iii, p. 16.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 99.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 236.
* ↑ Ibid., p, 240.
* ↑ Walker, Creeds, p. 188 n.
* ↑ R. C. Winthrop, J. Winthrop, vol. i, p. 61.
* ↑ Hutchinson, History, vol. i, p. 142.
* ↑ Hutchinson, History, vol. i, p. 142.
* ↑ Newport Church Papers, cited by Backus, Baptists, vol. i, p. 178.
* ↑ Backus, Baptists, vol. i, p. 198 n.
* ↑ John Clark, “Ill Newes from New England” (London, 1652), in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Series IV, vol. ii, p. 33.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 47.
* ↑ The Court that passed the sentences was composed of the magistrates only. Palfrey’s far-fetched theory, that the whole affair was engineered by Clark in order to acquire a grievance to be used in England later, has no foundation whatever in any contemporary conjecture, and in any case would not alter in the slightest the facts so far as Massachusetts is concerned. It is of interest only as showing to what lengths that colony’s clerical historians have gone in their efforts to defend in New England everything which they condemn in old England, and to treat the Massachusetts settlers as saints instead of very human Englishmen of the seventeenth century. Palfrey, History, vol. ii, pp. 350, 354.
* ↑ Cf. Chap. II, supra.
* ↑ Hutchinson, Papers, vol. ii, pp. 127 ff.; Backus, Baptists, vol. i, pp. 198 f.
* ↑ Hutchinson, Papers, vol. ii, pp. 131 f.
* ↑ Walker, Creeds, pp. 244 ff.
* ↑ For example, Francis Higginson, Thomas Welde, Samuel Eaton, Christopher Marshall. Jones, Quakers, p. 29.
* ↑ George Bishop, New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1703), p. 2.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, p. 269.
* ↑ Bishop, New England Judged, pp. 4 f., 12; Swarthmore Collection, vol. i, p. 66, cited in Jones, Quakers, p. 28 n. One of the curious elements in the psychology of the Puritans was their morbid interest in the most indecent sexual matters. One may find the details of a similar physical examination set forth by Winthrop, and the pages of his journal, as those of Bradford, the records of colonies and towns, the letters of clergymen, etc., all contain minute accounts of matters which today would find their place only in a limited class of medical textbooks.
* ↑ Richard Smith also arrived from Long Island, being deported thither again.
* ↑ Bishop, New England Judged, p. 10.
* ↑ Acts United Colonies, vol. ii, p. 156.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, pp. 277 f.
* ↑ Ibid., pp. 279 f.
* ↑ Bishop, New England Judged, p. 40.
* ↑ Jones, Quakers, pp. 45 ff.
* ↑ Acts United Colonies, vol. ii, pp. 180 f.
* ↑ R. I. Records, vol. x, pp. 376 f.
* ↑ Ibid., I, pp. 378 ff.
* ↑ Ibid., pp. 396 ff.
* ↑ Palfrey, History, vol. ii, p. 472 n.; Ellis, Puritan Age, pp. xvii, 457.
* ↑ Plymouth Col. Records, vol. XI, pp. 100, 101, 125, and passim; Conn. Col. Records, vol. i, pp. 283 f[.], 303, 308; New Haven Records, vol. ii, pp. 217, 238 ff.; Bishop, New England Judged, pp. 160 ff., 203 ff., 226 ff.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, pp. 308 f.
* ↑ Acts United Colonies, vol. ii, p. 212. John Winthrop, of Connecticut, signed with the notation: “looking art the last as a query and not as an Act; I subscribe.”
* ↑ Letter from Cudworth, in New England a degenerate Plant (London, 1659), p. 16.
* ↑ Massachusetts Archives, cited by R. P. Hallowell, The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts (Boston, 1887), pp. 153 ff.
* ↑ Bishop, New England judged, pp. 47-62.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 67.
* ↑ Bishop, New England Judged, p. 101.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 102. The law is in Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, pp. 345 ff.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, p. 348; also, The Heart of New England rent at the Blasphemies of the present Generation; Cambridge, 1659. The liberty of conscience which the more liberal part of the community was striving for he denounced as liberty “to answer the dictates of the errors of Conscience in walking contrary to Rule. It is a liberty to blaspheme, a liberty to seduce others from the true God. A liberty to tell lies in the name of the Lord” (p. 51). We may note here that several New England historians, as one of the defenses of Massachusetts, lay stress upon the vituperative language employed by the Quakers. As a matter of fact, none found in the contemporary records at all equals that of the Puritans, the violence of whose language is open for any to read in their legislative enactments and state documents. Many remarks addressed by officers of the Puritan courts, from Endicott down, to their helpless prisoners, could be expressed in modern books only by a series of dashes.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, pp. 349, 367, 366; Bishop, New England Judged, p. 107.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, pp. 383 f.
* ↑ Bishop, New England Judged, p. 134.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. i, p. 419.
* ↑ Besse, Abstract of the Sufferings, etc., cited by Jones, Quakers, pp. 91 ff.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. I, pp. 384 ff; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, Series III, vol. ii, p. 203.
* ↑ W. Sewel, History of the Quakers (New York, 1844), vol. i, p. 338.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 344; Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, p. 20.
* ↑ Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680, p. 312; Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, p. 24.
* ↑ Sewel, Quakers, vol. i, p. 345; Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, p. 24.
* ↑ The account is From Sewel, Quakers, vol. i, pp. 345 ff. The letter has often been reprinted. Cf. Jones, Quakers, p. 98; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-68, pp. 55 f.
* ↑ The laws were temporarily suspended. Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, p. 34. A popular ballad, supposed to have been written about 1676, is interesting, not only for its confirmation of other contemporary sources as to where the blame rested, but as showing the popular feeling.
* ↑ Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, pp. 2 ff.
* ↑ Ibid., pp. 59, 164 ff.; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-1668, p. 94[.]
* ↑ The modern reader may find cases and references in Jones, Quakers, pp. 101 ff.
* ↑ Macdonald, Select Charters (New York, 1906), pp. 142, 165.
* ↑ Cf., e.g., the petition of the inhabitants of Dover in 1662 against the increase of Quakers. Massachusetts Records, vol. iiv, pt. ii, p. 69.
* ↑ Burton’s Diary, cited by Hosmer, Young Sir Harry Vane, p. 501.
* ↑ Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, n.d.), p. 94.
* ↑ Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-1668, p. 111.
* ↑ H. H. Russell Smith, Theory of Religious Liberty in the Reigns of Charles II and James II (Cambridge University press, 1911), pp. 53, 1 ff.
* ↑ Humboldt; cited by J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Oxford), p. 71.