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The Great Republic by the Master Historians
The Persecution of the Quakers
by Bancroft, Hubert H.
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[The history of Massachusetts during the latter half of the seventeenth century
presents several occurrences of particular interest, such as the Quaker
persecution, King Philip's Indian war, and the witchcraft delusion. The first of
these now calls for attention. We may premise with a brief statement of
preceding events. One of these was an effort in England to prevent Puritan
emigration, which is said to have had the effect to retain John Hampden and
Oliver Cromwell in that country. If so, the king in this committed an error
which in the end proved fatal to himself. In 1638, John Harvard, a minister of
Charlestown, left something over three thousand dollars in support of a school
previously founded by the colony. This was the origin of Harvard College. In
1643 the four colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New
Hampshire formed a confederacy, under the title of THE UNITED COLONIES OF NEW
ENGLAND. Rhode Island was, at a later date, refused admission into the
confederacy, which continued in existence for over forty years. Each colony was
to contribute men and money to the common defence, while two commissioners from
each colony formed an annual assembly for the settlement of all questions
relating to the confederacy.
The religious dissensions which had formerly agitated the colony were renewed by
the emigration of persons of other sectarian views, who were little disposed to
submit to the intolerance of the Puritan churches and tribunals. In 1651 a party
of Anabaptists reached Massachusetts. The doctrines they advocated raised a
storm of opposition in the colony; they were arrested, tried, fined, and one of
them severely flogged, and a law was passed banishing from the colony any one
who should oppose the dogma of infant baptism. The treatment received by the
Quakers was of sufficient severity and importance to demand special
consideration, and we therefore select a description of it from James Grahame's
"History of the United States."]
The treatment which the Quakers experienced in Massachusetts was much more
severe [than that of the Anabaptists], but certainly much more justly provoked.
It is difficult for us in the calm and rational deportment of the Quakers of the
present age to recognize the successors of those wild enthusiasts who first
appeared in the north of England about the year 1644 and received from the
derision of the world the title which they afterwards adopted as their sectarian
denomination.... When the doctrines of Quakerism were first promulgated, the
effects which they produced on many of their votaries far exceeded the influence
to which modern history restricts them, or which the experience of a rational
and calculating age finds it easy to conceive. In England, at that time, the
minds of men were in a state of feverish agitation and excitement, inflamed with
the rage of innovation, strongly imbued with religious sentiment, and yet
strongly averse to restraint. The bands that so long repressed liberty of speech
being suddenly broken, many crude thoughts were eagerly broached, and many
fantastic notions that had been vegetating in the unwholesome shade of locked
bosoms were abruptly brought to light: and all these were presented to the souls
of men roused and whetted by civil war, kindled by great alarms or by vast and
indeterminate designs, and latterly so accustomed to partake or contemplate the
most surprising changes, that with them the distinction between speculation and
certainty was considerably effaced..
It was the wildest and most enthusiastic visionaries of the age whom Quakerism
counted among its earliest votaries, and to whom it afforded a sanction and
stimulus to the boldest excursions of unregulated thought, and a principle that
was adduced to consecrate the rankest absurdity of conduct.... The unfavorable
impression which these actions created long survived the extinction of the
frenzy and folly that produced them.
While, in pursuance of their determination to proselytize the whole world, some
of the Quakers travelled to Rome, in order to illuminate the Pope, and others to
Constantinople, for the purpose of converting the Grand Turk, a party of them
embarked for America and established themselves in Rhode Island, where persons
of every religious (Protestant) denomination were permitted to settle in peace,
and no one gave heed to the sentiments or practices of his neighbors. From hence
they soon made their way into the Plymouth territory, where they succeeded in
persuading some of its inhabitants to embrace the doctrine that a sensible
experience of inward light and spiritual impression was the meaning and end of
Christianity and the essential characteristic of its votaries, and to oppose all
regulated order, forms, and discipline, whether civil or ecclesiastical, as a
vain and Judaizing substitution of the kingdom of the flesh for the kingdom of
the spirit.
On their first appearance in Massachusetts (July, 1656), where two male and six
female Quakers arrived from Rhode Island and Barbadoes, they found that the
reproach entailed on their sect by the insane extravagance of some of its
members in England had preceded their arrival, and that they were regarded with
the utmost terror and dislike by the great bulk of the people. They were
instantly arrested by the magistrates, and diligently examined for what were
considered bodily marks of witchcraft. No such indications having been found,
they were sent back to the places whence they came, by the same vessels that had
brought them, and prohibited with threats of severe punishment from ever again
returning to the colony. A law was passed at the same time, subjecting every
shipmaster importing Quakers or Quaker writings to a heavy fine; adjudging all
Quakers who should intrude into the colony to stripes and labor in the house of
correction, and all defenders of their tenets to fine, imprisonment, or exile..
The penal enactments resorted to by the other settlements [than Rhode Island]
served only to inflame the impatience of the Quaker zealots to carry their
ministry into places that seemed to them to stand so greatly in need of it; and
the persons who had been disappointed in their first attempt returned almost
immediately to Massachusetts, and, dispersing themselves through the colony,
began to proclaim their mystical notions, and succeeded in communicating them to
some of the inhabitants of Salem. They were soon joined by Mary Clarke, the wife
of a tailor in London, who announced that she had forsaken her husband and six
children in order to convey a message from heaven, which she was commissioned to
deliver to New England. Instead of joining with the provincial missionaries in
attempts to reclaim the neighboring savages from their barbarous superstition
and profligate immoralities, or themselves prosecuting separate missions with a
like intent, the apostles of Quakerism raised their voices in vilification of
everything that was most highly approved and revered in the doctrine and
practice of the provincial churches. Seized, imprisoned, and flogged, they were
again dismissed with severer threats from the colony, and again they returned by
the first vessels they could procure. The government and a great majority of the
colonists were incensed at their stubborn pertinacity, and shocked at the
impression which they had already produced on some minds, and which threatened
to corrupt and subvert a system of piety whose establishment, fruition, and
perpetuation supplied their fondest recollections, their noblest enjoyment, and
most energetic desire. New punishments were introduced into the legislative
enactments against the intrusion of Quakers and the profession of Quakerism
(1657) and in particular the abscission of an ear was added to the former
ineffectual severities. Three male Quaker preachers endured the rigor of this
cruel law.
But all the exertions of the provincial authorities proved unavailing, and
seemed rather to stimulate the zeal of the obnoxious sectaries to brave the
danger and court the glory of persecution (1658). Swarms of Quakers descended
upon the colony; and, violent and impetuous in provoking persecution, calm,
resolute, and inflexible in sustaining it, they opposed their power of enduring
cruelty to their adversaries' power of inflicting it, and not only multiplied
their converts, but excited a considerable degree of favor and pity in the minds
of men who, detesting the Quaker tenets, yet derived from their own experience a
peculiar sympathy with the virtues of heroic patience, constancy, and contempt
of danger.. It was by no slight provocations that the Quakers attracted these
and additional severities upon themselves.. In public assemblies and in crowded
streets, it was the practice of some of the Quakers to denounce the most
tremendous manifestations of divine wrath on the people, unless they forsook
their carnal system. One of them, named Faubord, conceiving that he experienced
a celestial encouragement to rival the faith and imitate the sacrifice of
Abraham, was proceeding with his own hands to shed the blood of his son, when
his neighbors, alarmed by the cries of the lad, broke into the house and
prevented the consummation of this blasphemous atrocity. Others interrupted
divine service in the churches by loudly protesting that these were not the
sacrifices that God would accept; and one of them illustrated his assurance by
breaking two bottles in the face of the congregation, exclaiming, "Thus will the
Lord break you in pieces!" They declared that the Scriptures were replete with
allegory, that the inward light was the only infallible guide to religious
truth, and that all were blind beasts and liars who denied it.
The female preachers far exceeded their male associates in folly, frenzy, and
indecency. One of them presented herself to a congregation with her face
begrimed with coal-dust, announcing it as a pictorial illustration of the black
pox, which Heaven had commissioned her to predict as an approaching judgment on
all carnal worshippers. Some of them in rueful attire perambulated the streets,
proclaiming the speedy arrival of an angel with a drawn sword to plead with the
people; and some attempted feats that may seem to verify the legend of Godiva of
Coventry. One woman, in particular, entered stark naked into a church in the
middle of divine service, and desired the people to take heed to her as a sign
of the times, and an emblem of the unclothed state of their own souls; and her
associates highly extolled her submission to the inward light, that had revealed
to her the duty of illustrating the spiritual nakedness of her neighbors by the
indecent exhibition of her own person. Another Quakeress was arrested as she was
making a similar display in the streets of Salem. The horror justly inspired by
these insane enormities was inflamed into the most vehement indignation by the
deliberate manner in which they were defended, and the disgusting profanity with
which Scripture was linked in impure association with notions and behavior at
once ridiculous and contemptible. Among other singularities, the Quakers
exemplified and inculcated the for-bearance of even the slightest demonstration
of respect to courts and magistrates; they declared that governors, judges,
lawyers, and constables were trees that cumbered the ground, and presently must
be cut down, in order that the true light might have leave to shine and space to
rule alone; and they freely indulged every sally of distempered fancy which they
could connect, however absurdly, with the language of the Bible..
It has been asserted by some of the modern apologists of the Quakers that these
frantic excesses, which excited so much attention and produced such tragical
consequences, were committed, not by genuine Quakers, buy by the Ranters, or
wild separatists from the Quaker body. Of these Ranters, indeed, a very large
proportion certainly betook themselves to America.... It is certain, however,
that the persons whose conduct we have particularized assumed the name of
Quakers, and traced all their absurdities to the peculiar Quaker principle of
searching their own bosoms for sensible admonitions of the Holy Spirit,
independent of the scriptural revelation of divine will. And many scandalous
outrages were committed by persons whose profession of Quaker principles was
recognized by the Quaker body, and whose sufferings are related, and their
frenzy applauded, by the pens of Quaker writers.
Exasperated by the repetition of these enormities, and the extent to which the
contagion of their radical principle was spreading in the colony, the
magistrates of Massachusetts, in the close of this year (1658), introduced into
the Assembly a law denouncing the punishment of death upon all Quakers returning
from banishment. This legislative proposition was opposed by a considerable
party of the colonists; and various individuals, who would have hazarded their
own lives to extirpate the heresy of the Quakers, solemnly protested against the
cruelty and iniquity of shedding their blood. It was at first rejected by the
Assembly, but finally adopted by the narrow majority of a single voice. In the
course of the two following years (1659, 1660) this barbarous law was, carried
into execution on three separate occasions,--when four Quakers, three men and a
woman, were put to death at Boston. It does not appear that any of these
unfortunate persons were guilty of the outrages which the conduct of their
brethren in general had associated with the profession of Quakerism. Oppressed
by the prejudice created by the frantic conduct of others, they were adjudged to
die for returning from banishment and continuing to preach the Quaker doctrines.
In vain the court entreated them to accept a pardon on condition of abandoning
foreever the colony from which they had been repeatedly banished. They answered
by reciting the heavenly call to continue there, which on various occasions,
they affirmed, had sounded in their ears, in the fields and in their dwellings,
distinctly syllabling their names and whispering their prophetic office and the
scene of its exercise. When they were conducted to the scaf-fold, their demeanor
expressed unquenchable zeal and courage, and their dying declarations breathed
in general a warm and affecting piety.
These executions excited much clamor against the government; many persons were
offended by the exhibition of severities against which the establishment of the
colony itself seemed intended to bear a perpetual testimony; and many were
touched with an indignant compassion for the sufferings of the Quakers, that
effaced all recollection of the indignant disgust which the principles of these
sectaries had previously inspired. The people began to flock in crowds to the
prisons and load the unfortunate Quakers with demonstrations of kindness and
pity.
[This feeling finally became so strong that the magistrates dared no longer
oppose it. After the condemnation of Wenlock Christison, who had defended
himself with marked ability, the magistrates felt it necessary to change the
sentences of the condemned Quakers to flogging and banishment. As the demeanor
of the Quakers grew more quiet and orderly, the toleration of them increased,
and the flogging of Quakers was soon after prohibited by Charles II.]
The persecution thus happily closed was not equally severe in all the New
England States: the Quakers suffered most in Massachusetts and Plymouth, and
comparatively little in Connecticut and New Haven. It was only in Massachusetts
that the inhuman law inflicting capital punishment upon them was ever carried
into effect. At a subsequent period, the laws relating to vagabond Quakers were
so far revived that Quakers disturbing religious assemblies, or violating public
decorum, were subjected to corporal chastisement. But little occasion ever again
occurred of executing these severities, the wild excursions of the Quaker spirit
having generally ceased, and the Quakers gradually subsiding into a decent and
orderly submission to all the laws, except such as related to the militia and
the support of the clergy,--in their scruples as to which the provincial
legislature, with reciprocal moderation, consented to indulge them.
James Grahame
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