USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > St. Botolph's town; an account of old Boston in colonial days > Part 7
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One can scarcely believe the records as one follows the story of the way President Dun- ster of Harvard College was treated for the crime of believing in adult baptism. Because he would not baptize infants he was deprived of his office (in October, 1654), and when he asked leave to stay for a few months in the house he had built, on the ground that
" 1st. The time of the year is unseasonable, being now very near the shortest day and the depth of winter.
" 2nd. The place into which I go is unknown
ST.
THE WELLS - ADAMS HOUSE, ON SALEM STREET, WHERE THE BAPTISTS HELD SECRET MEETINGS
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to me and my family, and the ways and means of subsistence. .
" 3d. The place from which I go hath fuel and all provisions for man and beast laid in for the winter. . .. The house I have builded upon very damageful conditions to myself, out of love for the college, taking country pay in lieu of bills of exchange on England, or the house would not have been built. ...
" 4th. The persons, all beside myself, are women and children, on whom little help, now their minds lie under the actual stroke of affliction and grief. My wife is sick and my youngest child extremely so and hath been for months, so that we dare not carry him out of doors, yet much worse now than before ... . "
Still slight heed was paid to him. For in answer to these pathetic demands Dunster was reprieved only until March and then, with what was due him still unpaid, he was driven forth, a broken man, to die in poverty and neglect. Clearly Massachusetts was not a comfortable place for the Baptists. You see the eminent John Cotton had declared that the rejection of infant baptism would overthrow the church; that this was a capital crime and that there- fore, those opposing this tenet were "foul murtherers! " The offence was plainly enough
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admitted to be against the clergy rather than against God. When John Wilson - of whom in his venerable old age Hawthorne has given us a pleasing portrait in " The Scarlet Let- ter " - was in his last sickness he was asked to declare what he thought to be the worst sins of the country. His reply was that people sinned very deeply in his estimation when they rebelled against the power of the clergy.
Upon the Quakers, who absolutely refused to conform, and who promulgated the doctrine that the Deity communicated directly with men, were naturally visited the worst of all the re- ligious persecutions. The first Quakers who came to Boston were women, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, the former being a person whose previous experience enabled her to compare unfavourably the manners of New England Christians with those of Turkish Mahometans! For, some time before setting out for Boston, Mary Fisher had made a romantic pilgrimage to Constantinople for the purpose of warning the Turks to " flee from the wrath to come." This was at a time when the Grand Vizier was encamped with his army near Adrianople, to whom this astonishing person having jour- neyed " 600 miles without any abuse or in- jury " had herself announced as "an Eng-
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lishwoman bearing a message from the Great God to the Great Turk." She was promptly given an audience and treated with great re- spect, an escort being even offered to her when the time came for her to depart.
As for her treatment in Boston, let us read Sewel: " It was in the month called July, of this present year (1656) when Mary Fisher and Ann Austin arrived in the road before Boston, before ever a law was made there against the Quakers; and yet they were very ill-treated; for before they came ashore the deputy governor, Richard Bellingham (the governor himself being out of town), sent of- ficers aboard, who searched their trunks and chests and took away the books they found there, which were about one hundred and car- ried them ashore, after having commanded the women to be kept prisoners aboard; and the said books were, by an order of the council, burnt in the market-place by the hangman. . .. And then they were shut up close prisoners and the command given that none should come to them without leave; a fine of five pounds being laid upon any that should otherwise come at or speak with them, tho' but at the window. Their pens, ink and paper were taken from them and they net suffered to have any candle-
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light in the night season; nay, what is more, they were stript naked under pretence to know whether they were witches, tho' in searching, no token was found upon them but of inno- cence. And in this search they were so bar- barously misused that modesty forbids to men- tion it. And that none might have communi- cation with them a board was nailed up before the window of the jail.
" And seeing they were not provided with victuals, Nicholas Upshal, one who had lived long in Boston and was a member of the church there, was so concerned about it (liberty being denied to send them provision) that he pur- chas'd it of the jailor at the rate of five shil- lings a week lest they should have starved. And after having been about five weeks pris- oners, William Chichester, master of a vessel, was bound in one hundred pound bond to carry them back, and not suffer any to speak with them, after they were out on board; and the jailor kept their beds and their Bible, for his fees."
The lack of laws touching the Quakers was now at once supplied. Those who brought in members of this sect were fined and those who entertained them deprived of one or both ears. In 1656 an act was passed by which it cost
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five shillings to attend a Quaker meeting and five pounds to speak at one. In October of the same year the penalty of death was decreed against all Quakers who should return to the colony after they had been banished. When Nicholas Upshall, the kindly innkeeper 1 who had befriended Mary Fisher and her comrade, protested against such legislation he was fined and finally banished. Then, to provide a fillip to zeal, constables who failed vigorously to break up Quaker meetings were themselves fined and imprisoned, a share of the fine im- posed being given to the informer. The object of this last-named legislation was to sustain the atrocious custom of "flogging through three towns," a privilege established by the Vagabond Act, so called, of May, 1661, in which it was provided that any foreign Quaker or any native, upon a second conviction, might be ordered to receive an unlimited number of stripes, the whip for such service being a two- handled implement, armed with lashes made of twisted and knotted cord or catgut. The last Quaker known to have been whipped in Boston was Margaret Brewster, whose offence Samuel Sewall has chronicled in the following paragraph: "July 8, 1677, New Meeting
'See " Among Old New England Inns.",
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House Mane: In sermon time there came in a female Quaker, in a canvas frock, her hair disshevelled and loose like a Periwigg, her face as black as ink, led by two other Quakers and two others following. It occasioned the great- est and most amazing uproar that I ever saw. Isaiah i. 12, 14." Whittier has put the scene into verse for us and made us poignantly to feel its horror :
" Save the mournful sackcloth about her wound, Unclothed as the primal mother, With limbs that trembled and eyes that blazed With a fire she dared not smother.
" And the minister paused in his sermon's midst And the people held their breath, For these were the words the maiden said Through lips as pale as death :
"Repent ! repent ! ere the Lord shall speak In thunder and breaking seals ! Let all souls worship him in the way His light within reveals.
" She shook the dust from her naked feet And her sackcloth closer drew, And into the porch of the awe-hushed church She passed like a ghost from view."
The meeting-house which provided the back- ground for this very dramatic scene was the predecessor on the same site of the present Old
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South Church.1 Thither Margaret Brewster had travelled a long distance for the express purpose of protesting against further persecu- tions of her sect. At her trial, she said some brave words that effectually stirred - after an interval - the consciences of her persecutors. John Leverett was then chief magistrate and to him she appealed thus: " Governour, I de- sire thee to hear me a little for I have some- thing to say in behalf of my friends in this place: ... Oh governour I cannot but press thee again and again, to put an end to these cruel laws that you have made to fetch my friends from their peaceable meetings, and keep them three days in the house of correc- tion, and then whip them for worshipping the true and living God: Governour, let me en- treat thee to put an end to these laws, for the desire of my soul is that you may act for God, and then would you prosper, but if you act against the Lord and his blessed truth, you will assuredly come to nothing, the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. .. . "
" Margaret Brewster," came the stern re- ply, " you are to have your clothes stript off to the middle, and to be tied to a cart's tail at the South Meeting House, and to be drawn
& See " Romances of Old New England Churches."
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through the town, and to receive twenty stripes upon your naked body."
But though Margaret Brewster suffered last she did not suffer most. Mary Dyer paid the extreme penalty in 1660 because she insisted on coming back to Boston after she had been re- prieved from death and banished. In no case better than here may we see illustrated the lengths to which religious enthusiasm will carry the person possessed by it. For with William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson she had been condemned to hang on the Com- mon, but " after she was upon the ladder with her arms and legs tied and the rope about her neck she was spared at the earnest solicitation of her son and sent out of the colony." But, because she thought she must needs die for the triumph of her cause she came back a year later to be executed.
Josiah Southwick, eldest son of Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, was another who " appeared manfully at Boston in the face of his persecutors " after he had been shipped to England. As punishment, he was " sentenced to be whipt at a cart's tail, ten stripes in Bos- ton, the same in Roxbury and the same in Ded- ham." The peculiar atrocity of flogging from town to town lay in the fact that the victim's
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wounds became cold beween the times of pun- ishment, and in winter often froze, the result- ing torture being intolerably agonizing.
The case of the Southwicks is particularly interesting as an extreme example of the far- reaching ferocity of persecution as pursued by Endicott. Whittier in his poem, " Cassan- dra Southwick," has given us the colour of this event but, for poetic purposes, has made the woman young. In point of fact, however, Law- rence and Cassandra Southwick were an aged couple, members of the Salem church. Be- sides the son Josiah, already referred to, they had a younger boy and girl named Daniel and Provided. The father and mother were first arrested in 1657 for harbouring two Quakers, and although her husband was soon released Cassandra was imprisoned for seven weeks and fined forty shillings because there was found on her person a Quaker tract. Later, the three elder Southwicks were again arrested and sent to Boston to serve as an example. Here, in the February of 1657 they were whipped without form of trial, imprisoned eleven days and their cattle seized and sold to pay a fine of £4 13 s. for six weeks' absence from worship on the Lord's day. The letter which they sent from their prison in Boston
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to Endicott and the others at Salem is worthy of being reproduced in full because it breathes the very spirit of that peace for which the Quakers ideally stood.
" This to the Magistrates at Court in Salem.
" Friends,
" Whereas it was your pleasure to commit us, whose names are underwritten, to the house of correction in Boston, altho' the Lord, the righteous Judge of heaven and earth, is our witness, that we had done nothing worthy of stripes or of bonds; and we being committed by your court to be dealt withal as the law provides for foreign Quakers, as ye please to term us; and having some of us suffered your law and pleasures, now that which we do ex- pect is, that whereas we have suffered your law, so now to be set free by the same law, as your manner is with strangers, and not to put us in upon the account of one law, and execute another law upon us, of which according to your own manner, we were never convicted as the law expresses. If you had sent us upon the account of your new law, we should have expected the jaylor's order to have been on that account, which that it was not, appears by the warrant which we have, and the punish-
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wa
ment which we bare, as four of us were whipp'd, among whom was one who had for- merly been whipp'd so now also according to your former law.
" Friends, let it not be a small thing in your eyes, the exposing as much as in you lies, our families to ruine. It's not unknown to you the season and the time of year for those who live of husbandry, and what their cattle and families may be exposed unto; and also such as live on trade; we know if the spirit of Christ did dwell and rule in you these things would take impression on your spirits. What our lives and conversation have been in that place is well known; and what we now suffer for is much of false reports, and ungrounded jealousies of heresie and sedition. These things lie upon us to lay before you. And, for our parts, we have true peace and rest in the Lord in all our sufferings, and are made will- ing in the power and strength of God, freely to offer up our lives in this cause of God for which we suffer: Yea and we do find (through grace) the enlargements of God in our impris- oned state, to whom alone we commit ourselves and families, for the disposing of us according to his infinite wisdom and pleasure, in whose love is our rest and life.
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" From the House of Bondage in Boston wherein we are made captives by the wills of men, although made free by the Son, John 8, 36. In which we quietly rest, this 16th of the 5th month, 1658.
" LAWRENCE
" CASSANDRA SOUTHWICK,
" JOSIAH
" SAMUEL SHATTOCK,
" JOSHUA BUFFUM."
When Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick were rearrested after banishment for not hav- ing gone away promptly, the old people pite- ously pleaded " that they had no otherwhere to go." But they were none the less com- manded to get out quickly under pain of death. They went to Shelter Island, where they died within a few days of each other as a result of flogging and starvation. And, inconceivable as it seems, the sale as slaves of the younger chil- dren, Daniel and Provided, was actually au- thorized by law to satisfy a debt accumulated from fines for their non-attendance at church! Thus were free-born English subjects dealt with for cherishing a faith subversive of a theocracy.
In all honesty, however, it should be said
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that not all the Quakers, by any means, were as mild and inoffensive as the Southwicks. Even the gentle-spirited Roger Williams was at one time so sorely tried in patience by them that he allowed himself to write: "They are insufferably proud and contemptuous. I have, therefore, publicly declared myself that a due and moderate restraint and punishment of these incivilities, though pretending conscience, is so far from persecution, properly so called, that it is a duty and command of God unto all mankind, first in Families, and thence unto all mankind Societies."
What did they do? Everything which they thought might tend to batter down the intol- erant spirit of Puritanism. A favourite method of protest was for Quaker women to break bottles over the head of a preacher " as a sign of his emptiness." John Norton was more than once thus affronted while engaged in the solemn delivery of the Thursday lecture in Boston. This could scarcely have been pleasant, of course, either to the preacher or his people. But a little tact, above all a sense of humour, would have smoothed the sharp- ness of the controversy. Only, these qualities were precisely the ones which the Puritans and the Quakers both conspicuously lacked.
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Against the Puritan persistency, therefore, there was ranged the exceeding contumacy of the Quakers. And if the war had been left to fight itself out, the Quakers, because they had a great principle on their side, would probably have won the day, revolting and bloody as must have been the battles. Happily, however, three or four influences cooperated to put an end to this unseemly conflict.
One of the sufferers from persecution hav- ing gone to England and gained access to Charles II, brought back from that monarch a peremptory command that the death penalty against the Quakers should be no more in- flicted and that those who were under judg- ment or in prison should be sent to England for trial. Sir Richard Saltonstall, too, - who had returned to England some time before, and was watching with great interest, though at a distance, the course of events in and about Bos- ton, - perceived that the intolerance of Wilson and Cotton would work great harm to the col- ony, and to these two teachers of the Boston First Church he had addressed a manly letter of remonstrance. Most important of all for the Quakers, John Norton, who of all the clergy had exercised the most baleful influence in the direction of intolerance, died in 1663, suddenly
SIR RICHARD SALTONSTALL
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and of apoplexy, and the friends of the Qua- kers, after the fashion of the day, pronounced his sudden taking off a punishment sent by the Lord.
Already John Norton had been nearly fright- ened to death in England by the Quakers. The narrow-minded but well-meaning priest had been sent with Simon Bradstreet to present an address to the just-crowned Charles and find out what his attitude towards the colonies was to be. Norton had accepted this mission with reluctance, for he knew perfectly well that, in the eye of the English law, the executions he had pushed against the Quakers were homicide. But, after long vacillation, " the Lord so en- couraged and strengthened his heart " that he ventured to sail. From the king and his prime minister he and his companion soon found they had nothing to fear, but they were none the less uncomfortable in London, the reason whereof may be gleaned from this anecdote related by Sewel :
" Now the deputies of New England came to London, and endeavoured to clear them- selves as much as possible, but especially priest Norton, who bowed no less reverently before the archbishop, than before the king. They would fain have altogether excused
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themselves; and priest Norton thought it suf- ficient to say that he did not assist in the bloody trial nor had advised to it.
" But John Copeland, whose ear was cut off at Boston, charged the contrary upon him : and G. Fox the elder, got occasion to speak with them in the presence of some of his friends and asked Simon Bradstreet, one of the New England magistrates, 'whether he had not a hand in putting to death those they nicknamed Quakers '? He not being able to deny this confessed he had. Then G. Fox asked him and his associates that were present, ' whether they would acknowledge themselves to be subjects to the law of England? and if they did by what law they had put his friends to death? ' They answered 'They were sub- ject to the laws of England and they had put his friends to death by the same law as the Jesuits were put to death in England.' Here- upon G. Fox asked, 'whether they did believe that those, his friends whom they had put to death, were Jesuits or jesuistically affected? ' They said ' Nay.' 'Then ' replied G. Fox, 'ye have murdered them; for since ye put them to death by the law that Jesuits are put to death here in England, it plainly appears you
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have put them to death arbitrarily, without any law.' "
Fox might have turned the tables, it is clear, upon the magistrate and the minister, but he had no desire to do that. Though many royal- ists urged him to prosecute relentlessly these New England persecutors of his followers, he said he preferred to leave them " to the Lord to whom vengeance belonged." So Bradstreet and John Norton came back to their homes in safety though they passed a very bad quar- ter of a year in London.
The election in 1673 of Leverett as governor sounded, however, the death-knell to persecu- tion. For though he had been trained under Cotton's preaching, he was personally opposed to violent methods of suppressing dissenting sects, and, during his administration, the Bap- tists, the Quakers and all the rest worshipped their God undisturbed by any legal interfer- ence. Long and bitter had been the struggle, but now, at last, there was assured to those in Massachusetts a boon for which men have ever been content to yield up their life in dun- geons, on the scaffold and at the stake, -that very noble and precious thing we call " free- dom to worship God."
VIII
BOSTON AS JOHN DUNTON SAW IT
WHAT the Journal of Madame Knight is to those who are studying tavern and transpor- tation conditions in the New England of two centuries ago,1 the Letters of John Dunton are to us when we are concerned with Boston in the latter part of the seventeenth century. That time was peculiarly barren of description at the hands of visitors, upon whom the city made an impression rather favourable as a whole. Sewall's Diary is of inestimable value, of course, but he was a part of all that he de- scribed and so could not bring an unbiased mind to bear upon his subject. And many of the visitors who wrote about us took a hostile tone and so presented material by no means trustworthy.
Sometimes, to be sure, there was good rea- son for the harshness of the picture drawn. When Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, for
1 See " Among Old New England Inns."
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instance, gained the impressions which have since been published by the Long Island His- torical Society, they were strangers, unable to speak English, and " as Jesuits who had come here for no good " were of course regarded with suspicion. Some of the things which Dunton saw through rather rose-coloured glasses, they seem to have found not at all prepossessing. But their understatements of the country's attractions are generally less to be credited than his slight overstatement. What they wrote is interesting, though, and some few passages from their pens may well enough be quoted before we proceed to enjoy Dunton's racy discourse.
Our Jesuit friends shared in a fast day at one of the Boston churches and they were not in the least edified. " In the first place a min- ister made a prayer in the pulpit of full two hours in length; after which an old minister delivered a sermon an hour long, and after that a prayer was made and some verses sung out of the psalm. In the afternoon three or four hours were consumed with nothing except prayers, three ministers relieving each other alternately: when one was tired another went up into the pulpit. The inhabitants are all Independent in matter of religion, if it can be
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called religion; many of them perhaps more for the purposes of enjoying the benefit of its privileges than for any regard to truth and godliness. ... All their religion consists in observing Sunday by not working or going into the taverns on that day; but the houses are worse than the taverns. . . There is a penalty for cursing and swearing such as they please to impose, the witnesses thereof being at liberty to insist upon it. Nevertheless, you discover little difference between this and other places. Drinking and fighting occur there not less than elsewhere."
One of the most curious items is their pic- ture of Harvard College. Apparently the in- stitution was not then very flourishing (June, 1680), for they found only ten students and no professor! On entering the College build- ing they discovered " eight or ten young fel- lows sitting about, smoking tobacco, with the smoke of which the room was so full that you could hardly see; and the whole house smelt so strong of it that when I was going upstairs, I said, this is certainly a tavern. ... They could hardly speak a word of Latin so that my comrade could not converse with them. They took us to the library where there was nothing particular. We looked over it a little."
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Dunton's experience at Harvard we shall find to be quite a different one though his visit there was only six years later than that of the missionaries. A very red-blooded gentleman was this London bookseller and journalist, who, after Monmouth's insurrection, came to New England to sell a consignment of books and so retrieve his depressed fortunes. Dunton had been intended for the ministry, but developing some tendencies of the gay Lothario stripe he became, instead, apprenticed to a bookseller and, succeeding in this line of work, soon set up a shop for himself. On August 3, 1682, he married the daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, a distinguished non-conformist minister. One sister of this lady became the mother of John Wesley and another the wife of Defoe. She herself must have been a remarkable person for she held the affection of her flighty hus- band the while she enabled him to keep his credit good and to be of financial aid to several dependent relatives.
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