USA > Massachusetts > The Quaker invasion of Massachusetts > Part 5
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" We can rejoice that we are counted worthy and called hereunto to bear our testimony against a cruel and hard-hearted people who are slighting the day of your visitation and foolishly requiting the Lord for his goodness and shamefully intreating
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his hidden ones whom he has sent amongst you to call you from the evil of your ways. .
. The Lord our God is arising as a mighty and terrible one to plead the cause of his people and to clear the cause of the innocent: but surely he will in no wise acquit the guilty who have shed the blood of the innocent and ye shall assuredly feel his judgment. . . . Woe, woe unto you for you have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water, and are greedily swallow- ing the polluted waters that come through the stinking 1 channel of your howling mas- ter's unclean spirits ; whom Christ cries woe against and who cannot cease from sin, having hearts exercised with covetous practices : woe unto them (saith the Serip- tures) for they have run greedily after the error of Balaam who loved the wages of unrighteousness. . .
"Surely the overflowing scourge will pass over you and sweep away your refuge of lies and your covenant with hell shall be disannulled. . . . Oh that you had owned the day of your visitation before it had been
1 This old English word, now almost obsolete except in vulgar circles, was familiar to polite ears and in frequent use in the seventeenth century. See quotation from Milton, p. 12; and from Rev. John Higginson, p. 95.
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too late and had hearkened to the voice of his servants whom he hath sent unto you again and again in love and tenderness to yourselves. . . . And then these wicked laws had never been made nor prosecuted. . Your glorying will be turned into shame and confusion of face and your beauty will be as a fading flower which suddenly withereth away. ... We have written to clear our conscience, and if you should account us your enemies for speak- ing the truth, and heat the furnace of our affliction hotter, yet know we shall not fall down and worship your wills ; . . . all the sufferings that we have endured (from you) for Christ, have not at all marred his visage to us, but we still see more beauty in him ; well knowing that as they did unto him so they will do unto us, and now they are come to pass, we remember that he said these things. MARY TRASK, MARGARET SMITH.
"From your house of correction where we have been unjustly restrained from our children and habitations, one of us above ten months and the other about eight ; and where we are yet continued by your oppressors that know no shame. Boston, 21st of ye 10mth, 1660."
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When Wenloek Christison was on trial for his life, he said to the court, " Do not think to weary out the living God by tak- ing away the lives of his servants ! What do you gain by it? For the last man that you put to death, here are five come in his room : and if you have power to take my life from me, God can raise up the same principle of life in ten of his servants and send them among you, in my room, that you may have torment upon torment, which is your portion ; for there is no peace to the wieked, saith my God."
The righteous indignation of this heroic soul is sometimes referred to as evidence of a malicious spirit. Does it not rather show the spirit of a martyr who, in the hour of peril, was faithful to the memory of his mur- dered friends and dared to confront their executioners with uncompromising fidelity to the cause for which they died ?
John Burstow was one of the five Friends referred to by Christison, who had come into the presence of the court to support him in the hour of trial. But little is known of him beyond this fact, and that while in gaol, in 1661, he wrote a letter to his persecutors in which he expresses his
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belief that their hearts were hardened be- yond redemption, and that the righteous judgments of the Lord would be poured forth upon them. His letter is unmistaka- bly that of a Puritan who, having been con- verted to Quakerism, nevertheless continued to draw his inspiration mainly from the old Hebrew prophets. A few sentences will give the spirit of the letter, which, however denunciatory it may be, is neither blasphe- mons nor stupid. "Your assemblies are an abomination to the Lord, your hands are defiled with blood . . . ye that have an ear to hear, hearken and come forth from among them that ye may be as fire-brands plucked out of the fire, for as certainly as the plagues were poured forth upon hard-hearted Pha- raoh, shall the plagues and judgments of the Lord be poured forth upon the inhabitants of this town of Boston."
Josiah Southwick was a representative Quaker. A full recital of his sufferings would melt a heart of stone, and yet he addressed a letter, from the gaol, to the General Court, of which the following is an extract. It fitly indicates the spirit of the entire letter : " Some have said we are the persecutors, but we know we are the perse-
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cuted : yet we can freely say, the Lord lay not your sin to your charge, for I believe many of you know not what you do."
During her imprisonment, , Mary Dyer addressed a letter to the "General Court at Boston," in which she said, " And have you no other weapons to fight with against spir- itnal wickedness as you call it? Search with the light of Christ in you and it will show you of whom you take counsel. . . . It is not my own life I seek, but the life of the seed which I know the Lord hath blessed. And I know this ; that if you con- firm your law, the Lord will overthrow both your law and you, by his righteous judg- ments and plagues poured justly upon you. In love and in the spirit of meekness, I again beseech you, for I have no enmity to the persons of any : but you shall know that God will not be mocked."
Viewed from a literary, moral, or religious standpoint, Mary Dyer's letters (and this is equally true of the letters and other writ- ings of very many early Quakers) compare favorably with the best efforts of the lead- ing Puritans. Daniel Gould, a compara- tively illiterate Quaker, wrote a letter dated "rod Iland the 3 month 1660," and ad-
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dressed " To the rulers & people of the town & jurisdiction of bostene." He appealed to them as follows : " I am grieved to see your cruelty and your hard-heartedness against a people that cannot flatter you nor will- fully do you any wrong, but if any should do you any wrong or trespass against any man, let a righteous law take hold of such ; but what need any law be made against the innocent, those that do you no wrong. . . Concerning religion let every one be fully persuaded in his own mind and wor- ship according as God shall persuade his own heart, and if any worship not God as they ought to do and yet liveth quietly and peaceably with their neighbors and country- men and doeth them no wrong, is it not safer for you to let them alone to receive their reward from him who said, I will ren- der vengeance to mine enemies and reward them that hate me. . . . Let God alone be Lord of the conscience, and not man, and let us have the same liberty and freedom amongst you, as other Englishmen have to come and visit our friends and kindred and do that which is honest and lawful to be done in buying or selling ; and if any have a mind to reason or speak concerning the
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way and worship of God, that they may not be put in prison or punished for it, and so let people have liberty to try all things and hold fast that which is good."1 Had the rulers heeded the advice of this uneducated but liberal and clear-headed Quaker, instead of the bigoted counsel of the cultivated and accomplished John Norton, they might have established a civil and religious order in the colony which would have forever marked them as just and enlightened legislators.
The second proposition to be considered is, that whereas Dr. Ellis's arraignment of Friends gives the impression that extrava- gant and offensive behavior was the rule with them, the truth is that their extrava- gances were comparatively infrequent, and, aside from their use of emphatic scriptural language, were exceptional.
The third statement is, that the persecu- tion of Friends was not only not the result, but was the direct cause of such improprie- ties as may be proved upon them. These two propositions may be considered jointly.
As fair specimens of the invective in- dulged in by the Quakers, Dr. Ellis quotes
1 For this and other Quaker letters, see Appendix, pp. 202-222.
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some harsh language from the journal of Humphrey Norton, which he found in the British Museum. It is not in any. of our libraries, but other Quaker works, written during the same period, confirm the belief that Friends, smarting under a sense of wrong and personal injury, did not hesi- tate to call men and things by their right names. And yet they were quick to forgive, and they bore no malice. Their denuncia- tion of persecution and superstitious church ordinances was scriptnral almost without exception. It is impossible for any one to cite a single instance of indecent railing by a Quaker, such as we have seen was in- dulged in with comparative impunity by the Puritan Edmund Batter, a government official and church-member. It may not only be admitted, but all lovers of fair play must find satisfaction in the fact, that Friends resorted to scriptural weapons in the unequal conflict. It is questionable, however, whether the practice was so habit- ual with them as is represented. It is more probable that their invective was the special utterance extorted by special or specific deeds of Puritan violence. The Puritan court records seem to confirm this view, for
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the reports of arrests and trials are remark- ably free from charges of rudeness of either speech or behavior, and it is noteworthy that in the scriptural argument against Quakerism written by John Norton and published by order of the General Court, October 18, 1659, it is alleged that "the practice of the Quakers . .. is to belch out railing and cursing speeches," but the accusation is qualified by the words, " some of them at least." 1 It is a mistake to sup- pose that those Friends who indulged in what, to polite ears of this age, sounds ex- travagant and ill-mannered, were in any way peculiar, or that they spoke in an un- known tongue ; for they merely conformed to the manners and customs characteristic of the age in which they lived, and espe- cially characteristic of the Puritans. This has already been demonstrated as to Eng- land, in the preceding pages, by quotations from Puritan authors who called clergy- men of the Established Church " Baal- ites and Balaamites," and the " service book " an " abomination," and by citations of the acts and language of other men and writers, including Milton. In New Eng-
1 See Appendix, p. 147
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land the same customs were prevalent. The Puritans were forward to abuse men with their tongue, and were perfectly at home in the vindictive vernacular. We have already observed how impossible it was for them to enact a law aimed at Friends, without ushering it in with a vitu- perative epithet. In these laws and other documents we are made familiar with snch terms as cursed sect of hereticks, blasphe- mouth opinions, devilish opinions, pestilent errors and practices, diabolical doctrine, per- nicious sect, horrid tenets, instrument of satan, rogues and vagabonds, incorrigible rogues, etc. Charles Chauncey, President of Harvard College, in urging the enforce- ment of capital punishment, spoke of six Quaker prisoners as " six wolves in a trap," to which, in a later day, Elizabeth Hooten retorted by denouncing the college as " a cage of unclean birds."
In Hutchinson's History it is related that at the ordination of Mr. Higginson, in 1660, John Smith of Salem was arrested for mak- ing a disturbance by crying out, "What you are going about to set up, our God is pull- ing down ; " while Bishop, withont, however, designating the time or occasion, quotes
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Higginson as stigmatizing the Quaker's In- ward Light as "a stinking vapor from hell." Were not the Puritans quite equal to the Friends in extravagance of language and the use of harsh and vindictive epithets ?
It is commonly understood that the Qua- kers constantly interrupted the religious meetings and the famous Thursday lecture of the Puritans, but this is an error started by some malicious or careless commentator and greedily adopted by others. In rare instances, such as the one Hutchinson re- lates, they may have done so; but both Pu- ritan and Quaker records prove that the Friends, as a rule, waited until service had ended, before delivering their testimony, and the same witnesses prove that instead of being impelled by an " aimless spirit of annoyance " to address church congrega- tions, they were inspired by an enlightened distrust of religious ordinances and Chris- tian ministration that fostered superstition, dogmatism, and persecution. When they attempted to hold their own meetings, they were violently assaulted, their houses were invaded, and they were haled before the magistrates. A very large number of the arrests, of which there is any report, were
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made because Friends refused to attend church and bravely maintained their right to hold meetings of their own. Edmund Batter, the two Archers, Benjamin Felton, Henry Skerry - all church-members -and Thomas Roots, are named by Bishop as the " bloody huntsmen " who made themselves especially prominent in ferreting out Qua- ker meetings and dragging the " cursed heretics " to judgment. The Quakers were persecuted and goaded into going to the sanctuary of these inquisitors, and, when meeting or lecture was over, protesting against such outrages and the wickedness of both Christian ministers and the religion that sanctioned them. A careful search shows that in two instances the Friends enforced their righteous protests by the unique method of breaking bottles. Two women, Sarah Gibbons and Dorothy Waugh, went through this dramatic performance in "2d Month, 1658," in the presence of John Nor- ton, "as a sign of his emptiness." Both of them had been, previously, the victims of persecution. In 1663, Thomas Newhouse, another sufferer, bore his testimony in the same manner, crying out, "So they should be dashed in pieces." Newhouse subse-
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quently fell from grace, and was disowned as an apostate by more sober Friends, to whom he was a frequent source of trouble.1 When Wenlock Christison was on trial for his life, in 1661, Catherine Chattam at- tended court, appropriately clothed in sack- cloth and ashes. It is reported, also, that Elizabeth Hooten,2 who came here with an express permit from the King to purchase property and to become a resident, but was refused permission to do so by the author- ities, was arrested as a "vagabond " and barbarously whipped for crying aloud, " Re- pent," in the streets of Cambridge. Old records and authorities contain these and a few other illustrations of what are known as the extravagances of the Quakers ; but instead of bristling all over with them as Puritan apologists would have us believe, it is impossible to find any considerable num- ber, and the few that are to be found are readily traced to the persecution. Some of the more familiar instances are counted as men in buckram by the excited imagina-
1 William Edmundson's Journal, p. 69.
Believed to be the first convert to Quakerism made by George Fox. See brief account of her sufferings in Appen- dix, p. 177.
7
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tions of writers, who magnify their number to a degree that would honor Falstaff.
The most serious of all the charges on the score of extravagance deserves separate con- sideration. One has a right to infer from the sketch Dr. Ellis has given of the state of affairs during the period which he de- scribes, that it was not uncommon for Qua- ker women to parade the streets and to en- ter the churches unattired, and that the colonial anthorities were goaded into a re- sort to barbarous legislation by such wild and crazy freaks.1 There is a serious mis- apprehension of the truth here. The rec- ords furnish instances of two women who were literally stripped of their clothing by the authorities ; and many other instances of women who were stripped from the waist upwards and exposed to public gaze, but from the arrival of Mary Fisher and Aun Anstin upon these inhospitable shores, in 1656, down to the passage of the " vagabond law " in May, 1661, in which the cruelties of corporal punishment culminated, - dur- ing this entire time, there was not a single case of such social indecorum by the Qua-
1 Massachusetts and its Early History ; also The Memorial History of Boston, vol. i.
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kers, - not one. Dr. Ellis cites the case of a woman who appeared in this condition in Boston, her body being smeared with black paint. He is wrong. The record shows that this woman, Margaret Brewster, was abundantly clothed, and it also shows that this event occurred in the year 1677; 1 that is, fifteen years after the last year of the times of which Dr. Ellis professes to give a his- tory ! In two instances only, once in " 9th mo. 1662" and once in May, 1663, women appeared in public without their garments, and in both cases their acts were the result of persecution. A detailed report of the Wardwell case may serve to help us in ac- counting for them. Thomas Wardwell was a Puritan and a freeman of the Massachu- setts colony. He lived in Boston, where on November 23, 1634, his son Eliakim was baptized. Eliakim removed to Hamp- ton about the year 1659. It is not known at what time he embraced the Qnaker faith, but on April 8, 1662, he was fined for ab- sence from church on twenty-six Sabbaths. In December, 1662, Ann Coleman, Mary
1 Judge Sewall's Diary, vol. i. p. 43. For a very inter- esting report of Margaret Brewster's trial, etc., see Appendix, op. 193-202.
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Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, at the insti- gation of Rev. Mr. Rayner, and by order of deputy magistrate Richard Walden, were stripped naked from the middle upward, tied to a cart, and, though the weather was "bitter cold," were driven through several towns. On arrival at each town they were cruelly whipped. At Dover, while the flog- ging was being administered, the Rev. Mr. Rayner "stood and looked and laughed at it," whereupon Eliakim Wardwell, who was also present, reproved the reverend gentle- man for his brutality, and thereby added one more piece of insolence to the list of Quaker " outrages." For this offensive be- havior he was put in the stocks along with William Fourbish, who had also manifested irreverence by rebuking the pious Rayner. Soon after this event, Wardwell harbored and entertained his friend Wenlock Christi- son. Such an offense was too grievous to be overlooked, and the Rev. Seaborn Cot- ton, with truncheon in hand, headed a party of order-loving citizens, and marched from his own home to the house of Wardwell, some two miles away. Christison received him and asked him " what he did with that club in his hand." Pastor Cotton replied,
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saying, " he came to keep the wolves from his sheep." Christison was immediately seized and dragged away. The wolf having been secured, Wardwell, who, as head of the family, was the bell-wether of Mr. Cot- ton's flock of sheep, was summoned to court and fined. To satisfy the fine, his saddle- horse was taken from him. The horse was worth fourteen pounds, and as this sum ex- ceeded the fine, a vessel of green ginger was left at his house to settle the account. But the green ginger speedily went the way of the horse, for Wardwell was soon fined again for his own and his wife's absence from church, and in time was rendered al- most penniless by repeated seizures of his property. The Rev. Seaborn Cotton, it seems, had a sharp eye for business, and, knowing the Wardwells would not pay for preaching they did not hear and would not eonntenance by their presence, he shrewdly sold his "rate " - the sum of money the Wardwells were obliged by law to contrib- nte to his support - to one Nathaniel Boul- ter. How large a shave this dealer in lapsed church tithes charged Cotton, we shall never know. We do know, however, that before he concluded the bargain he visited the
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Wardwells under pretense of borrowing a little corn for himself, which they willingly lent him. Having thus surreptitiously dis- covered the quantity of corn in the crib, and its whereabouts, he, "Judas-like," went and bought the " rate " and then returned and " measured the corn away as he pleased."
Lydia Wardwell was married to Eliakim, October 17, 1659. She also was a Pu- ritan, and a church-member to the manor born, being the daughter of Isaac Perkins, who was a freeman of the colony. She is described as "a young and tender, chaste woman," and was no doubt such. She be- came a Quaker, with her husband, and in a loyal, wifely way had shared the trials and sufferings to which they had been doomed during the few years of their married life. She knew the story of Ann Austin and Mary Fisher; she probably had witnessed the flogging of her own friends, Ann Cole- man, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and had heard the laughter of the Christian minister, as the lash descended upon their naked bodies. Four of her friends had been hanged and scores of others tortured. The guest of her fireside had been kidnapped
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under her eyes ; the rapacious church tithe dealer and pious magistrates had stripped her home of even the grass that grew in the meadow. The burden laid upon this bride was too heavy for her young spirit, and, in the light of a subsequent event, it is reason- able to suppose that it produced mental aberration. The original narrator of her sad experience states that while these troub- les fell thick and fast and heavily upon her, she was repeatedly sent for, to go to church, " to give a reason " for her separation from it. Pestered and goaded by these demands, and probably with an imagination disor- dered by her sufferings, she answered a summons in May, 1663, by disrobing her body and, in this condition, entering the church. It was "exceeding hard," the nar- rator says, " to her modest and shamefaced disposition," to pass through this terrible ordeal. She went thus as a " sign " of the spiritual nakedness of her persecutors. This strange and dreadful scene occurred at the church in Newbury. The sequel is far more shocking to us than the deed itself. The poor soul was arrested and on the 5th of May, 1663, was sentenced by the court at Ipswich to "be severely whipped and pay
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costs and fees to the marshall of Hampton for bringing her, 10s. 6d. and fees, 2s. 6d." In accordance with this sentence "she was tied to the fence post of the tavern . . . stripped from her waist upwards, with her naked breasts to the splinters of the posts and then sorely lashed with twenty or thirty cruel stripes." 1 Previous to this, in 9th mo. of 1662, Deborah Wilson, who had passed through much the same scenes and sufferings, appeared, in the same manner and for the same purpose, in the streets of Salem. In her case the constable, Daniel Rumbal, it is said, took compassion on her, and she escaped with only moderate chas- tisement. It is quite possible that the con- stable had misgivings, or, it may be, positive information regarding her mental condition; for, subsequently, and after persecution was measurably abated, she was arraigned " for frequently absenting herself from the public ordinances," and was dismissed because, as the court record reads, " she is distempered in her head."
The acts of Lydia Wardwell, Deborah Wilson, Thomas Newhouse, and Margaret Brewster play a conspicuous part in the 1 New England Judged, pp. 376-377.
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Quaker melodrama which we are told pre- ceded the Puritan tragedy. The truth is, they were not the prelude but the after- piece and the sequel to the tragedy. They are, however, repeatedly and persistently cited in order to justify or to extenuate the cruelties of the Puritan rulers. Such acts, we are told, might well drive a sober people to desperation, and tempt them to resort to the most severe remedies. But will some apologist take the trouble to explain by what process of reasoning the legislation of 1656 to 1661 can be attributed to offenses committed in 1662, 1663, and 1677? His- tory must be read backwards that this in- tellectual feat may be performed.
The popular apologies for the Puritans, that now pass for history and are to be read in the pages of standard works (notably those of Palfrey and Bancroft), as well as in the historical essays of many other writ- ers, are based upon an unwarrantable exag- geration of the character and number of Quaker offenses and upon a reckless con- fusion of dates.1 This serious and fatal de- fect necessarily renders such historical crit-
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