USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 26
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
them. The crowning folly or iniquity in the course of the Puritans was in following up their penal inflictions, through banishments, imprisonments, fines, scourgings, and mutilations, to the execution on the gallows of four martyr victims. But what shall we say of the persistency, the exasperating contemptuousness and defiance, the goading, maddening obstinacy, and reproaching invectives of those who drove the magistrates, against their will, to vindicate their own insulted authority and to stain our annals with in- nocent blood? Cotton Mather called them an " enchanted people."
The writer of these pages, after an exhaustive study of this episode of our history for another purpose, has been led to adopt this view of the equal folly and culpability of both parties in this dire tragedy.1 Calm self- possession, indifference, or an exercise of patience on the part of the magistrates on the first appearance of these enthusiasts, or a forbearing, considerate, and gentle method adopted by those who believed they had a divine mission to discharge, would have averted the catastrophe. But these were the very graces and qualities which were on either side the most Jack- ing. The authentic reports of "the ravings and blasphemies " associated with the " Ranters " in Old England made the magistrates alarmed by the exposure of their colony to peculiar perils from the presence of such an exciting and mischievous element, when it should manifest itself here. They were well aware that they had among their restless spirits inflamma- able material, and men and women whose Puritan and Biblical training had quickened them to an alert and inquisitive interest in controversy, specula- tion, and pious mysticisms. Their worst fears were realized when they found that the Quaker spirit was contagious and catching among a class of their own citizens. Indeed, it appears from the legislation and pro- ceedings of the authorities against the avowed Quakers, that their intent was as much or more to prevent the dissemination of their notions as to visit penalties upon the original utterers of them. The fervid "testimonies" and the stinging objurgations screamed out by the Quakers as they were led along the streets, or as they burst upon the assembly in the meeting- house, or engaged the ears of passers-by from between the bars of their prisons, were sure of meeting sympathy, secret or avowed, from occa- sional witnesses ; and this sympathy was often made deep and tender by the passive submissiveness and gentleness of the sufferers under barbarous cru- elties. The magistrates being on the alert for the intrusion of these dreaded
1 [There were certainly some, though few, among the principal people who saw clearer than the rest what intolerance was accomplishing. Sir Richard Saltonstall, who watched the course of events after his return to England, addressed a manly letter of remonstrance to the two teach- ers of the Boston First Church. Bond, Water- town, ii. 416; Hutchinson, Papers, p. 401 ; Backus, New England, i. 245.
John Norton The death, mn 1663, of John Norton (who, four
years after the decease of Cotton, had come from Ipswich to be his successor in the First Church, 1656) had certainly removed one who exercised a baleful influence in the direction of intolerance. He died of apoplexy, and the friends of the Quak- ers, after the fashion of the day, pronounced it a judgment of the Lord. The entry in the Roxbury church records of his sudden death is given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 18So, p. 89, and in July, 1859, an early pedigree owned by Prof. C. E. Norton of Cambridge - En.]
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fanatics, easily rid themselves of the first of the sort, as they arrived by sea. They were retained on shipboard; and the masters of vessels who brought them hither were compelled, under penalty, to carry them away.
SIR RICHARD SALTONSTALL.1
' | The present representative of the family, Leverett Saltonstall, Esq., kindly furnished a photograph of the original portrait of bis an- cestor by Rembrandt, from which this engraving is taken. It is in his possession. There are copies of it in the gallery of the Historical So- ciety and in Memorial Hall at Cambridge. It
has been engraved on steel in Drake's Boston, p. 122, and elsewhere. Saltonstall came over with Winthrop, but returned to England the next year. Ile was born in 1 586, and died about 1658. The family descent is followed in the N'. E. Hlist. and Geneal. Reg., 1847; Bond's Water town ; and Drake's Boston, p. 68. - ED.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
But very soon the pertinacious troublers found an access into the jurisdic- tion from Rhode Island, - that harborage of all sorts of persons " unset- tled in judgement." Well would it have been for our magistrates if they had followed a hint conveyed to them, with sly humor, in the shrewd and sagacious reply of the authorities of Rhode Island to a request sent to them from Massachusetts for co-operating measures of repression and punish- ment against the Quakers. The answer was, that they had found that the Quakers were a sort of people that did affeet persecution; that they lived by inviting and provoking it; and that they had already come to loathe Rhode Island because they were allowed full liberty to vent their prophecy- ings and revelations. But, most unfortunately, our authorities thought and acted differently. They steadily pursued a course of increased severity and harshness in the penalties denounced and inflicted by their laws, -though always ready and willing to suspend them, if the offenders would go away and stay away. But this was the very thing the Quakers, in avowed fidelity to conscience and their mission, would not do. It would be a weak and fatal concession to the fear of man, and a timid surrender of their solemn trust. Their patient resolve of spirit and their bitterness and provocative- ness of speech and behavior were alike stiffened and aggravated. They denounced the ministers as " Baal's priests ; " " the seed of the Serpent ; " "the brood of Ishmael," &c. Here is a description drawn by one of them of a church member : -
" A man that hath a covetous and deceitful rotten heart, lying lips, which abound among them, and a smooth, fawning, flattering tongue, and short hair, and a deadly en- mity against those that are called Quakers and others that oppose their wayes, - such a hypocrite is a fit man to be a member of any N. England church." 1
The Thursday lecture in Boston was a solemn occasion, which drew the magistrates and people to listen to the words of their preacher. One may well imagine the consternation and rage attendant upon this incident, as related in one of the Quakers' Journals : -
" 13th of 2ยช Month. 1658. Sarah Gibbins and Dorothy Waugh spoke at Lector. Death fed Death, through the painted sepulchre John Norton "1 [the minister].
The women proceeded to break two bottles over his head, " as a sign of his emptiness."
And again : -
" J. Rous and H. Norton were moved to go to the great meeting-house at Boston upon one of their Lector days, where we found John Norton their teacher set up, who like a babling Pharisee run over a vain repetition near an hour long, like an impudent smooth fac'd harlot, who was telling her Paramoors a long fair story of her husband's kindness, while nothing but wantonness and wickedness is in her heart," &c.1
1 From a Quaker's journal, New England's Ensigne, &c., copied by the writer from the original in the British Museum.
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
It may readily be allowed that the magistrates and ministers were, by no rule of reason or religion, under obligation to subject themselves to such effrontery and insult as this. And when such wild enthusiasts, generally women, appeared in the streets and meeting-houses in a state of nudity, or in ghostly sheets, with their faces smeared with black paint, "prophetically," the fright and horror of the spectacle might well justify the severest meas- ures to prevent its repetition. Among a people under the cloud of many superstitions and dreads, such exhibitions were portentous in causing hys- terical shocks and agonizing fears. Even about the beginning of the next century, Judge Sewall records the dismay and panic caused by the rushing in of such Quaker prophets into the assembly of the South Church. The magistrates of the earlier period, while personally exasperated almost beyond endurance, felt themselves stirred by the obligations of their trust to punish such desperate offenders. Leniency and tolerance, under the cir- cumstances, would have seemed to them a crime. Even the gentle-spirited Roger Williams, under a sore trial of his patience by the Quakers, allowed himself to write of them: "They are insufferably proud and contemptuous. I have, therefore, publicly declared myself that a due and moderate re- straint and punishment of these incivilities, though pretending conscience, is so far from persecution, properly so called, that it is a duty and com- mand of God unto all mankind, first in Families, and thence into all mankinde Societies." 1
Somewhere beneath the soil of Boston Common lie the ashes of four so-called Quakers, - three men and one woman, - who were cast into their rude graves after they had been executed on the gallows, between the years 1659 and 1661.2 This death penalty was the culmination of the suc-
1 George Fox digged out of his Burrowes. There is a witticism in this title, referring to Bur- roughs, the companion and co-preacher with Fox. [Coddington, who had been a Boston merchant, having become one of the founders of Rhode Island, was chosen its Governor, and adopted the tenets of the Quakers. He took exception to Williams's course in his controversy with Fox, and wrote a letter to Governor Leverett, complaining of the countenance he had given to Williams. Leverett wrote a reply. Neither of these letters is known to be extant. Williams, having seen this correspondence, wrote an "Answer," which was printed in Boston by John Foster. This has been reprinted in the R. I. Hist. Soc. Proc. 1875-76. There are letters, &c., of Williams's in Ibid. 1877-78. - ED.]
2 [ The crowd of North-enders was so great returning from two of these executions, Oct. 27, 1659, when William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson were hung, that the drawbridge on Ann Street (now North Street), over the canal which made the North End an island, fell through under the weight. Strange to say, the VOL. 1. - 24.
execution drew not a few Quakers into the town, "bringing linen wherein to wrap the dead bodies," and "to look the bloody laws in the face." There is in the Mass. Archives, x., a characteristic letter addressed to the Governor
Mary Trash Margarob Smith
Boston 2th of y in" 1680; nith
from two women, and dated " from your house of correction, where we have been unjustly restrained." It was on the occasion of this ex- ecution that Mary Dyer sat on the gallows with a rope about her neck while the others were swung off. She was sent out of the jurisdiction, but, returning the next June, finally suffered the last penalty. There is in the Mass. Archives, x., a petition from her husband, W. Dyer, asking that his wife may be sparcd. Dr. Ellis prints it
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
cessive inflictions to which Puritan legislation vainly had recourse to be rid of an intolerable plague. It was denounced upon stich as, returning a fourth time after punishment and banishment, refused, even when on the gallows, to keep their lives on condition that they would not again obtrude them- selves where they were so unwelcome. Their refusal to comply with this condition convinced the magistrates, who " desired their lives absent rather than their deaths present," that "they courted death and thrust themselves upon it." Some readers may find relief in the fact that, even after the long trial of the patience of the magistrates, the infliction of the death penalty was effected only by the vote of a bare majority of the Court, and was most vehemently opposed by earnest remonstrances from some of the best peo- ple.1 Our historian, Hutchinson, rightly balances " the strange delusion the Quakers were tinder in courting persecution, and the imprudence of the authorities in gratifying this humor as far as their utmost wishes could carry them." One may all the more regret the heady temper, the rancor, and the violence shown on either side, because the parties were so admirably in his Lowell lecture on " The Treatment of In- Hist. and Geneal. Reg. v. 465; Drake's Boston, P. 345. An account of Upsall, with a view of the truders and Dissentients," p. 123. Her story is told in Anderson's Memorable Women of Puritan Times. A posthumous tract by Marmaduke CE Uplat Stevenson, entitled A Call from Death to Life, London, 1660, is one of the rarities of Americana. Cf. Mensies Catalogue, No. 1,903, and Brinley
most humbly supliant W Dyr
27th of 3:1660
Catalogue, No 3,571. It has appended to it two letters from Peter Pearson, giving "a brief re- lation of the manner of the martyrdom " of Stevenson and Robinson. It is noted in the Sewall Papers, i. 82, 91, that in 1685 the Quak- ers asked permission "to enclose the ground the hanged Quakers are buried in, under or near the gallows, with pales " It was denied " as very inconvenient ; " but nevertheless a "few feet of ground was enclosed with boards." - En. }
1 [Longfellow makes the Governor express this aversion in his John Endicott : -
" Four already have been slain ; And others banished upon pain of death. lint they come back again to meel their doom, Bringing the linen for their winding sheels. We must not go too far. In truth I shrink From shedding of more blood. The people murmur At our severity."
But Endicott was the most bitter and persistent advocate of extreme measures. The Nicholas Upsall of this tragedy, who was imprisoned and banished for harboring Quakers, was a veritable citizen, whose blood still runs among us. N. E.
stone on his grave in the Copp's Hill burial-ground, is given in the N. E. Ilist. and Geneal. Reg., January, ISSo. There is in the Mass. Ar- chives, x., a petition from his wife Dorothy, his son-in-law William Greenough, and Upsall's children, asking for the revoking of the decree of banish- ment. The Court refused it. Mr. Rowland Il. Allen, in his New England Tragedies in Frose,
Dorothy unfall Willow Covenguy Elizthe of face Cervonne vsfals Sujananfall
Boston, 1869, has followed out the historical in- cidents which Longfellow weaves into his plot. Hawthorne uses these Quaker persecutions as the basis of his " Gentle Boy," - one of his Twice Told Tales. - ED.]
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qualified for testing their issues by disputation and the tongue. Richard Baxter foiled the weapon of one very persistent Quaker, who had been arguing that all men were illumined by the inner light, by asking the question, " If all have it, why may not I have it?" 1
What would have been the final working out of the pitched conflict between Quaker contumacy and Puritan persistency, had they been left to the action of their own energies without the intervention of an external mediating agency, it would hardly have been difficult for any but the most resolute and stern of the magistrates to have forecast. The Quakers would have conquered by simple endurance. Their weapons were what in the immediate future were to be recognized as vital and effective truths. But one of the sufferers having gone to England and gained access to Charles II. brought back from the monarch a peremptory command that the death penalty against the Quakers should be no more inflicted, and that those who were under judgment or in prison should be sent to England for trial.2 The King's interference with the stern rule of the Puritan Commonwealth also involved the immediate removal of the restriction of the franchise to church- members, and its extension to all citizens who were in other respects entitled to it. The Court, however, managed to evade the concession here required of them, by substituting conditions which substantially retained the rigid
1 [It is not worth while here to follow out the bibliographical intricacies of the literature of these Quaker persecutions. The reader is referred to Dr. HI. M. Dexter's Bibliography of Congregationalism : J. Smith's Catalogue of Friends' Books ; and some of the rarer books noted in the Brinley Catalogue, ii. 100. Of the older books, G. Bishop's New England Judged, Part 1., 1661, and Part II., 1667, - both parts with additions, 1703, of which a copy. with many other of the Quaker productions, is in the pos- session of Dr. Ellis, -puts the Quakers' side, while the Boston minister, John Norton, on whom the burden of the unhappy conflict fell, in behalf of the churches offered their apology in his Heart of New England rent at the Blas- Themies of the Present Generation, Cambridge, 1659, -a book published by authority and at the public charge, and for which the Court made him a grant of land. Not much reading on either side is edifying, and the joint production of John Kous and others, New England a Degenerate Plant, London, 1659, is worth attention chiefly for its record of the laws and proceedings of the colonies against the Quakers. We also owe to Rous, Fox, and others another harrowing narra- tive of their sufferings, printed in London in 1659, as The Secret Workes of a Cruel People. Their own later chroniclers always cover these New England experiences, as in William Sewel's Ilistory of the Quakers, 1722, &c., fourth and fifth books, and Jos. Besse's Sufferings of the People
called Quakers, London, 1753, each depending largely on G Bishop's book ; and such more recent works as Janney's Ilist. of the Friends, i. ch. xiii .- xv., and Gough's Quakers, ch. xiv. Our New Eng- land historians all follow the story with more or less consideration for the authorities. Ilub- bard, New England, ch. Ixv .; Mather, Magnalia, vii. ch. iv .; Hutchinson, Mass. Bay ; Bancroft, United States, i. ch. x., ii. ch. xvi., and centenary edition, i. ch. x. ; Palfrey, New England, ii. 452, - a careful account with some detail; Bryant and Gay, United States, il. ch. viii. and ix .; Barry, Massachusetts, i. ch. xiii. ; P. W. Chand- ler, American Criminal Trials, i., with an ap- pendix of documents; Dexter, As to Roger Williams, pp. 105, 124, &c. Dr. Ellis has written a history of the subject, which is still in manu- script. - ED.]
2 [ Dr. Palfrey, Hist. of New England, ii. 519, says : "The resolution to abstain from further capital punishments had been taken some months before, though the magistrates, perhaps, were not indisposed to appeal to the King's injunction, rather than avow a change of judgment on their own part." The letter of the King was intrusted to one Samuel Shattuck, who had been banished, and he, with other Quakers, arrived in Boston in 166r One of the disturbers at least, Win- lock Christison, recanted a little too carly, or he might have enjoyed the triumph of his release without so satisfying the magistrates as he did. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
method of securing the ballot. On this point - the vital and all-essential security of their original polity - they were soon compelled to yield, because the royal mandate was reinforced by so strong a party of the uncovenanted non-voters within the colony insisting upon their rights. Not till the provincial was substituted for the colonial charter was the spell of the Puritan domina- tion effectually broken; and then the Puri- tan Commonwealth was prostrated. The sur- vival from it in tradition, in influence, in the sway of manifold habits and customs, and in the lessons of childhood retaining their power over those who lived to advanced age, per- petuated very much of its austere and char- acteristic qualities in this community. Nor even in these days, among the mixed and diversified elements of our population and all the relaxing and liberalizing results of the most radical social change, is the fire in the Simlock Christison ashes of Puritanism wholly extinguished.
It may have been well that, in the train and succession of the experimentings on the theory of the model for planting a State, secure and prosperous, what we regard now as fundamen- tally an erroneous and impracticable one was so thoroughly tested. An earnest and lofty purpose, demanding high vir- tues, zeal, self-consecration, and stern fidelity could alone have prompted the master spirits of this colony, and sus- tained them under the exactions of their enterprise. They were, for their time, intelligent and wise men; and by the best standards of any age their char- acters in their intents and aims - of integrity, sincerity, devoutness, and un- selfishness - must be adjudged to have been elevated and pure. They showed heroic powers of endurance; they were simple and frugal in their mode of life ; " they scorned delights and lived labori- may ous days ; " and in their generation, more murr. O resolutely and disinterestedly than any 2 the Condomino from my goal in Boston. " day By 4:"mo. 966) /. other community of men and women known to us, they had regard, in all that they devised and did, far more for the welfare and advantages of their
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
posterity than for their own. How far their erroneous and impracticable experiment of constructing a State from a Church was the consequence or the cause of the limitations of wisdom, the superstitions, and the errors which appear in their policy, it might be difficult fairly to decide. Their thorough trial of what proved to be an impracticable theory may help to reconcile us to all the risks and exposures of our present system, which recognizes only secular interests. Large allowance should be made by us for what was so ungenial, gloomy, and repulsive in the Puritan character, as manifested dur- ing the brief period of intolerance and severity in their history, on the score of the harshness and rudeness of the circumstances under which the first generation born on the soil grew into life. The first comers had sweet and tender memories of dear old England. Their children had none of these. Their childhood was not nursed on milk. They saw no games or pageants, no holidays or festivals, no gray old churches or ivy-clad castles. They had no picture-books or romances. The shadows of the wilderness hung over them, and the ways through it were lonely and full of terrors. A som- bre domestic discipline saddened their years of subjection. The weariness of their long day-tasks was compensated by no evening jollities. These sober and grave influences clouded their lives, and passed into maturer austerities in their characters. Religion had to them more of frights and bugbears than of fair visions and sweet solaces. The charter of the colony assigned the terms for holding its Courts, as " Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas." But only in the charter, not elsewhere in the records, do those words and the things and associations of which they are the symbols appear. The children grown here never heard them. The dispensation of religion to them offered them lessons above their comprehension, divested of all attractions in the mode of their teaching, - dry, dreary, and saddening.
There is an offset of a generous and grateful character to be made for all that is just in the severity of censure visited upon these Puritan legislators for their narrowness and bigotry, their rigid and harsh austerity against those who disturbed their peace, and yet so patiently suffered the penalties of their protests, their dissent, and their heresies. These disturbers were dealt with as enthusiasts and fanatics, at a time and under circumstances of dread experience that made enthusiasm and fanaticism most alarming in their impulses, methods, and tendencies, as destructive of domestic, social, and civil order. But while the Puritan outlook was narrow in that direction, it was broad and generous in another. They did not stand as champions of ignorance, indifference, or the conservatism of prejudice and error. While we call them superstitious, we have to remind ourselves that there was noth- ing to them more odious or debasing than what they themselves, by the degree of their enlightenment, had come to regard as superstition. This they identified with ignorance and folly. And it was because of this that the Puritans came nearer than any other class of religionists to making an idol of knowledge, of the exercise of mental freedom and vigor, and of the education of the young. The unrest of Puritanism, its constant labor to
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
verify and certify its fundamentals of doctrine and dispensation, kept the intellect in full vigor, and prompted the inquisitive spirit which gradually released it from a slavish bondage. Certain it is, that wherever in Christen- dem we trace the presence and influence of the doctrinal system and disei- phine characteristic of Puritanism, - as in Geneva, Holland, Scotland, Old and New England, -we find tokens of intellectual vigor in the commanding minds of statesmen, scholars, and men of affairs. And consequent upon this quality has been their noble zeal to promote education, knowledge, learning, in all their ranges, so that their elevating influence may be shared by all classes of the people. The college planted in the wilderness by the magistrates of Boston, and the system of common schools provided by the Court of the Puritan colony, attest that its founders recognized in edu- cation the only safeguard of liberty. They would not have dreaded lest freedom in thought and policy should exceed due restraints, provided only that they could anticipate and guide its development by true enlightenment. It is easy to reconcile the professed heavenly-mindedness of the Puritans with their manifest regard for worldly thrift. They confessedly recognized the mundane virtues ; and we, their posterity, share largely in the account of their having done so. There was candor as well as shrewdness in the avowal made by the patriarch White for our colonists, that " nothing sorts better with Piety than Competency,"- a truth which the prophet Agur had, long before their day, uttered by inspiration.
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