Page images
PDF
EPUB

Puritans had no bowels of mercy for those who, like themselves, had fled from persecution in the old world. Towards Quakers, especially, they entertained feelings of the most deadly hatred, as the laws common to all the New England colonies clearly prove. Among the Blue Laws of Connecticut we find the following:

"18. No Quaker or dissenter from the established worship of this dominion, shall be allowed to give a vote for the election of magistrates or any officers.

19. No food or lodging shall be afforded to a Quaker, Adamite, or other heretic."

But, as we have already intimated, the laws of the Plymouth colony against Quakers were the most rigid of all, and the only ones, in fact, which were stric dy executed. The following are among the orders of the Court, assembled at Plymouth at different times in the years 1657, 1658, 1659, &c. They were copied by our author from the Plymouth Records themselves :

[ocr errors]

It is ordered by the court, that in case any shall bring in any Quaker, Rantor, or other notorious heretiques, either by lande or water, into any parte of this government, shall forthwith, upon order from any one magistrate, returne them to the place from whence they came, or clear the government of them on the penaltie of paying the fine of twenty shillings for every weeke that they shall stay in the government after warninge."2

In the same year it was further

"Enacted by the court and the authoritie thereof, that noe Quaker or person commonly soe called, bee entertained by any person or persons within this government, under the penalty of five pounds for every such default, or be whipt, and in case any one shall entertaine any such person ignorantly, if hee shal testify on his oath that hee knew not them to bee such, he shal be freed of the aforesaid penalty, provided hee upon his first discerning them to bee such, doe discover them to the constable or his deputy."

3

October 6th, 1657, an order was passed banishing Humphrey Norton, a Quaker, from the colony, and on the 14th of October following, this additional law was enacted against Quakers; for atrocious cruelty it is surpassed by few documents of the kind on record in any country, Christian or pagan:

"As an addition to the late order in reference to the coming or bringing in of the cursed sect of the Quakers into this jurisdiction, it is ordered that whosoever shall from henceforth bring, or cause to be brought, directly or indirectly, any knowr Quaker or Quakers, or other blasphemous heretiques into this jurisdiction. every such person shall forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds to the country and shall by warrant from any magistrate, be committed to prison, there to remain till the penalty be satisfied and paid, and if any person or persons within this jurisdiction shall henceforth entertaine and conceal any such Quaker or Quakers, or other blasphemous heretiques (knowing them so to be), every such person shall forfeit to the country forty shillings for every hour's enter

1 Ibid. p. 122.

2 Ibid. p 13.

3 lbid. p. 14.

tainment and concealment of any Quaker or Quakers as aforesaid, and shall be committed to prison as aforesaid, until the forfeitures be fully satisfied and paid; and it is further ordered, that if any Quaker or Quakers shall presume, after they have once suffered what the law requireth, to come into this jurisdiction, every such male Quaker shall for the first offence, have one of his ears cut off, and be kept att work in the house of correction till he can be sent away att his own charge; and for the second offence, shall have the other ear cut off, &c., and kept att the house of correction as aforesaid. And every woman Quaker that hath suffered the law here, that shall presume to come into this jurisdiction, shall be severely whipt, and kept at the house of correction at work, till she be sent away at her own charge, and so also for her coming again she shall be alike used as aforesaid. And for every Quaker, he or she, that shall a third time herein again offend, THEY SHALL HAVE THEIR TONGUES BORED THROUGH WITH A HOT IRON, and be kept at the house of correction, close at work, till they be sent away at their own charge.” '

Alas for the gallantry and the tender mercies of the pilgrim fathers! If these laws, and many more of a similar nature, too numerous and lengthy for quotation, be any index of their character, then shall we thank God, as long as we live, that we have not a drop of Puritan blood in our veins. We could not even feel easy or comfortable, were we descended from those holy men, with long visages and sanctimonious looks, but with cold and iron hearts steeled against humanity; who could pray as long prayers at the corners of the streets as the ancient Pharisees, or the more modern Praise-God-Bare-Bones of Cromwell's fanatical army, but who were as merciless as fanatical, and as hypocritical as any other Pharisees of them all, whether ancient or modern. Much would we prefer to be ranked with the publicans and sinners, than with such saints!

66

By laws subsequently enacted, all persons under suspicion of holding the "diabolical doctrines" of the 'cursed sect" of Quakers, were forbidden, under severe penalties, from meeting together for worship; ' Quakers, Ranters, and all such corrupt persons could not be admitted as freemen, nor be allowed to vote; their books were to be seized by the public officers, and presented to the court; and even their horses were to be taken and confiscated to the government.

that we must copy it entire :

This last law is so curious.

"Whereas we find that, of late time, the Quakers have bin furnished with horses, and thereby they have not only more speedy passage from place to place to the poisoning of the inhabitants with their cursed tenetts, but alsoe thereby have escaped the hands of the officers, that might otherwise have apprehended them. It is therefore enacted by the court and the authoritie thereof, that if any person or persons whatsoever in this government, doth or shall furnish any of them with horse or horsekind, the same to bee fortited and seized on for the use of this government; or any horses that they shall bring into the government, or shall be brought in for them, and they make use of, shall bee forfited as aforesaid; and that it shall be lawful for any inhabitant to make seizure of any such horse and to deliver him to the constable or treasurer for the use of the county."

1 Ibid. p. 14-15.

2 P. 16.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid. p. 20.

5 P. 33

We will conclude our rapid summary of the laws against Quakers, with the following extract from the Plymouth Record of 1660:

"It is enacted by the court and the authoritie thereof, that if any person or persons commonly called Quakers, or any other such like vagabonds shall come into any towne of this government, the marshall or constable shall apprehend him or them, and upon examination, soe appearing, hee shall whip them or cause them to be whipt with rodds,' , &c.

Talk of the Spanish inquisition after this! And yet these laws were not a mere dead letter, as the early history of Massachusetts abundantly proves. It appears, from the public Records themselves, that the following persons were banished, after having suffered imprisonment, and probably the other terrible penalties of the law;- Humphrey Norton, Samuel Shattock, Lawrence Southwick and wife, Nicholas Phelps, Joshua Buffam, and Josiah Southwick; that William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and Mary Dyer were sentenced to death, and the two first executed; and that the treasurer was empowered to sell into slavery "to any of the English nation at Virginia and Barbadoes, Daniel and Provided Southwick, son and daughter of Lawrence Southwick," because they had been either unwilling or unable to pay the fines imposed on them for recusancy.? The Quakers loudly protested against this high-handed injustice and glaring crualty; but their protest was either allowed to pass unheeded, or it was met with additional insult Thus Humphrey Norton, who was a Quaker, and who had smarted under the rod of persecution of the governor of the Plymouth patent," addressed a letter, "with care and speed," to the chief of his persecutors, upon whom, after having charged him with uttering eight palpable lies, he thus denounced the divine vengeance:

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

The cry of vengeance will persue thee day and night for other men's goods, hard speeches, unrieghteouse actions which thou hast done and spoken against us and others, without and contrary to the righteouse law;

. . the days of thy wailing will be like unto that of a woman that murthers the fruite of her wombe; the anguish and paine that will enter upon the reignes will be like gnawing wormes lodging betwixt thy hart and liver; when these things come upon thee, and thy back bowed downe with paine, in that daye and houre thou shalt know to thy grief that prophetts to the Lord God wee are, and the God of vengeance is our God.""

What reply was made to this and similar protests? The General Court of Massachusetts published an elaborate "declaration," which is found spread out on the Records, and in which the course pursued against the Quakers is defended by a long train of arguments, copiously interlarded with texts of Scripture! The Court thus openly defended the doctrine of persecution on the authority of the Bible. This strongly reminds us of John Calvin's famous, or rather infamous book in favor of punishing heretics, written by him expressly to vindicate his agency ir the burning of Servetus. Verily the disciples were worthy of their master; but neither the one nor the other had any right even to pronounce the soul. thrilling word-LIBERTY.

1 P. 34.

2 P. 17, seqq.

S l'p. 23-4.

But we are tired of unfolding these cruelties; and we willingly pass from the sad history of the formal and demure New England Quakers, to that of the fantastic and mischief-loving New England witches. We know not upon what principle of philosophy or theology we are to account for the singular fact, that witches were at that time so abundant in New England; but the fact itself seems undeniable, at least if we are to give any credit to the testimony of the Rev. Cotton Mather, and of scores of other grave and cotemporary witnesses. Speaking of the great number of cases of witchcraft, which had occurred during his time, the Rev. Cotton Mather says:

"For every one of which we have such a sufficient evidence, that no reasonable man in this whole country ever did question them; and it wili be unreasonable to do it in any other."'

Another grave old chronicler, John Josselyn, gent., gives the following testimony on the same subject:

66

2

There are none that beg in this country, but there be witches too many-bottle-bellied witches and others that produce many strange apparitions, if you will believe report, of a shallop at sea manned with women, and of a ship and great red horse standing by the mainmast, the ship being in a small cove to the eastward vanished of a sudden," &c. Whoever will reject these authorities, must be very hard to convince, indeed; and had a person so skeptical chanced to live in New England at the time of the famous trials for witchcraft, he would have been in great danger of being hung as a wizard himself, — that's all. We can scarcely even guess, why it was that the witches took so remarkable a fancy to the early Yankees. Whether it was that there was some secret congeniality of feeling between the two, or that the evil one envied, and sought to mar, by his diabolical incantations, the extraordinary sanctity of the pilgrim fathers, we know not, but leave it to the shrewdness of our readers to divine. Perhaps the following passages from "the wonders of the invisible world," written by the Rev. Cotton Mather, exhibiting the reputed origin, the characteristic symptoms, and the fearful ravages of the New England witchcraft, may aid us greatly in coming to a right conclusion on a subject so important:

"It is to be confessed and bewailed," says this grave old Puritan minister, "that many inhabitants of New England, and young people especially, had been led away with little sorceries, wherein they did secretly those things that were not right against the Lord their God; they would often cure hurts with spells, and practice detestable conjurations with sieves, and keys, and peas, and nails, and horse shoes, to learn the things for which they had a forbidden and impious curiosity. Wretched books had stolen into the land, wherein fools were instructed how to become able fortune tellers.

Although these diabolical divinations are more ordinarily committed perhaps all over the world, than they are in the country of New England, yet that being a country devoted unto the worship and service of the Lord Jesus Christ above the rest of the world, he signalized his vengeance (in)

i History of New England, b. vi, ch. 7. Quoted by Irving. Works i, 119.

2 Quoted by Irving. Ibid.

these wickednesses with such extraordinary dispensations as have not often (been) seen in other places.

"The devils which had been so played withall, and it may be by some few criminals more explicitly engaged and employed, now broke in upon the country after as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of. Some scores of people, first about Salem, the centre and first born of all the towns in the colony, and afterwards in other places, were arrested with many preternatural vexations upon their bodies, and a variety of cruel torments which were evidently from the demons of the invisible world. The people that were infected and infested with such demons, in a few days' time arrived unto such a refining operation upon their eyes, that they could see their tormenters; they saw a devil of a little stature, and of a tawny color, attended still with spectres that appeared in more human circumstances.

"The tormenters tendered to the afflicted a book, requiring them to sign it, or to touch it at least in token of their consenting to be listed in the service of the devil; which they refusing to do, the spectres under the command of that black man, as they called him, would apply themselves to torture them with prodigious molestations.

"The afflicted wretches were horribly distorted and convulsed; they were pinched black and blue; pins would be run every where in their flesh; they would be scalded till they had blisters raised on them; and a thousand other things, before hundreds of witnesses, were done unto them, evidently preternatural; for if it were preternatural to keep a rigid fast for nine, yea, for fifteen days together; or if it were preternatural to have one's hands tied close together with a rope to be plainly seen, and then by unseen hands presently pulled a great way from the earth, before a crowd of people; such preternatural things were endured by them.

[ocr errors]

But of all the preternatural things which these people suffered, there were none more unaccountable than those wherein the prestigious demons would ever now and then cover the most corporeal things in the world with a fascinating mist of invisibility. As now, a person was cruelly assaulted by a spectre, that she said came at her with a spindle, though no body else in the room could see either the spectre or the spindle; at last, in her agonies, giving a snatch at the spectre, she pulled the spindle away; and it was no sooner got into her hand, but the other folks then present beheld that it was indeed a real, proper, iron spindle; which, when they locked up very safe, it was, nevertheless, by the demons taken away to do farther mischief.

"Again, a person was haunted by a most abusive spectre, which came to her, she said, with a sheet about her, though seen to none but herself. After she had undergone a deal of teaze from the annoyance of the spectre, she gave a violent snatch at the sheet that was upon it; whereupon she tore a corner, which in her hand immediately was beheld by all that were present, a palpable corner of a sheet: and her father, which was of her, catched, that he might see what his daughter had so strangely seized; but the spectre had like to have wrung his hand off, by endeavoring to wrest it from him; however, he still held it; and several times this odd accident was renewed in the family. There wanted not the oaths of good credible people to these particulars.

"Also is it known, that these wicked spectres did proceed so far as to steal several quantities of money from divers people, part of which individual money dropt sometimes out of the air, before sufficient spectators, into the hands of the afflicted, while the spectres were urging them to subscribe their covenant with death. Moreover, poisons, to the standers

« PreviousContinue »