The Persecution of the Quakers: Rhode Island and Quakerism

On their first appearance in Massachusetts (July, 1656), where two male and six female Quakers arrived from Rhode Island and Barbadoes, they found that the reproach entailed on their sect by the insane extravagance of some of its members in England had preceded their arrival, and that they were regarded with the utmost terror and dislike by the great bulk of the people. They were instantly arrested by the magistrates, and diligently examined for what were considered bodily marks of witchcraft. No such indications having been found, they were sent back to the places whence they came, by the same vessels that had brought them, and prohibited with threats of severe punishment from ever again returning to the colony. A law was passed at the same time, subjecting every shipmaster importing Quakers or Quaker writings to a heavy fine; adjudging all Quakers who should intrude into the colony to stripes and labor in the house of correction, and all defenders of their tenets to fine, imprisonment, or exile.

The penal enactments resorted to by the other settlements [than Rhode Island] served only to inflame the impatience of the Quaker zealots to carry their ministry into places that seemed to them to stand so greatly in need of it; and the persons who had been disappointed in their first attempt returned almost immediately to Massachusetts, and, dispersing themselves through the colony, began to proclaim their mystical notions, and succeeded in communicating them to some of the inhabitants of Salem. They were soon joined by Mary Clarke, the wife of a tailor in London, who announced that she had forsaken her husband and six children in order to convey a message from heaven, which she was commissioned to deliver to New England. Instead of joining with the provincial missionaries in attempts to reclaim the neighboring savages from their barbarous superstition and profligate immoralities, or themselves prosecuting separate missions with a like intent, the apostles of Quakerism raised their voices in vilification of everything that was most highly approved and revered in the doctrine and practice of the provincial churches. Seized, imprisoned, and flogged, they were again dismissed with severer threats from the colony, and again they returned by the first vessels they could procure. The government and a great majority of the colonists were incensed at their stubborn pertinacity, and shocked at the impression which they had already produced on some minds, and which threatened to corrupt and subvert a system of piety whose establishment, fruition, and perpetuation supplied their fondest recollections, their noblest enjoyment, and most energetic desire. New punishments were introduced into the legislative enactments against the intrusion of Quakers and the profession of Quakerism (1657) and in particular the abscission of an ear was added to the former ineffectual severities. Three male Quaker preachers endured the rigor of this cruel law.

But all the exertions of the provincial authorities proved unavailing, and seemed rather to stimulate the zeal of the obnoxious sectaries to brave the danger and court the glory of persecution (1658). Swarms of Quakers descended upon the colony; and, violent and impetuous in provoking persecution, calm, resolute, and inflexible in sustaining it, they opposed their power of enduring cruelty to their adversaries' power of inflicting it, and not only multiplied their converts, but excited a considerable degree of favor and pity in the minds of men who, detesting the Quaker tenets, yet derived from their own experience a peculiar sympathy with the virtues of heroic patience, constancy, and contempt of danger.. It was by no slight provocations that the Quakers attracted these and additional severities upon themselves.. In public assemblies and in crowded streets, it was the practice of some of the Quakers to denounce the most tremendous manifestations of divine wrath on the people, unless they forsook their carnal system. One of them, named Faubord, conceiving that he experienced a celestial encouragement to rival the faith and imitate the sacrifice of Abraham, was proceeding with his own hands to shed the blood of his son, when his neighbors, alarmed by the cries of the lad, broke into the house and prevented the consummation of this blasphemous atrocity. Others interrupted divine service in the churches by loudly protesting that these were not the sacrifices that God would accept; and one of them illustrated his assurance by breaking two bottles in the face of the congregation, exclaiming, "Thus will the Lord break you in pieces!" They declared that the Scriptures were replete with allegory, that the inward light was the only infallible guide to religious truth, and that all were blind beasts and liars who denied it.