The Persecution of the Quakers

The history of Massachusetts during the latter half of the seventeenth century presents several occurrences of particular interest, such as the Quaker persecution, King Philip's Indian war, and the witchcraft delusion. The first of these now calls for attention. We may premise with a brief statement of preceding events. One of these was an effort in England to prevent Puritan emigration, which is said to have had the effect to retain John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell in that country. If so, the king in this committed an error which in the end proved fatal to himself. In 1638, John Harvard, a minister of Charlestown, left something over three thousand dollars in support of a school previously founded by the colony. This was the origin of Harvard College. In 1643 the four colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire formed a confederacy, under the title of THE UNITED COLONIES OF NEW ENGLAND. Rhode Island was, at a later date, refused admission into the confederacy, which continued in existence for over forty years. Each colony was to contribute men and money to the common defence, while two commissioners from each colony formed an annual assembly for the settlement of all questions relating to the confederacy.

The religious dissensions which had formerly agitated the colony were renewed by the emigration of persons of other sectarian views, who were little disposed to submit to the intolerance of the Puritan churches and tribunals. In 1651 a party of Anabaptists reached Massachusetts. The doctrines they advocated raised a storm of opposition in the colony; they were arrested, tried, fined, and one of them severely flogged, and a law was passed banishing from the colony any one who should oppose the dogma of infant baptism. The treatment received by the Quakers was of sufficient severity and importance to demand special consideration, and we therefore select a description of it from James Grahame's "History of the United States."]

THE treatment which the Quakers experienced in Massachusetts was much more severe [than that of the Anabaptists], but certainly much more justly provoked. It is difficult for us in the calm and rational deportment of the Quakers of the present age to recognize the successors of those wild enthusiasts who first appeared in the north of England about the year 1644 and received from the derision of the world the title which they afterwards adopted as their sectarian denomination.... When the doctrines of Quakerism were first promulgated, the effects which they produced on many of their votaries far exceeded the influence to which modern history restricts them, or which the experience of a rational and calculating age finds it easy to conceive. In England, at that time, the minds of men were in a state of feverish agitation and excitement, inflamed with the rage of innovation, strongly imbued with religious sentiment, and yet strongly averse to restraint. The bands that so long repressed liberty of speech being suddenly broken, many crude thoughts were eagerly broached, and many fantastic notions that had been vegetating in the unwholesome shade of locked bosoms were abruptly brought to light: and all these were presented to the souls of men roused and whetted by civil war, kindled by great alarms or by vast and indeterminate designs, and latterly so accustomed to partake or contemplate the most surprising changes, that with them the distinction between speculation and certainty was considerably effaced.

It was the wildest and most enthusiastic visionaries of the age whom Quakerism counted among its earliest votaries, and to whom it afforded a sanction and stimulus to the boldest excursions of unregulated thought, and a principle that was adduced to consecrate the rankest absurdity of conduct.... The unfavorable impression which these actions created long survived the extinction of the frenzy and folly that produced them.

While, in pursuance of their determination to proselytize the whole world, some of the Quakers travelled to Rome, in order to illuminate the Pope, and others to Constantinople, for the purpose of converting the Grand Turk, a party of them embarked for America and established themselves in Rhode Island, where persons of every religious (Protestant) denomination were permitted to settle in peace, and no one gave heed to the sentiments or practices of his neighbors. From hence they soon made their way into the Plymouth territory, where they succeeded in persuading some of its inhabitants to embrace the doctrine that a sensible experience of inward light and spiritual impression was the meaning and end of Christianity and the essential characteristic of its votaries, and to oppose all regulated order, forms, and discipline, whether civil or ecclesiastical, as a vain and Judaizing substitution of the kingdom of the flesh for the kingdom of the spirit.