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Chapter 5. Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers: The Prosecution of Religious Crime in Early America
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C h a p t e r Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers The Prosecution of Religious Crime in Early America Susan Juster Charles Arabella could not help himself. Having accidentally spilled ‘‘some scalding pitch upon one of his feet,’’ he swore ‘‘by God.’’ Though his ‘‘blasphemous words’’ were clearly ‘‘spoken in a great passion,’’ Arabella nonetheless found himself convicted of the crime of blasphemy, a capital offense in most British colonies. The court mercifully ordered him to be ‘‘bored through his tongue and fined £20 sterling’’ instead of sentencing him to death; one report claims his tongue was bored ‘‘three times.’’ Unable to come up with the fine, Arabella remained in prison for six months before successfully petitioning the Council of Trade and Plantations for his release.1 A tale seemingly straight out of the collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne , whose persecuting Puritans stalk the popular history of religion in early America, there are some surprises in this story. Arabella was not, in fact, a victim of Puritan bigotry. He was a resident of the colony of Maryland and his unfortunate verbal lapse occurred in 1701, long after the Act of Toleration of 1689 had presumably ushered in a new era of moderation in Britain and its overseas possessions. Yet rather than moving to decriminalize religious crimes such as blasphemy in the wake of that landmark legislation, the colony of Maryland revised its ‘‘Act Against Blasphemy’’ in 1715 to toughen its provisions . As the governor of Maryland explained, ‘‘The Act for punishment of Blasphemy, prophane swearing, cursing and drunkenness . . . not being thought sufficiently to provide against those enormous offenses, was reenacted , more severe penaltys inflicted and the execution of them more severely 124 Practices of Tolerance and Intolerance enjoyned.’’2 While there is no evidence that the act was more strenuously applied after 1715 than before, its ringing endorsement of ‘‘severe penaltys’’ for crimes against God sounds a discordant note within our conventional histories of the American colonies as beneficiaries—indeed, as harbingers—of a more enlightened attitude toward religious heterodoxy and the expression of dissent. Scholars have long argued that, though hardly islands of religious liberty, the American colonies, including the Puritan commonwealths, were relatively free of the kind of bigotry and persecutory fervor that marked the darkest years of Europe’s confessional wars. Even Catholics—the favorite whipping boy of rabid Protestants everywhere in Anglo-America—were largely spared the physical assaults and collective degradations inflicted upon them in the Reformed states on the European continent, despite the persistent strain of vicious anti-Catholic rhetoric that characterized public discourse in the colonies as Owen Stanwood documents in this volume. Stephen Foster notes in surveying New England’s laws against heresy that ‘‘the list of victims is mercifully short, and the punishments meted out, with several appalling exceptions, were not very severe.’’3 We’re all familiar with the ‘‘appalling exceptions’’ he’s referring to—the four Quaker missionaries who went bravely to their deaths in 1659 and 1661, and the handful of Baptists and Quakers who were whipped, maimed, and exiled for their faith in the decades leading up to the Restoration. Yet most historians accept the general premise that colonial Americans enjoyed a degree of religious toleration uncommon in the western world before the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century made ‘‘liberty’’ a theoretical as well as practical achievement. This chapter does not dispute the larger consensus that legal prosecutions for religious crimes were an occasional rather than regular feature of the colonial court system, but rather surveys the legal records over the first century of English settlement to see just how often Anglo-Americans found themselves on trial for their religious beliefs or behaviors.4 All together, the published records of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island , New Haven, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland , Virginia, and North Carolina over the period 1620 to 1700 yield just over one hundred cases of religious crimes—a figure large enough to dispel an overly optimistic view of the British colonies as happily heterodox yet small enough to confirm the general absence of a large-scale campaign against dissent. This is by no means a comprehensive survey. County-level records are not included, nor the files of justices of the peace or other local officials. Certain crimes—notably profanity and blasphemy—were more likely to be [54.210.126.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:00 GMT) Heretics, Blasphemers, Sabbath...