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Chapter Eleven CHALLENGES TO THE FAITH: PLURALISM AND DECLENSION Stripped of confidence by the collapse ofthe English Puritan state, New Englanders became more divided in their attitudes toward religious dissent and, principally in Massachusetts, more repressive in their treatment of sectaries. What justification there is for regarding the seventeenth -century colonists as cruel bigots is drawn from events in the Bay between 1658 and 1692. Judged by European standards, earlier dissenters such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had been let off lightly— they were not executed, subjected to imprisonment, or even whipped. Quakers and Baptists who challenged the Bay Colony's orthodoxy in the 1660s and after were not always so fortunate. Yet if some Puritan leaders were harsh toward nonbelievers, they were no more tolerant ofwhat they saw as their own failings (though less extreme in punishing them). The period that saw the execution of Quakers and imprisonment of Baptists was coincident with a period in which the clergy fought each other over the question of baptism, and in which they elaborated the literary form of the jeremiad, verbally castigating themselves and theirflocksfor having wandered from the path of righteousness. Thus the Puritans' intolerance was in part at least a symptom of their own collective and personal self-doubt. "She Hangs There Like a Flag" First to feel the new harshness of the Puritan magistrates were the Quakers. But the punishment and execution of Friends was not simply a case of Puritans seeking to rid their society of threatening religious influences. Banishment would have sufficed to keep error out of the colony had the Quakers accepted the exile imposed on them by the Massachusetts courts. As Governor Endecott explained it, the Friends were not executed for their Pluralism and Declension 155 religious beliefs per se, but for "their superadded presumptuous and incorrigible contempt of authority. They would not be restrained but by Death." At least one modern historian has agreed with the Salem magistrate. Daniel Boorstin has argued that "the Puritans had not sought out the Quakers in order to punish them; the Quakers had come in quest of punishment." While many missionary Friends showed little sign of the thirst for martyrdom detected by Boorstin, among the Quakers who came to Massachusetts were some of the most disorderly and unrestrained "heretics" to ever challenge the colony's orthodoxy. Friends disrupted Puritan worship services by interrupting sermons, by strolling naked down the aisles, and by other means calculated to focus attention on themselves and their ideas. Fines were no deterrent, and when banished, these Quakers returned. In effect they did mock the laws and authority of the Bay and provoked the magistrates to excess even before the confidence of those gentlemen was shaken by the Restoration. In June of 1658, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, two Friends who had previously been whipped and banished from the Bay, returned to Massachusetts and were arrested in Dedham. A public disputation was held in Boston in an effort to convert the two prisoners while also offering a public refutation of Quaker beliefs. When Holder and Copeland remained unmoved by this demonstration, the magistrates ordered them each to have an ear cut off (not unusual punishment by the standards of the day) and once again banished them from the colony. The normal criminal penalties in New England were shaming rituals that depended for their efficacy upon the guilty party being part of the community and concerned about the esteem of neighbors. Offenders from the outside, and those that rejected the standards of the community, posed more difficult problems. The Quakers were threatened with death if they returned, and in October the General Court legitimatized that threat by legislation establishing the death penalty for any who returned from banishment. In September of 1659, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and Mary Dyer were arrested, tried as Quakers, and banished. Mary Dyer— who had earlier been sent from the Bay as one of Anne Hutchinson's followers—returned home to Rhode Island, while Robinson and Stephenson traveled north to New Hampshire. But soon all three were reunited and back in Boston, bearing witness to the truth as they saw it. In October of 1659, they were tried by the General Court with Governor Endecott presiding , and were convicted and sentenced to death. Mary Dyer, on the scaffold with hands bound and face covered, was reprieved while her fellow missionaries were hung. But within a year she was again arrested in Boston and, refusing to pledge never to...

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