by Mac Griswold
For the Massachusetts Bay colonists, determined to forge a commonwealth with a strong work ethic and an ironclad chain of command, these free-floating, fire-breathing enthusiasts were “masterless men.” Vagrancy, homelessness, and idleness represented gross social and religious disorder in their Puritan world. Poverty signified God’s displeasure. It didn’t help that many early Quakers came from the lesser ranks of society and had little education: they were tenant farmers, servants, weavers, shepherds, cobblers, plowmen, and yeomen before leaving those lives behind. Last but never least, Quakers were often suspected of witchcraft: “If the heretics were witches, their success at converting English men and women to their blasphemous views was much easier to explain,” writes the historian Carla Gardina Pestana.
Colonial Puritans read about the civil disobedience that Quakers in the mother country used to expose “false worship”—meaning any religion but their own Quaker faith. English Friends with ash-smeared bodies and faces burst into churches and tore their clothes to shreds. Quaker women walked through the streets “going naked for a sign” (probably meaning that they stripped to their short transparent shifts) to signify their Edenic spiritual purity. In Boston, Friends smashed bottles to smithereens on a Puritan meetinghouse floor in 1658 to show how the Lord would smash all who ignored their teachings. Refusing to pay tithes to “hireling” ministers, Quaker missionaries accused Puritan clergymen wholesale of lying to uphold the institutional power that blocked believers from God’s truth. John Rous, Humphrey Norton, and other Friends who sought to break open the colonies for the Lord headed to New England, where resistance was strongest. Henry Fell, an early visitor to Shelter Island, wrote, “The word of ye lord came to mee that I should goe to New England there to be a witness for him … For his word was as a fire & a hamer in me.” Savage persecution only intensified Friends’ zeal. For Quakers, as for early Christians, the idea of valiant suffering was deeply ingrained. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, titled his first book, written in the Tower of London after his convincement, No Cross, No Crown.
Puritans denounced Quaker meetings as savage and as uncivilized as Indian powwows. Roger Williams, who detested what he saw as Quaker intolerance and pride, wrote that Fox displayed a “loose and wild spirit” in a debate with university-educated New England ministers. The Friend leaped and skipped from topic to topic “like a wild satyre or Indian, catching and snapping at here and there a sentence.” In fact, Friends and Indians got along remarkably well. The missionary John Taylor, a Yorkshireman convinced by Fox, “came late into an Indian Town” one evening on his way to Shelter Island in 1659. He was invited to spend the night in a “Wigwam or House.” One tribal elder lay ill next door, and “by and by came a great many lusty proper Men, Indians all, and sat down, and every one had a short Truncheon Stick in their hands pretty thick, about two foot long. So they began to Pow-wow as they called it … They all spake very Loud, as with one Voice and knock’d on the Ground with their Truncheons; so that it made the very Woods ring and the Ground shake.” Taylor interrupted the ceremony to say that the healing deities (“dark Infernal Spirits”) they sought would not come while an Englishman was present. But, he added, once he got to Shelter Island he would “send one that should Cure him, which I did.” The sick man recovered, giving Taylor, on his next journey through the Indian town, the chance to deliver his Quaker message to receptive ears—“and they heard me soberly and did Confess to the Truth I spake by an Interpreter that was my Guide.”
Of Shelter Island, Taylor wrote, “We were received very kindly by one Nathaniel Silvester … this island was his own: And he had a great many Indians lived on it, and they were Friendly and Sober and made Serviceable to Friends for Guides.” (Although he was respectful toward the Indians he encountered, like all the Quaker missionaries, Taylor had evidently met some who were neither friendly nor sober.)
The Puritans also feared the Quakers because they preached in beautiful, gripping, and accessible language. What Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts had warned about the seductive speech of earlier dissenters from the Boston Covenant was equally true of the Quakers: “They would … pray with such soule-ravishing expressions and affections, that a stranger that loved goodnesse, could not but love and admire them, and so be the more easily drawne after them; looking upon them as men and women as likely to know the secrets of Christ, and bosome-counsels of his Spirit, as any others.” Although Quakers shared the Calvinist tradition of self-examination as a precondition for enlightenment, they rejected the continual punishment of self-doubt and abasement. Once they had seen the light, they were saved. During Fox’s spiritual struggle to shape himself as a Quaker, he saw within his being “an ocean of darkness and death” and “the natures of dogs, swine, vipers, of Sodom and Egypt” before beholding “an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.”
In early February 1658, Humphrey Norton, one of North America’s first “Public Friends,” or preachers, made his way to Southold to spread the Quaker message. New Haven Colony, unlike Massachusetts, hadn’t codified punishments for Quakers. But something had to be done about Norton, who marched into the “steeple-house” one Sunday, broke up the service, reviled the colony’s magistracy and government, and denounced the pastor. The miscreant was hauled off to New Haven, where he refused to answer the official charges, demanding that charges of his own be read instead (they were not). He was locked up in an outdoor jail (in February in New England) for three weeks. On March 10, during what Quakers later termed his “frivolous trial,” a large iron key was bound over Norton’s mouth, symbolically locking it shut. He was then whipped, branded, fined, and banished from the colony. New Haven hastily passed anti-Quaker laws modeled on those of Massachusetts.
During the same month as Norton’s fracas in Southold, Nathaniel became embroiled in a dispute there with a Captain George Deakins. Their quarrel ostensibly concerned the insurance terms for some Shelter Island livestock to be loaded aboard Deakins’s Goulden Parrett, but the real issue was Nathaniel’s insistence that his island was sovereign territory. Ever since his chastisement by the New Haven court, he had apparently maintained that because New Haven Colony had refused to purchase the property before Stephen Goodyear sold it to the partners, it was exempt from any jurisdiction except his own. When Deakins proposed to Nathaniel that the local magistrates settle their differences, his adversary replied that “hee scorned to goe to Southold.” Tempers rose. Nathaniel said he didn’t care whether the cattle and sheep were loaded or not. Deakins countered, “I see you say, you are out of the reach of all power, both of Old and New England and namely the Lord Protectors [Oliver Cromwell] power?” Nathaniel answered, “And soe I am.” Only three weeks later, Giles Sylvester apologized to the Southold magistrates for publicly stating that “all the ministers in New England were witches.” Feisty Giles did not offer a full apology, however. His precise target, he explained, had been ordained ministers who were “formall and not spirituall”; in other words, those who preached from Scripture and not from direct divine inspiration, as Quakers did. Giles’s language and Nathaniel’s actions tell us that certainly by 1658 both men had been “convinced.”
“A Place Called Shelter Island Yt Belongs to a Friend”
Along with Thomas Rous and Lewis Morris and the Coddingtons, Nathaniel and Grizzell ranked among the mere handful of prosperous first-generation Atlantic Quakers whose assets, social standing, and decisive actions gave incalculable aid to less fortunate brethren. Only as the Society of Friends solidified after 1665, and its members toned down their radicalism, would sizable numbers of middle-class converts join the fold. Rous and Morris offered the benefits of their government connections and respectability as major planters. Coddington’s Rhode Island, that “Sinke into which all the Rest of the Colonyes empty their Hereticks,” proved its official commitment to religious tolerance by refusing to persecute or extradite Quakers.
Nathaniel’s unique and daring contribution
was to create a lawful sanctuary in the very region where Quakers suffered the most severe persecution. His argument turned on a legal distinction regarding the purchase history of Shelter Island. When James Farrett took Shelter and Robins Islands as his agent’s commission from the Earl of Sterling in 1639, he thereby removed them from colonial government control; when Stephen Goodyear later sold them to Nathaniel and his partners in 1651 (after New Haven Colony turned down Goodyear’s offer), he did so as a private citizen, not as a New Haven Colony representative, thereby preserving their independent status. Nathaniel’s narrow distinction held again in 1666 when Governor Richard Nicolls of New York bestowed the manor patent, confirming a certain independence from regional government.
What impelled an ambitious man with a wife and young children, heavy obligations to his business partners, and an uneasy equilibrium with his workforce to risk antagonizing his neighbors and regional governments as a religious extremist? Nathaniel knew the exaltations and comforts of belonging to a tiny, close-knit group of dissidents. His participation in the Separatists’ sophisticated, far-flung print network would also have primed him to find similar sustenance in Quaker publications. And he had the support and encouragement of family, friends, and business associates. His brothers Giles and Joshua, who lived with him in the 1650s and ’60s, apparently became Quakers. And there was his beloved island, his shield against persecution, which lived up to its name. Each meeting of Friends on Shelter Island pulsated with a reckless, communal energy. They were going to harvest the world for Jesus.
Nathaniel suddenly appears different from his younger self: he’s more open, loving, and generous, a man who extends aid and succor to fellow believers. Take Joan Brocksopp, an English matron who, after hearing the call in her sixties, left her Quaker husband, Thomas, at home, traveled to America, and spent time on Shelter Island. In a letter to fellow Friend John Bowne of Flushing, Long Island, Thomas Brocksopp wrote, “As the Lord gives the opportunity, my dear love to Nathaniel Sylvester of Shelter Island, whose tender love and fatherly care of my wife when she was with him, the Lord God of my life render into his bosom an hundred fold.” John Taylor likewise took leave “in much Love and Tenderness of Nathaniel Silvester, his Wife and Family, and all Friends there, leaving them to the Grace of God and ingrafted Word that is able to save their Souls.” Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick—elderly, ill, and obdurate Quaker exiles from Salem, Massachusetts—fled to Shelter Island and lived in the Sylvester household until their deaths a year and a half later.
Grizzell, perhaps even more than Nathaniel, knew about life’s uncertainties from her family experience. Brought up as an Anglican, she had traveled further than Nathaniel in joining the Quaker covenant. Like other Quaker converts, she would undergo an expansion of interior spiritual space that was as painful as it was rapturous. Both men and women took part in discussions of Scripture and theological works, working through their readings and beliefs with intellectual rigor. Grizzell wasn’t a preacher, a Public Friend, like one of Nathaniel’s sisters, Mercie Cartwright, or Boston’s Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer. But there is no reason to assume that she differed from other female Quakers in the seriousness of her search for a new spiritual connection, or in her intellectual independence.
By 1659 the Quakers were everywhere in the English Atlantic World, and almost everywhere in trouble. On Shelter Island with Grizzell and Nathaniel, they could encourage each other, marvel at the cruelty of the authorities, preach God’s vengeance on their abusers (in what we think of today as very un-Quakerish language), rejoice in the coming millennium, and recover from mutilations and imprisonment. They slept on feather beds and ate the plantation’s ample fare (in prison they were often starved). They read the latest pamphlets and letters, meditated and prayed, held tumultuous meetings—and planned their next forays to find converts, or to “witness” the trials of fellow Quakers, and risk further incarceration. How these colloquies helped the little band shape themselves as Quakers can’t be known at this distance, but the authors of the Quaker pamphlets called “sufferings” record many who sojourned at one time or another with Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester on Shelter Island.
A port of entry for ships carrying Friends from England and on to Rhode Island, Virginia, and Barbados, Shelter Island was now on the Quaker map as a place where captains could safely land such Quaker passengers with their combustible message. Risking everything, Nathaniel and Grizzell had gained new souls and shared the exhilarating company of kindred spirits. They were surely having the time of their lives.
13
QUAKER MARTYRS, QUAKER PEACE
The Antinomian Controversy
Massachusetts’s Puritan elect trembled and burned at the emergence of the Quakers for very good reasons. Etched in their memory was the religious feud that had torn their infant Boston community apart in 1636, only twenty years before. Now, with the Quakers in their midst, they again foresaw looming political anarchy, social chaos, and satanic temptations (carnal as well as theological). The 1636 dispute—known as the Antinomian Controversy, so called from the Greek anti, against, and nomos, law—concerned the merits of grace versus works, a subject for theological debate since the beginnings of Christianity. In 1637, a colonial court condemned Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), a member of Boston’s elect and a respected healer, for heresy and banished her and many of her followers and adherents, including William Coddington, from Massachusetts. Hutchinson’s accusers (who were also her judges) hated her for her certainty of her eternal salvation through grace alone, that gift of God that could free men and women from the obligation to do good on earth, and for her refusal to serve their ministers and observe church law with the exactitude they required from her. They also hated Hutchinson for her intellectual agility. Governor John Winthrop called her “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.”
After the civil court found Hutchinson guilty, she was tried by Boston’s church elders. The Reverend John Cotton, whom Hutchinson had followed across the Atlantic from England, turned against her to save his reputation, claiming that the religious views of this middle-aged matron and mother of thirteen would lead her into adultery. When she had been formally excommunicated and rose to leave the meetinghouse alone, her friend and follower Mary Dyer rose and walked out too, holding Hutchinson’s hand.
A year before the church trial, Dyer had given birth to a stillborn infant. Hutchinson, who had assisted the midwife, Jane Hawkins, buried the body secretly with Cotton’s help. Hawkins later revealed what she knew. Governor John Winthrop, well aware of Dyer’s support for Hutchinson, had the corpse disinterred. He described the decayed remains as those of a “woman child, a fish, a beast, and a fowle” with claws and horns. Modern medical historians have concluded that the child suffered both from spina bifida and anencephaly (in which a baby is born without a cranium, and with small or missing brain hemispheres). Winthrop circulated the news by letter, and although he did not publicly label Dyer’s misfortune a “special providence,” or a warning from God about how Hutchinson’s wickedness brought God’s wrath on her followers, he hardly needed to, in an age that put equal faith in divine intervention and witchcraft.
The banished Hutchinson and her family moved to Rhode Island. Soon after (in 1638), she herself spontaneously aborted an anencephalic fetus. Winthrop, alerted to the mishap, hunted down the Rhode Island doctor who witnessed the birth and arranged for a report to be circulated that “30. [sic] monstrous births [occurred] at once; none … of humane shape.” Here was “God’s casting voice … testifying his displeasure … as clearely as if he had pointed with his finger.”
Following her husband’s death in 1642, and after Massachusetts threatened to annex Rhode Island, the unstoppable and heroic Hutchinson moved her family west to Yonkers, in New Netherland, and to safety, or so she thought. The Dutch were at war with the Siwanoy Indians, who warned Hutchinson not to settle among them, but she had faith
that God would protect her. Barely a year later, she and six of her children were slaughtered by a Siwanoy war party in 1643 as they retaliated against the Dutch.
“Quaker Martyrs”
Mary Dyer was as spiritually driven and intellectually active as Hutchinson. Her contemporaries repeatedly described her as “comely,” an adjective that then connoted feminine beauty and modesty matched by moral grace. Winthrop, for example, recalled her as “a very proper and comely young woman,” as if to underscore his astonishment that this paragon could commit the transgressions for which she had been banished. Gerard Croese, a Dutch minister, later praised Dyer as a “person of no mean extract and parentage, of an estate pretty plentiful, of a comely stature and countenance, of a piercing knowledge in many things, of a wonderful sweet and pleasant discourse, so fit for great affairs, that she wanted nothing that was manly, except only the name and the sex.”
With the rest of the Boston outcasts, Dyer moved to Rhode Island and lived there for a decade. In the early 1650s, shortly after the birth of a sixth child, she left her husband, Edward Dyer, and their children for England. When she returned to Boston in February 1657 as a Quaker preacher, the authorities arrested her. Edward secured her release on payment of a £100 bond and the promise that she would not return to Massachusetts, on pain of death. But Dyer soon reappeared in Boston to hurl herself against the colony’s 1658 capital law. Quickly imprisoned, she was sentenced to be hanged with two younger Friends, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson. Quakers from all over New England converged on Boston; one woman brought winding sheets for the martyrs’ corpses. On October 27, sixty-four armed soldiers surrounded the three as they walked a mile to the scaffold. They went “hand in hand, all three of them, as to a Wedding Day,” Dyer in the middle. Onlookers said that their faces shone with joy. By official command, military drums rolled incessantly, so that only those closest to the gallows could hear the heretics’ last words. Robinson and Stevenson rejoiced that they would be at rest with the Lord; Dyer spoke of the “sweet incomings and refreshings of the Spirit.” Robinson stepped up to the platform; the hangman adjusted the noose, and after he pulled the ladder away, Robinson’s body jerked, writhed, and was still. Then came Stevenson’s turn. Having watched her companions perish, Dyer ascended. Her face was covered with a handkerchief, her arms and feet bound. Theatrically, improbably, a long pause followed. The hangman took off Dyer’s blindfold. Unmoving, and seemingly unmoved, she continued to stand with the halter around her neck. She had to be forcibly escorted from the platform, even after hearing that the magistrates had reprieved her.
