Volume 1, Chapter 36, The Decline and the Rigors of Plymouth
What in all this time was happening to Plymouth, the mother colony of all New England?
Succinctly, it was rapidly and irretrievably declining.
As we have seen, its fur trade had virtually disappeared by 1640, and for the next 20 years only further decline ensued.
By the mid-1640s, the town of Plymouth was virtually a ghost town, and economically the colony had become a backwater of Massachusetts Bay.
By the 1640s, Plymouth, like Massachusetts, found the intensity of its religious zeal on the wane, and heresy and moral laxity were increasing.
Plymouth faced a crossroads on how to react to this development.
by Liberty and Toleration or by Following Massachusetts Path of Persecution.
The critical point came in 1645 when William Vassel, a leading merchant, presented to the
General Court of Plymouth as well as to that of Massachusetts Bay a petition for complete
religious liberty, to grant full and free tolerance of religion to all men that will
Preserve the Civil Peace and Submit Unto the Government.
All men meant exactly that, including families, Roman Catholics and Jews.
There was great sentiment in the general court in favor of the vassal petition.
It commanded the support, in fact, of a majority of the Chamber of Deputies and even of such
an old roustabout as Captain Miles Standish.
But the ruling oligarchy of the colony, headed by Governor Bradford, Thomas Prance and Edward
Winslow, strongly opposed religious liberty and was able to block its approval.
This was the turning point, and for the next two decades, Plymouth accompanied its economic
decline by following the lead of Massachusetts in increased theocracy and religious persecution.
The colony proceeded to impose fines for failing to attend church, corporal penalties for
denying the scripture, and denial of the rights of citizenship to all critics of the laws
of Plymouth or of the true religion.
One of the persistent troubles of Plymouth was a shortage of ministers, aggravated by
its poverty, decline and increased intolerance.
To deal with this scarcity, Plymouth took another fateful step down the theocratic road.
It established a state church supported by taxation.
Protests against this new establishment were led by Dr. Matthew Fuller of the town of Duxbury,
who for his pains was denounced as wicked by the Plymouth authorities and forced to
pay a steep fine.
Despite this establishment, the pilgrim ministers remained poor, as they had to collect the
pulpit taxes themselves, and the parishioners were usually far in arrears.
Religious persecution continued to tighten.
The colony did not believe itself too poor to afford inspectors of youth.
One was appointed in each parish to supervise and birch any boy unruly in church.
When this procedure failed, the inspectors intensified their birching penalties and included
girls in this corporal punishment as well.
Governor William Bradford died in 1657 at the age of 67.
He left the colony impoverished, though he himself died a rich man, the richest in Plymouth.
He was succeeded by Thomas Prince, who liked to think of himself as a terror to evildoers.
When the Quaker influx arrived in Plymouth, Prince was as good as his word. Laws passed
against Quakers provided for the summary arrest of suspected heretics in order to keep corrupt
would-be freemen from the colony. And as a special slap at any Anglican deviation, the
vicious practice of celebrating Christmas was outlawed.
In 1659, six Quakers were banished, and Governor Prince thundered that all Quakers deserved
to be destroyed, both they, their wives, and their children, without pity or mercy.
But most pilgrims balked at this call for total victory.
As a result, the colony did not flay, brand, or mutilate, let alone kill, its Quakers,
as did Massachusetts Bay.
The leading case of Quaker persecution in Plymouth was that of Humphrey Norton, who
was banished and then returned. Though denounced by Governor Prince, Norton refused, according
to Quaker principles, to take an oath of allegiance. Sentenced to be whipped, Norton managed to
escape the punishment by refusing to pay the customary marshal's fee for the service of
of Being Whipped, and was again expelled.
As in Massachusetts Bay, there was widespread public opposition to the persecution.
The persecution itself multiplied the number of Quaker converts.
Thus, almost the entire town of Sandwich, at the entrance to Cape Cod, was converted
to the Quaker faith.
Barnstable, further along the Cape, liberally harbored and protected Quakers.
Indeed, Bonstable's pilgrim minister, Rev. John Lothrop, accepted his church members,
all who promised to keep the Ten Commandments.
To deal with the troublesome sandwich problem, the colonial government of Plymouth sent there
as special colonial constable one George Barlow, soon to be notorious as the Quaker Terror.
Barlow was paid on a commission basis by Plymouth Colony for finding heretics, naturally his
His zeal was unbounded. Barlow ruthlessly plundered the town of Sandwich, finding all suspects
and disenfranchising eight freemen. The people of Sandwich dealt with Barlow in their own
good way, resisting, harassing him and his family and putting them into the stocks. Finally
the people triumphed and Barlow was driven out of town.
Another leading center of resistance in heresy was Toxbury, north of the town of Plymouth.
Duxbury was a town filled with Baptist and Quaker converts.
Here resistance to the tyranny of the Plymouth authorities was led by Reverend John Holmes
and the Howland family.
Zoweth Howland was put into the stocks by the authorities for criticizing the persecuting
ministers and many citizens of Duxbury joined him in choosing to pay the fine rather than
attend the Pilgrim Church.
Particularly galling to the despotic Governor Prince was the fact that his own daughter
Elizabeth had fallen in love with author Howland, the leading opponent of his tyrannical rule.
Repeatedly Prince had Howland arrested and heavily fined for the crime of courting Elizabeth,
but Prince finally, after a decade, broke down and permitted their marriage.
One of the strongest centers of liberal resistance in Plymouth was the town of Situate, at the
extreme north of the colony. Here the resistance was led by two eminent leaders of the colony,
the veteran assistant governor, Captain James Cudworth, and Timothy Hatherley, a member
of the general court for twenty years. Hatherley was summarily expelled from the general court
and disfranchised by the province, but the town of Situate stubbornly re-elected him
as a deputy. The general court, however, refused to seat the intractable Hatherley.
Cudworth in his turn was dismissed from his high post as one of Plymouth's two commissioners
of the United Colonies. Bitterly, Cudworth denounced the actions. Our civil powers are
so exercised in matters of religion and conscience that we have no time to affect anything that
tends to the promotion of the civil wheel.
Cudworth also attacked the establishment of a state religion as well as the persecution
of the Quakers.
But even Cudworth's protest was met in the familiar way.
He was dismissed as assistant governor, deprived of his military command, and disfranchised.
This treatment of Cudworth only swelled the tide of protest.
The frightened magistrates decided to appoint sound and reliable pilgrims in each town to
argue with the Quakers and convert them. But this policy turned out disastrously. Deacon
John Cook, officially appointed to spy upon heretics, was himself converted to the Baptist
faith and excommunicated by the pilgrims. A much more telling blow to the authorities
was the case of Isaac Robinson. Robinson, son of the beloved Reverend John Robinson,
the founder of the Pilgrim Sect, who had never left Leiden, Holland for America, was appointed
the official Convincer at Sandwich. Instead, the would-be converter was himself converted
and became a Quaker. The embittered magistrates denounced Robinson for sundry scandals and
and Falsehoods dismissed him from all his offices and deprived him of his rights as
a free man.
In the end, the Quakers emerged victorious, as they did in Massachusetts Bay.
Town after town in Plymouth Colony eventually took it upon itself to grant full civil rights
to the Quakers.
The death of old Governor Prince in 1673 brought the more liberal, younger generation to the
and the new governor, Major Josiah Winslow, restored all civil rights to the Quakers and their supporters.
James Cudsworth, too, was renamed assistant governor. The old persecuting zeal in Plymouth Colony was ended.