The Persecution of Quakers
Quakers Arrested in Salem
Jul 17, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion
In June of 1658, a town meeting was held at the ship Tavern in Salem to discuss the latest Quaker problem. Recently, the town constables had raided the house of one Nicholas Phelps. There, they had interrupted a Quaker meeting in progress. The constables arrested nineteen of those attending the meeting and tossed them into jail to await trial the following week.
Quaker Threatens Parliament at Gun Point
In discussing the Quaker problem perhaps a particular incident in London, that supposedly involved a Quaker, was brought up. It seems that a Quaker had entered Parliament with a gun, saying that: "his inner light had commanded him to kill everyone there." In view of the Quakers' abhorrence to violence, one can not help but question whether the possibly deranged fellow was truly a Quaker. Perhaps those who were unsympathetic to the Quaker cause assumed that surely the dangerous fellow must have been a Quaker to have attempted such a fool stunt.
In Massachusetts the authorities verbally degraded the Quakers by insisting they had "free morals" and that any actually believing Quaker woman was nothing more than a "Quaking slut."
Quaker Deportees
The June 1658 incident of a secret Quaker meeting being held in or around Salem was not the first clash the Puritans had had with the Quakers in Massachusetts. Two years earlier, in 1656, a Captain George Corwin discovered two Quakers aboard his ship, the Swallow, that had at the time been anchored in Boston Harbor. The two Quaker "heretics" had been arrested at once, inspected for marks indicating that they were witches, and then sent back to the ship to await deportation.
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