Tag:

Taunton Mass.

The 1790 Census: New England by the Numbers

Just after the American Revolution, Gilmanton, N.H., ranked as the 30^th biggest municipality in the United States. The Lakes Region town was bigger than Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Trenton, Louisville, Cincinnati and Savannah, according to the 1790 census.

New Hampshire, in fact, had four towns among the 30 largest in the country, including Londonderry, Portsmouth and Rochester. Only four New England states belonged to the union then, but they were home to 19 of the 30 biggest cities and towns in the country. Back then, one in four U.S. citizens lived in New England.

The region’s power and influence in the early Republic can be inferred from the 1790 census, the first taken in the United States. It didn’t last long. The westward migration had already begun in 1787, from a minister’s house in Ipswich, Mass. As people migrated west for land and opportunity, new cities and towns began to eclipse those of New England.

Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn served as U.S. Marshal for Maine during the 1790 census. Painting by Gilbert Stuart.

The 1790 Census

In 1790, there were 93,000 people living in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including the District of Maine. A year after the federal government took the 1790 census, 86,000 Vermonters officially joined New England.

Massachusetts alone held nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, and Boston ranked as the third biggest municipality. Only New York and Philadelphia had more people. Census takers counted Boston’s population at 18,320 — about the size of contemporary Hopkinton, Mass.

Jonathan Jackson served as U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts during the 1790 census.

Today, only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population lives in Massachusetts, and Boston has slipped to the 24th biggest city.

Census taking in 1790 was an inexact science. Congress ordered U.S. marshals to take it. Each state had only one marshal, so the marshal appointed assistants to count people. The 650 enumerators had nine months to collect the data and post the results in two public places. Then they stored the results in the federal courthouse.

The U.S. marshals in New England included Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn for Maine, Jonathan Jackson for Massachusetts, John Parker for New Hampshire, William Peck for Rhode Island and Philip Bradley for Connecticut.

Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both questioned whether the census could count everyone. During a time of difficult travel and communication, the enumerators probably missed some people. And they deliberately missed all Indians not taxed, for example.

In the end, the census takers managed to count just under 4 million people.

A pitcher commemorating the 1790 census

Urban vs. Rural

The vast majority of Americans lived in the country in 1790. New Hampshire was one of the more urban states, with more towns in the Top 30 rankings than Connecticut, which only had New Haven and Hartford. New Hampshire, in fact, had more municipalities in the Top 30 than Pennsylvania, which had almost three times the population.

Today, New Hampshire’s biggest city – Manchester – ranks 259^th, the only New Hampshire municipality among the top 300 U.S. cities.

Massachusetts was similarly urban, though some towns had not yet started to grow into cities – Worcester, Springfield and Fall River, for example, were all smaller than Gilmanton, N.H. Lowell didn’t even exist.

But the towns in Massachusetts that ranked in the top 30 might surprise you. In ascending order, they were Plymouth, Beverly, New Bedford, Taunton, Middleborough, Sherburne, Newburyport, Gloucester, Marblehead and Salem. Salem was bigger than Richmond, Va., and Albany, N.Y. Middleborough, Mass., was also bigger than Albany.

New England, in fact, had five of the 10 largest urban places in the United States: Boston, Salem, Mass.; Newport, R.I.; Providence, R.I., and Marblehead, Mass.

Connecticut had a significantly more rural character then than it does now. New Hampshire’s population was denser, especially along the southern border. The Connecticut towns of Stamford, Waterbury and Danbury had fewer people than Gilmanton. Bridgeport, now Connecticut’s biggest city, wouldn’t incorporate for another 30 years.

Westward Ho!

The center of the U.S. population has steadily moved west and slightly south, as people migrated and new states joined the union. New England’s presence steadily declined.

Ten years after the 1790 census, only 15 New England cities ranked in the top 30, despite having added Vermont. And in 1820, New England had just 13 of the biggest cities and towns.

In 1790, Massachusetts had 9.7 percent of the U.S. population. Twenty years later it had only 6.5 percent, as four states had joined the union. And in 229 years, the Bay State has slipped from fourth to 15^th place.

Gilmanton has grown a little from its base of 2,613 in 1790, when it had an ironworks and a half-dozen villages and parishes. In 2017, 3,734 lived in the town. But Gilmanton never again appeared on the list of the top 30 cities and towns in the United States.

For a list of the Top 30 cities, click here.

This story was updated in 2021.

0 comment 495 views

Elizabeth Poole, the Puritan Who Founded Taunton, Mass.

Elizabeth Poole left the comforts of her family manor house in England to join the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony.

Plaque depicting Elizabeth Poole

She was 48, unmarried, rich and well-connected. Her family had come to England with William the Conqueror. King James I knighted her father, and Queen Elizabeth I knighted her maternal grandfather, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer.

John Winthrop called Elizabeth, a devout Puritan, “a gentlewoman, an ancient maid.”

Elizabeth then decided she wanted to convert Native Americans to Christianity. She would become the first woman to found a town in the Americas.

Foundress of Taunton. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Elizabeth Poole

Elizabeth Poole left England on April 22, 1637 on the Speedwell with two friends, 14 servants, goods and 20 tons of salt for preserving fish. She also brought a Geneva Bible, which remained in her family for three centuries.

A sister and a brother, William, also migrated to Plymouth Colony. William and his family had probably already arrived when Elizabeth got there. Another sister married the Rev. Nicholas Street, one of the first ministers in Taunton.

Soon after she arrived, Elizabeth Poole bought a large tract of land in a settlement called Cohanett from Massasoit. A few Pilgrims had already settled there.

Winthrop wrote that she “endured much hardship, and lost much cattle.”

By the beginning of 1639, there were seven freemen in the settlement, probably with their families and servants and possibly others.

The ancestral home of Elizabeth Poole

On March 3, 1639, Taunton was incorporated as a town. Within four years, 54 men between the age of 16 and 64 living in Taunton. A meetinghouse, the First Parish Church, was built on Church Green in 1640. In 1652, Elizabeth helped found an ironworks, one of the first in North America, on the Two Mile River.

Piety, Liberality, Sanctity of Manners

Elizabeth Poole died at the age of 65. She is buried in Taunton, and her gravestone reads:

Here rest the remains of Elizabeth Poole, a native of Old England, of good family, friends and prospects, all which she left in the prime of her life, to enjoy the religion of her conscience, in this distant wilderness; a great proprietor of the township of Taunton, a chief promoter of its settlement, and its incorporation in 1639-40; about which time she settled near this spot, and having employed the opportunity of her virgin state in piety, liberality, and sanctity of manners, died May 21, 1664, aged 65.

The Bible went back to her family, whose descendants of lived in the Shute-Barton Manor House until 2009. Then it became a National Trust property.

In 1950, the family sold her Bible to a collector from Northern Ireland. It was then scheduled to be auctioned on Jan. 10, 2023, in Belfast.

According to the auctioneer, “The Bible, because of its historic importance, is expected to attract much attention and is valued at between £5000-10,000. ”

This story last updated in 2023.

3 comments 2k views

Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Elizabeth Buffum Chace belonged to old and distinguished Rhode Island families, but she was distrusted and shunned because of her ardent opposition to slavery.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace

Her ancestor Daniel Gould came from England and settled in Newport in 1637. He became a member of the Society of Friends and married the daughter of John Coggeshall, the first president of the Aquidneck Colony who was also a Quaker.

Newport, which is on Aquidneck Island, was a slave market. Between 1709 and 1807, Newport merchants sponsored more than 900 voyages to Africa and brought more than 100,000 slaves to the Americas.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace had reason to believe her Quaker ancestors ‘were somewhat implicated in the African slave trade.’

Quakers couldn’t sanction the practice, though, and by 1727 began to speak out against the slave trade. In 1780, New England Quakers abolished slavery among its members.

An Abolitionist Is Born

Elizabeth Buffum was born on Dec. 9, 1806, in Smithfield, R.I., to Arnold Buffum and Rebecca Gould Buffum.

She described how she came to be an ardent abolitionist in her book, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences, which she wrote at the age of 85.

When her father was a child, she wrote, it wasn’t unusual for slaves from New York to flee to Rhode Island. A slave family escaped and lived on her grandfather’s farm. Arnold Buffum’s opposition to slavery grew stronger as he aged, and he became the first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Though Quakers officially opposed slavery, they viewed the Buffums with suspicion. They avoided the Buffums because they argued for the immediate abolition of slavery. Many Quakers believed in the gradual abolition of slavery, and that slaves should go to African colonies.

Quaker ministers urged Elizabeth to keep quiet. Her Quaker brother-in-law told her slaves shouldn’t be free because, “I shouldn’t want to see a black man sitting on the sofa beside my daughter.”

The Chace house. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

At 23, she married Samuel Chace, the son of Oliver Chace, who founded several textile mills. Warren Buffett founded Berkshire Hathaway on the Chace mills. The Chaces were also an old Quaker family strongly opposed to slavery.

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace moved to Valley Falls, R.I. They then had 10 children after the first five died.

Jim Crow

The Chaces opened their home to abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Abby Kelley, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone.

Frederick Douglass

They didn’t just fight slavery, they battled racism. In her book, Elizabeth Buffum Chace described how they stood up to Jim Crow in Massachusetts. As she and her husband entered a railroad car in Taunton,

Samuel Rodman, an Anti-Slavery man from New Bedford, and a highly respectable, well-dressed colored man and his wife, from the same town, took seats therein also. The conductor came and ordered the colored people to leave the car. We all remonstrated, of course, but without avail. He called the superintendent, who peremptorily repeated the order. They got out quietly, and we did the same, (but not so quietly,) and retired to the waiting room, leaving the car empty.

The railroad officials added a car for the African-American couple, and the Chaces joined them. “We found them intelligent, agreeable companions,” she wrote.

Underground Railroad

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace also became conductors on the Underground Railroad as more and more people escaped slavery.

Often, she wrote, they were carried by small coastal vessels from Virginia at Norfolk or Portsmouth and carried to New England – Fall River, New Bedford and Cape Cod.

In Fall River, they’d find shelter with Nathaniel B. Borden and his wife — Elizabeth’s sister Sarah — and sent in a closed carriage at night,

…with Robert Adams, a most faithful friend as their conductor. Here we received them, and, after preparing them for the journey, my husband would accompany them a short distance, on the Providence and Worcester railroad, acquaint the conductor with the facts, enlist his interest in their behalf, and then leave them in his care, to be transferred at Worcester, to the Vermont road, from which, by a previous general arrangement, they were received by a Unitarian clergyman named Young, and sent by him to Canada, where they uniformly arrived safely.

She used to give them an envelope with her address on it so they could mail it from Toronto to let her know they’d arrived safely.

Midnight Visitors

They were once awakened in the middle of the night by a mother and her two boys. She had escaped slavery in Maryland, moved to Fall River and quietly earned a living as a laundress. A notorious slave-catcher started snooping around her neighborhood asking about her.

Her friends sent her to the Chace’s house in Valley Falls, where they awaited the arrival of her oldest son, who would bring their belongings.

We kept them three or four days, in hourly fear and expectation of the arrival of the slave-catcher; our doors and windows fastened by day as well as by night, not daring to let our neighbors know who were our guests, lest some one should betray them. We told our children, all, at that time, under fourteen years of age, of the fine of one thousand dollars, and the imprisonment of six months, that awaited us, in case the officer should come, and we should refuse to give these poor people up.

Finally, the 17-year-old son arrived with their belongings and money raised by their neighbors in Fall River.

Once, a light-skinned African-American stayed at their house for 10 days pretending to be a fugitive slave. He was actually an escaped burglar. The Chaces found him very well-mannered and entertaining.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Buffum Chace fought against racial discrimination in the schools and for women’s rights and prison reform.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace died on Dec. 12, 1899. Today , the Elizabeth Buffum Chace House in Warwick, R.I., shelters and aids victims of domestic violence.

Her son Arnold Buffum Chace became a famous mathematician and chancellor of Brown University. Her daughter, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, became a prominent author. Two of her grandchildren became renowned professors and another grandson was a U.S. Collegiate Tennis champion and is credited with bringing ice hockey to the United States.

This story about Elizabeth Buffum Chace was updated in 2023.

Image of Elizabeth Buffum Chace PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13709459.

5 comments 673 views

Samuel Danforth, Star-Gazing Puritan, Sees A ‘Herald of wrath to a secure and impenitent World,’ aka, A Comet

When a mighty comet streaked across the night sky in 1664, Samuel Danforth predicted a series of catastrophes for his fellow Puritans who lived in the howling wilderness of New England.

He even did it in some of the first verses published in the New World:

There, with long bloody Hair, a Blazing Star
Threatens the World with Famine, Plague & War :
To Princes, death ; to Kingdomes many crosses : To all Estates, Inevitable Losses …

Danforth, both an astronomer and minister, created the first known almanac in America. He also delivered sermons described as powerful, eloquent and tearful.

In a pamphlet published about the comet of 1664, Danforth wrote the Bible made the purpose of comets very clear: as signals of great and notable changes.

And bad things had already started to happen in New England.

Samuel Danforth

Samuel Danforth was born Oct. 17, 1626 in Framingham, England. He migrated with his father and five siblings to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. He studied astronomy at Harvard College. After graduation in 1643 he stayed on as a tutor and published almanacs in 1647, 1648 and 1649. Those are the earliest surviving almanacs in America.

Ordained a minister in 1650, he became pastor of the church in Roxbury, Mass.

In 1670, he delivered one of the most famous sermons in history, A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness, to the Massachusetts General Court.

Danforth, typical of the Puritans frightened by the frontier that crowded in on them, asked a question in the sermon. “What is it that distinguisheth New England from other Colonies and Plantations in America? ” The answer: They entered the “waste and howling wilderness” to “walk in the Faith of the Gospel with all good Conscience according to the Order of the Gospel, and your enjoyment of the pure Worship of God according to his Institution, without humane Mixtures and Impositions.”

Danforth was also a true product of the Puritan culture of condemnation. He rebuked tavern-goers when he saw them through his study window. When a young man named Benjamin Goad was hanged for having sex with a ‘lady horse’ in broad daylight, Danforth delivered a sermon justifying his execution as essential to preserving the church and society.

Comet of 1664

In the winter of 1664, a comet crossed the night sky and caught the attention of such European notables as Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton. Pepys, in his diary, recorded “mighty talk” about the comet, and the king and queen had stayed up to watch it. Ordinary people went into a frenzy, prophesizing awful events – which did happen. They included one of the coldest winters in history, the plague and the Great Fire of 1666.

In New England, Danforth couldn’t resist offering a theological interpretation to the comet in a pamphlet. He gave it the daunting title An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star; As it appeared in New-England in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and in the beginning of the 12th Moneth, 1664. Together with a Brief Theological Application thereof.

Though he lived in a howling wilderness, his conclusions about the comet conformed to contemporary scientific thought in Europe.

This Comet is not a new fixed Star, but a Planetick or Erratick Body, wandring up & down in the etherial firmament under the fixed stars.

The rest of it revealed pure Puritanical thinking. He wrote, for example,

The Holy Scriptures, which are the Authentick and un- erring Canon of truth, teach us to look at Comets, as Portentous and Signal of great and notable Changes.

Earthquake

Danforth also noted that an earthquake provided a similar warning four years earlier. The earthquake of 1663 caused some houses to be “rock’t like cradles” and might portend the “Lords shaking the foundations of our Churches and of our civil state.”

And he offered several examples of recent calamities: The death of Puritan ministers. Mr. John Norton, “translated into an higher Orb” and of whom New England was not worthy. Also the death of Samuel Stone, “the strength and glory of Connecticut” who “fell a sleep sweetly and placidly in the Lord.” (Stone was assistant to Thomas Hoooker, and Hartford was named for his home town.)

Their principal grain was turned into “an husk and rotteness” by “the sad Mildew and Blasting.”

A severe drought the previous summer burnt up their pastures, and early frosts “smote our Indian corn.”

He then concluded:

God forbid that any of us, should be Ασε΄ρες πλανη˜τας wandring Stars, Eccentrick and Erratick in our motions, as all Seducers and Impostors are for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

Samuel Danforth lived another 10 years, dying on died November 19, 1674 at the age of 48.

This story updated in 2021.

0 comment 730 views

Before Old Glory, There Was the Taunton Flag

The people of Taunton, Mass., celebrate the Taunton Flag with a friendly festival on their green every October. But when first raised on Oct. 21, 1774, the flag inspired an angry controversy.

The Taunton Flag

Taunton, Mass., was a hotbed of rebellious fervor. By the time the town raised the Taunton Flag, it had sent lawyer Robert Treat Paine to the First Continental Congress representing Massachusetts.

Six years earlier, Paine defended a 16-year-old slave named Bristol accused of murdering the sister of Dr. William McKinstry to gain his freedom. Paine lost the case and Bristol died on the gallows.

In 1774, Taunton’s Sons of Liberty ran Loyalists out of town. One of the last to go was McKinstry, though the Sons allowed his wife to stay behind.

The Taunton Flag

On Friday, October 21, 1774, patriotic Tauntonians erected an enormous liberty pole. On Monday, October 24, the Boston Evening Post reported the story:

We have just received the following intelligence from Taunton… A liberty pole 112 feet long was raised. Attached to it was a Union flag with the words Liberty and Union sewed on. The following lines were fixed to the pole:

Bird’s-eye view of the Taunton Green in 1875

CRESCIT AMOR PATRIAE QUE CUPIDO (The love of country and the desire for freedom)

Be it known to the present,
And to all future generations,
That the Sons of Liberty in Taunton
Fired with a zeal for the preservation of
Their rights as men, and as
American Englishmen,
And prompted by a just resentment of
The wrongs and injuries offered to the
English colonies in general, and to
This Province in particular,
Through the unjust claims of
A British Parliament and the
Machiavellian policy of a British ministry,
Have erected this monument or Liberty standard,
As a testimony of their fixed resolution
To preserve sacred and inviolate
Their birthrights and charter rights,
And to resist even unto blood
All attempts for their subversion or abridgement.
Born to be free, we spurn the knaves who dare
For us the chains of slavery to prepare;
Steadfast in freedom’s cause, we’ll live and die,
Unawed by statement; foes to tyranny,
But if oppression brings us to our graves,
And marks us dead, she ne’er shall mark us slaves.

Liberty and Union

The flag, also known as the Liberty and Union Flag, symbolized revolt against British oppression. The Evening Post story inspired flags with similar mottoes throughout the colonies.

One person unimpressed with the Taunton Flag was the wife of Dr. William McKinstry. According to Two Men of Taunton: In the Course of Human Events, 1731-1829, Mrs. McKinstry,

…took no pains to conceal her contempt for the Patriots. Her neighbors endured her scorn for a while; then, one morning, these women of the New England Taunton, jealous because Mistress McKinstry was still enjoying her afternoon tea, proceeded to her house on High Street (as the women marched in Old English Taunton during Monmouth’s Rebellion), dragged her from her fireside, marched her down to the Green, and around the Liberty Pole in humiliating token of allegiance.

Every year, Taunton holds a Liberty and Union Festival in October to commemorate the raising of the Taunton Flag. In 2022, the festival was scheduled for October 15-16. It did not include humiliating forced marches in front of the Taunton Flag.

Dr. William McKinstry appears in an earlier post on Oct. 19, 2015. Find out why by clicking here. This story last updated in 2022.

6 comments 787 views

Way More Than the Scarlet Letter: Puritan Punishments

In their rigid enforcement of community standards, New England’s Puritan punishments often often included the bilbo, the cleft stick, the brand, the ear crop and the letter, scarlet and otherwise.

Puritan punishments included whippings.

In Massachusetts, New Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven Colony, the Puritans cared more for moral behavior and clean living than for property rights. They took their laws from the Bible, rather than English precedent. Consequently, Puritan punishments tended to be doled out less for larceny and more for blasphemy, drunkenness, fornication and smoking.

Puritan Punishments

The Puritans never incarcerated prisoners for a long time. They accepted capital punishment, though, for 12 crimes, including blasphemy, counterfeiting and witchcraft.

Puritan law recognized the principle that no one should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. They also explicitly limited government power. Puritan law prohibited unlawful search and seizure, double jeopardy and compulsory self-incrimination. It also guaranteed bail, grand jury indictment and trial by jury.

Rhode Island, though, proved an exception, taking nearly all of its laws from English precedent.

The Bilbo

From Alice Morse Earle's 'Curious Punishments of Bygone Days'

Alice Morse Earle, in her ‘Curious Punishments of Bygone Days,’ catalogued Puritan punishments.

The first Puritans took with them the bilbo as a way to punish sinners and lawbreakers. According to Alice Morse Earle, the Spanish named it after its place of origin — Bilboa, Spain. They shipped bilboas with the Spanish Armada in anticipation of all the English prisoners they would have to shackle.

Earle explains,

They were a simple but effective restraint; a long heavy bolt or bar of iron having two sliding shackles, something like handcuffs, and a lock. In these shackles were thrust the legs of offenders or criminals, who were then locked in with a padlock. Sometimes a chain at one end of the bilboes attached both bilboes and prisoner to the floor or wall.

In 1629, the carousing, fun-loving colonist Thomas Morton had the effrontery to erect a Maypole. He did it right under the noses of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony. Myles Standish led a raiding party, arrested Morton and put him in the bilbo.

The Indians, reported Morton, came and looked at him and wondered what it all meant.

The Puritans eventually replaced bilboes with wooden stocks.

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne enshrined in literature the Puritan punishment of ordering a sinner to wear a scarlet ‘A.’ But the Puritans had other letters of shame. In 1656 a woman received a sentenced to be whipped at Taunton and Plymouth, fined and forever ‘to have a Roman B cutt out of ridd (red) cloth & sewed to her vper garment on her right arm in sight.’ The ‘B’ stood for blasphemy.

William Bacon in 1636 had to spend an hour in the pillory wearing in public view a great ‘D’ — for drunkenness.

In 1633, Robert Coles had to stand with a white sheet of paper on his back with the word ‘Drunkard’ written in ‘great letters’ on it, and stand as long as the court ordered ‘for abuseing himself shamefully with drinke.’ The next year, Coles received a more severe sentence: He had to wear a D made of red cloth on a white background for a year.

Massachusetts magistrates reproved anyone who interrupted a preacher during worship. If they did it twice, they had to pay a fine of five pounds, stand on a block four feet high with a sign in capital letters, ‘WANTON GOSPELLER.’

Wickednesse

Puritan punishments in Connecticut were even tougher. In 1650 the general court tried a man in Hartford for ‘contemptuous carriages’ against the church and minister. He had to stand upon a four-foot high block or stool on Lecture Day with a paper fixed on his breast with the words, ‘AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNNER OF GOD’S HOLY ORDINANCES.’ The purpose of his punishment: so others would ‘fear and be ashamed of breakinge out in like wickednesse.’

When Joan Andrews of York, Maine, sold a firkin of butter with stones in it, she had to stand in a public place. She also had a description of her cheating ‘written in capitall letters and pinned upon her forehead.’ Around 1650 Ann Boulder of Boston stood in irons for a half hour with a sign pinned to her that said, “PUBLICK DESTROYER OF PEACE.”

Cleft Stick

Slanderers, scolds and liars were liable to have a cleft stick – a stick split at the end – put onto their tongues while they stood in a public place.

In 1639 in Salem, Mass., two men got drunk and lied about it. They had to pay fines and stand by the meeting house door with a paper on their hats ‘subscribed for gross premeditated lyinge.’ Authorities put cleft sticks on their tongues.

Men, women and even children could have their tongues ‘thrust into the cleft stick.’ In Providence, teachers used a ‘whispering stick’ as a punishment for whispering. Disciplinarians tied a wooden gag with holes in it onto a child’s tongue. Many children had a cleft stick placed on their tongues ‘for ill words or untimely words in school,’ wrote Earle.

Branding and Maiming

Puritan branding, from 'Curious Punishments of Bygone Days'

Another of the savage Puritan punishments.

Branding and maiming were common Puritan punishments, especially for Quakers.

Quaker George Bishop gave an account of a Quaker’s treatment in New Haven in New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord.

The Drum was Beat, the People gather’d, Norton was fetch’d and stripp’d to the Waste, and set with his back to the Magistrates, and given in their View Thirty-six cruel Stripes with a knotted cord, and his hand made fast in the Stocks where they had set his Body before, and burn’d very deep with a Red-hot Iron with H. for Heresie.

Massachusetts banned Quakers, and the Puritan punishments for returning were painful. Colonial records described in 1657 what should happen to Quakers who came back:

A Quaker if male for the first offense shall have one of his ears cut off; for the second offense have his other eare cutt off; a woman shalbe severely whipt; for the third offense they, he or she, shall have their tongues bored through with a hot iron.

Offenders could try to have their Puritan punishments mitigated by seeking the intervention of clergy. A counterfeiter in Salem, condemned to death, pleaded for a clergyman to help him. As a result, he got only a brand on his hand.

Mary Dyer received the most extreme of the Puritan punishments for returning to the colony after banishment. She was hanged in Boston in 1660.

Abel Buell

Abel Buell of Killingworth, Conn., got caught minting money on homemade plates. Historian John Warner Barber described the price he paid:

The tip only of Buell’s ear was cropped off: it was held on his tongue to keep it warm till it was put on the ear again, where it grew on. He was branded on the forehead as high up as possible. This was usually done by a hot iron in the form of a letter designating the crime, which was held on the forehead of the criminal till he could say the words “God save the king.”

Buell later printed the first map of the United States of America.

This story about Puritan punishments was updated in 2022.

33 comments 3.7k views

Newer Posts

Older Posts