MASSACHUSETTS, Persecution in, Sylvester Hassell Bonds and imprisonment and scourging attended the Baptists in Massachusetts. A few came over with the first emigrants, but not making their sentiments public, were not molested for several years.
In 1635 Roger Williams was banished, and, leaving Massachusetts, founded Rhode Island. In 1639 several Baptists were fined, or imprisoned, or disenfranchised, or threatened with banishment (different penalties being inflicted on different ones), for attempting to found a church in Weymouth, a town about fourteen miles southeast of Boston. In 1644 a poor man named Painter, in Boston, was tied up and whipped for refusing to have his infant child baptized.
In July, 1651, upon the request of an aged Baptist, of Lynn, named William Witter, who was not able to travel and visit his church at Newport, Rhode Island, three members of the church, John Clark, Obadiah Holmes, and a John Crandall, came to Lynn, Massachusetts, twelve miles from Boston, to hold meeting with him. While Mr. Clarke was preaching from Revelation 3:10, two constables entered the house and arrested Clarke, Holmes and Crandall; and the Court sentenced Clarke to pay a fine of twenty pounds, Holmes thirty pounds, and Crandall five pounds, or be publicly whipped.
All conscientiously refused to pay the fine, and were sent back to prison. Some of Mr. Clarke’s friends paid his fine without his consent. Mr. Crandall was released on a promise to appear at the next Court. Mr. Holmes was kept in prison at Boston until September, when, his fine not having been paid, he was brought out publicly and severely whipped, receiving thirty stripes with a three-corded whip, so that he could take no rest for some weeks except as he lay on his knees and elbows, not being able to suffer any other part of his body to touch the bed.
While he was undergoing the cruel strokes, the Lord gave him a more glorious manifestation of his presence than ever before, so that he scarcely felt the outward pain, and he told the magistrate that they had struck him as with roses, and he prayed the Lord not to lay this sin to their charge.
Warrants were issued against thirteen persons, whose only crime was showing some emotions of sympathy towards this innocent sufferer; but eleven escaped, and, while the other two were preparing to receive ten lashes apiece, some friends paid their fines.
Notwithstanding the Congregational persecutions, the Baptists increased in Massachusetts. A Baptist Church was formed in Boston in 1665, and for several years some of the members spent most of their time in courts and prisons. In 1643 the “Church of England” was established by law in Virginia. In 1653 Sir William Berkeley, royal governor of Virginia, strove, by whippings and brandings, to make the inhabitants of that colony conform to the Established “Church,” and thus drove out the Baptists and Quakers, who found a refuge in the Albemarle country of North Carolina, a colony which “was settled,” says Bancroft, “by the freest of the free, by men to whom the restraints of other colonies were too severe.” (Hassell’s History ppg 522, 523)