Deborah Wilson and Salem Quakers
Quaker Burying Ground,
Essex Street
In 1629, approximately two hundred people (many of them Puritans
fleeing religious persecution in England) landed in Salem. Among
them were a number of ministers charged by the Puritan-dominated
Massachusetts Bay Company to establish a church. According to Salem
historian Jim McAllister, “Governor John Endicott had already
determined that the church would adopt the form used by the Pilgrims
in Plymouth; that is, it would be autonomous, answerable only to
its members rather than to a higher temporal authority. This was
a first step toward separation from the hierarchical Church of England.”58
Adherents of the Church of England were not tolerated in Salem,
and, as McAllister further wrote, “religious freedom, it was
clear to all, would not be a hallmark of the new ‘Bible Commonwealth.’”59
One victim of Salem’s intolerance of alternative religious
practices was Deborah Wilson, a Quaker who came to Salem with other
missionaries in the late 1650s. These missionaries and their local
followers posed a real threat to the Congregationalist-dominated
power structure because they believed in the inherent equality of
men and women, in a direct relationship with God, a lay leadership
form of church governance that included women, and they were against
violence of any kind. Massachusetts outlawed Quakerism in 1658 because
of the challenge Quakers posed to the established order of colonial
society, and it then became even more important for Quakers to “witness”
for their beliefs and to stand their ground despite beatings, maimings,
and worse. Mary Dyer, who was also a Quaker, was hanged on Boston
Common. Deborah Wilson, who had staged a protest against the church
by walking naked through Salem to make the point that the church
was “bare” of morals, received a different fate. She was
arrested, tried, and sentenced to walk through town “topless
and flogged up to 30 lashes.”60
The Constable in charge of meting out this sentence could not bring
himself to follow through. Instead, he and Deborah’s husband
Robert devised a plan. “Each time the constable snapped the
whip… her husband [who accompanied her] clapped his hat with
his hand to imitate the sound of the whip hitting flesh.”61
Notes
58. McAllister, From Naumkeag to Witch City,
5.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 13.
61. Ibid.
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