hat consumed
their tracts was to be a spark that lighted a great conflagration. When
the General Court met, it passed a long and incendiary law against the
coming of the Quakers, telling of their "divilish opinions," and
providing for the fining and whipping of offenders. This did not keep
away the detested sect, who believed that they were intrusted by God
with a message to the world and would not be silenced. There were among
them many devoted men; but there were yet more devoted women, and the
second, like the first, "intrusion" of the Quakers was by women, Ann
Burden and Mary Dyer. In August, 1657, arrived a pioneer in Mary Clark,
who boldly proclaimed that she came with "a message from the Lord," and
who found her welcome in the receipt of twenty stripes and banishment.
Salem began to be known as a stronghold of the Quakers or at least of
their admirers, and among others one Cassandra Southwick, an old woman,
was imprisoned for sympathy extended to the Friends. Perhaps there was
other reason as well, for under the date of March 9, 1660, we find that
"Major Hawthorne, at dinner with the Gov. and Magistrates at a Court of
Assistants, said that at Salem there was a woman, called Cassandra
Southwick, that said she was greater than Moses, for Moses had seen God
but twice, and his back, and she had seen Him three times, and face to
face, instancing the places." Probably Cassandra--ominous name!--was a
fanatic who had become insane from a sense of self-importance, as was
too often the case with religious enthusiasts, and had made herself
obnoxious to the powers of the colony by her claims. We hear no more of
her after her imprisonment; but she too was typical of a certain phase
of New England femininity in those days.

It is in Mary Dyer, however, that we find the true type of the New
England Quakeress--a type which persists in more than one aspect of the
American woman. Believing that she was sent by God with His words to
mankind, she would not be hushed from uttering them. Sent away from
Boston on her first appearance there, she soon returned and preached the
"infamous" doctrines of her sect--"peace and goodwill toward men." In
the interval between her visits the offence of which she was guilty in
preaching the creed of the Quakers had been made capital--one of the
deepest blots that rest upon even this speckled period of New England
history. Mary Dyer felt that in returning to Boston to preach she was
going to her deat