essels carried planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and
exchanged them for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and
commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists.

The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton,
Hooker, Haynes, Bradford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger
Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peters, Ludlow,
Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others less
conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to the adjacent colonies.
The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping in, and a
loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social order. The
Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox features of the
Congregational system as determined up to that time, gave place to the
Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its rise to the coming to
maturity of the second generation, the children of the first settlers,
now admitted to membership but not to full communion--a wide departure
from the original purpose of the founders. Rhode Island continued to be
the colony of separatism and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist,
Anabaptist, and religious anarchist of the William Harris type found
place, though not always peace. Cotton Mather later said there had never
been "such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there
have been in that colony."

The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as they
did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and
John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and
roused the orthodox colonies to deny admission to ranters, heretics,
Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their books as "corrupt,
heretical, and blasphemous," flung these people into prison with every
mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in
church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and
emissaries of Satan. The first-comers were sent back to Barbados whence
they came; the next were returned to England; those of 1657 were
scourged; those of 1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous
year, were mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under
the harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary
Dyer, though reprieved and banished, persisted in returning to her
death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in N