[Illustration: Sign-board of Pembroke Tavern.]
For some years the Quakers never were absent from the whipping-post. They were trying enough, preaching everywhere, and on all occasions, yet never willing to keep silent when the Puritan preacher held forth; not willing, even, to keep away from the Puritan meeting. They interrupted these meetings in most offensive ways, and were promptly whipped. One poor Quakeress, Lydia Wardwell, "a young tender chaste person," but almost demented with religious excitement, was taken forcibly from the Ipswich meeting-house and "tyed to the fence-post of the Tavern," and then sorely lashed.
The pillory sometimes took the place of the stocks. In enduring this punishment the culprit stood on a sort of bench, and his head and hands were confined in holes cut in a hinged or divisible board. Lecture day was often chosen as the day of punishment; as Hawthorne said, "it was a day of public shame, the day on which transgressors received their reward of ignominy." Thus Nicholas Olmstead, sentenced to the pillory in Hartford "next Lecture day," was "sett on a lytle before the beginning and to stay on a lytle after the end." In Maryland offenders were "nayled by both eares to the Pillory, 3 Nailes in each Eare, and the Nailes to be slit out." Samuel Breck says that in 1771, in Boston, men and women were constantly seen pilloried, exposed to insults and jeers, and pelted with filth and garbage.
The 18th of September, 1755, was a great day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A negro woman named Phyllis was then and there burned to death--in punishment for her share in the murder of her master. The diary of a Boston gentleman still exists which shows us how he passed the day; cheerfully drinking punch from tavern to tavern, and cheerfully watching the hanging of the man-murderer and the burning of the woman. The day's record ends: "Went home, went to bed and slept and woke up very finely refreshed." Criminals were preached at in public, read their dying confessions in public, were carted through the streets in open tumbrils, and were hanged in public. On all those occasions the taverns flowed with good cheer and merry meetings, for people came for many miles to witness the interesting sight, and many were the happy reunions of friends.