Two hours for a kiss

What happened

Rothbard describes the Puritan Sunday in Massachusetts: work, travel and levity were outlawed, and "kissing one's wife in public on a Sunday was also outlawed" (CiL, p. 168). His example is a sea captain who came home on a Sunday morning from a three-year voyage, kissed his wife on the doorstep, and was made to sit in the stocks for two hours for "lewd and unseemly behavior on the Sabbath Day." Alice Morse Earle, who collected the story in 1891, gives him a name and a year: Captain Kemble of Boston, 1656, a man of wealth. As the story has since been retold, he was Thomas Kemble of Charlestown and the year was 1653. The stocks were the ordinary furniture of a Massachusetts town: two heavy boards with holes for the ankles, hinged at one end and hasped at the other, set where everyone passing could see who was in them. Two hours there was the town's way of telling a man, and his neighbors, what the law thought of him. The same code compelled church attendance, fined absence, and sent the police through the towns to search for absentees. Rothbard's point is that the Puritans did not merely preach their morals; they enforced them with the state, and a husband's greeting at his own door became a crime.