Dragged at the cart's tail

What happened

In August 1657 Robert Hodgson, a young English Quaker, landed at New Amsterdam and went out among the English towns of Long Island to preach. At Hempstead a magistrate had him seized, and Governor Peter Stuyvesant sent the sheriff with a guard of twelve musketeers to bring him in. They took his Bible and papers, pinioned him, and arrested two women for giving him shelter. The women were put in a cart, and Hodgson was tied to the back of it and hauled nearly thirty miles over bad roads and through the woods to New Amsterdam, most of the way in the dark. He arrived much bruised and torn. Rothbard tells the rest: Hodgson, "for the crime of being a Quaker, was fined 600 guilders and sentenced to two years at hard labor" (CiL, pp. 308-309), without being allowed to speak in his own defense. He refused to work and refused to pay. He was chained to a wheelbarrow, beaten with a tarred rope, hung up and whipped, and at last released to go to Rhode Island. Rothbard notes that the persecution did what it did in New England and multiplied the Quakers. Then the Company in Amsterdam overruled Stuyvesant and ordered that "the consciences of men ought to remain free and unshackled." The English towns of Long Island had made freedom of conscience stick in New Netherland.