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Conceived in Liberty Companion · Volume I, chapter 29 · 1 June 1660

Suppressing Heresy: Massachusetts Persecutes the Quakers · The road to the gallows on Boston Neck, Boston

That none might hear her speak

Content note: The narrative describes Mary Dyer and other Quakers being hanged for their religious dissent.

A calm woman in a plain brown dress and white linen cap walks up a dusty marsh road between two drummers and soldiers carrying tall pikes, toward the blurred timber post of a gallows at the right edge of the picture.
Modern AI-assisted reconstruction. Boston Neck, 1 June 1660, nine in the morning. Mary Dyer walks to the gallows between two drummers and a guard of soldiers, and the drums beat so that none might hear her speak. Rothbard calls her hanging murder for religion and says the Quakers’ calm defiance broke the Puritan rulers’ bloody laws, and one more Quaker was hanged before the king stopped it. Chapter 29 of Conceived in Liberty.
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The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 29 for his account.

Mary Dyer had been banished from Massachusetts on pain of death for being a Quaker. In October 1659 she had stood on the gallows ladder with the rope on her neck while two friends were hanged beside her, been reprieved at the last moment and sent away. She came back anyway, to bear witness against the law. On 31 May 1660 the General Court sentenced her to hang the next morning at nine. On 1 June the marshal took her from the prison, and a band of soldiers with pikes and muskets marched her about a mile out to the gallows on Boston Neck, with drums beating before her and behind her “that none might hear her speak.” At the ladder she was offered her life if she would go home to Rhode Island. She refused, told the captain she had come to keep blood-guiltiness from the colony, and was hanged. Massachusetts hanged one more Quaker, William Leddra, in March 1661. Then a letter from the restored king stopped the executions, and the persecution failed. Rothbard calls the Quaker hangings “the tragic climax: murder” (CiL, p. 233) by an oligarchy of magistrates and ministers, and he sides with George Bishop, who wrote to those magistrates that their “bloody laws were snapped asunder by a woman” (p. 234).

About the reconstruction

This is an AI-assisted adaptive companion inspired by Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty. It draws on sources beyond the book and is not Rothbard’s original text or a condensation of it. Each scene identifies whether its narration combines sources or separates an account of the book from additional context.

The sources establish the event and accounts of it. The painting’s poses, expressions, lighting, and arrangement are artistic choices rather than a surviving visual record.

Suggest a correction to this companion scene. Notes about the original book are recorded separately.

Full sources and reuse information

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 29, pp. 227-240. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. IV, pt. 1, 1650-1660 (Boston, 1854): p. 3 (gallows order, 1650), pp. 60-61 (apparel law, 1651), pp. 383-384 (sentence, guard and reprieve, Oct 1659), p. 419 (sentence and warrant, 31 May 1660). Primary source
  3. Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England (London, 1661; EEBO-TCP A77941), account of Mary Dyer’s execution, read in the Famous Trials transcription. Primary source
  4. George Bishop, New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord (1661; abridged ed. London: T. Sowle, 1703; reprinted Philadelphia: Thomas William Stuckey, 1885); pages from the 1885 reprint: p. 119, pp. 200-201, pp. 450-451. Primary source
  5. Michael J. Canavan, ‘Where Were the Quakers Hanged in Boston?’, paper read 17 May 1910, Proceedings of the Bostonian Society (annual meeting, January 1911), pp. 37-49. Secondary source
  6. Horatio Rogers, Mary Dyer of Rhode Island: The Quaker Martyr That Was Hanged on Boston Common, June 1, 1660 (Providence: Preston and Rounds, 1896). Secondary source
  7. Amelia Mott Gummere, The Quaker: A Study in Costume (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1901), pp. 6-7, 30-31, 59-60. Secondary source
  8. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ‘Massachusetts Dress Ways’. Secondary source
  9. Pilgrim Hall Museum, ‘Arms & Armor’ (accessed 2026-09-29). Secondary source
  10. ‘Mary Dyer’, Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-29), for her birth about 1611 from the 1633 marriage record, citing Anderson, Sanborn and Sanborn, The Great Migration, vol. II (2001), p. 381. Secondary source
  11. ‘A cornucopia of myths: Pilgrims dressed in all black and wore buckles’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 Nov 2011, quoting former Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker. Secondary source

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0. External sources retain their own terms.

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