nothin Hooray! We Were Less Intolerant Than We… | New Haven Independent

Hooray! We Were Less Intolerant Than We Thought

Allan Appel Photo

In early New Haven plantation if a Quaker bothered us once, we whipped and expelled him or her. The second offense, we’d brand the offender’s hand with an H” for heretic.” Third time someone railed against clerical authority, that person get a second hand H” on the other hand. The fourth time the offender refused to hold his or her tongue, we’d bore a hole in it.

At least we didn’t hang people like they did in Massachusetts.

That was the law and the comparatively more tolerant view in New Haven. It makes us look better than the stereotype of ours being the strictest of the old Bible colonies” and Christian utopias planted in the new world.

That refreshing view emerged Saturday during a talk at the New Haven Museum before a crowd of 75 early local history buffs on the occasion of the city’s 375 birthday, the inspiration for various events all month with the big party on April 27.

Bremer at site of Theophilus Eaton’s house, 35 Elm St.

The speaker was Francis J. Bremer, professor emeritus of history at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. His subject was John Davenport, New Haven’s founding pastor. 

After his remarks, Bremer, who recently authored a new Davenport biography, led a tour of the Nine Squares that included the site of Davenport’s old manse, now Channel 8 on Elm at State Street.

One could imagine him [Davenport] being a 17th-century televangelist if had this technology,” Bremer quipped.

On the way to Davenport’s house, the group stopped at 35 Elm, where the civil leader of old New Haven, Theophilus Eaton, lived. Eaton’s wife Anne presented Davenport with one of the early challenges to religious toleration when in 1643, a brief five years after the founding, she walked out on his sermon because she believed there was no scriptural basis for baptizing infants.

N.H. Museum’s 1797 Amos Doolittle engraving of Davenport, based on earlier painting.

Instead of shutting her up, Davenport tried to prove his case in painstaking sessions of one-on-one Bible study. When Anne didn’t give in, he excommunicated her.

That was a comparatively mild punishment, Bremer asserted. It involved denial of permission to enter the church [although there was an excommunicants’ listening area, so to speak] and no social ostracism.

The church never judged nor did the civil authorities judge her position. New Haven had not followed the lead of Massachusetts in criminalizing [opposition to] infant baptism,” Bremer said.

The spirit of communication lives, as Channel 8 sits on Davenport’s house site.

He described Davenport as a man who didn’t pretend he knew it all but who could benefit from further learning. So Davenport was wiling to talk more rather than ban those who talked about it,” he said.

The same better record for New Haven obtained with Quakers, whom we preferred to expel rather than hang; and for witches, very few of whom, if any, New Haven authorities burned. Bremer said his research revealed that between 1638 and 1662 three women accused of witchcraft were acquitted and asked to leave town, although in Fairfield, then part of New Haven, two witches were executed.

People ended up feeling pretty good by the end of Saturday’s 45 minute tour. They returned to the museum for afternoon lectures on women and domestic life in John Davenport’s New Haven and the struggle for the founding of a college in town.

Bremer expressed some diplomatic frustration because his understanding of the city’s plans for the 375th anniversary, focused on an April 27 celebration, are going to be far more modest than the 300th and 350th. They will feature an open microphone, a laser light sculpture, and, when the history’s invoked, a focus on the Revolutionary period.

There are going to be [a lot of] fifes and drums. Well, they didn’t have a lot of those in the colonial era,” he said.

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