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30 HISTORY OF FALMOUTH.
was this that led him and his associates, who probably sympathized with him to commence a new settlement at this place. It has been said that the Quakers even here have suffered persecution -- that their property has been destrained and I have heard of a story of one Butler, a Friend, who was tied to a cart and whipped through the town. If such scenes have been enacted I cannot believe they were approved by the authorities of this town.* The leading settler here was actually disfranchised and was not restored to his rights until 1673, for the very reason that he interfered to protect the Quakers from persecution. In the absence of all allusions in the early records to such occurrences we must conclude that, if the Quakers were persecuted in this town, it must have been on the authority and in obedience to the laws of the General Court established at Plymouth and not as the result of a persecuting spirit on the part of our own inhabitants. There is no doubt that the first company of settlers here were all Congregationalists, but a meeting of Friends or Quakers was early established. Isaac Robinson had embraced some of the peculiarities of that sect before leaving Barnstable and it is not improbable that a knowledge of this fact, he being a man of great influence in the colony, led members of that sect, to look to this as a favourable place to establish their worship. From the records of the Friends' Monthly meetings, at Sandwich, it appears that a meeting for * -- since the above was written I have found on the records of the town, an application from the "persecuted Quaker Daniel Butler" above alluded to, to the town to be released from liabilities to the minister on account of his being a Friend This request was granted by the town, thus showing, I think, that if said Butler was persecuted it was not the result of town action
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