Free Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll Page A

Quakers, from extravagant fines and whippings to slicing off their ears and slitting their tongues. In October 1658, Massachusetts passed a law condemning them to death if they even entered the state.
    Nine months later, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson did just that, intentionally challenging the law. They were promptly tossed into prison. When Mary Dyer visited them, she, too, was jailed. William Dyer went ballistic, excoriating the magistrates by letter for mistreating his wife. “You have done more in persecution in one year than the worst bishops [back in England] did in seven,” he raged. Although William Dyer no longer lived in Massachusetts, he still commanded respect and was able to secure Mary’s release. Stephenson and Robinson were freed as well.
    But precisely as the Rhode Island authorities had forewarned in their September 1657 letter to the United Colonies, the draconian laws only served as a magnet to the Quakers. Stephenson and Robinson marched right back into Massachusetts and were arrested, and Mary Dyer left Newport for Boston to offer moral support. Once again, she was incarcerated. All three received death sentences.
    On October 27, 1659, Dyer, Stephenson, and Robinson were led to the gallows. Stephenson went first. “Be it known unto all this day that we suffer not as evil-doers, but for conscience sake,” he said when the noose was draped over his head. After a final prayer was uttered by thelocal minister, Stephenson went off the platform. The rope snapped straight; his body tensed, shuddered, and then went limp.
    Robinson followed.
    Dyer was saved for last so she could watch the other two die. Her legs and arms were bound, and the noose was placed around her neck. Suddenly a voice cried out, “Stop! For she is reprieved.” Unbeknownst to Dyer, Endicott had conceded to giving her one last chance, after first giving her a memorable scare. Dyer was untied, taken down from the gallows, and escorted out of Boston.
    Far from being shaken by the experience, Dyer was furious that she’d been spared while her fellow Quakers had been killed. Seven months later, on May 31, 1660, Governor Endicott and Dyer were once more face-to-face.
    “Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” he asked, incredulous.
    “I am the same Mary Dyer that was here at the last General Court,” she said.
    Endicott had lost all patience. “Tomorrow,” he told her, “[you will] be hanged till you are dead.”
    “This is no more than what you said before,” Dyer replied.
    “But now it is to be executed.”
    The next morning she again calmly approached the gallows on Boston Common. The noose was tightened. A minister placed a handkerchief over her face so that the assembled crowd would not witness her final, involuntary contortions. A signal was given, and she dropped. Her neck broke the instant the rope went taut, and Mary Dyer was dead.
    Dyer was not the last Quaker to be martyred; one year later, a man named William Leddra was hanged. Influenced by a prominent Quaker in England named Edward Burrough, King Charles II ordered that the executions stop.
    A U.S. Naval Hospital stands where Dyer’s farm used to be in Newport, just off Third Street. Outside the hospital’s entrance, a security officer asks me the nature of my visit. I describe my search for unmarkedsites and Mary Dyer’s connection to the place. He smiles and from out of nowhere asks: “Okay, history guy. Where’d the name Jeep come from?” (I’m thrown at first but then realize that my latest rental car is a Jeep, so the question isn’t totally irrelevant.)
    His tone is playful, but for a moment I’m afraid that if I fail to answer correctly, he might actually turn me away, like the Sphinx blocking passage to Thebes. If memory serves, there are a couple of theories about the etymology of Jeep, but I’m so caught off-guard, I can’t recall a single one of them.
    “C’mon,” he says, “it’s short for ‘general purpose,’ or