Critical Skills

A federal tax assessed by counting the windows of a man’s house. Eighteen neighbors arrested. A marshal holding them in a Bethlehem tavern. A Continental Army veteran who put on his old uniform and rode at the head of four hundred armed men to demand them back. Two treason trials. Two death sentences. A gallows scheduled. Against the unanimous advice of his cabinet, President John Adams signed a pardon two days before the hanging — and lost the presidency over it. The justice who tried to hang John Fries is remembered today as the only Supreme Court justice ever impeached. The President who saved him is on the currency. The auctioneer who stood at the tavern door and started all of it is a roadside marker in Quakertown. He carried the line between riot and war from a tavern door into constitutional law. John Fries needs to be remembered.

Her hands bound. Her feet bound. A handkerchief over her face. The noose on her neck. Two companions already hanged in front of her. Then the reprieve — staged in advance by the Governor of Massachusetts so she would, in his words, feel the chill of death and get some sense in her head. Seven months later, Mary Dyer sailed back to Boston. She had told the General Court she would return if they refused to repeal the law. They refused. She came back to be hanged on the statute she was trying to overturn. The colony obliged her. Fourteen months after her death, the law was dead too. She carried religious liberty in colonial America from a claim the Crown would eventually have to decide into a fact the Crown could no longer ignore. Mary Dyer needs to be remembered.