The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, Haynes, Bradford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peters, Ludlow, Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others less conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to the adjacent colonies. The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping in, and a loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social order. The Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox features of the Congregational system as determined up to that time, gave place to the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its rise to the coming to maturity of the second generation, the children of the first settlers, now admitted to membership but not to full communion--a wide departure from the original purpose of the founders. Rhode Island continued to be the colony of separatism and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist, Anabaptist, and religious anarchist of the William Harris type found place, though not always peace. Cotton Mather later said there had never been "such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there have been in that colony."
The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as they did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and roused the orthodox colonies to deny admission to ranters, heretics, Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their books as "corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous," flung these people into prison with every mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and emissaries of Satan. The first-comers were sent back to Barbados whence they came; the next were returned to England; those of 1657 were scourged; those of 1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous year, were mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under the harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary Dyer, though reprieved and banished, persisted in returning to her death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in New Haven, flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made almost no impression; only in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern Long Island did they find a resting place.