Sarah Scott was born in Providence to Silvanus and Joanna Jenckes Scott in 1707. She was the great-granddaughter of
Richard Scott
, the first Rhode Islander to embrace the Quaker faith. Richard was married to Katherine Marbury, the sister of Anne Hutchinson, who challenged Puritan leaders in Massachusetts, was exiled to Rhode Island,
and later met a gruesome end in New Netherland. Their father Francis Marbury, through whom they descended
from Charlemagne, had similarly challenged and been persecuted by Anglican authorities in England.
The Bishop of London had called the young Francis “a very ass, an idiot, and a fool” for his complaints that the Church appointed ministers who were too
poorly trained to properly guide their flocks. Anne and Katherine’s mother descended from English kings beginning with William the Conqueror, so
Katherine’s great-granddaughter Sarah possessed a worthy ancestry.
Quakerism
flourished in Rhode Island due to the freedom of conscience provision of the Rhode Island Charter
granted to the colony in 1663 by King Charles II of England. The
tolerance of Quakerism attracted an even broader assortment of nonconformist and dissenters, some of whom were of the Quaker faith, to the Rhode Island
colony. Between 1660 and 1670, Rhode Island was the most important northern colony to the Quakers and Newport was the unrecognized center of Quakerism
until William Penn founded Pennsylvania. Before 1700, Quaker Friends may have constituted a majority of
the population of Rhode Island (about 5900 people at that time). With such a concentration of Quaker Friends and a policy of tolerance, Rhode Island
naturally became the site of increased Quaker political influence and missionary conversion.
Several Rhode Island Quakers became major political figures. By the 1770s, Quakers had been a political force in the colony for one hundred years. Sarah Scott married one of these influential Quakers on October 9, 1726. Stephen Hopkins was a celebrated Quaker political figure in Rhode Island, serving
as a colonial governor and Supreme Court justice. He was one of the two Rhode Island delegates to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
Hopkins was not the only Quaker to serve as governor of Rhode Island. Quaker governors also served during King Philip’s War and the Seven Years War, but their adoption of pacifism hurt their numbers in the
General Assembly and other public offices during and after the war. Not all Rhode Islanders were accepting of the Quakers. General Nathanael Greene complained of the Quaker education system because it bred
“Ignorance and Superstition instead of piety.” Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, also disliked the Quakers, even challenging a popular Quaker religious
figure to a debate while he was visiting Providence.
However, the religious toleration of Quakerism in Rhode Island and the bad treatment of Friends in neighboring New England colonies drove Quakers to reside
in Rhode Island where they could live without significant persecution. The United Colonies of New England (UCNE), which
consisted of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Haven and Plymouth Colonies, all had adopted anti-Quaker legislation. Sarah Scott’s great-grandmother
Katherine Marbury Scott was jailed in Massachusetts after a missionary trip. Rhode Island was used as a base of operation for New England Quaker
missionaries because of its religious toleration. In colonies with state churches, in New England and in the south, Quakers’ property was seized when they
refused to pay tithes to churches of other denominations. In Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Quakers were exempted from these types of taxes.
Also, in those states the Quakers were not persecuted for following their pacifist beliefs and abstaining from militia service. In 1658, the UCNE
petitioned Rhode Island to adopt anti-Quaker legislation, only to receive a reply from John Stanford,
Clerk of the General Assembly
, which stated Rhode Island had no intention of dropping the freedom of conscience provision from the charter. Quakerism flourished in Rhode Island and
continued to influence America’s development.
On October 9, 1726, Sarah Scott and Stephen Hopkins wed; both were nineteen years old. They were married in Scituate, the town where they would live much
of their lives before
moving to Providence
. Stephen Hopkins was soon to become a very important Rhode Islander, serving as the third, fifth and seventeenth Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court
(1751-55, 1755-56 and 1770-75, respectively) and as the twenty-eighth, thirtieth, thirty-second, and thirty-fourth Governor of Rhode Island (1755-1757, 1758-62 and 1663-65 and 1767-68 respectively). However,
Hopkins also was expelled by the Providence Meeting for owning a slave only a few years before 1776. It was said that his wife Sarah “was a kindly,
industrious, and frugal woman, a good mother and affectionate wife,” very much aligned with the teaching of the Quaker faith. Sarah bore seven children,
five of whom lived to adulthood. Two of her sons, John and Silvanus, died while abroad in
1753, the same year of their mother’s death. Sarah died in Providence and was interred in the North Burial Ground. Stephen joined her in 1785.
Zachary Pereira, Student at Rhode Island College
Further Reading:
Colket, Meredith B. The English Ancestry of Anne Marbury Hutchinson and Katherine Marbury Scott. Philadelphia: Magee Press, 1936.
Frost, William. The Quaker Family in Colonial America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.
Worrall, Arthur. Quakers in the Colonial Northeast. London: University Press of New England, 1980.
Hamm, Thomas. The Quakers in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.