Obadiah Holmes

He died on 15 OCT 1682 in Newport, Rhode Island Colony, British Colonial America.

Pedigree Chart (3 generations)

Obadiah Holmes (1606-1682)	Robert Hulmes (1578-1640)	Robert Hulme (c1533-1605)
		Robert Hulme (c1533-1605)
		Alice Unknown (1557-1610)
		Alice Unknown (1557-1610)
	Katherine Johnson (1586-1630)

Events

Multimedia

Notes

Note 1

Obadiah Holmes, The Baptist Martyr The Puritans Should Have Left Alone - New England Historical Society

The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts viewed Obadiah Holmes as a loathsome Baptist, and they ordered him whipped 30 times in public. They probably should have thought twice about doing so.

In Puritan eyes, crimes against their religion were far worse than crimes against property. They punished blasphemy with the whip, the Bilbo, the brand or the ear crop.

But the savage beating of Obadiah Holmes brought international attention to the very ideas the Puritans wanted to suppress.

As he stood at the whipping post, Obadiah Holmes provoked a Puritan magistrate to a debate over his beliefs. Several centuries later, one of his descendants would ride his debating skill to the presidency of the United States.

OBADIAH HOLMES Obadiah Holmes was baptized March 18, 1610, in Didsbury, England in the county of Lancashire. He had a restless soul, a pugnacious spirit, a hot temper and a tendency to find fault. As a boy, he rebelled against his religious parents.

“I minded nothing but folly, and vanity,” he wrote. Then when his mother died, he blamed himself and changed his ways.

At 21, Obadiah Holmes married Katherine Hyde, and they had nine children. Together they ‘braved the dangers of the sea’ to come to Massachusetts in the Great Puritan Migration. He started a glassmaking business in Salem, but moved to Rehoboth in Plymouth Colony. There he led a small group of Baptists who opposed infant baptism.

A grand jury — including William Bradford, John Alden and Miles Standish — indicted Obadiah Holmes for heresy. So he and his family left Plymouth for Newport, R.I., in 1650.

In Newport he quickly associated with Baptist ministers John Crandall and John Clarke, a prominent advocate of religious freedom.

THE FATEFUL TRIP TO LYNN In the summer of 1651, the three men took a mission trip to an elderly Baptist man in the town of Lynn, just north of Boston. While they held a small religious service in the old man’s home, two constables burst in, arrested them and took them to jail in Boston.

A court found the three men guilty of a half-dozen crimes of heresy. The magistrate fined John Clarke 20 pounds, John Crandall 5 pounds and Obadiah Holmes 30 pounds. Friends of Clarke and Crandall paid their fines. Holmes refused to let them.

On July 31, 1651, a magistrate sentenced Obadiah Holmes to 30 lashes, one for each pound he owed. Holmes proclaimed,

Obadiah Holmes awaited his whipping for five weeks in a Boston jail. Roger Williams heard about his sentence, and he sent a blistering letter to Gov. John Endecott for persecuting people for their religious beliefs.

THE WHIPPING On Sept. 5, 1651, a crowd gathered around the whipping post in Boston to watch the flogging. Obadiah Holmes asked to speak, but Magistrate Encrease Nowell refused. Holmes spoke anyway, saying he was about to shed his blood for what he believed. Nowell said it was no time for debate.

“I am to suffer for … the Word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ,” said Obadiah Holmes.

“No, it is for your error and going about to seduce the people,” Nowell said.

Then the executioner tied him to the whipping post and lashed him 30 times with a three-corded whip.

When the whipping ended, a bleeding, panting Obadiah Holmes said, "You have struck me as with roses."

The whipping left his skin so raw and painful he couldn’t lie down, but rested on his knees and elbows for days.

“Those who have seen the scars on Mr. Holmes’ back (which the old man was wont to call the marks of the Lord Jesus), have expressed a wonder that he should live,” wrote Joseph Jenckes, Rhode Island governor.

After Obadiah Holmes recovered enough to travel, he returned to Newport where family and friends welcomed him four miles outside the town. The next year he took over as pastor of the Newport Church, the second Baptist church in America. He held the position for 30 years until his death.

AN ILL WIND News spread fast and far about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. In the end it resulted in more, not less, religious freedom.

If the Puritans intended to intimidate heretics by it, they failed. Two years after the whipping of Obadiah Holmes, Harvard President Henry Dunster wouldn’t have his infant son baptized.

John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre. He went to England and wrote a book called Ill Newes in New England. It included a letter from Obadiah Holmes describing his whipping.

Richard Saltonstall, a prominent Puritan founder of Massachusetts then in London, read the book. He sent a letter to the Puritan pastors in the colony and berated them for ‘tyranny and persecutions in New England.’

RHODE ISLAND The whipping of Obadiah Holmes also had the unintended consequence of helping to preserve Rhode Island’s independence. At the time, the dissenters of Rhode Island felt very much persecuted by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The two colonies wanted to divide Rhode Island and absorb it. Rhode Island needed a royal charter to survive.

John Clarke spent a decade in England as an agent for the colony of Rhode Island. When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Clarke lobbied him for a charter. He found a sympathetic ear, since Charles had little use for Puritans. They had, after all, beheaded his father. Clarke drafted the Rhode Island Royal Charter and Charles approved it in July 1663. The charter granted unprecedented religious freedom in Rhode Island and remained in effect for 180 years.

Obadiah Holmes died Oct. 15, 1682, in Newport, R.I. His great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Abraham Lincoln, was elected the 16th president of the United States.

Note 2

Note 3

Born (and baptized) around 1610 in England, Obadiah Holmes “had a restless soul, a pugnacious spirit, a hot temper, and a tendency to find fault”. He later commented after his conversion to Christ, that “I minded nothing but folly and vanity”. He married at twenty-one and he and his wife had nine children. He immigrated to America and began a glass-making business in the great seaport town of Salem, Massachusetts. Because of his dissenting beliefs, he moved his family to Plymouth, where he led a small Anabaptist congregation. Indicted for heresy by a grand jury which included William Bradford, Miles Standish, and John Alden, Holmes then moved his family to Rhode Island, where he joined with two Baptist pastors.

In 1651, while the three men were visiting an elderly friend in Lynn, Massachusetts, the constables arrested all three for spreading heretical views, trying to subvert the Word of God, and creating social discord. They were fined by the court, but Obadiah refused to allow friends to pay the thirty pounds. After saying “I bless God, that I am worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus”, he was taken to jail for five weeks to await his punishment and contemplate his continuing pugnacious spirit. The authorities likely were hoping for repentance and paying of the fine. However, Holmes was taken to Boston Commons and tied to a whipping post. Stripped to the waist, he was lashed thirty strokes with a three-strand whip. He preached and taught while he was being whipped, defying the local magistrate who tried to silence him. No doubt some of the bystanders were reminded of the Apostles refusing to keep silent under Roman persecution. The difference, of course, was that the local authorities were all Christian churchmen enforcing the laws of the colony.

The bloody punishment injured Holmes so severely that, for the next three months, he could only sleep on his hands and knees.

The Governor of Rhode Island said that anyone witnessing the scars on Holmes’s back would wonder how he ever survived the punishment. When Holmes recovered enough to return to Rhode Island, he became the pastor of only the second Baptist Church in America, for thirty years.

Sympathy for Holmes did have some effect. Two years later, the President of Harvard College refused to have his infant son baptized and was fired for having adopted Anabaptist doctrine. John Clarke, one of the other ministers, published an account of the persecution, which elicited strong letters of disapproval from English Puritans to ministers in New England. No changes to the laws were forthcoming, however, and the men were condemned by John Cotton, the Mathers, and other prominent New England clergy for attempting to lead people astray with false doctrine.

Obadiah Holmes’ last will and testament was published in the 20th Century, and he left behind several written accounts of his trial and persecution. He died October 15, 1682 at the age of seventy-two and was buried on the family farm, where his grave lies to this day. One of his numerous direct descendants (eight of his nine children lived to adulthood), was President Abraham Lincoln.

Note 4

Abraham Lincoln, became the 16th president of the United States. The line of descent is shown below.

The discovery of the direct line from Holmes to Abraham Lincoln was made by Wilbur Nelson, who published a small booklet on the subject: Obadiah Holmes, Ancestor and Prototype of Abraham Lincoln (Newport, 1932).

Obadiah Holmes

Personal and Family Information

Pedigree Chart (3 generations)

Events

Multimedia

Notes

Note 1

Note 2

Note 3

Note 4