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# A Woman in Ashes and Soot Stopped a Boston Sermon in 1677. The Court Called Her a Devil.
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/a-woman-in-ashes-and-soot-stopped-a-boston-sermon-in-1677-the-court-called-her-a-devil/
- Published: 2026-10-28T10:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T10:02:00.000Z
- Description: She warned Boston that a plague was coming. The magistrates whipped her through the streets. Then the smallpox arrived.
- Author: Deep Time
- Tags: History, Halloween Week, New England

Boston, July 8, 1677\. The minister, Thomas Thacher, is mid-sermon when a woman comes up the aisle barefoot, sackcloth over her shoulders, ash in her loose hair and her face blackened with soot. Other Quakers walk with her. Women shriek. Some faint. Samuel Sewall, who was in the pews and would later sit as a judge at the Salem witch trials, called it "the greatest and most amazing uproar that I ever saw." Margaret Brewster delivers a warning from God to the rulers of Boston.

She had sailed from Barbados to do this and rose from a sickbed to go through with it. Sackcloth and ashes were the wardrobe of the Hebrew prophets confronting corrupt power, a visual language with centuries of force behind it. Brewster wore it into a room that knew exactly what it meant.

Boston read it differently. At trial, the constable who arrested her said he could barely swear she was the same woman; in church, he testified, she had looked like a devil. Gov. John Leverett told her she had come as the devil incarnate. She was sentenced to be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart's tail and whipped out of town with 20 lashes. Three women who came in with her were tied to the cart too.

Four Quakers had been hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661\. Brewster's whipping is often cited as the last of its kind against a Quaker there.

She had also warned of a coming plague. Within months, smallpox killed about 700 people in Boston. Thacher wrote the first medical document printed in the American colonies to fight it. He died the following year.

She walked in wearing a costume more than 2,000 years old. The court that sentenced her saw only the devil in it.

**Read the full story at** [Colonial Society of Massachusetts, July 31, 1677](https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/312?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Scripture is full of prophets in sackcloth whom the powerful dismissed as madmen or worse. Boston had the whole book memorized and still played its assigned part.