American Jezebel (2 page)

Were she alive today, Anne Hutchinson might be a minister, a politician, or a writer. Four hundred years ago, when the vast majority of women could not even write their names, how did she emerge boldly to question the leading men of the day as to the nature of salvation and grace? What fueled her self-confidence and her sustained anger at colonial authorities? Where did she find the strength of character to stand for hours before scores of seated men, parrying their every Gospel quotation, replying again and again with wit? This book is a response to these and other bedeviling questions. Through it, I hope, Anne Hutchinson may claim her rightful place as America’s founding mother.

“Anne Hutchinson is present,” a male voice announced from somewhere in the crowded meetinghouse, momentarily quieting the din that filled its cavernous hall. The meetinghouse of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a square structure of timber and clay with a thatched roof, served as the community’s city hall, church, and courthouse—the latter its role this chilly Tuesday in November 1637. Hearing the news that the defendant had arrived, scores of bearded heads in black felt hats turned to find the one woman in the crowd.

There was nothing auspicious about Anne Hutchinson’s appearance as she stood in the doorway alongside several male relatives and supporters, awaiting the start of her trial. She was forty-six years old, of average height and bearing, with an unremarkable face. Her petticoat fell almost to the ground, revealing only the tips of her leather boots. Against the cold she wore a wool mantua, or cloak. A white coif covered her hair, as was the custom of the day. Besides that and her white linen smock and neckerchief, she wore all black. She was a stranger to no one present, having ministered as midwife and nurse to many of their wives and children. All knew her to be an active member of the church of Boston, the wife of the wealthy textile merchant William Hutchinson, the mother of twelve living children, and the grandmother of one, a five-day-old boy who just that Sunday had been baptized. There was, in short, no outer sign to suggest she was an enemy of the state.

Enemy she was, though, indeed the greatest threat Massachusetts had ever known. More than a few men in the room, including several of the ministers, considered her a witch. Others believed the Devil had taken over her soul. The governor, John Winthrop, who was waiting in an antechamber of the meetinghouse to begin the trial over which he would preside, suspected her of using her devilish powers to subjugate
men by establishing “the community of women” to foster “their abominable wickedness.”

Anne Hutchinson’s greatest crime, and the source of her power, was the series of weekly public meetings she held at her house to discuss Scripture and theology. At first, in 1635, the evening meetings had been just for women, who then were generally encouraged to gather in small groups to gossip and offer mutual support. Soon scores of women, enchanted by her intelligence and magnetism, flocked to hear her analysis of the week’s Scripture reading, which many of them preferred to the ministers’ latest interpretation. “Being a woman very helpful in times of childbirth and other occasions of bodily infirmities, [Hutchinson] easily insinuated herself into the affections of many,” an official observed. Her “pretense was to repeat [the ministers’] sermons,” the governor added, “but when that was done, she would comment upon the doctrines, interpret passages at her pleasure, and expound dark places of Scripture, and make it serve her turn,” going beyond “wholesome truths” to “set forth her own stuff.” One minister, Thomas Weld, reported that her “custom was for her scholars to propound questions and she (gravely sitting in the chair) did make answers thereunto.” This was especially grievous in a time when the single chair in every house was for the use of the man alone.

Men had begun to accompany their wives to Hutchinson’s meetings in 1636, and as her audiences swelled she offered a second session of religious instruction each week, just as the colonial ministers liked to give a Thursday lecture as well as their Sunday sermon. The Reverend Weld lamented that members of her audience, “being tainted, conveyed the infection to others,” including “some of the magistrates, some gentlemen, some scholars and men of learning, some burgesses of our General Court, some of our captains and soldiers, some chief men in towns, and some eminent for religion, parts, and wit.” Anne Hutchinson had “stepped out of [her] place,” in the succinct phrase of the Reverend Hugh Peter, of Salem—she “had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.”

It was painfully clear to Governor Winthrop, who had an excellent view of her comings and goings from his house directly across the road from hers in Boston, that Anne Hutchinson possessed the strongest constituency of any leader in the colony. She was, he confided in his
journal, “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and an active spirit, and a very voluble tongue.” Her name was absent (on account of her sex) from every offensive political act and document, he observed, but she was behind them all. “More bold than a man,” she was Virgil’s
dux foemina facti,
“the woman leading all the action”—the breeder and nourisher of all the county’s distempers, the sower of political and religious discord. Before Mistress Hutchinson had arrived in America, in the fall of 1634, all was sweetness and light, he recalled. Now that she was here, all was chaos.

Through a side door of the meetinghouse, the forty magistrates of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts filed into the dimly lit room. This court of no appeal, the only court available to the fledgling colony’s roughly seven thousand settlers, comprised the governor, a deputy governor, seven of their assistants (chosen by the freemen to serve as the colony’s board of directors), and thirty-one deputies, prominent freemen chosen by the colony’s fourteen towns (forerunners to the state’s legislators). The judges that day included the assistant Simon Bradstreet, of Cambridge, thirty-three, who as colonial secretary was expected to take notes; Salem’s John Endicott, the righteous, forty-nine-year-old former soldier who had recently tried to pass a law forcing all women to wear veils, as in the Old Testament; and Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, who at sixty-one was the oldest judge.

Eight ministers in black robes also joined the procession, not to judge the defendant but to give testimony, as witnesses. Colonial ministers, despite their vast public power, were not allowed to hold public office, a distinction that kept Massachusetts from being a theocracy. These divines included the Reverend Zechariah Symmes, with whom Anne had sparred over theological matters during the grueling trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and John Wilson, Boston’s senior pastor, who had recently called Anne out of that meetinghouse on account of her heresies. In England these Puritans had been hounded by church authorities, silenced, and in a few cases imprisoned, but here in Massachusetts they ran the state church. Still, most had come reluctantly to this land where, an anonymous female colonist admitted, “the air is sharp, the rocks many, the trees innumerable, the grass little, the winter cold, the summer hot, the gnats in summer biting, the wolves at
midnight howling.” Back in 1629, while planning their first trip here, the founders had put ministers first on their long list of “supplies.”

Just that morning, there had been a last-minute change in the roster of men arrayed before Anne Hutchinson. Governor Winthrop had hastily appointed two new judges to replace three who had expressed support for Mistress Hutchinson. Notwithstanding the change, this group of ministers and magistrates possessed the “highest concentration” in the colony of wealth, intelligence, and power.

To a man, they wore greatcoats, leather gloves, and hats against the cold, in addition to their standard loose white linen shirts, knickers, and thick stockings tied with cloth garters. All had leather shoes, and most of their hats were lined in the brow with leather. The meetinghouse lacked a fireplace, and the bitter chill of winter had arrived early that year. Just the week before, in an early November ice storm, a young man had frozen to death while trying to cross the nearby Charles River in a skiff.

Every judge but one took his seat on one of the wooden benches at the front of the hall that faced the crowd. The last judge to enter the hall was the governor, who approached the single desk and cushioned chair before the benches and sat down.

Governor John Winthrop, a small man of forty-nine with a tense, worried mien, was not only the architect of this trial but also its leading magistrate, serving as both chief judge and chief prosecutor. Winthrop had been born in Suffolk, England, in 1588, attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years, during which he considered becoming a clergyman, and was trained as a lawyer in London. He worked as a government attorney and justice of the peace, and, as squire of the manor of Groton, in Suffolk, he was admitted in 1628 to the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court in London that train English lawyers. Although he was considered a strong candidate for Parliament, he never had a chance to run for office in England.

In the late 1620s John Winthrop and other pious Puritans saw England as in a decline. Men were treated like cattle, he believed, and money trumped morals. He was increasingly offended by the “papist,” or Catholic, leanings of the Anglican Church under King Charles I, who had ascended the throne in 1625. True religion was about to expire, Winthrop feared. William Laud, whom Charles had chosen to be
come Bishop of London in 1628, leaned toward Arminianism—the belief, put forward by a Dutch minister named Arminius, that people by their own free will can achieve faith and salvation—which especially offended Puritans, who so emphasized divine grace as against the ability of humans to effect their own salvation. Furious at Bishop Laud, the Puritans appealed to Parliament, which decided to suppress his “popery” in the state church. As a result of this and similar parliamentary challenges to his rule, King Charles abrogated Parliament in March 1629, a decision that cost John Winthrop his government post.

The following summer the forty-two-year-old gentleman barrister joined a company of Puritan gentry wishing to leave England and form a new colony in America, with the approbation of the king, who granted the colonial charter. The Massachusetts Bay Company, as it was called, chose Winthrop as its first governor, in recognition of his political and administrative skills, which Hawthorne noted in “Mrs. Hutchinson” (1830): “In the highest place sits Winthrop, a man by whom the innocent and the guilty might alike desire to be judged, the first confiding in his integrity and wisdom, the latter hoping in his mildness.” In Winthrop’s personal journal, which is now a primary source on early Massachusetts, the new governor saw himself as the Moses of a new Exodus, embarking on a second Protestant Reformation—withdrawing from the church of England as it had withdrawn a century earlier from the church of Rome. In the spring of 1630 he led a flotilla of eleven ships carrying nearly a thousand nonconformist Protestants like himself across the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the Separatists who nine years earlier had founded Plymouth Plantation, Winthrop aimed not to separate from his country but to extend its reach while purifying its church—hence the name
New
England.

Now, in 1637, Winthrop had been elected to his fifth one-year term as colonial governor, after having lost the office for three years, most recently to the young Sir Henry Vane, a supporter of Hutchinson. Each spring, according to the royal charter, the governor was elected from among the members of the General Court by the members themselves. But in 1633 voting rights were extended to all male members of the state church who were at least sixteen years old—roughly one-quarter of the adult population. After this, Winthrop, who had been chosen governor first in 1630 and reelected three times, had been defeated—in
1634 by Thomas Dudley, in 1635 by John Haynes, and in 1636, most distressingly, by the Hutchinsonian Vane. By this time, increasing numbers of citizens were traders, merchants, sailors, and brokers, who had more commercial and mercantile concerns than the earlier émigrés, who tended to support Winthrop. Ironically, the highest-born immigrant of all—Vane, the idealistic son of a member of the king’s Privy Council—was, together with the free-thinker Anne Hutchinson, the champion of Boston’s burgeoning middle class.

Winthrop’s concerns in court that day in November 1637 were both internal and external. King Charles, alarmed by rumors he had heard of Separatism in the American church and a dangerously independent spirit in its government, was threatening to revoke the colonial charter he had granted the settlers in 1629 and to send a royal governor to rule them. In addition, the colonists increasingly feared aggression by the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch, who were also exploring and settling the continent, and by the native tribes. Just the summer before, Massachusetts had fought and won the Pequot War, their first campaign against the natives, on the coast of what would become Connecticut. That war had ended in July with the massacre by colonial soldiers of almost every Pequot man, woman, and child—a “divine slaughter,” in the words of the Cambridge pastor Thomas Shepard, who was present in the courtroom that day.

To Winthrop’s dismay, Anne Hutchinson opposed war against the native tribes. Her attitude toward the natives reminded the governor of the Reverend Roger Williams’s “dangerous” refusal to support the conversion (and, if necessary, killing) of Indians in the name of Christ. As Williams put it, “Jesus never called for the sword of steel to help the sword of spirit.” Believing the English king had no right to give away land that was not his, the Reverend Williams, of Salem, in 1635 had written a letter to Charles I saying it was evil to take Indian lands without payment. Massachusetts Bay authorities persuaded Williams not to send the letter and continued to watch him warily. They rejected his novel concept of freedom of conscience—“Forced worship,” he believed, “stinks in God’s nostrils.” In October 1635 they asked him to retract criticisms of their involvement in church affairs in Salem. He refused, continuing to preach his unorthodox message about religious liberty. That winter they banished him, and he later settled Providence
Plantation, forty miles to the southwest, where he was no longer such an irritant. But now Mistress Hutchinson was spreading similarly noxious views. During the summer of 1637, most of her male followers refused to enlist in the Pequot War, presenting a serious problem for the governor and for the Reverend Wilson and Captain John Endicott, the leaders of the military campaign.

“Reducing” Mistress Hutchinson—correcting or subduing her—would help Winthrop on all these counts, by showing his strength and unifying the colony to which he was devoted. Massachusetts Bay was, after all, his New Canaan, his ideal “city upon a hill” for all the world to emulate. He had uttered these now-famous words in the spring of 1630 on board the
Arbella
as he and his company sailed toward the New World (or, according to some historians, on the dock in Southampton just prior to the ship’s departure): “God shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, the Lord make it like that of New England…. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Having given up so much to come here, Winthrop could not abide the thought of Massachusetts threatened or split: the salvation of the colony was the central goal of his career.