America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (8 page)

This was no polite theological controversy to be argued inside universities by whispering men in robes, poring over ancient Latin texts.

These were some of the central ideas at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and all the blood spilled in their wake. To English Puritans, the thought that salvation could be earned by works simply deepened a theological divide that further split England, forcing thousands of Puritans to leave. In 1634, Anne Hutchinson, her husband, Will, and their ten children (she had lost four others in early childhood) sailed for America on the
Griffon,
joining a decade-long Puritan migration that reshaped New England and with it American history.

The great migration had begun in 1630, when John Winthrop, aboard the
Arbella
, led a flotilla of seventeen ships bringing the first one thousand Puritan colonists to America. “They fled,” wrote Carol Berkin, “the economic penalties imposed on them by the government | 55 \

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they criticized and the threat of imprisonment for their religious views, but they also fled what they judged to be an increasingly immoral society, whose values alienated and isolated them as surely as any edicts of bishop or king. Their departure from England was a rejection of their countrymen’s lasciviousness, idleness, and extravagance and the corrupt public life they saw around them . . . streets filled with drunks, prostitutes and beggars.”14

Governor Winthrop carried the charter for a new colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was a commercial venture as well as a religious one. Besides God, the Puritans would answer to shareholders. Unlike the Pilgrims who had preceded them in 1620, this wave of Puritan settlers did not call themselves separatists. Certainly they wished to purify the Church of England, but they did not plan to abandon it. In fact, the Congregational Church, New England’s core institution for centuries, was born out of this new American intermin-gling of Pilgrim and Puritan. As Nathaniel Philbrick put it, “The Puritans staunchly denied it, but their immigration to America had turned them, like the Pilgrims before them, into Separatists. They might claim to be still working within the Church of England, but as a practical matter with no bishops in New England, they were free to worship as they saw fit.”15 The distinction between the Pilgrims, those who came to Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and the Puritans, who came after 1629, initially settling Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, eventually disappeared as the great wave of Puritan settlers transformed the colony. 16

Anchoring near Salem, a second English colony founded on the Massachusetts coast north of Plymouth in 1625, they were greeted with the news that eighty of Salem’s colonists had died in the previous winter. The “starving times” that had halved the
Mayflower
Pil-

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grims’ number in 1620 were not over. Spending their first winter in holes dug in the side of a hill and simple wooden lean-tos, two hundred of Winthrop’s new emigrants died from cold and starvation that first year. Winthrop struggled to keep the colony alive in a settlement they called Boston—after the Protestant bastion in Lincolnshire, where John Cotton preached. The successive waves of Puritan settlers bringing fresh supplies kept the Massachusetts Bay Colony alive. John Cotton followed in 1633 and became the father-in-law of Increase Mather and grandfather to Cotton Mather, who was named in his honor. By most estimates, more than twenty-one thousand Puritans arrived in Massachusetts over the next few years, the Hutchinsons among them. Within a few years, Boston was the largest of some twenty townships flourishing in Massachusetts.

As a trusted midwife, Anne Hutchinson had always spoken with her charges about John Cotton’s teachings as she guided them through labor and delivery—a captive audience, no doubt. Now in America, she did the same. Midwifery and the birthing process were one of the few women’s preserves in the colonial world. But in its exclusion of men, its intimacy, and the midwife’s use of herbs, there was also a faint hint of secret and possibly dark doings. And of course, the possibility that a dead or deformed infant was the devil’s work also cast the midwife in a suspicious light—except to the women she tended.

Drawn by Hutchinson’s extraordinary charisma and intelligence, women soon flocked to her home to hear her discussions of Scripture and John Cotton’s sermons—informal religious gatherings that began the year after she arrived in America. In time, the women brought their husbands as well. By 1636, Anne Hutchinson was attracting enough listeners to expand to two evenings a week, sometimes to audiences of as many as eighty people. With the blessing of the influential | 57 \

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John Cotton, her followers grew to include the young Henry Vane, who had recently supplanted John Winthrop as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Politics and theology were never far apart in Massachusetts Bay. And that was the source of the trouble.

At some point, Anne Hutchinson had moved beyond simple scriptural readings to commentary on the teachings of some of the leading Puritan ministers of the day. It was this step, along with the changing tenor of the finer points of her theology, that brought down the wrath of the Bay Colony’s Puritan fathers. As Anne Hutchinson honed her message, “sanctification” was not evidence of “justification.” In other words, how someone behaved had no influence on whether that person was saved. While this notion was in keeping with fundamental Puritan theology, it made men such as Governor Winthrop worry that Hutchinson’s teachings were potentially subversive. If taken far enough, Hutchinson’s ideas might lead her followers to believe that they could shirk responsibility, since following church and civil orders was ultimately fruitless. Hutchinson also believed in “personal revelation,” the idea that God spoke directly to people—or so her accusers claimed. This was a frontal assault on the bedrock Puritan notion that God’s will was revealed only through a careful, literal reading of the Bible—“the fundamental conviction,” as Edmund S. Morgan noted, “on which the Puritans built their state, their churches, and their daily lives.”17

Considering this female teacher-healer as a danger to both their religious and civic authority—and they would have seen no difference between the two—the Puritan elders of Massachusetts put the several-months-pregnant Anne Hutchinson on trial in November 1637. It followed in the aftermath of recent vicious fighting against the Pequot Indians. In the eyes of the men who now sat in judgment of her, Anne | 58 \

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Hutchinson had not helped her cause by opposing violence against the Indians.

During the two-day trial in which judges were also prosecutors (and jury), most historians agree that Hutchinson bested her male accusers.

“In nearly every exchange of words, she defeated [Winthrop], and the other members of the General Court with him,” Edmund S. Morgan commented. “The record of her trial, if it is proper to dignify the pro-cedure with that name, is one of the few documents in which her words are recorded, and it reveals a proud, brilliant woman put down by men who judged her in advance.”18

Defending herself, Hutchinson closed with a prophecy that confirmed the men’s view that she was challenging the authority of the judges, which in their logic was tantamount to heresy. “Therefore take heed what yee go about to doe unto me,” she warned. “For I know that for this God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole State.”

Strong words from a woman standing up to the most powerful men in her world. It was this sort of audacious self-assuredness and open challenge to authority that must have prompted one of the judges to say, “I am fully persuaded that Mistress Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil.”

When she told the judges that she had received a divine revelation, “by the voice of his own spirit to my soul,” Hutchinson provided the proof of heresy the court needed. Overwhelmingly convicted on the basis of “false revelations, ” she was judged “not fit for our society” and banished from Boston.

One immediate result of this trial was the decision to establish the colony’s first college to train new clergymen. The school was built in Newtown, scene of the Hutchinson trial, and the area’s name was changed to Cambridge, in honor of England’s great university; the | 59 \

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school itself would later be named for its first great benefactor, John Harvard. A Puritan minister and son of a London butcher and tavern owner, Harvard came to America in 1637 but died a year later at age thirty, bequeathing his four-hundred-volume library and half his considerable estate to the school. In essence, Harvard existed because of Hutchinson, as Harvard’s own Peter Gomes wrote. “Mrs. Hutchinson was the mother of New England’s first and most serious theological schism . . . ; in debate she bested the best of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s male preachers, theologians, and magistrates; and . . . as a result of her heresy the colony determined to provide for the education of a new generation of ministers and theologians who would secure New England’s civil and theological peace against future seditious Mrs. Hutchinsons.”19

Given her advanced pregnancy, the imposition of the sentence was delayed until the end of winter, and Hutchinson remained under what was essentially house arrest. After being excommunicated by her congregation, she and her husband, Will, along with their children, some of their spouses, and thirty other families, left Massachusetts in March 1638 for the island of Aquidneck, in the territory of the Rhode Island colony, which had been purchased from the Narragansett Indians by Roger Williams, another renegade Puritan chased from Boston. The Hutchinsons and their followers founded a settlement called Portsmouth. In June 1638, Anne Hutchinson’s pregnancy ended with the birth of a deformed fetus, not uncommon among older pregnant women. This “unnatural pregnancy” was seized upon by Boston’s elders as further proof of her links with the devil—and that God was punishing her.

After her husband’s death in 1642, Anne Hutchinson moved with six of her children, settling in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.

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She was permitted to homestead there by the Dutch, who were more tolerant in questions of faith than Boston’s Puritans. Dutch governor Willem Kieft, already at war with local Indians, was happy to have more settlers, especially those he could place as a buffer in no-man’sland.

There, fatally, Anne Hutchinson and her family got caught in the crossfire. In the heat of a late summer day in 1643, Anne Hutchinson’s nine-year-old daughter was gathering berries in a meadow that overlooked what is now called Long Island Sound. The child probably dallied and, as most children might, ate as many blueberries as she put in her basket. The last of Anne Hutchinson’s fourteen children born in England, Susan Hutchinson lived with her mother and extended family in what was then New Amsterdam—to be renamed New York when the Dutch capitulated to the British in 1664. The area in which the Hutchinsons were homesteading was later to be named after another early settler, Jacob Bronck.

As Susan went about her work, she must have heard screams and seen the smoke rising from the direction of her family’s homestead.

There is no account of the child’s reaction. Legends told in this part of the Bronx long afterward held that when the Siwanoy warriors found her, Susan Hutchinson was hiding inside the cleft of a large glacial boulder, known as Split Rock. Her mother, other family members, and several servants all fell victim to the Indian war axes, their bodies then burned in the conflagration as their farmhouse was torched. Fifteen in all died that day when a Siwanoy war party swept through the Hutchinson homestead. An Algonquian-speaking people related to the Lenni Lenape (or Delaware) tribe, the Siwanoy lived in the area between the modern Bronx and Connecticut, covering parts of Westchester County along Long Island Sound. Their attack on the | 61 \

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Hutchinson farm was a reprisal for the massacre of a group of Lenni Lenape a few months earlier. It came during a two-year-long conflict known as Kieft’s War, a localized conflict foolishly begun by the Dutch governor. Incompetent and cruel, the heavy-handed Willem Kieft had allowed the prospering trade relations with the local tribes to sour and then turn disastrous. In a series of battles fought between 1640 and 1643, hundreds of Indians and scores of Dutch settlers had been killed.

Ignoring warnings about the Siwanoy raiders, Anne Hutchinson had decided to stay put with her family: she had always enjoyed good relationships with Indians and was something of a pacifist. Since the time of the earlier Pequot War, fought in New England between 1636

and 1637, Hutchinson had argued against fighting with the Indians.

As leader of a scripture study group in Boston, she had convinced some of her male disciples not to join a militia force at war with local Indians—making them some of American’s earliest conscientious ob-jectors.

But now she was fatally mistaken. According to Hutchinson biographer (and descendant) Eve LaPlante, “the Siwanoy took Susan captive, and their chief, Wampage, adopted her. Wampage also took on Susan’s mother’s name, calling himself ‘Anne-Hoeck’ from then on, for it was customary for a Siwanoy warrior to assume the name of his most illustrious victim. The neighboring land was called Ann-Hoeck’s Neck. The river was given Anne’s surname, and so the modern highway beside it is the Hutchinson River Parkway.” Following the raid, nine-year-old Susan Hutchinson spent the next eight or nine years with the Siwanoy and, according to LaPlante, “is said to have left the tribe reluctantly.” At eighteen, she arrived back in Boston, where her brother still lived, and married another settler a few months later. 20

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To the Puritan fathers back in Boston, the news of the Indian attack that resulted in Susan’s capture and the death of much of her family gave great comfort. Indeed, one of their most heartfelt prayers seemed to have been answered. Longtime Massachusetts governor John Winthrop remarked, “Thus it has pleased the Lord to have compassion of his poor churches here, and to discover this great imposter, an instrument of Satan so fitted and trained to his service for interrupting the passage [of his] kingdom in this part of the world, and poisoning the churches here.”