Conceived in Liberty (34 page)

While Williams’ heart was in the right place in insisting on purchasing all land voluntarily from the Indians, there were important aspects of the land problem that he had not thought through. While the Indians were certainly entitled to the land they cultivated, they also (1) laid claim to vast reaches of land which they hunted but which they did not transform by cultivation, and (2) owned the land not as individual Indians, but as collective tribal entities. In many cases the Indian tribes could not alienate or sell the lands, but only lease the use of their ancestral domains. As a result, the Indians also lived under a collectivistic regime that, for land allocation, was scarcely more just than the English governmental land-grab against which Williams was properly rebelling. Under both regimes, the actual
settler
—the first transformer of the land, whether white or Indian—had to fight his way past a nest of arbitrary land claims by others, and pay their exactions until he could formally own the land.

Williams, always a friend of the Indians, bought from the sachems, or chiefs, a grant of the large amount of land called the “Providence Purchase.” Williams then donated the land to a Town Fellowship, a joint property held equally by himself and five of his followers—the Fellowship shortly enlarged to thirteen. As long as only the original settlers lived in Providence, all was peaceful, and virtually no government arose at all. As Williams described it, “The masters of families have ordinarily met once a fortnight and consulted about our common peace, watch and plenty; and mutual consent have finished all matters of speed and pace.” But it was inevitable that new settlers would come, and then that the arbitrary nature of the land allocation should give rise to conflict. Indeed, recriminations and tensions rapidly developed. Not realizing the inherent injustice of any arbitrary claims to unsettled land, and therefore not realizing that he and the others of the Fellowship were taking on the aspect of quasi-feudal land monopolists, Williams naturally believed he had acted generously
in giving the land to the Fellowship. But the later settlers, forced to purchase the land from the Fellowship, properly resented this feudalistic proprietary.

The Fellowship, later enlarged to fifty-four, assigned eleven acres to each member, plus the right to an additional 100 acres apiece. In this way some of the land passed quickly to the individual members of the Fellowship. If their acreage was not in precise proportion to the degree of settlement, at least this land was now in the hands of its just owners, the individual settlers. But, unfortunately, the great bulk of the Providence tract still remained in the hands of the collective Fellowship proprietary, and in 1640 the Fellowship moved to formalize its claim, and to establish a proprietary oligarchy over future settlers. In that year, the Fellowship drew up a “Plantation Agreement at Providence,” and appointed a board of five “disposers” that would take charge of disposing of the land, managing the land held in common, and passing judgment on the qualification of new settlers. Taught little humility by their own sufferings, the disposers tended to be rigorous in their judgments. Before a man was permitted to settle and buy land in Providence, even the land of an individual settler willing to sell, the Fellowship had to approve, and a veto by one Fellow was sufficient to bar the newcomer. The original Fellows soon admitted more members, but the number of Fellows never exceeded 101, and the later members received only twenty-five rather than 100 acres of collectively owned land. Positions in the Fellowship descended to the heirs of the original members; the other settlers who were permitted to become landowners in Providence were excluded from the select circle of the Fellowship proprietary, which thus controlled the land and government. The Fellowship kept a sharp check on its five disposers, but this hardly made the government of Providince less oligarchical.

The most oligarchic feature of the Plantation Agreement dealt with Pawtuxet, a tract of land immediately south of Providence. Pawtuxet had been purchased from Indian sachems in the spring of 1638 and turned over by Williams to the Fellows, then numbering thirteen. Overriding Williams’ wishes, the Fellows, led by William Arnold and William Harris, decided in October of 1638 eventually to divide the Pawtuxet lands among themselves, without even providing for any new settlers. The Agreement of 1640 confirmed Pawtuxet as a closed proprietorship.

Roger Williams carried his principles of religious liberty into practice. There was no state church, and no one was forced to attend church. Williams himself was to change his religious views several times, becoming a Baptist for a few months, and then ending as a Seeker, who held to no fixed creed. Liberty has its own inner logic, and so Williams’ religious liberty in Providence extended also to women. One of Williams’ Salem adherents who had followed him to Providence, Joshua Verin, tasting the heady wine of religious liberty, grew disenchanted with Williams’ sermons and stopped attending church. This was perfectly legitimate in his
newfound home, but Verin went so far as to prevent his wife from attending, even beating her to prevent her from going. Verin was therefore disfranchised by Providence in the spring of 1638 for restraining his wife’s conscience; he soon returned to Salem, where he could again exercise the Puritan role of despotic paterfamilias.

The logic of liberty had, as we shall see, even more drastic implications. For, as some citizens of Providence began to reason, if the conscience of the individual was to be supreme in religious matters, if the state was to have no power to interfere with any actions determined by his religious conscience, why shouldn’t his liberty extend to civil matters as well? Why shouldn’t the individual’s conscience reign supreme in all civil as well as religious affairs?

Very shortly after the expulsion of Roger Williams, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was rent far more widely by another heresy with roots deep in the colony—the “antinomianism” of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. A major reason for the crisis that Anne Hutchinson’s heresy posed for Massachusetts was that she occupied a high place in the colony’s oligarchy. Arriving in Massachusetts in 1634, she and her husband lived close to Governor Winthrop’s mansion in Boston and participated in Boston’s high society. A friend of the eminent Rev. John Cotton, she first confined her religious activities to expatiating on Cotton’s sermons. Soon, however, Mrs. Hutchinson developed a religious doctrine of her own, now known as antinomianism. She preached the necessity for an inner light to come to any individual chosen as one of God’s elect. Such talk marked her as far more of a religious individualist than the Massachusetts leaders. Salvation came only through a covenant of grace emerging from the inner light, and was not at all revealed in a covenant of works, the essence of which is good works on earth. This meant that the fanatically ascetic sanctification imposed by the Puritans was no evidence whatever that one was of the elect. Furthermore, Anne Hutchinson made it plain that she regarded many Puritan leaders as
not
of the elect. She also came to assert that she had received direct revelations from God.

In contrast to Williams’ few Salem followers, Anne Hutchinson had rapid and sweeping success in converting her fellow citizens. John Cotton now became a follower of hers, as did young Sir Henry Vane, chosen governor by the General Court in 1636, and Anne’s brother-in-law, Rev. John Wheelwright. Indeed, John Winthrop (deputy governor in 1636) wrote disgustedly
that virtually the entire church at Boston had become her converts. As bitter enemies of Anne, there remained especially Winthrop and the senior minister of Boston, John Wilson. Mrs. Hutchinson failed in her attempt to oust Wilson from his post, but she did succeed in having him censured by his own congregation.

The Hutchinsonian movement began, if inadvertently, to pose political problems for the oligarchy as well. The conscription of soldiers for a war against the Indians met resistance from Boston Hutchinsonians, on the ground that the military chaplain, Rev. John Wilson, was under a “covenant of works” rather than of grace.

The anti-Hutchinson forces moved first against the fiery Reverend Mr. Wheelwright; the General Court narrowly convicted him of sedition and contempt in March 1637. But the sentencing of Wheelwright was postponed. The turning point of the Hutchinson affair came with the May election of 1637, which the Winthrop forces managed to win by shifting its site from pro-Hutchinson Boston to Newtown (now Cambridge). The election pitted Sir Henry Vane against former governor Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, running for his old post of deputy governor. With the election turning on the Hutchinson issue, Vane carried Boston but lost the other towns heavily. Winthrop, Dudley, and the majority of the magistrates, or assistants, were carried by the conservative, anti-Hutchinson faction—a not surprising victory when we consider that suffrage was restricted to the ranks of accepted church members.

This overwhelming defeat spelled swift suppression for the antinomian heretics. Quickly the new General Court passed a law that penalized strangers and was directed against a group of Hutchinsonians known to be on their way from England. Disheartened, Sir Henry Vane gave up the struggle and returned to England. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, John Cotton promptly deserted his old disciple, abjectly recanted his “heresies,” and at a Newtown synod denounced ninety-one antinomian opinions as unwholesome or blasphemous. Vane was gone and Cotton an apostate, but there was still the Reverend Mr. Wheelwright. The already convicted Wheelwright was again hauled before the General Court and sentenced to banishment from the colony. Wheelwright walked through the snows to New Hampshire in the north, where he founded the settlement of Exeter. When by 1643 Massachusetts had appropriated the New Hampshire towns, Wheelwright fled to Maine. But by 1646 Wheelwright had recanted, bewailed his own “vehement and censorious spirit,” and was allowed back into Massachusetts.

Having vented their fury on the major followers and isolated the leader, the Puritan oligarchs proceeded to the culminating point of the drama: the trial and persecution of Anne Hutchinson herself. There was no independent judiciary in the colonies; the supreme judicial arm in Massachusetts was the legislative body, the General Court, at this time a unicameral legislature presided over by the governor. Anne Hutchinson was
hauled up for “trial,” or rather public examination, before the General Court in November 1637. Anne’s enemies on the General Court duly “tried” her, convicted her of sedition and contempt, and banished her from the colony. Governor Winthrop summarized the proceedings thus: “The Court hath already declared themselves concerning... the troublesomeness of her spirit, and the dangers of her course amongst us, which is not to be suffered.” Winthrop then called for a vote that Mrs. Hutchinson “is unfit for our society—and... that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away....” Only two members voted against her banishment.

When Winthrop pronounced the sentence of banishment Anne Hutchinson courageously asked: “I desire to know wherefore I am banished.” Winthrop refused to answer: “Say no more. The court knows wherefore, and is satisfied.” It was apparently enough for the court to be satisfied; no justification before the bar of reason, natural justice, or the public was deemed necessary.

The General Court now proceeded against all the leading Hutchinsonians, concentrating on sixty Bostonians who had previously signed a moderate petition denying that Reverend Wheelwright had stirred up sedition among them. Two members of the General Court, both of whom had spoken up for Mrs. Hutchinson at the trial, were expelled from the court and banished from the colony. Many people were disfranchised, and seventy-five citizens were disarmed, on the pretext that the Hutchinsonians were plotting to follow the path of the German Anabaptists of old and rise up in armed revolt. The “reasoning” as expounded by Dudley at the Hutchinson trial was that the German Anabaptists had
also
claimed to enjoy private revelations. Hutchinsonian military officers were forced to recant, but the determined Capt. John Underhill refused to do so and was duly banished.

Anne Hutchinson’s ordeal was still not ended. Spared banishment during the rugged winter, she was imprisoned at the home of one of her major enemies, and the elders attempted, throughout the winter, to argue her out of her convictions. Finally, they subjected her to an ecclesiastical trial the following March. Tormented, ill, and exhausted, Mrs. Hutchinson momentarily recanted, but as she continued to be denounced, her spirits returned and she put forth her views again.

To save himself from the fate meted out to the other Hutchinsonians, John Cotton now apparently felt that his personal recantation was not enough, so he joined the pack rending Mrs. Hutchinson at the ecclesiastical trial. This man, whom Anne Hutchinson had revered and followed to the New World, now turned on her savagely, wailing that he had been duped, denouncing her as a liar and for conduct tending eventually to infidelity.

The Boston ecclesiastical court then pronounced excommunication upon Anne, and it was the peculiar satisfaction of the Rev. John Wilson, her most bitter enemy, to deliver the sentence: