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Anne Hutchinson (née Marbury; July 1591 – August 1643) was a Puritan spiritual adviser, mother of 15, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy which shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area, and her popularity and charisma helped create a theological schism that threatened to destroy the Puritans' religious community in New England. She was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters.
Hutchinson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, the daughter of Francis Marbury, an Anglican cleric and school teacher who gave her a far better education than most other girls received. She lived in London as a young adult, and there married her old friend from home William Hutchinson. The couple moved back to Alford where they began following dynamic preacher John Cotton in the nearby port of Boston, Lincolnshire. Cotton was compelled to emigrate in 1633, and the Hutchinsons followed a year later with their 11 children and soon became well established in the growing settlement of Boston in New England. Anne was a midwife and very helpful to those needing her assistance, as well as forthcoming with her personal religious understandings. Soon she was hosting women at her house weekly, providing commentary on recent sermons. These meetings became so popular that she began offering meetings for men as well, including the young governor of the colony Henry Vane.
She began to accuse the local ministers (except for Cotton and her husband's brother-in-law John Wheelwright) of preaching a "covenant of works" rather than a "covenant of grace," and many ministers began to complain about her increasingly blatant accusations, as well as certain theological teachings that did not accord with orthodox Puritan theology. The situation eventually erupted into what is commonly called the Antinomian Controversy, culminating in her 1637 trial, conviction, and banishment from the colony. This was followed by a March 1638 church trial in which she was put out of her congregation.
Hutchinson and many of her supporters established the settlement of Portsmouth with encouragement from Providence Plantations founder Roger Williams in what became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. After her husband's death a few years later, threats of Massachusetts taking over Rhode Island compelled Hutchinson to move totally outside the reach of Boston into the lands of the Dutch. Five of her older surviving children remained in New England or in England, while she settled with her younger children near an ancient landmark called Split Rock in what later became The Bronx in New York City. Tensions were high at the time with the Siwanoy Indian tribe. In August 1643, Hutchinson, six of her children, and other household members were massacred by Siwanoys during Kieft's War. The only survivor was her nine year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive.
Hutchinson is a key figure in the history of religious freedom in England's American colonies and the history of women in ministry, challenging the authority of the ministers. She is honored by Massachusetts with a State House monument calling her a "courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration." She has been called the most famous—or infamous—English woman in colonial American history.
Hutchinson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, the daughter of Francis Marbury, an Anglican cleric and school teacher who gave her a far better education than most other girls received. She lived in London as a young adult, and there married her old friend from home William Hutchinson. The couple moved back to Alford where they began following dynamic preacher John Cotton in the nearby port of Boston, Lincolnshire. Cotton was compelled to emigrate in 1633, and the Hutchinsons followed a year later with their 11 children and soon became well established in the growing settlement of Boston in New England. Anne was a midwife and very helpful to those needing her assistance, as well as forthcoming with her personal religious understandings. Soon she was hosting women at her house weekly, providing commentary on recent sermons. These meetings became so popular that she began offering meetings for men as well, including the young governor of the colony Henry Vane.
She began to accuse the local ministers (except for Cotton and her husband's brother-in-law John Wheelwright) of preaching a "covenant of works" rather than a "covenant of grace," and many ministers began to complain about her increasingly blatant accusations, as well as certain theological teachings that did not accord with orthodox Puritan theology. The situation eventually erupted into what is commonly called the Antinomian Controversy, culminating in her 1637 trial, conviction, and banishment from the colony. This was followed by a March 1638 church trial in which she was put out of her congregation.
Hutchinson and many of her supporters established the settlement of Portsmouth with encouragement from Providence Plantations founder Roger Williams in what became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. After her husband's death a few years later, threats of Massachusetts taking over Rhode Island compelled Hutchinson to move totally outside the reach of Boston into the lands of the Dutch. Five of her older surviving children remained in New England or in England, while she settled with her younger children near an ancient landmark called Split Rock in what later became The Bronx in New York City. Tensions were high at the time with the Siwanoy Indian tribe. In August 1643, Hutchinson, six of her children, and other household members were massacred by Siwanoys during Kieft's War. The only survivor was her nine year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive.
Hutchinson is a key figure in the history of religious freedom in England's American colonies and the history of women in ministry, challenging the authority of the ministers. She is honored by Massachusetts with a State House monument calling her a "courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration." She has been called the most famous—or infamous—English woman in colonial American history.
Anne Hutchinson - Wikipedia
Posted from en.wikipedia.org
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Good morning Maj Marty Hogan and thank you for all the great history buff birthday posts each day. I don't comment, but I do enjoy reading them.
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Maj Marty Hogan
COL Mikel J. Burroughs cop that sir. I know and you are tagged in a lot of posts. Enjoy your RED Friday sir.
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COL Mikel J. Burroughs
Maj Marty Hogan - Yes a lot, but I try everyday to get to as many as possible and comment/respond as time permits - thanks Marty!
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Eve LaPlante - Anne Hutchinson, Founding Mother, American Jezebel
A lecture by Eve LaPlant, author of the book "American Jezebel", on the story of the activist women of the 17 Century who was one of the unheralded founders ...
Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that July 20 is the anniversary of the birth of Puritan spiritual adviser who was the mother of 15 children Anne Hutchinson née Marbury who was an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy which shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.
She strangely believed that true believers could recognize other true believers simply by looking at them.
Eve LaPlante - Anne Hutchinson, Founding Mother, American Jezebel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRKwdFzINOg
Images:
1. 1637 Anne Hutchinson trial painting;
2. Anne Hutchinson Memorial. The inscription reads: In Memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson; Baptized at Alford, Lincolnshire England, 20 – July 1595 (sic)
Killed by the Indians at East Chester New York 1643; Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration;
3. 1637-08 Anne Hutchinson trial, illustration by Edwin Austin Abbey, circa 1901
4. August 20, 1643 Massacre of Anne Hutchinson,” by Siwanoy warriors illustration published in A Popular History of the United States, circa 1878
Biographies:
1. historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/
2. womenhistoryblog.com/2007/10/anne-marbury-hutchinson.html
1. Background from {[https://historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/]}
Who Was Anne Hutchinson?
Rebecca Beatrice Brooks January 26, 2015
Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan religious leader and midwife who moved from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634.
The following are some facts about Anne Hutchinson:
Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, Lincolnshire, England on July 20, 1591 and was the daughter of Bridget Dryden and Francis Marbury, a Deacon in the Church of England.
Francis Marbury was a dissident minister who had been silenced and imprisoned many times for complaining about the poor training of English clergymen.
Anne Hutchinson’ Childhood & Early Life:
As a child, Anne had been deeply influenced by her rebellious father and his own troubles with the church left a big impression on her, according to the book “American Jezebel”:
“Although entirely without formal schooling, like virtually every woman in her day, Anne Hutchinson had been well educated on her father’s knee. Francis Marbury, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, school-master, and Puritan reformer, was her father. In the late 1570s, more than a decade before her birth, his repeated challenges to Anglican authorities led to his censure, his imprisonment for several years, and his own public trial – a on a charge of heresy, the same charge that would be brought against his daughter, of refuting church dogma or religious truth. Marbury’s trial was held in November 1578 at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, fifty-nine years and an ocean distant from her far better known trial. His trial left an abiding mark on her, though, and its themes foreshadowed those of hers. During a lengthy period of church-imposed house arrest that coincided with Anne’s first three years of life, her father composed from memory a biting transcription of his trial, which he called ‘The conference between me and the Bishop of London’ with ‘many people standing by.’ This dramatic dialogue, published in the early 1590s as a pamphlet, was one of the central texts he used to educate and amuse his children.”
On August 9, 1612, Anne married William Hutchinson, a London merchant, with whom she eventually had 15 children.
The couple moved back to Alford and began attending the services of a new preacher, Reverend John Cotton, at St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire.
Anne was instantly mesmerized by Cotton and the two began a mentor-type relationship. Under his guidance, Anne led weekly prayer meetings in her home.
After John Cotton went into hiding when he was threatened with imprisonment for his views, he fled England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633.
Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony:
Feeling lost without her mentor, Anne then convinced her husband that they should follow Cotton to the New World. William consented and the Hutchinsons arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on September 18, 1634.
As a wealthy and prominent cloth merchant, William bought a half-acre lot on the Shawmut peninsula, in what is now downtown Boston, and built a large timber frame two-story house on the exact spot where the Old Corner Bookstore building now stands.
William Hutchinson continued his cloth business and Anne became a midwife, often giving spiritual advice to the mothers she assisted.
Things went well for both Cotton and the Hutchinsons until 1636, when they started speaking out against the way Puritans leaders were being trained, thus sparking the Antinomian Controversy, a religious and political conflict that lasted until 1638, according to the book “Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States”:
“Soon after Cotton began complaining that the Puritan ministers in Massachusetts Bay were emphasizing the covenant of works, Hutchinson began holding meetings at her house. Initially, she merely led discussions relating to Cotton’s sermons. Later, rumors circulated that she had accused the ministers of teaching only the covenant of works. Such an accusation assaulted the heart of the Puritan beliefs, that faith mattered most. To accuse the Puritan ministers of teaching a covenant of works was to accuse them of being no better than the Church of England, against which the Puritan movement had originally begun as an alternative to Anglican ‘faithlessness.’ Hutchinson’s charge struck at the power of the colony’s leaders: the ministers did not hold public office, but they wielded enormous political power and to portray them as being on the wrong path implied they should be replaced. Consequently, her claims divided the Puritan community, and in 1636 those who supported her succeeded in electing Henry Vane as the colony’s governor. Vane, the 24-year-old son of a British government official, had attended Hutchinson’s meetings.”
This victory was short lived since the orthodox Puritans defeated Vane in the next election and elected John Winthrop as Governor.
Feeling pressure to maintain conformity in the colony, Winthrop and his colleagues met in August of 1637 and decided to find a way to discredit and denounce Hutchinson. Incidentally, it was during this meeting that the religious leaders first discussed the idea of the New England Confederation, which was an alliance between the New England colonies.
First the religious leaders decided to disenfranchise and ban Anne’s prominent friends and allies and then they charged Hutchinson with sedition, the act of inciting people to rebel against authority.
The fact that Hutchinson’s charge of sedition was against the ministers, not the civil magistrates, demonstrates the lack of separation between church and state and suggests that if you undermine one, you undermine the other as well.
Hutchinson found herself in more trouble in October of 1637, about a month before her trial began, when she assisted in Mary Dyer’s birth of what the Boston ministers would later call a “monster.” Dyer’s baby was a stillborn with anencephaly and spina bifada malformations.
Knowing the controversy the birth would create, Hutchinson wrapped the baby in a blanket in an attempt to conceal its deformities and buried it in unconsecrated ground, most likely somewhere on Boston Common.
Winthrop and others eventually learned of the birth and exhumed the corpse. Upon examining it, the Boston ministers declared the deformed baby a punishment from God, just as they did later when Hutchinson endured a similar delivery herself in 1638, and viewed Hutchinson guilty by association for her role in the birth.
Anne Hutchinson’s Trial:
Hutchinson was brought to trial for sedition on November 7, 1637. During her trial, Hutchinson, who was possibly pregnant at the time (many historians aren’t sure if she became pregnant before or after her trial), underwent intense questioning.
Winthrop accused her of violating the 5th commandment to “honor they father and thy mother,” implying that she had defied authority. He also criticized her for teaching men, which was a violation of the Puritan’s rule that women should not be leaders.
Her testimony, during which she proudly professed to violating many Puritan rules, was the most damning, according to the book “Rebels and Renegades”:
“Hutchinson denied she had ever said the ministers were preaching only the covenant of works. Nevertheless, she said, ‘When they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.’ Strong and assertive, Hutchinson made a startling claim in her testimony to the court: ‘I bless the Lord,’ she said. “He hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong.’
‘How do you know that was the spirit?’ the court asked her.
‘How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?’ she replied.
‘By an immediate voice,’ the court said.
‘So too me by an immediate revelation,’ she responded.
‘How! An immediate revelation ,’ the court said.
‘By the voice of his spirit to my soul,’ she insisted.
Thus Hutchinson had claimed that God had revealed himself directly to her, a stance that violated the Puritan doctrine that revelation ended with the bible. Orthodox Puritans labeled Hutchinson a blasphemer and an antinomian, a person who believed that commands came only from God and that salvation freed an individual from the laws of church and state….Such ideas as Hutchinson’s opened society to potential disorder, should everyone assert that they could determine God’s revelations, and with them, God’s directions, for themselves.”
The court declared her a heretic, banished her from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ordered her to be gone by the end of March.
Afterward, they placed her under house arrest at the home of Joseph Weld, while she awaited her church trial. It was during this time that her friend and mentor, Reverend John Cotton, turned his back on her, according to an article in Harvard Magazine:
“Having been found guilty in her civil trial, she was placed under house arrest to await ecclesiastical trial. In 1638, the final blows were delivered. A sentence of banishment was never in doubt. Her former mentor, John Cotton, fearing for his own credibility, described her weekly Sunday meetings as a ‘promiscuous and filthie coming together of men and women without Distinction of Relation of Marriage’ and continued, ‘Your opinions fret like gangrene and spread like leprosy, and will eat out the very bowels of religion.'”
Hutchinson’s church trial began on March 15, 1638 at her home church in Boston. During the trial, the church leaders tried to get her to repent and confess her errors but to no avail, according to the book
“The Antinomian Controversy”:
“If the trial seems harsh to the modern reader, its role within the Puritan context was punitive only in a limited sense. Punishment by the church was meant to inspire repentance, and a genuine act of repentance could lead to the restoration of church membership. Those who prosecuted Mrs. Hutchinson hoped that she would confess her errors, as, for a moment, she did. But in the end she stood her ground and the church had no other choice then to cast her out.”
The church leaders read the charges against Hutchinson and tried to get her to admit they were errors but she remained defiant, according to court records:
“Mr. Leverit: Sister Hutchinson, here is diverse opinions laid to your charge by Mr. Shephard and Mrs. Frost, and I must request you in the name of the church to declare whether you hold them or renounce them as they be read to you.
1. That the souls of all men by nature are mortal.
2. That those that are united to Christ have two bodies, Christ’s and a new body and you knew not how Christ should be united to our fleshly bodies.
3. That our bodies shall not rise with Christ Jesus, not the same bodies at the last day.
4. That the Resurrection mentioned is not of our resurrection at the last day, but of our union to Jesus Christ.
5. That there be no created graces in the human nature of Christ nor in believers after their union.
6. That you had no scripture to warrant Christ being now in heaven in his human nature.
7. That the Disciples were not converted at Christ’s death.
8. That there is no Kingdom of Heaven but Christ Jesus.
9. That the first thing we receive for our assurance is our election.
These are alleged from Mr. Shepard. The next are from Roxbury.
1. That sanctification can be no evidence of a good estate in no wise.
2. That her revelations about future events are to be believed as well as scripture because the same Holy Ghost did indite both.
3. That Abraham was not in saving estate until he offered Isaac and so saving the firmness of God’s election, he might have perished eternally for any work of grace that was in him.
4. That a hypocrite may have the righteousness of Adam and perish.
5. That we are not bound to the law, not as a rule of life.
6. That not being bound to the law, no transgression of the law is sinful.
7. That you see no warrant in scripture to prove that the image of God in Adam was righteousness and true holiness.
These are alleged against you by Mr. Wells and Mr. Eliot. It is desired by the church, Sister Hutchinson, that you express this be your opinion or not.
Anne: If this be error then it is mine and I ought to lay it down. If this be truth, it is not mine but Christ Jesus’ and then I am not to lay it down. But I desire of the Church to demand one question. By what rule of the word when these elders shall come to me in private to desire satisfaction in some points and do profess in the sight of God that they did not come to entrap nor ensnare me, and now without speaking to me and expressing any dissatisfaction would come to bring it publicly into the Church before they had privately dealt with me? For them to come and inquire for light and afterwards to bear witness against it. I think it is a breach of Church Rule, to bring a thing in public before they have dealt with me in private.”
Although it appeared at times during the trial that Hutchinson did admit to errors and mistakes, she still refused to recant her beliefs and was found guilty and excommunicated.
Anne Hutchinson in Rhode Island:
Hutchinson left Massachusetts for Roger Williams’ settlement in Rhode Island on April 1. Her husband, most of her children and many of her friends had already left the colony months before in order to prepare a place for the group to live.
Accompanying Hutchinson on her long walk to Rhode Island were her remaining children, Mary Dyer and about 60-70 of Hutchinson’s followers, many of whom had been exiled by the court themselves in November for sedition.
The group slept in wigwams they either found along the way or made themselves. The journey took over six days and in the second week of April the group finally reached Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, where their family and friends had already begun to build a settlement.
That May, Hutchinson went into labor and gave birth to a hydatidiform mole, a mass of tissue that is often the result of sperm fertilizing a blighted egg.
When Winthrop learned of the news, he appeared to take pleasure in her misfortune and wrote to Anne’s doctor, John Clarke, to find out more of the details. He later reported in his journal:
“Mistress Hutchinson being big with child, and growing toward the time of her labour, as others do, she brought forth not one (as Mistress Dyer did) but (which was more strange to amazement) thirty monstrous births or thereabouts, at once, some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as far as I could ever learn) of human shape. These things are so strange that I am almost loath to be the reporter of them, lest I should seem to feign…But see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgement to her sin every way, for look – as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters. And as [there were] about thirty opinions in number, so many monsters. And as those were public, and not in a corner mentioned, so this is now come to be known and famous over all these churches, and a great part of the world.”
Reverend John Cotton also spoke to his congregation about Hutchinson’s miscarriage, stating it “might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness” and suggested it was a punishment from God for her crimes.
Hutchinson continued to find herself surrounded by political controversy in Rhode Island.
Wealthy merchant William Coddington was elected governor of the Aquidneck Island settlement, which they named Pocasset, but he quickly began to alienate the settlers and was overthrown in April of 1639. Hutchinson’s husband, William, was chosen as the new governor.
Coddington and several others then left the area and established the settlement of Newport. After a year, the two settlements decided to reunite and Coddington became Governor of the island and William Hutchinson was chosen to be one of his assistants.
In February of 1639, Winthrop sent three ministers, Edward Gibbons, William Hibbins and John Oliver, to visit Anne Hutchinson to force her to recant her beliefs. When she refused, they warned her that Massachusetts was poised to take over the colony of Rhode Island and she would no longer be welcome there.
After William Hutchinson died in 1642, realizing her future in Rhode Island was uncertain, Anne Hutchinson moved with her children to New York, to the area that is now Pelham Bay Park, which was then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. There they would be out of reach of the Massachusetts Puritans.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1830 biographical sketch of Hutchinson, titled “Mrs. Hutchinson,” Hawthorne envisioned that Hutchinson found not only peace of mind in New York but also the chance to be the leader she always wanted to be:
“Her final movement was to lead her family within the limits of the Dutch Jurisdiction, where, having felled the trees of virgin soil, she became herself the virtual head, civil and ecclesiastical, of a little colony. Perhaps here she found repose, hitherto so vainly sought. Secluded from all whose faith she could not govern, surrounded by dependents over whom she held an unlimited influence, agitated by none of the turmoltuous billows which were left swelling behind her, we may suppose, that, in the stillness of nature, her heart was stilled.”
Anne Hutchinson’s Death:
Little did Hutchinson know, the Dutch colony was a dangerous place to live at the time due to some bad blood between the local Native American tribes and the colony’s governor Willem Kieft.
Many of the local Native American tribes in New York at the time were unhappy about the Dutch settlement and often tried to persuade the settlers to leave.
Kieft further enraged the tribes by mistreating and deceiving them, such as when he tried to extort “protection” money from the Algonquins, Raritans and Wappinger Indians to keep them safe from the local Mohawk tribe, which Kieft actually controlled and used to terrorize other tribes.
When the other tribes refused to pay and attacked the Dutch colony, Kieft unleashed the Mohawks on them. In 1641, Kieft again tried to persuade the Wappinger Indians to pay by sending the Mohwaks after them.
Failing to realize who was really behind the attacks, the Wappinger Indians appealed to Kieft for help. Kieft responded by sending more Mohawks after them and then some of his own troops to attack them.
Actions such as these eventually sparked a series of events known as Kieft’s War.
One of these events occurred in August of 1643, when a party of Siwanoy indians raided the section of New York that Hutchinson lived in and she and six of her children were brutally killed, according to the book “American Jezebel”:
“The Siwanoy warriors stampeded into the tiny settlement above Pelham Bay, prepared to burn down every house. The Siwanoy chief, Wampage, who had sent a warning, expected to find no settlers present. But at one house the men in animal skins encountered several children, young men and women, and a woman past middle age. One Siwanoy indicated that the Hutchinsons should restrain the family’s dogs. Without apparent fear, one of the family tied up the dogs. As quickly as possible, the Siwanoy seized and scalped Francis Hutchinson, William Collins, several servants, the two Annes (mother and daughter), and the younger children—William, Katherine, Mary, and Zuriel. As the story was later recounted in Boston, one of the Hutchinson’s daughters, ‘seeking to escape,’ was caught ‘as she was getting over a hedge, and they drew her back again by the hair of the head to the stump of a tree, and there cut off her head with a hatchet.’”
The bodies were dragged into the house, which was then set on fire.
Hutchinson’s nine-year-old daughter, Susanna, was out picking berries at the time of the attack. She hid from the attackers but was eventually captured and lived with her captors for a few years until she was ransomed back to her family, according to the book “Unafraid: The Life of Anne Hutchinson:”
“When another treaty of peace was finally concluded with the Indians in 1645, one of the articles insisted on was a solemn obligation to restore the daughter of Anne Hutchinson. The Dutch guaranteed that had been offered by the New England friends of the little captive, and the obligation on both sides was fulfilled. Susan was restored to the Dutch – against her will, it is said, since she had learned to like her Indian captors – and she was eventually returned to Rhode Island.”
The reaction in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Anne Hutchinson’s death was harsh. Winthrop wrote in his journal:
“Thus it had 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…This American Jezebel kept her strength and reputation, even among the people of God, till the hand of civil justice laid hold on her, and then she began evidently to decline, and the faithful to be freed from her forgeries…”
The Reverend Thomas Weld also seemed pleased with Hutchinson’s death and happily wrote to acquaintances in England:
“The Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from our great and sore affliction… I never heard that the Indians in those parts did ever before this commit the like outrage upon any one family or families; and therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman…”
Later when it was discovered that the warrior, Wampage, took Anne Hutchinson’s name after her death, calling himself “Anne Hoeck,” it was assumed that he was the one who took her life, since it was customary among Native-Americans to adopt the name of their most notable victim.
In 1654, Wampage even transferred the deed of the Hutchinson’s property to Thomas Pell and listed his name on the document as “Anne Hoeck alias Wampage.”
Anne Hutchinson’s Descendants:
Hutchinson has a number of notable descendants. Her great-great grandson was Thomas Hutchinson, who became the loyalist Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay during the American Revolution.
Her other descendants include U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, George H. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Melville Weston Fuller, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Her grandson, Peleg Sanford, became Colonial Governor of Rhode Island.
Eve LaPlante, the author of Hutchinson’s biography “American Jezebel” is also one of Hutchinson’s descendants.
Anne Hutchinson’s Legacy: Why Was Hutchinson Important?
Anne Hutchinson is considered one of the first notable woman religious leaders in the North American Colonies. She fought for religious freedom and openly challenged the male dominated government and church authorities, making her a religious and feminist role model.
A number of local landmarks in New York were later named after Hutchinson. The neighboring land near where Hutchinson lived was named Anne-Hoeck’s neck, the local river was named the Hutchinson and the highway that runs alongside it was named the Hutchinson River Parkway.
In 1922, The Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the State Federation of Women’s Clubs erected a statue of Anne Hutchinson, sculpted by artist Cyrus Dallin, in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston.
In 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis officially pardoned Anne Hutchinson, therefore revoking her banishment from Massachusetts and clearing her name.
Sources:
King-Rugg, Winnifred. Unafraid: The Life of Anne Hutchinson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930.
Hamilton, Neil A. Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States. Routledge, 2002.
Randall, Willard Sterne and Nancy Nahra. Forgotten Americans: Footnote Figures Who Changed American History. Da Capo Press, 1998.
LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson. Harper Collins Publishers, Inc, 2010.
The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History. Edited by David D. Hall, Duke University Press, 1990.
Bryant, William Cullen. A Popular History of the United States. Vol. I, Charles Scribner’s sons, 1878.
“Anne Hutchinson Arrives in the New World.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/anne-hutchinson-arrives-in-the-new-world
Gomes, Peter G. “Anne Hutchinson: Brief Life of Harvard’s Midwife: 1595-1643.” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2002, harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/anne-hutchinson.html
“Anne Marbury Hutchinson.” National Women’s History Museum,
2. Background from {[https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2007/10/anne-marbury-hutchinson.html]}
ANNE HUTCHINSON
Women In Religion: Early American Religious Leader
Puritan leaders called Anne Hutchinson and her supporters Antinomians—individuals opposed to the rule of law. Puritans saw her as a challenge to their male-dominated society. Tried for sedition, she was also exiled as a danger to the colony. She lived in Rhode Island for a time and then moved to New Amsterdam, where she was killed in 1643 during a conflict between settlers and Native Americans.
Anne Marbury was born in Alford England, in July 1591, the daughter of Francis Marbury, a deacon at Christ Church in Cambridge. Anne’s father believed that most of the ministers in the Church of England hadn’t received the proper training for their position, and he said so. He was promptly arrested and spent a year in jail for his subversive words of dissent. But he wasn’t deterred, and he was arrested several more times.
So it Is no surprise that Anne developed an interest in religion and theology when she was very young, and she wasn’t afraid to ask questions about faith and the Church. Anne was home-schooled, and read from her father’s library, where she found there were as many questions about faith as there were answers. In 1605, she moved with her family to London.
At the age of 21, Anne married Will Hutchinson, a prosperous cloth merchant. They returned to Alford, and Anne took on the role of housewife and mother. The couple considered themselves part of the Puritan movement, and they followed the teachings of the Puritan preacher John Cotton.
Anne bore 15 children and learned midwifery, a skill that entitled a woman to special respect and esteem. She also maintained her interest in theology. At a time when Puritans could not worship freely in England, they chose to follow the Reverend Cotton when he emigrated to Boston in 1633.
Anne and William and their children were among the 200 passengers who arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the Griffen in the fall of 1634, in search of a place where they could worship freely. The Hutchinsons bought a house in Boston and a 600-acre farm. Anne received a warm welcome at first. Bostonians appreciated her skill as a midwife.
Bible Study
When the men of her church formed Bible study groups after church, Anne invited her female friends and neighbors to her home to discuss the Bible and the teachings of the local ministers. These ministers taught their parishioners that they could only find God by following the teachings of the Bible, and that only they—the ministers—could interpret the Bible correctly.
The Puritans interpretation of freedom of religion meant only that they would tolerate the neighboring colonies and their freedom to worship in any way they saw fit. John Winthrop and the rest of the founders dreamt of a settlement where freedom to worship meant you did not think or do unless you were acting in accordance to the strictest interpretation of the Bible. The freedom to worship, yes, but not the freedom to think.
America’s First Female Religious Leader
At her meetings, Anne stated that she believed anyone could communicate directly with God—without the help of ministers or the Bible. Anne, who was very intelligent at a time when women were not encouraged to develop their minds, was soon offering her views on a variety of topics.
Her meetings became very popular, and soon men began to support her—important men like Sir Henry Vane, who would later be elected governor of the colony. An eloquent speaker, she began to draw large crowds of women and men.
By the summer of 1636, the Puritans began to view her as a threat. Small women’s prayer groups were allowed by law, but large groups listening to the teachings and opinions of one individual leader were considered disorderly. The Puritans believed that women should obey men at all times, and that they should be forbidden to teach religion.
As her following grew, the magistrates decided that she was a dangerous woman who must be stopped. The laws of Massachusetts Bay were based on biblical teachings, and the colony’s leaders took seriously Paul’s commandment that women be silent in public meetings. But Anne’s supporters insisted that her meetings were private gatherings.
On Trial for Heresy
In August of 1637, Anne Hutchinson was condemned by a conference of ministers. She was charged her with sedition for undermining the authority of the ministers and heresy for expressing religious beliefs that were different from those of the colony’s religious leaders.
She was then tried by the General Court, the first female defendant in a Massachusetts court. Though she was 47, pregnant, and exhausted, she stood tall in the courtroom and bravely faced her accusers—forty-nine well-educated and powerful leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, presided over by Governor John Winthrop. There was no lawyer to defend her.
For nearly all of the first day of her trial, Winthrop was the only accuser who spoke. Hutchinson, he said, had held meetings that were “not tolerable” in the sight of God, and she had stepped beyond the bounds of what was allowed for women.
But she used the Bible and the men’s own words to skillfully defend herself. She stated that holding meetings in the home to discuss religion had been a common Puritan practice in England. She told them that God had spoken to her directly, and that only God could be her judge. This infuriated the Puritans—God would not speak to a woman!
But in the end, the verdict was against her. She was banished from—forced to leave—Massachusetts Bay Colony on March 22, 1638, and labeled a woman not fit for our society.
With her family and 60 followers, Anne left for the more tolerant Providence Plantation in Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams. She lived first at Aquidneck, Rhode Island.
In September 1638, Governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that Anne Hutchinson had delivered a stillborn, misshapen child. In the seventeenth century, stillborn children and children with birth defects were called monstrous births, and were believed to represent either God’s displeasure or the devil’s influence over the mother.
After her husband died, Anne moved to Long Island in New Amsterdam, where she and five of her children were killed in an Indian raid during an attack by Native Americans in September 1643.
America’s First Women’s Rights Activist
Anne Marbury Hutchinson was brought down by the contemporary mores surrounding the role of women in Puritan society. She had not succeeded in changing the laws of her time, but her courageous actions helped set the stage for an America in which religious freedom became a reality.
In 1922, a statue was erected in front of the State House in Boston. It depicts Anne Hutchinson and her daughter Susannah, the only survivor of the Native American conflict in which her mother and siblings died. In 1945, the legislature voted to revoke Anne’s banishment.
Anne Hutchinson Memorial
The inscription reads: In Memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Baptized at Alford Lincolnshire England 20, July 1595. Killed by the Indians at East Chester New York 1643. Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration
Today Anne Hutchinson is remembered as the first American woman to fight publicly for religious freedom and for women’s rights—a brave and principled woman who had the courage to speak her mind freely in a male hierarchy that allowed women no voice.
As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway.
FYI SGT John MeredithMSgt John McGowanMSgt David M.LTC Jeff ShearerSGT Philip RoncariCPT Jim GallagherLt Col Jim CoeCWO3 Dennis M.SGT (Join to see)PO3 Bob McCordSgt Albert Castro1SG John MillanSSgt Boyd Herrst TSgt Rodney BidingerSGT Jim ArnoldSFC Randy PurhamCDR (Join to see) PO3 Phyllis Maynard
She strangely believed that true believers could recognize other true believers simply by looking at them.
Eve LaPlante - Anne Hutchinson, Founding Mother, American Jezebel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRKwdFzINOg
Images:
1. 1637 Anne Hutchinson trial painting;
2. Anne Hutchinson Memorial. The inscription reads: In Memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson; Baptized at Alford, Lincolnshire England, 20 – July 1595 (sic)
Killed by the Indians at East Chester New York 1643; Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration;
3. 1637-08 Anne Hutchinson trial, illustration by Edwin Austin Abbey, circa 1901
4. August 20, 1643 Massacre of Anne Hutchinson,” by Siwanoy warriors illustration published in A Popular History of the United States, circa 1878
Biographies:
1. historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/
2. womenhistoryblog.com/2007/10/anne-marbury-hutchinson.html
1. Background from {[https://historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/]}
Who Was Anne Hutchinson?
Rebecca Beatrice Brooks January 26, 2015
Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan religious leader and midwife who moved from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634.
The following are some facts about Anne Hutchinson:
Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, Lincolnshire, England on July 20, 1591 and was the daughter of Bridget Dryden and Francis Marbury, a Deacon in the Church of England.
Francis Marbury was a dissident minister who had been silenced and imprisoned many times for complaining about the poor training of English clergymen.
Anne Hutchinson’ Childhood & Early Life:
As a child, Anne had been deeply influenced by her rebellious father and his own troubles with the church left a big impression on her, according to the book “American Jezebel”:
“Although entirely without formal schooling, like virtually every woman in her day, Anne Hutchinson had been well educated on her father’s knee. Francis Marbury, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, school-master, and Puritan reformer, was her father. In the late 1570s, more than a decade before her birth, his repeated challenges to Anglican authorities led to his censure, his imprisonment for several years, and his own public trial – a on a charge of heresy, the same charge that would be brought against his daughter, of refuting church dogma or religious truth. Marbury’s trial was held in November 1578 at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, fifty-nine years and an ocean distant from her far better known trial. His trial left an abiding mark on her, though, and its themes foreshadowed those of hers. During a lengthy period of church-imposed house arrest that coincided with Anne’s first three years of life, her father composed from memory a biting transcription of his trial, which he called ‘The conference between me and the Bishop of London’ with ‘many people standing by.’ This dramatic dialogue, published in the early 1590s as a pamphlet, was one of the central texts he used to educate and amuse his children.”
On August 9, 1612, Anne married William Hutchinson, a London merchant, with whom she eventually had 15 children.
The couple moved back to Alford and began attending the services of a new preacher, Reverend John Cotton, at St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire.
Anne was instantly mesmerized by Cotton and the two began a mentor-type relationship. Under his guidance, Anne led weekly prayer meetings in her home.
After John Cotton went into hiding when he was threatened with imprisonment for his views, he fled England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633.
Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony:
Feeling lost without her mentor, Anne then convinced her husband that they should follow Cotton to the New World. William consented and the Hutchinsons arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on September 18, 1634.
As a wealthy and prominent cloth merchant, William bought a half-acre lot on the Shawmut peninsula, in what is now downtown Boston, and built a large timber frame two-story house on the exact spot where the Old Corner Bookstore building now stands.
William Hutchinson continued his cloth business and Anne became a midwife, often giving spiritual advice to the mothers she assisted.
Things went well for both Cotton and the Hutchinsons until 1636, when they started speaking out against the way Puritans leaders were being trained, thus sparking the Antinomian Controversy, a religious and political conflict that lasted until 1638, according to the book “Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States”:
“Soon after Cotton began complaining that the Puritan ministers in Massachusetts Bay were emphasizing the covenant of works, Hutchinson began holding meetings at her house. Initially, she merely led discussions relating to Cotton’s sermons. Later, rumors circulated that she had accused the ministers of teaching only the covenant of works. Such an accusation assaulted the heart of the Puritan beliefs, that faith mattered most. To accuse the Puritan ministers of teaching a covenant of works was to accuse them of being no better than the Church of England, against which the Puritan movement had originally begun as an alternative to Anglican ‘faithlessness.’ Hutchinson’s charge struck at the power of the colony’s leaders: the ministers did not hold public office, but they wielded enormous political power and to portray them as being on the wrong path implied they should be replaced. Consequently, her claims divided the Puritan community, and in 1636 those who supported her succeeded in electing Henry Vane as the colony’s governor. Vane, the 24-year-old son of a British government official, had attended Hutchinson’s meetings.”
This victory was short lived since the orthodox Puritans defeated Vane in the next election and elected John Winthrop as Governor.
Feeling pressure to maintain conformity in the colony, Winthrop and his colleagues met in August of 1637 and decided to find a way to discredit and denounce Hutchinson. Incidentally, it was during this meeting that the religious leaders first discussed the idea of the New England Confederation, which was an alliance between the New England colonies.
First the religious leaders decided to disenfranchise and ban Anne’s prominent friends and allies and then they charged Hutchinson with sedition, the act of inciting people to rebel against authority.
The fact that Hutchinson’s charge of sedition was against the ministers, not the civil magistrates, demonstrates the lack of separation between church and state and suggests that if you undermine one, you undermine the other as well.
Hutchinson found herself in more trouble in October of 1637, about a month before her trial began, when she assisted in Mary Dyer’s birth of what the Boston ministers would later call a “monster.” Dyer’s baby was a stillborn with anencephaly and spina bifada malformations.
Knowing the controversy the birth would create, Hutchinson wrapped the baby in a blanket in an attempt to conceal its deformities and buried it in unconsecrated ground, most likely somewhere on Boston Common.
Winthrop and others eventually learned of the birth and exhumed the corpse. Upon examining it, the Boston ministers declared the deformed baby a punishment from God, just as they did later when Hutchinson endured a similar delivery herself in 1638, and viewed Hutchinson guilty by association for her role in the birth.
Anne Hutchinson’s Trial:
Hutchinson was brought to trial for sedition on November 7, 1637. During her trial, Hutchinson, who was possibly pregnant at the time (many historians aren’t sure if she became pregnant before or after her trial), underwent intense questioning.
Winthrop accused her of violating the 5th commandment to “honor they father and thy mother,” implying that she had defied authority. He also criticized her for teaching men, which was a violation of the Puritan’s rule that women should not be leaders.
Her testimony, during which she proudly professed to violating many Puritan rules, was the most damning, according to the book “Rebels and Renegades”:
“Hutchinson denied she had ever said the ministers were preaching only the covenant of works. Nevertheless, she said, ‘When they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.’ Strong and assertive, Hutchinson made a startling claim in her testimony to the court: ‘I bless the Lord,’ she said. “He hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong.’
‘How do you know that was the spirit?’ the court asked her.
‘How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?’ she replied.
‘By an immediate voice,’ the court said.
‘So too me by an immediate revelation,’ she responded.
‘How! An immediate revelation ,’ the court said.
‘By the voice of his spirit to my soul,’ she insisted.
Thus Hutchinson had claimed that God had revealed himself directly to her, a stance that violated the Puritan doctrine that revelation ended with the bible. Orthodox Puritans labeled Hutchinson a blasphemer and an antinomian, a person who believed that commands came only from God and that salvation freed an individual from the laws of church and state….Such ideas as Hutchinson’s opened society to potential disorder, should everyone assert that they could determine God’s revelations, and with them, God’s directions, for themselves.”
The court declared her a heretic, banished her from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ordered her to be gone by the end of March.
Afterward, they placed her under house arrest at the home of Joseph Weld, while she awaited her church trial. It was during this time that her friend and mentor, Reverend John Cotton, turned his back on her, according to an article in Harvard Magazine:
“Having been found guilty in her civil trial, she was placed under house arrest to await ecclesiastical trial. In 1638, the final blows were delivered. A sentence of banishment was never in doubt. Her former mentor, John Cotton, fearing for his own credibility, described her weekly Sunday meetings as a ‘promiscuous and filthie coming together of men and women without Distinction of Relation of Marriage’ and continued, ‘Your opinions fret like gangrene and spread like leprosy, and will eat out the very bowels of religion.'”
Hutchinson’s church trial began on March 15, 1638 at her home church in Boston. During the trial, the church leaders tried to get her to repent and confess her errors but to no avail, according to the book
“The Antinomian Controversy”:
“If the trial seems harsh to the modern reader, its role within the Puritan context was punitive only in a limited sense. Punishment by the church was meant to inspire repentance, and a genuine act of repentance could lead to the restoration of church membership. Those who prosecuted Mrs. Hutchinson hoped that she would confess her errors, as, for a moment, she did. But in the end she stood her ground and the church had no other choice then to cast her out.”
The church leaders read the charges against Hutchinson and tried to get her to admit they were errors but she remained defiant, according to court records:
“Mr. Leverit: Sister Hutchinson, here is diverse opinions laid to your charge by Mr. Shephard and Mrs. Frost, and I must request you in the name of the church to declare whether you hold them or renounce them as they be read to you.
1. That the souls of all men by nature are mortal.
2. That those that are united to Christ have two bodies, Christ’s and a new body and you knew not how Christ should be united to our fleshly bodies.
3. That our bodies shall not rise with Christ Jesus, not the same bodies at the last day.
4. That the Resurrection mentioned is not of our resurrection at the last day, but of our union to Jesus Christ.
5. That there be no created graces in the human nature of Christ nor in believers after their union.
6. That you had no scripture to warrant Christ being now in heaven in his human nature.
7. That the Disciples were not converted at Christ’s death.
8. That there is no Kingdom of Heaven but Christ Jesus.
9. That the first thing we receive for our assurance is our election.
These are alleged from Mr. Shepard. The next are from Roxbury.
1. That sanctification can be no evidence of a good estate in no wise.
2. That her revelations about future events are to be believed as well as scripture because the same Holy Ghost did indite both.
3. That Abraham was not in saving estate until he offered Isaac and so saving the firmness of God’s election, he might have perished eternally for any work of grace that was in him.
4. That a hypocrite may have the righteousness of Adam and perish.
5. That we are not bound to the law, not as a rule of life.
6. That not being bound to the law, no transgression of the law is sinful.
7. That you see no warrant in scripture to prove that the image of God in Adam was righteousness and true holiness.
These are alleged against you by Mr. Wells and Mr. Eliot. It is desired by the church, Sister Hutchinson, that you express this be your opinion or not.
Anne: If this be error then it is mine and I ought to lay it down. If this be truth, it is not mine but Christ Jesus’ and then I am not to lay it down. But I desire of the Church to demand one question. By what rule of the word when these elders shall come to me in private to desire satisfaction in some points and do profess in the sight of God that they did not come to entrap nor ensnare me, and now without speaking to me and expressing any dissatisfaction would come to bring it publicly into the Church before they had privately dealt with me? For them to come and inquire for light and afterwards to bear witness against it. I think it is a breach of Church Rule, to bring a thing in public before they have dealt with me in private.”
Although it appeared at times during the trial that Hutchinson did admit to errors and mistakes, she still refused to recant her beliefs and was found guilty and excommunicated.
Anne Hutchinson in Rhode Island:
Hutchinson left Massachusetts for Roger Williams’ settlement in Rhode Island on April 1. Her husband, most of her children and many of her friends had already left the colony months before in order to prepare a place for the group to live.
Accompanying Hutchinson on her long walk to Rhode Island were her remaining children, Mary Dyer and about 60-70 of Hutchinson’s followers, many of whom had been exiled by the court themselves in November for sedition.
The group slept in wigwams they either found along the way or made themselves. The journey took over six days and in the second week of April the group finally reached Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, where their family and friends had already begun to build a settlement.
That May, Hutchinson went into labor and gave birth to a hydatidiform mole, a mass of tissue that is often the result of sperm fertilizing a blighted egg.
When Winthrop learned of the news, he appeared to take pleasure in her misfortune and wrote to Anne’s doctor, John Clarke, to find out more of the details. He later reported in his journal:
“Mistress Hutchinson being big with child, and growing toward the time of her labour, as others do, she brought forth not one (as Mistress Dyer did) but (which was more strange to amazement) thirty monstrous births or thereabouts, at once, some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as far as I could ever learn) of human shape. These things are so strange that I am almost loath to be the reporter of them, lest I should seem to feign…But see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgement to her sin every way, for look – as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters. And as [there were] about thirty opinions in number, so many monsters. And as those were public, and not in a corner mentioned, so this is now come to be known and famous over all these churches, and a great part of the world.”
Reverend John Cotton also spoke to his congregation about Hutchinson’s miscarriage, stating it “might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness” and suggested it was a punishment from God for her crimes.
Hutchinson continued to find herself surrounded by political controversy in Rhode Island.
Wealthy merchant William Coddington was elected governor of the Aquidneck Island settlement, which they named Pocasset, but he quickly began to alienate the settlers and was overthrown in April of 1639. Hutchinson’s husband, William, was chosen as the new governor.
Coddington and several others then left the area and established the settlement of Newport. After a year, the two settlements decided to reunite and Coddington became Governor of the island and William Hutchinson was chosen to be one of his assistants.
In February of 1639, Winthrop sent three ministers, Edward Gibbons, William Hibbins and John Oliver, to visit Anne Hutchinson to force her to recant her beliefs. When she refused, they warned her that Massachusetts was poised to take over the colony of Rhode Island and she would no longer be welcome there.
After William Hutchinson died in 1642, realizing her future in Rhode Island was uncertain, Anne Hutchinson moved with her children to New York, to the area that is now Pelham Bay Park, which was then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. There they would be out of reach of the Massachusetts Puritans.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1830 biographical sketch of Hutchinson, titled “Mrs. Hutchinson,” Hawthorne envisioned that Hutchinson found not only peace of mind in New York but also the chance to be the leader she always wanted to be:
“Her final movement was to lead her family within the limits of the Dutch Jurisdiction, where, having felled the trees of virgin soil, she became herself the virtual head, civil and ecclesiastical, of a little colony. Perhaps here she found repose, hitherto so vainly sought. Secluded from all whose faith she could not govern, surrounded by dependents over whom she held an unlimited influence, agitated by none of the turmoltuous billows which were left swelling behind her, we may suppose, that, in the stillness of nature, her heart was stilled.”
Anne Hutchinson’s Death:
Little did Hutchinson know, the Dutch colony was a dangerous place to live at the time due to some bad blood between the local Native American tribes and the colony’s governor Willem Kieft.
Many of the local Native American tribes in New York at the time were unhappy about the Dutch settlement and often tried to persuade the settlers to leave.
Kieft further enraged the tribes by mistreating and deceiving them, such as when he tried to extort “protection” money from the Algonquins, Raritans and Wappinger Indians to keep them safe from the local Mohawk tribe, which Kieft actually controlled and used to terrorize other tribes.
When the other tribes refused to pay and attacked the Dutch colony, Kieft unleashed the Mohawks on them. In 1641, Kieft again tried to persuade the Wappinger Indians to pay by sending the Mohwaks after them.
Failing to realize who was really behind the attacks, the Wappinger Indians appealed to Kieft for help. Kieft responded by sending more Mohawks after them and then some of his own troops to attack them.
Actions such as these eventually sparked a series of events known as Kieft’s War.
One of these events occurred in August of 1643, when a party of Siwanoy indians raided the section of New York that Hutchinson lived in and she and six of her children were brutally killed, according to the book “American Jezebel”:
“The Siwanoy warriors stampeded into the tiny settlement above Pelham Bay, prepared to burn down every house. The Siwanoy chief, Wampage, who had sent a warning, expected to find no settlers present. But at one house the men in animal skins encountered several children, young men and women, and a woman past middle age. One Siwanoy indicated that the Hutchinsons should restrain the family’s dogs. Without apparent fear, one of the family tied up the dogs. As quickly as possible, the Siwanoy seized and scalped Francis Hutchinson, William Collins, several servants, the two Annes (mother and daughter), and the younger children—William, Katherine, Mary, and Zuriel. As the story was later recounted in Boston, one of the Hutchinson’s daughters, ‘seeking to escape,’ was caught ‘as she was getting over a hedge, and they drew her back again by the hair of the head to the stump of a tree, and there cut off her head with a hatchet.’”
The bodies were dragged into the house, which was then set on fire.
Hutchinson’s nine-year-old daughter, Susanna, was out picking berries at the time of the attack. She hid from the attackers but was eventually captured and lived with her captors for a few years until she was ransomed back to her family, according to the book “Unafraid: The Life of Anne Hutchinson:”
“When another treaty of peace was finally concluded with the Indians in 1645, one of the articles insisted on was a solemn obligation to restore the daughter of Anne Hutchinson. The Dutch guaranteed that had been offered by the New England friends of the little captive, and the obligation on both sides was fulfilled. Susan was restored to the Dutch – against her will, it is said, since she had learned to like her Indian captors – and she was eventually returned to Rhode Island.”
The reaction in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Anne Hutchinson’s death was harsh. Winthrop wrote in his journal:
“Thus it had 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…This American Jezebel kept her strength and reputation, even among the people of God, till the hand of civil justice laid hold on her, and then she began evidently to decline, and the faithful to be freed from her forgeries…”
The Reverend Thomas Weld also seemed pleased with Hutchinson’s death and happily wrote to acquaintances in England:
“The Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from our great and sore affliction… I never heard that the Indians in those parts did ever before this commit the like outrage upon any one family or families; and therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman…”
Later when it was discovered that the warrior, Wampage, took Anne Hutchinson’s name after her death, calling himself “Anne Hoeck,” it was assumed that he was the one who took her life, since it was customary among Native-Americans to adopt the name of their most notable victim.
In 1654, Wampage even transferred the deed of the Hutchinson’s property to Thomas Pell and listed his name on the document as “Anne Hoeck alias Wampage.”
Anne Hutchinson’s Descendants:
Hutchinson has a number of notable descendants. Her great-great grandson was Thomas Hutchinson, who became the loyalist Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay during the American Revolution.
Her other descendants include U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, George H. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Melville Weston Fuller, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Her grandson, Peleg Sanford, became Colonial Governor of Rhode Island.
Eve LaPlante, the author of Hutchinson’s biography “American Jezebel” is also one of Hutchinson’s descendants.
Anne Hutchinson’s Legacy: Why Was Hutchinson Important?
Anne Hutchinson is considered one of the first notable woman religious leaders in the North American Colonies. She fought for religious freedom and openly challenged the male dominated government and church authorities, making her a religious and feminist role model.
A number of local landmarks in New York were later named after Hutchinson. The neighboring land near where Hutchinson lived was named Anne-Hoeck’s neck, the local river was named the Hutchinson and the highway that runs alongside it was named the Hutchinson River Parkway.
In 1922, The Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the State Federation of Women’s Clubs erected a statue of Anne Hutchinson, sculpted by artist Cyrus Dallin, in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston.
In 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis officially pardoned Anne Hutchinson, therefore revoking her banishment from Massachusetts and clearing her name.
Sources:
King-Rugg, Winnifred. Unafraid: The Life of Anne Hutchinson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930.
Hamilton, Neil A. Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States. Routledge, 2002.
Randall, Willard Sterne and Nancy Nahra. Forgotten Americans: Footnote Figures Who Changed American History. Da Capo Press, 1998.
LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson. Harper Collins Publishers, Inc, 2010.
The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History. Edited by David D. Hall, Duke University Press, 1990.
Bryant, William Cullen. A Popular History of the United States. Vol. I, Charles Scribner’s sons, 1878.
“Anne Hutchinson Arrives in the New World.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/anne-hutchinson-arrives-in-the-new-world
Gomes, Peter G. “Anne Hutchinson: Brief Life of Harvard’s Midwife: 1595-1643.” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2002, harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/anne-hutchinson.html
“Anne Marbury Hutchinson.” National Women’s History Museum,
2. Background from {[https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2007/10/anne-marbury-hutchinson.html]}
ANNE HUTCHINSON
Women In Religion: Early American Religious Leader
Puritan leaders called Anne Hutchinson and her supporters Antinomians—individuals opposed to the rule of law. Puritans saw her as a challenge to their male-dominated society. Tried for sedition, she was also exiled as a danger to the colony. She lived in Rhode Island for a time and then moved to New Amsterdam, where she was killed in 1643 during a conflict between settlers and Native Americans.
Anne Marbury was born in Alford England, in July 1591, the daughter of Francis Marbury, a deacon at Christ Church in Cambridge. Anne’s father believed that most of the ministers in the Church of England hadn’t received the proper training for their position, and he said so. He was promptly arrested and spent a year in jail for his subversive words of dissent. But he wasn’t deterred, and he was arrested several more times.
So it Is no surprise that Anne developed an interest in religion and theology when she was very young, and she wasn’t afraid to ask questions about faith and the Church. Anne was home-schooled, and read from her father’s library, where she found there were as many questions about faith as there were answers. In 1605, she moved with her family to London.
At the age of 21, Anne married Will Hutchinson, a prosperous cloth merchant. They returned to Alford, and Anne took on the role of housewife and mother. The couple considered themselves part of the Puritan movement, and they followed the teachings of the Puritan preacher John Cotton.
Anne bore 15 children and learned midwifery, a skill that entitled a woman to special respect and esteem. She also maintained her interest in theology. At a time when Puritans could not worship freely in England, they chose to follow the Reverend Cotton when he emigrated to Boston in 1633.
Anne and William and their children were among the 200 passengers who arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the Griffen in the fall of 1634, in search of a place where they could worship freely. The Hutchinsons bought a house in Boston and a 600-acre farm. Anne received a warm welcome at first. Bostonians appreciated her skill as a midwife.
Bible Study
When the men of her church formed Bible study groups after church, Anne invited her female friends and neighbors to her home to discuss the Bible and the teachings of the local ministers. These ministers taught their parishioners that they could only find God by following the teachings of the Bible, and that only they—the ministers—could interpret the Bible correctly.
The Puritans interpretation of freedom of religion meant only that they would tolerate the neighboring colonies and their freedom to worship in any way they saw fit. John Winthrop and the rest of the founders dreamt of a settlement where freedom to worship meant you did not think or do unless you were acting in accordance to the strictest interpretation of the Bible. The freedom to worship, yes, but not the freedom to think.
America’s First Female Religious Leader
At her meetings, Anne stated that she believed anyone could communicate directly with God—without the help of ministers or the Bible. Anne, who was very intelligent at a time when women were not encouraged to develop their minds, was soon offering her views on a variety of topics.
Her meetings became very popular, and soon men began to support her—important men like Sir Henry Vane, who would later be elected governor of the colony. An eloquent speaker, she began to draw large crowds of women and men.
By the summer of 1636, the Puritans began to view her as a threat. Small women’s prayer groups were allowed by law, but large groups listening to the teachings and opinions of one individual leader were considered disorderly. The Puritans believed that women should obey men at all times, and that they should be forbidden to teach religion.
As her following grew, the magistrates decided that she was a dangerous woman who must be stopped. The laws of Massachusetts Bay were based on biblical teachings, and the colony’s leaders took seriously Paul’s commandment that women be silent in public meetings. But Anne’s supporters insisted that her meetings were private gatherings.
On Trial for Heresy
In August of 1637, Anne Hutchinson was condemned by a conference of ministers. She was charged her with sedition for undermining the authority of the ministers and heresy for expressing religious beliefs that were different from those of the colony’s religious leaders.
She was then tried by the General Court, the first female defendant in a Massachusetts court. Though she was 47, pregnant, and exhausted, she stood tall in the courtroom and bravely faced her accusers—forty-nine well-educated and powerful leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, presided over by Governor John Winthrop. There was no lawyer to defend her.
For nearly all of the first day of her trial, Winthrop was the only accuser who spoke. Hutchinson, he said, had held meetings that were “not tolerable” in the sight of God, and she had stepped beyond the bounds of what was allowed for women.
But she used the Bible and the men’s own words to skillfully defend herself. She stated that holding meetings in the home to discuss religion had been a common Puritan practice in England. She told them that God had spoken to her directly, and that only God could be her judge. This infuriated the Puritans—God would not speak to a woman!
But in the end, the verdict was against her. She was banished from—forced to leave—Massachusetts Bay Colony on March 22, 1638, and labeled a woman not fit for our society.
With her family and 60 followers, Anne left for the more tolerant Providence Plantation in Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams. She lived first at Aquidneck, Rhode Island.
In September 1638, Governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that Anne Hutchinson had delivered a stillborn, misshapen child. In the seventeenth century, stillborn children and children with birth defects were called monstrous births, and were believed to represent either God’s displeasure or the devil’s influence over the mother.
After her husband died, Anne moved to Long Island in New Amsterdam, where she and five of her children were killed in an Indian raid during an attack by Native Americans in September 1643.
America’s First Women’s Rights Activist
Anne Marbury Hutchinson was brought down by the contemporary mores surrounding the role of women in Puritan society. She had not succeeded in changing the laws of her time, but her courageous actions helped set the stage for an America in which religious freedom became a reality.
In 1922, a statue was erected in front of the State House in Boston. It depicts Anne Hutchinson and her daughter Susannah, the only survivor of the Native American conflict in which her mother and siblings died. In 1945, the legislature voted to revoke Anne’s banishment.
Anne Hutchinson Memorial
The inscription reads: In Memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Baptized at Alford Lincolnshire England 20, July 1595. Killed by the Indians at East Chester New York 1643. Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration
Today Anne Hutchinson is remembered as the first American woman to fight publicly for religious freedom and for women’s rights—a brave and principled woman who had the courage to speak her mind freely in a male hierarchy that allowed women no voice.
As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway.
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The Puritans | Witchcraft in the Colonies | Anne Hutchinson | Antinomianism
A company of English refugees, called Puritans, sail west to flee religious persecution and form a colony in the New World, but passionate disagreements over...
The Puritans | Witchcraft in the Colonies | Anne Hutchinson | Antinomianism
A company of English refugees, called Puritans, sail west to flee religious persecution and form a colony in the New World, but passionate disagreements over spiritual matters threaten to divide the colonists. This documentary looks at witchcraft in the colonies, Antinomianism and Anne Hutchinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiVzBUc4EJk
Images:
1. Anne Hutchinson on Trial by Edwin Austin Abbey 'Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court
2. Trial of Anne Hutchinson- Internet Archive- from Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days by Geraldine Brooks
3. Banishment Anne Hutchinson and family from Mass. Bay Colony. It took 6 days to walk to Rhode Island
4. Susanna Cole (Hutchinson) surviving youngest daughter of William and Anne Hutchinson. Wife of Wampage Hook, Sachem of the Siwanoys and John Cole
Background from {[https://www.famous-trials.com/hutchinson/2395-hutchinson-1637-account]}
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637): An Account
America was not always the “Land of Liberty.” In the 1630s, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, questioning Puritan dogma could bring you a world of trouble. It could get you shunned, it could get you ex-communicated, it could even get you criminally convicted and banished. Anne Hutchinson found all this out in 1637. But Hutchinson’s trial and conviction also, in ways that would have surprised her detractors, helped set American on a path towards greater toleration for religious differences.
Background
Hutchinson’s story, like so many of the Colonial Era, begins in England. In the late 1620s, John Winthrop, who, as the Governor of the Colony would later decide to prosecute Hutchinson, grew disenchanted with what he saw as the “papist” (Catholic) leanings of the Church under King Charles I. He also was unhappy with what he and other Puritans believed was a moral decline in his country. (The word “Puritan” is derived from the goal of the sect to “purify” the church of its Catholic excesses and tendencies and return to a church more like one that early Christians might have recognized.) The final straw for Winthrop and a band of Puritans was decision of King Charles to abrogate Parliament in 1629 rather to accede to Parliament’s demands that Charles pull back from what Puritans saw as his movement toward “popery.”
When Winthrop and other Puritan landholders asked to leave England and establish a new colony in America based on Puritan principles, King Charles saw it as a good riddance and granted the colonial charter. Winthrop and nearly one thousand other Puritans set sail across the Atlantic in eleven ships in the spring of 1630.
Anne Hutchinson was the daughter of Francis Marbury, a member of the clergy who himself had been tried and convicted of heresy in 1578 in London. Anne was born in 1591 and grew up in the town of Alford, population less than 500, near the central east coast of England. With her father under house arrest for again attacking the Church of England, Ann could enjoy, in her early years, his tutoring, including readings from the transcript of his own heresy trial.
Francis Marbury finally promised to cease his criticism of his superiors and regained his license to preach. Francis accepted a post as vicar in London when Anne was 14, and the family followed him there. Six years later, Francis Marbury died suddenly, but not before he had given Anne not only a strong Christian faith, but also a healthy contempt for the Anglican Church.
At age 21, Anne Marbury married William Hutchinson, five years her senior. The couple moved in to a home in Alford. One Sunday they traveled to the Church of St. Botolph’s, some 24 miles from Alford, to hear a sermon delivered by the minister John Cotton, who was rapidly gaining a reputation as a gifted speaker. They would make the six-hour trip many times more. Cotton preached that God offers salvation to the elect without condition—that neither faith nor good works was required. “Absolute grace,” he called it, and Anne saw Cotton’s view as absolute truth.
With the ascension of Prince Charles to the throne in 1625, England began to shift back toward Rome and away from Calvinism and Puritanism. All books on the subject of religion required a license from the Anglican Church and sermons departing from orthodox teaching were banned. In this increasingly hostile environment, Puritans faced a choice—they could go underground, they could go to prison, or they could go to America, where they might hope to continue preaching as they saw fit openly.
In April of 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Company, led by John Winthrop, boarded a fleet of ships near the Isle of Wright.
The first year in the New World was hard. Two hundred settlers died of cold, illness, or starvation. When the first supply ship arrived, 80 settlers took the return trip back to England.
Three years later, John Cotton left hiding in the Puritan underground and sailed for Massachusetts. He soon became the most popular preacher in the new colony. His Sunday sermons, running up to six or seven hours in length, were copied by church-goers and discussed at length.
Cotton’s departure for America left Hutchinson without her most important religious inspiration. She said that after Cotton and another minister she admired left, “there was none in England that I durst hear.” She experienced a revelation that she should follow Cotton to the New World. She should “go thither also” even though “there I should be persecuted and suffer much trouble.” William sold his business and bought the family, including ten children, tickets (at 100 pounds per person) for the trip to America.
Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston harbor in September of 1634. John Cotton greeted her on the pier and led the Hutchinson family up the dock to their new home. Upon their arrival, Massachusetts Bay Colony had about 5,000 English settlers, with about 1,000 of those living in Boston, the colony’s largest town.
Six weeks later Anne was accepted for full membership in the Boston church. Religion was everything in a Puritan community. The Bible was often the only book in a home. Scripture was read and studied on a daily basis. Church services were long and frequent. Events that today would be explained by science, luck, or coincidence were explained in Biblical terms. Historian Frank Collinson described the life of a Puritan as “in one sense a continuous act of worship.”
Services were held in spare meetinghouses without altars or statuary. There was no singing or formal liturgy. No Christmas or wedding celebrations, no carnivals or sacred places. It was all rather severe.
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, women, banned from participation in church services, often met in their homes to discuss their minister’s last sermon or Biblical text. It was all that was left them. Women could not be ministers, could not vote on church matters, and could not even talk in church. They entered the church meetinghouse through a separate door and sat together on a separate side of the building.
It was in these women’s religious study groups held in private homes that Anne Hutchinson first began in 1635 to make a name for herself as an astute interpreter of the Bible. Her meetings grew in popularity. She added a second weekly session to accommodate all the women who wanted to hear her wisdom. Anne’s influence came from not only her Biblical training and intelligence, but also because of the high social status of her family in the colony. Will Hutchinson, Anne’s husband was wealthy. They lived in an impressive gabled home just across from Governor Winthrop’s house in Boston.
Hutchinson began to raise eyebrows in the colony when word leaked that in her study groups she had questioned the Biblical interpretations of local ministers in their sermons. In particular, Anne took issue with ministers who suggested that people need to display their faith, perform good deeds, and act as a decent Puritan should in order to show that they have been saved. Anne rejected this view, which was called a “covenant of works.” Instead, she insisted that the Bible makes clear that salvation is a matter of grace—that God chose souls before birth and granted the gift of salvation without conditions. This was called “a covenant of grace.” A covenant of works versus a covenant of grace: that theological question would take center stage in the trial of Anne Hutchinson.
The Apostle Paul, as noted by Anne and others, seemed to side with the covenant of grace in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” Luther and Calvin, key figures in the Reformation, also accepted salvation as a matter of grace. The Puritan ministers undoubtedly saw a problem with the suggestion that people could sit idly by and expect salvation—it was all too easy and might discourage rule-following and even, God forbid, skipping church services. Winthrop saw the Hutchinson view as “a very easy and acceptable way to heaven—to see nothing, to have nothing, but wait for Christ to do all.”
The crisis deepened in 1636 when Hutchinson, upset with a sermon being delivered by John Wilson, a minister hand-picked by Governor Winthrop to replace a minister favored by Anne, stood up and walked out of the meetinghouse. A number of other women followed her out. A colleague of the minister complained of Hutchinson and her supporters, “Now the faithful ministers of Christ must have dung cast on their faces.”
For Hutchinson, things turned toward the better. Her political supporter, Henry Vane, was elected governor, replacing John Winthrop. And she soon found a new minister who shared her theological views. John Wheelwright arrived from England in May 1636, and began preaching in Boston the next month. Winthrop was left to stew, writing in his diary about Hutchinson’s “dangerous errors.” But the schism over the question of salvation and whether it came unconditionally from God or had to be earned through works continued to deepen.
Anne Hutchinson was called to a meeting in December 1636. She faced a panel of seven ministers who demanded to know her views on the Scripture and on their own preaching. Two and a half months later, ministers meeting in Cambridge for a Synod identified 82 errors held by Hutchinson that had been recorded in their meeting with her. They also banned her from leading religious discussion groups, which they called inappropriately “prophetical” and “disorderly.” Governor Winthrop offered a summary of her grave mistakes: She would “interpret passages at her pleasure and expound dark places of Scripture and make it her own.” Rather that sticking to “wholesome truths,” she “set forth her own stuff.”
Winthrop succeeded in dispatching Reverend Wheelwright to Mount Wollaston, where he could cause less harm. May 17, 1637 was a turning point in the history of Massachusetts Bay. Magistrates and freemen assembled in Cambridge Common to decide who would control the colony. Supporters of John Winthrop and his orthodox theology carried the day. Winthrop was elected Governor for a second time, replacing Henry Vane, who had been strongly backed by the Hutchinson.
The Great and General Court of Massachusetts rotated its sessions between Boston and Cambridge (or Newtown, as Cambridge was called at the time). When Winthrop decided to put Hutchinson on trial, he determined that his prospects for conviction were better in Cambridge than in Boston. The residents of Cambridge tended to be landed gentry and more conservative than the residents of Boston, who held more mercantile interests.
The Trial
The trial of Anne Hutchinson began on November 7, 1637 in a thatched-roof meetinghouse in Cambridge. Wearing a black wool cloak, a white bonnet over her long hair, and a white linen smock, Hutchinson entered the room and a voice announced, “Anne Hutchinson is present.” The nine magistrates and thirty-one deputies of the General Court of Massachusetts, including the governor, deputy governor, a team of assistants, and freemen selected by the 14 towns of the colony, took their seats on backless wooden benches that faced the crowd. The forty men included two recently appointed replacements for judges who expressed sympathy for Hutchinson’s case. Eight ministers also strode into court, all on hand to offer their testimony.
The General Court, whose authority derived from the royal charter, was an all-powerful body in the colony. It mixed legislative, executive, and judicial functions. It legislated on all aspects of colonial life, from the color of clothes that could be worn to requiring attendance at Sunday services. The only check on its power was the knowledge of its members that rulings that appeared too arbitrary or self-serving could prompt calls for a revocation of the charter.
Governor Winthrop, both the chief prosecutor and the chief judge, hoped that the trial would fortify his position of power and unify the colony, which had become divided and weakened by fighting over religious issues, especially the question of salvation. Winthrop, sitting at a desk, banged his gavel and called out, “Mistress Hutchinson, Mistress Hutchinson.” When the crowd quieted, he continued: “Mistress Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here.” Standing silently before the Governor, Hutchinson listened as the Governor outlined what he saw as her sins. “You have spoken diverse things…prejudicial to the honor of the churches and ministers….And you have maintained a meeting or general assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable or comely in the sight of your God nor fitting for your sex.” Winthrop ended his opening remarks with a threat: “If you are obstinate in your course, then the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further.”
Hutchinson answered by complaining about the vague nature of the accusations against her: “I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.” Winthrop replied, “I have told you some already, and more I can tell you.” “Name one, sir,” Anne demanded. “Have I not named one already?” was Winthrop’s somewhat lame reply. Nothing Winthrop had alleged Hutchinson had done amounted to a criminal offence. “We are your judges and not you ours,” Winthrop reminded Hutchinson. “If you have a rule for it from God’s word, you may,” Anne countered.
Hutchinson and Winthrop proceeded to trade Biblical passages, either as evidence for or against the right of a woman to provide instruction on the meaning of Scripture. Anne pointed to Titus which says older women are the teachers of “honest things,” while Hutchinson noted that Timothy 2:12 states, “I permit not a woman to teach,…but to be in silence.” Arguments in Puritan Massachusetts were won or lost on Scripture—every word was considered meaningful and true.
“Do you think it not lawful of me to teach men and why do you call on me to teach the court?” Anne asked the Governor. Winthrop responded, angrily, “We do not call upon you to teach the court, but to lay yourself open.”
The governor conceded Hutchinson was a woman of unusual talents: “Yes, you are a woman of most note, and of best abilities.” But that made her all the more dangerous. She had influence over the opinions of others and, Winthrop insisted, “You show not in all this by what authority you take upon yourself to be such a public instructor.”
Then, suddenly, Anne seemed ready to collapse. A chair was called for, and the trial continued.
Magistrate Thomas Dudley launched into an attack on Hutchinson, claiming that “Mistress Hutchinson has depraved all the ministers and hath been the cause of what is fallen out.” The charge suggested that Hutchinson had acted seditiously and in breach of the peace—charges which, if proven, might lead to her banishment. Anne rose to say, “I pray, sir, prove it.” Dudley and Hutchinson debated whether Anne had accused ministers of preaching falsely a covenant of works. “When they do preach a covenant of works, do they preach the truth?” Dudley asked. “Yes sir,” Anne replied, “but when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not the truth.” Dudley persisted, telling Anne that she not only did say ministers preached a covenant of works, but asserted that they “were not able ministers of the New Testament.” Anne argued that what she believed or said in private could not be a crime, and as women had no public role in Puritan society, what opinions she had or expressed could only be considered private—a rather clever argument.
Winthrop looked to the ministers in court, hoping they might have something to say that would add meat to the charges against Hutchinson. None took the bait. “Our brethren are very unwilling to answer, unless the court command us to speak,” said the Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem. Winthrop issued the command and six ministers testified. After they were done, Dudley offered a summary: “You see they have proved this, and yet you deny this, but it is clear. You say they preached a covenant of works and are not able ministers.” Winthrop added, “Here are six undeniable ministers who say [what you deny] it is true.” It had been a long day in the windowless meetinghouse. Winthrop announced, “The time now grows late. We shall therefore give you a little more time to consider of it, and therefore desire that you attend the court again in the morning.”
Hutchinson believed that one of the ministers had made a number of false statements about her private conference with the colony’s ministers the previous winter. When court reconvened, Anne asked that all the witnesses of the day before be recalled and swear to an oath that there testimony was true. The ministers expressed reluctance, being of the belief that taking an oath amounted to an affirmation of the absolute truth of everything they said—and their confidence about their testimony was less than absolute. Winthrop declared. “I see no necessity of an oath in this thing”—to which the Hutchinson supporters in the crowd shouted out, “We are not satisfied!” But Winthrop would not budge.
Asked for the names of defense witnesses, Hutchinson offered three. John Coggeshall told the court that Hutchinson “did not say all that [the ministers] lay against her.” Thomas Leverett, a lawyer, said that Anne had not specifically charged the ministers with preaching a covenant of works, only that “they did not preach a covenant of grace so clearly as Mr. Cotton did.” Hutchinson’s third and most influential witness, John Cotton, took a seat next to Anne.
Without question, the opinions of John Cotton mattered. Hutchinson biographer Eve LaPlante writes in her book American Jezebel that Cotton was “the unmitred pope of a pope-hating commonwealth.” Cotton testified reluctantly, telling the court, “I did not think I should be called to bear witness in this cause, and therefore did not labor to call to remembrance what was done.” Cotton told the court “that I was very sorry that she put comparisons between my ministry” and that of the other ministers. But Cotton added, to Anne’s relief, that he never heard her specifically accuse other ministers of preaching a covenant of works. And if Anne had left things there, she might have gotten off with an admonishment, not a conviction for heresy. But she couldn’t stop herself. She began to lecture the court.
Hutchinson told the court that the Lord told her she “must come to New England, yet I must not fear or be dismayed.” She said “the Lord did give me to see that those who did not teach the New Covenant had the spirit of the Antichrist.” She told the judges that she saw the truth “by an immediate revelation” from God—“by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.” To her judges, this was arrogance and heresy. God spoke only through ministers and Scripture, not directly to a woman. Deputy Governor Dudley announced, “I am now fully persuaded that Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil.”
Anne was not done. She ended her lecture with a warning: “I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and you’re your posterity and the whole state!” Historian David Hall writes that Anne’s “outburst made it easy” for the judges to do what they wanted to do anyway—rid the colony of Anne Hutchinson. In his private record of the proceedings, Winthrop called Hutchinson’s performance “the impudent boldness of a proud dame.”
When Anne finished speaking, Governor Winthrop pointed at Hutchinson and said, “This had been the ground of all these tumults and troubles. This had been the thing that has been the root of all the mischief.” Most of the judges, at least thirty of them, shouted their agreement: “We all consent with you!” Winthrop declared Hutchinson guilty. Of what, exactly, the court was less than clear. The finding seems to rest both on the heresy of claiming a revelation and sedition, in resisting the lawful authority of ministers. “The court hath declared itself,” he announced, and said it “would now consider what is to be done with her.”
Winthrop summed up the proceedings and asked for a vote. “If it be the mind of the court that she shall be banished out of liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away, let them hold up their hands.” Only two of the forty judges voted against banishment and imprisonment—and John Cotton was not among them. One minister abstained. Winthrop pronounced sentence: “Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.” Anne demanded to know “wherefore I am banished.” But she got no answer from Winthrop: “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”
Epilogue
A week after the sentencing, the General Court reconsidered its decision to erect a new college in Boston, and voted instead to build it in Cambridge because “this town was kept spotless from the contagion of opinions” that infected other parts of the colony. The new college would be named after “Mr. Harvard, who died worth 1600 pounds” and gave “half of his estate to the erecting of the school.”
The General Court had sympathy enough for Hutchinson to allow her to remain in Massachusetts through the winter. She stayed, under house arrest, at a home in Roxbury. She took with her only clothes, a Bible, and a guide to medicinal plants.
Where to go? In March 1638, William Hutchinson and 17 other men seeking a new, more religiously tolerant place, met in Boston. They incorporated themselves into what they called a “Bodie Politik.” And they all signed their names to what came to be called “the Portsmouth Compact.” The stated object of the Compact was to found a state where all “might worship God according to the dictates of conscience…unawed by civil power.”
William Hutchinson and six other Compact signers headed south. After meeting with Roger Williams and local Indians, the group settled on a new home: Aquidneck Island, south of Roger Williams’s Providence Plantations. Some years later, the new settlement of Portsmouth would become part of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The influence of both Williams and Hutchinson is evident in the 1663 charter for the new colony—a place where all might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. Or as the charter puts it: “No person …shall in any wise be molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matters of religion—so long as he keeps the peace.”
Meanwhile, Anne Hutchinson remained under arrest in Massachusetts, under orders to leave the colony before the end of March 1638. Before she would leave Massachusetts, however, she faced a church trial. Before the congregation of the Church of Boston, Anne was examined and excommunicated. In the proceeding, John Cotton used over-the-top language to describe the damage he believed Anne had caused in the colony: “And so your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the bowels of religion and hath so infected the churches that God knows when they will be cured!” Reverend John Wilson declared that Hutchinson had been “raised up by Satan…to cause divisions and to take away hearts and affections one from another.” By now, Hutchinson had become a community scapegoat. The proceeding ended with Wilson announcing, “I do deliver you up to Satan, that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to lie!”
On April 1, 1638, Anne Hutchinson began a six-day walk south to John Williams’s Providence Plantation, where she boarded a ship that took her to the island of Aquidneck. In Rhode Island, Anne could speak freely, and she could again enjoy the company of her husband, children, and grandchildren. But her husband Will, the first governor of Rhode Island, died in 1642 at the age of 55. That summer, Anne decided to leave Rhode Island and travel west to settle on land in Pellham Bay in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (which would later become New York). In July 1643, Anne was warned by Dutch neighbors that Siwanoy warriors were on their way and that she and her family should flee their farmstead. But Anne put her trust in God. The warriors swept into Pellham Bay. They scalped Anne and six of her children, then burned down her house.
What to make of the trial of Anne Hutchinson? First, the trial gave Anne the chance to address not only her entire colony, but posterity—an opportunity few women in the 1600s could ever hope to enjoy. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the trial led to a decision of the General Court in November 1637 might well have been wrong, but it helped lead to the birth of a nation where liberty would take on a new and more generous meaning. While the decision ended religious freedom for those in Massachusetts whose views differed from the approved theology, it led to an exodus of dissenters who helped create more tolerant societies elsewhere. In 1663, a full charter was given to Rhode Island and Providence Plantation. The charter guaranteed religious freedom for all persons. In no small measure, Anne Hutchinson helped chart the American course toward liberty."
A company of English refugees, called Puritans, sail west to flee religious persecution and form a colony in the New World, but passionate disagreements over spiritual matters threaten to divide the colonists. This documentary looks at witchcraft in the colonies, Antinomianism and Anne Hutchinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiVzBUc4EJk
Images:
1. Anne Hutchinson on Trial by Edwin Austin Abbey 'Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court
2. Trial of Anne Hutchinson- Internet Archive- from Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days by Geraldine Brooks
3. Banishment Anne Hutchinson and family from Mass. Bay Colony. It took 6 days to walk to Rhode Island
4. Susanna Cole (Hutchinson) surviving youngest daughter of William and Anne Hutchinson. Wife of Wampage Hook, Sachem of the Siwanoys and John Cole
Background from {[https://www.famous-trials.com/hutchinson/2395-hutchinson-1637-account]}
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637): An Account
America was not always the “Land of Liberty.” In the 1630s, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, questioning Puritan dogma could bring you a world of trouble. It could get you shunned, it could get you ex-communicated, it could even get you criminally convicted and banished. Anne Hutchinson found all this out in 1637. But Hutchinson’s trial and conviction also, in ways that would have surprised her detractors, helped set American on a path towards greater toleration for religious differences.
Background
Hutchinson’s story, like so many of the Colonial Era, begins in England. In the late 1620s, John Winthrop, who, as the Governor of the Colony would later decide to prosecute Hutchinson, grew disenchanted with what he saw as the “papist” (Catholic) leanings of the Church under King Charles I. He also was unhappy with what he and other Puritans believed was a moral decline in his country. (The word “Puritan” is derived from the goal of the sect to “purify” the church of its Catholic excesses and tendencies and return to a church more like one that early Christians might have recognized.) The final straw for Winthrop and a band of Puritans was decision of King Charles to abrogate Parliament in 1629 rather to accede to Parliament’s demands that Charles pull back from what Puritans saw as his movement toward “popery.”
When Winthrop and other Puritan landholders asked to leave England and establish a new colony in America based on Puritan principles, King Charles saw it as a good riddance and granted the colonial charter. Winthrop and nearly one thousand other Puritans set sail across the Atlantic in eleven ships in the spring of 1630.
Anne Hutchinson was the daughter of Francis Marbury, a member of the clergy who himself had been tried and convicted of heresy in 1578 in London. Anne was born in 1591 and grew up in the town of Alford, population less than 500, near the central east coast of England. With her father under house arrest for again attacking the Church of England, Ann could enjoy, in her early years, his tutoring, including readings from the transcript of his own heresy trial.
Francis Marbury finally promised to cease his criticism of his superiors and regained his license to preach. Francis accepted a post as vicar in London when Anne was 14, and the family followed him there. Six years later, Francis Marbury died suddenly, but not before he had given Anne not only a strong Christian faith, but also a healthy contempt for the Anglican Church.
At age 21, Anne Marbury married William Hutchinson, five years her senior. The couple moved in to a home in Alford. One Sunday they traveled to the Church of St. Botolph’s, some 24 miles from Alford, to hear a sermon delivered by the minister John Cotton, who was rapidly gaining a reputation as a gifted speaker. They would make the six-hour trip many times more. Cotton preached that God offers salvation to the elect without condition—that neither faith nor good works was required. “Absolute grace,” he called it, and Anne saw Cotton’s view as absolute truth.
With the ascension of Prince Charles to the throne in 1625, England began to shift back toward Rome and away from Calvinism and Puritanism. All books on the subject of religion required a license from the Anglican Church and sermons departing from orthodox teaching were banned. In this increasingly hostile environment, Puritans faced a choice—they could go underground, they could go to prison, or they could go to America, where they might hope to continue preaching as they saw fit openly.
In April of 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Company, led by John Winthrop, boarded a fleet of ships near the Isle of Wright.
The first year in the New World was hard. Two hundred settlers died of cold, illness, or starvation. When the first supply ship arrived, 80 settlers took the return trip back to England.
Three years later, John Cotton left hiding in the Puritan underground and sailed for Massachusetts. He soon became the most popular preacher in the new colony. His Sunday sermons, running up to six or seven hours in length, were copied by church-goers and discussed at length.
Cotton’s departure for America left Hutchinson without her most important religious inspiration. She said that after Cotton and another minister she admired left, “there was none in England that I durst hear.” She experienced a revelation that she should follow Cotton to the New World. She should “go thither also” even though “there I should be persecuted and suffer much trouble.” William sold his business and bought the family, including ten children, tickets (at 100 pounds per person) for the trip to America.
Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston harbor in September of 1634. John Cotton greeted her on the pier and led the Hutchinson family up the dock to their new home. Upon their arrival, Massachusetts Bay Colony had about 5,000 English settlers, with about 1,000 of those living in Boston, the colony’s largest town.
Six weeks later Anne was accepted for full membership in the Boston church. Religion was everything in a Puritan community. The Bible was often the only book in a home. Scripture was read and studied on a daily basis. Church services were long and frequent. Events that today would be explained by science, luck, or coincidence were explained in Biblical terms. Historian Frank Collinson described the life of a Puritan as “in one sense a continuous act of worship.”
Services were held in spare meetinghouses without altars or statuary. There was no singing or formal liturgy. No Christmas or wedding celebrations, no carnivals or sacred places. It was all rather severe.
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, women, banned from participation in church services, often met in their homes to discuss their minister’s last sermon or Biblical text. It was all that was left them. Women could not be ministers, could not vote on church matters, and could not even talk in church. They entered the church meetinghouse through a separate door and sat together on a separate side of the building.
It was in these women’s religious study groups held in private homes that Anne Hutchinson first began in 1635 to make a name for herself as an astute interpreter of the Bible. Her meetings grew in popularity. She added a second weekly session to accommodate all the women who wanted to hear her wisdom. Anne’s influence came from not only her Biblical training and intelligence, but also because of the high social status of her family in the colony. Will Hutchinson, Anne’s husband was wealthy. They lived in an impressive gabled home just across from Governor Winthrop’s house in Boston.
Hutchinson began to raise eyebrows in the colony when word leaked that in her study groups she had questioned the Biblical interpretations of local ministers in their sermons. In particular, Anne took issue with ministers who suggested that people need to display their faith, perform good deeds, and act as a decent Puritan should in order to show that they have been saved. Anne rejected this view, which was called a “covenant of works.” Instead, she insisted that the Bible makes clear that salvation is a matter of grace—that God chose souls before birth and granted the gift of salvation without conditions. This was called “a covenant of grace.” A covenant of works versus a covenant of grace: that theological question would take center stage in the trial of Anne Hutchinson.
The Apostle Paul, as noted by Anne and others, seemed to side with the covenant of grace in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” Luther and Calvin, key figures in the Reformation, also accepted salvation as a matter of grace. The Puritan ministers undoubtedly saw a problem with the suggestion that people could sit idly by and expect salvation—it was all too easy and might discourage rule-following and even, God forbid, skipping church services. Winthrop saw the Hutchinson view as “a very easy and acceptable way to heaven—to see nothing, to have nothing, but wait for Christ to do all.”
The crisis deepened in 1636 when Hutchinson, upset with a sermon being delivered by John Wilson, a minister hand-picked by Governor Winthrop to replace a minister favored by Anne, stood up and walked out of the meetinghouse. A number of other women followed her out. A colleague of the minister complained of Hutchinson and her supporters, “Now the faithful ministers of Christ must have dung cast on their faces.”
For Hutchinson, things turned toward the better. Her political supporter, Henry Vane, was elected governor, replacing John Winthrop. And she soon found a new minister who shared her theological views. John Wheelwright arrived from England in May 1636, and began preaching in Boston the next month. Winthrop was left to stew, writing in his diary about Hutchinson’s “dangerous errors.” But the schism over the question of salvation and whether it came unconditionally from God or had to be earned through works continued to deepen.
Anne Hutchinson was called to a meeting in December 1636. She faced a panel of seven ministers who demanded to know her views on the Scripture and on their own preaching. Two and a half months later, ministers meeting in Cambridge for a Synod identified 82 errors held by Hutchinson that had been recorded in their meeting with her. They also banned her from leading religious discussion groups, which they called inappropriately “prophetical” and “disorderly.” Governor Winthrop offered a summary of her grave mistakes: She would “interpret passages at her pleasure and expound dark places of Scripture and make it her own.” Rather that sticking to “wholesome truths,” she “set forth her own stuff.”
Winthrop succeeded in dispatching Reverend Wheelwright to Mount Wollaston, where he could cause less harm. May 17, 1637 was a turning point in the history of Massachusetts Bay. Magistrates and freemen assembled in Cambridge Common to decide who would control the colony. Supporters of John Winthrop and his orthodox theology carried the day. Winthrop was elected Governor for a second time, replacing Henry Vane, who had been strongly backed by the Hutchinson.
The Great and General Court of Massachusetts rotated its sessions between Boston and Cambridge (or Newtown, as Cambridge was called at the time). When Winthrop decided to put Hutchinson on trial, he determined that his prospects for conviction were better in Cambridge than in Boston. The residents of Cambridge tended to be landed gentry and more conservative than the residents of Boston, who held more mercantile interests.
The Trial
The trial of Anne Hutchinson began on November 7, 1637 in a thatched-roof meetinghouse in Cambridge. Wearing a black wool cloak, a white bonnet over her long hair, and a white linen smock, Hutchinson entered the room and a voice announced, “Anne Hutchinson is present.” The nine magistrates and thirty-one deputies of the General Court of Massachusetts, including the governor, deputy governor, a team of assistants, and freemen selected by the 14 towns of the colony, took their seats on backless wooden benches that faced the crowd. The forty men included two recently appointed replacements for judges who expressed sympathy for Hutchinson’s case. Eight ministers also strode into court, all on hand to offer their testimony.
The General Court, whose authority derived from the royal charter, was an all-powerful body in the colony. It mixed legislative, executive, and judicial functions. It legislated on all aspects of colonial life, from the color of clothes that could be worn to requiring attendance at Sunday services. The only check on its power was the knowledge of its members that rulings that appeared too arbitrary or self-serving could prompt calls for a revocation of the charter.
Governor Winthrop, both the chief prosecutor and the chief judge, hoped that the trial would fortify his position of power and unify the colony, which had become divided and weakened by fighting over religious issues, especially the question of salvation. Winthrop, sitting at a desk, banged his gavel and called out, “Mistress Hutchinson, Mistress Hutchinson.” When the crowd quieted, he continued: “Mistress Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here.” Standing silently before the Governor, Hutchinson listened as the Governor outlined what he saw as her sins. “You have spoken diverse things…prejudicial to the honor of the churches and ministers….And you have maintained a meeting or general assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable or comely in the sight of your God nor fitting for your sex.” Winthrop ended his opening remarks with a threat: “If you are obstinate in your course, then the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further.”
Hutchinson answered by complaining about the vague nature of the accusations against her: “I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.” Winthrop replied, “I have told you some already, and more I can tell you.” “Name one, sir,” Anne demanded. “Have I not named one already?” was Winthrop’s somewhat lame reply. Nothing Winthrop had alleged Hutchinson had done amounted to a criminal offence. “We are your judges and not you ours,” Winthrop reminded Hutchinson. “If you have a rule for it from God’s word, you may,” Anne countered.
Hutchinson and Winthrop proceeded to trade Biblical passages, either as evidence for or against the right of a woman to provide instruction on the meaning of Scripture. Anne pointed to Titus which says older women are the teachers of “honest things,” while Hutchinson noted that Timothy 2:12 states, “I permit not a woman to teach,…but to be in silence.” Arguments in Puritan Massachusetts were won or lost on Scripture—every word was considered meaningful and true.
“Do you think it not lawful of me to teach men and why do you call on me to teach the court?” Anne asked the Governor. Winthrop responded, angrily, “We do not call upon you to teach the court, but to lay yourself open.”
The governor conceded Hutchinson was a woman of unusual talents: “Yes, you are a woman of most note, and of best abilities.” But that made her all the more dangerous. She had influence over the opinions of others and, Winthrop insisted, “You show not in all this by what authority you take upon yourself to be such a public instructor.”
Then, suddenly, Anne seemed ready to collapse. A chair was called for, and the trial continued.
Magistrate Thomas Dudley launched into an attack on Hutchinson, claiming that “Mistress Hutchinson has depraved all the ministers and hath been the cause of what is fallen out.” The charge suggested that Hutchinson had acted seditiously and in breach of the peace—charges which, if proven, might lead to her banishment. Anne rose to say, “I pray, sir, prove it.” Dudley and Hutchinson debated whether Anne had accused ministers of preaching falsely a covenant of works. “When they do preach a covenant of works, do they preach the truth?” Dudley asked. “Yes sir,” Anne replied, “but when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not the truth.” Dudley persisted, telling Anne that she not only did say ministers preached a covenant of works, but asserted that they “were not able ministers of the New Testament.” Anne argued that what she believed or said in private could not be a crime, and as women had no public role in Puritan society, what opinions she had or expressed could only be considered private—a rather clever argument.
Winthrop looked to the ministers in court, hoping they might have something to say that would add meat to the charges against Hutchinson. None took the bait. “Our brethren are very unwilling to answer, unless the court command us to speak,” said the Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem. Winthrop issued the command and six ministers testified. After they were done, Dudley offered a summary: “You see they have proved this, and yet you deny this, but it is clear. You say they preached a covenant of works and are not able ministers.” Winthrop added, “Here are six undeniable ministers who say [what you deny] it is true.” It had been a long day in the windowless meetinghouse. Winthrop announced, “The time now grows late. We shall therefore give you a little more time to consider of it, and therefore desire that you attend the court again in the morning.”
Hutchinson believed that one of the ministers had made a number of false statements about her private conference with the colony’s ministers the previous winter. When court reconvened, Anne asked that all the witnesses of the day before be recalled and swear to an oath that there testimony was true. The ministers expressed reluctance, being of the belief that taking an oath amounted to an affirmation of the absolute truth of everything they said—and their confidence about their testimony was less than absolute. Winthrop declared. “I see no necessity of an oath in this thing”—to which the Hutchinson supporters in the crowd shouted out, “We are not satisfied!” But Winthrop would not budge.
Asked for the names of defense witnesses, Hutchinson offered three. John Coggeshall told the court that Hutchinson “did not say all that [the ministers] lay against her.” Thomas Leverett, a lawyer, said that Anne had not specifically charged the ministers with preaching a covenant of works, only that “they did not preach a covenant of grace so clearly as Mr. Cotton did.” Hutchinson’s third and most influential witness, John Cotton, took a seat next to Anne.
Without question, the opinions of John Cotton mattered. Hutchinson biographer Eve LaPlante writes in her book American Jezebel that Cotton was “the unmitred pope of a pope-hating commonwealth.” Cotton testified reluctantly, telling the court, “I did not think I should be called to bear witness in this cause, and therefore did not labor to call to remembrance what was done.” Cotton told the court “that I was very sorry that she put comparisons between my ministry” and that of the other ministers. But Cotton added, to Anne’s relief, that he never heard her specifically accuse other ministers of preaching a covenant of works. And if Anne had left things there, she might have gotten off with an admonishment, not a conviction for heresy. But she couldn’t stop herself. She began to lecture the court.
Hutchinson told the court that the Lord told her she “must come to New England, yet I must not fear or be dismayed.” She said “the Lord did give me to see that those who did not teach the New Covenant had the spirit of the Antichrist.” She told the judges that she saw the truth “by an immediate revelation” from God—“by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.” To her judges, this was arrogance and heresy. God spoke only through ministers and Scripture, not directly to a woman. Deputy Governor Dudley announced, “I am now fully persuaded that Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil.”
Anne was not done. She ended her lecture with a warning: “I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and you’re your posterity and the whole state!” Historian David Hall writes that Anne’s “outburst made it easy” for the judges to do what they wanted to do anyway—rid the colony of Anne Hutchinson. In his private record of the proceedings, Winthrop called Hutchinson’s performance “the impudent boldness of a proud dame.”
When Anne finished speaking, Governor Winthrop pointed at Hutchinson and said, “This had been the ground of all these tumults and troubles. This had been the thing that has been the root of all the mischief.” Most of the judges, at least thirty of them, shouted their agreement: “We all consent with you!” Winthrop declared Hutchinson guilty. Of what, exactly, the court was less than clear. The finding seems to rest both on the heresy of claiming a revelation and sedition, in resisting the lawful authority of ministers. “The court hath declared itself,” he announced, and said it “would now consider what is to be done with her.”
Winthrop summed up the proceedings and asked for a vote. “If it be the mind of the court that she shall be banished out of liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away, let them hold up their hands.” Only two of the forty judges voted against banishment and imprisonment—and John Cotton was not among them. One minister abstained. Winthrop pronounced sentence: “Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.” Anne demanded to know “wherefore I am banished.” But she got no answer from Winthrop: “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”
Epilogue
A week after the sentencing, the General Court reconsidered its decision to erect a new college in Boston, and voted instead to build it in Cambridge because “this town was kept spotless from the contagion of opinions” that infected other parts of the colony. The new college would be named after “Mr. Harvard, who died worth 1600 pounds” and gave “half of his estate to the erecting of the school.”
The General Court had sympathy enough for Hutchinson to allow her to remain in Massachusetts through the winter. She stayed, under house arrest, at a home in Roxbury. She took with her only clothes, a Bible, and a guide to medicinal plants.
Where to go? In March 1638, William Hutchinson and 17 other men seeking a new, more religiously tolerant place, met in Boston. They incorporated themselves into what they called a “Bodie Politik.” And they all signed their names to what came to be called “the Portsmouth Compact.” The stated object of the Compact was to found a state where all “might worship God according to the dictates of conscience…unawed by civil power.”
William Hutchinson and six other Compact signers headed south. After meeting with Roger Williams and local Indians, the group settled on a new home: Aquidneck Island, south of Roger Williams’s Providence Plantations. Some years later, the new settlement of Portsmouth would become part of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The influence of both Williams and Hutchinson is evident in the 1663 charter for the new colony—a place where all might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. Or as the charter puts it: “No person …shall in any wise be molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matters of religion—so long as he keeps the peace.”
Meanwhile, Anne Hutchinson remained under arrest in Massachusetts, under orders to leave the colony before the end of March 1638. Before she would leave Massachusetts, however, she faced a church trial. Before the congregation of the Church of Boston, Anne was examined and excommunicated. In the proceeding, John Cotton used over-the-top language to describe the damage he believed Anne had caused in the colony: “And so your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the bowels of religion and hath so infected the churches that God knows when they will be cured!” Reverend John Wilson declared that Hutchinson had been “raised up by Satan…to cause divisions and to take away hearts and affections one from another.” By now, Hutchinson had become a community scapegoat. The proceeding ended with Wilson announcing, “I do deliver you up to Satan, that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to lie!”
On April 1, 1638, Anne Hutchinson began a six-day walk south to John Williams’s Providence Plantation, where she boarded a ship that took her to the island of Aquidneck. In Rhode Island, Anne could speak freely, and she could again enjoy the company of her husband, children, and grandchildren. But her husband Will, the first governor of Rhode Island, died in 1642 at the age of 55. That summer, Anne decided to leave Rhode Island and travel west to settle on land in Pellham Bay in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (which would later become New York). In July 1643, Anne was warned by Dutch neighbors that Siwanoy warriors were on their way and that she and her family should flee their farmstead. But Anne put her trust in God. The warriors swept into Pellham Bay. They scalped Anne and six of her children, then burned down her house.
What to make of the trial of Anne Hutchinson? First, the trial gave Anne the chance to address not only her entire colony, but posterity—an opportunity few women in the 1600s could ever hope to enjoy. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the trial led to a decision of the General Court in November 1637 might well have been wrong, but it helped lead to the birth of a nation where liberty would take on a new and more generous meaning. While the decision ended religious freedom for those in Massachusetts whose views differed from the approved theology, it led to an exodus of dissenters who helped create more tolerant societies elsewhere. In 1663, a full charter was given to Rhode Island and Providence Plantation. The charter guaranteed religious freedom for all persons. In no small measure, Anne Hutchinson helped chart the American course toward liberty."
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