American Jezebel (21 page)

These scriptural references and the religious language of the Portsmouth Compact may seem to suggest that these men aimed to create yet another church, to compete with those of Massachusetts, but this was decidedly not their intent. The Rhode Island historian Samuel Arnold explained, regarding the Portsmouth Compact,

These men were determined, following Anne Hutchinson’s and their experiences in Massachusetts, to guarantee freedom of conscience in Rhode Island. One of their first written rules upon arriving was “No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise [ways] molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matter of religion—so long as he keeps the peace.” These first Rhode Islanders valued religious liberty, a freedom that, in large part because of them, the constitutions of Rhode Island and the United States would later proclaim.

A few days later, in the still-bitter March, the men packed building supplies on a ship that they hired to sail them around the tip of Cape Cod. Edward Hutchinson went with his father, leaving his wife and baby in the family’s house on Shawmut. The men traveled first to Providence Plantation, where the Reverend Williams arranged a meeting between them and the Narragansett
sachems,
or chieftains, Miantonomo and Canonicus.

On March 24, 1638, one day before the start of spring, the eighteen “purchasers of Rhode Island” gave the Narragansett sachems forty fathoms of white wampum beads, ten coats, and twenty hoes as a “gratuity” in exchange for the slender, fifteen-mile-long island of Aquidneck. The marks of Miantonomo, Canonicus and his son, and two other Indians, and the signatures of Randall Holden, the twenty-six-year-old Bostonian who represented the Hutchinsonian men, and the Reverend Roger Williams appear on the land deed. Although the sachems did not share the English settlers’ concept of ownership, they agreed to instruct their people to vacate the island before the next winter. Of the transfer, Roger Williams later noted in a self-congratulatory mode, “It was not price nor money that could have purchased Rhode Island. Rhode Island was obtained by the love and favor which that honorable gentleman Sir Henry Vane and myself had with the great sachem Miantonomo.”

The new proprietors of Rhode Island continued south on ships to their new home between the Sakonnet River and Narragansett Bay.
After exploring the land, which was level and boasted fertile soil, the men agreed to make their settlement on the flat northeastern end, which had a fine natural spring and a pleasant saltwater cove surrounded by marsh. The Indians called this place Pocasset, which the English made into Portsmouth, after the port from which some had sailed. They pitched tents and built huts to live in while they cleared land. As winter became early spring, the men chose two-to three-acre house lots between the cove and the spring and began framing simple houses. Amid their labor, they awaited their founder, who languished in her Roxbury jail.

As Will Hutchinson began building their new home, forty-five miles away on Aquidneck Island, Anne learned that she would be allowed to return to their house in Boston for a few days before her second trial. The location of this trial, just up the road from her house, was the simple structure of timber, clay, and thatch in which for three years she had prayed and worshiped and sung psalms—the Boston meetinghouse. Winthrop and the court had sufficiently reduced her “potent party” in Boston to permit a trial of Hutchinson to be held in her town.

In the few days before she was to depart Joseph Weld’s house, she eagerly awaited the trip by coach back along the muddy road to her own house. The Welds had the challenge of scheduling her trip to avoid the spring tide. Each spring, according to a seventeenth-century ditty, “The rocky nook, with hilltops three, looked eastward from the farms, and twice each day the flowing sea took Boston in its arms,” turning the Shawmut Peninsula briefly into an island, as Winthrop had first imagined it, from Charlestown, when he named it Trimountaine.

Having traveled from Roxbury back to Boston, Anne was again at home with her family for a few days in the second week of March. She still felt ill from the pregnancy, which was now visible to all, but she enjoyed the reunion with her many children and her new grandchildren. Much of the family’s time during these few days was taken up with packing to move. It seemed inevitable that the Hutchinsons would be forced again to leave behind many of their belongings.

The General Court convened in Boston on March 12, 1638, three days before she was to be brought to trial by her church. At this meeting the court banished the midwife Jane Hawkins, whom Anne had assisted at the Dyers’ sad delivery in October. Hawkins, who had come to
America in 1635 from Cornwall, England, with her husband, Richard, was ordered to disappear by May or else the magistrates would “dispose of her. In the meantime, she is not to meddle in surgery, or physics, drinks, plasters, or oils, nor to question matters of religion, except with the elders for satisfaction.”

To Winthrop, Mistress Hawkins’s attendance at Mistress Hutchinson’s meetings proved her a “rank Familist.” Hawkins’s other crimes included giving barren women fertility potions of herbs, being “notorious for familiarity with the Devil,” and occasionally falling into trances in which she spoke Latin. Men of the period tended to view midwifery, a realm of power from which they were excluded, with suspicion. English law prohibited midwives from using witchcraft, charms, or sorcery; administering herbs or potions to induce abortion; allowing a woman to deliver a child in secret; and baptizing infants. At a conference on religion at Hampton Court in 1604, King James I, upon being told that some midwives actually baptized, “grew earnest against the baptizing by women.”

“About Mrs. Hutchinson,” the March 1638 Massachusetts court record continues, “It is ordered that she shall be gone by the last of this month; and if she be not gone before, she is to be sent away by the counsel, without delay, by the first opportunity; and for the charges of keeping Mrs. Hutchinson, order is to be given by the counsel to levy it by distress of her husband’s good.” In addition, her son, “Edward Hutchinson, Junior, is bound in forty pounds” that no one “shall come to Mrs. Hutchinson [without the court’s permission]; and [after the trial] she is to remain at Mr. Cotton’s until further order.”

The court also ordered another Fast Day. “The 12th day of April should be kept a day of humiliation in the several churches, to entreat the help of God in the weighty matters which are in hand, and to divert any evil plots which may be intended, and to spare the way of friends which we hope may be upon coming to us.”

Three days later, on the morning of Thursday, March 15—the third lecture day of the month—Anne Hutchinson rose from her bed, dressed warmly, and had her morning meal of corn mush and baked fruit. Her son Edward and her son-in-law Thomas Savage prepared to accompany her, not only to support her but also because as male church members they were entitled to participate in matters before the church. With
these two young men, who were now twenty-four and twenty-nine, Anne Hutchinson stepped out her front door onto Cornhill Road. Directly across the road was John and Margaret Winthrop’s front door. Turning left, the Hutchinsons walked slowly up the icy dirt road toward the austere meetinghouse, which had no carvings or spire, as befitted the children and grandchildren of reformers who had smashed religious art in trying to free their Christianity from any pagan or Roman influence. Anne and her sons each carried a copy of the Bible.

That lecture day, as always, the saints of Boston gathered “by ten of the clock in the morning”—a banging drum announced the hour—to hear a reading from Scripture and, often, the second sermon of the week, usually by Wilson or Cotton. Today’s gathering was larger than usual, for it included not only the Boston congregation but also ministers from most churches of Massachusetts Bay and many other elders of the colony.

Anne Hutchinson and her sons arrived a few minutes late. When she entered the church, the Reverend Wilson was reading a Scripture passage he had chosen for the occasion. Staring as her son and son-in-law took their seats on benches in the family’s place at the front of the church, the minister intoned, “We have heard this day
very sweetly
that we are to cast down all our crowns at the feet of Christ Jesus.” The minister warned the members of his congregation to cut their ties to Anne Hutchinson so as to strengthen their bond with God. “So, let everyone be content to deny all relations of father,
mother,
sister, brother, friend, and enemy, and to cast down all our crowns, and whatsoever judgment or opinion that is taken up may be cast down at the feet of Christ. And let
all
be carried by the rules of God’s word, and tried by that rule, and if there be any error let no one rejoice! None but the devils in Hell will rejoice! But in all our proceedings this day let us lift up the name of Christ Jesus and so proceed in love!”

Hoping to avoid any censure on account of Hutchinson’s tardiness, Thomas Oliver, the seventy-year-old surgeon and church elder married to Anne’s friend Anne Oliver, stood. “I am to acquaint all this congregation that whereas our sister Hutchinson was not here at the beginning of this exercise, it was not out of any contempt or neglect to the ordinance, but because she hath been long [under] durance,” or imprisoned. The few eyes that had not already noted the pale face and swollen
abdomen of the woman at the center of the proceedings did so. “She is so weak,” Oliver continued, “that she conceives herself not fit nor able to have been here so long together.” He held up a piece of paper that his wife had given him, from Anne. “This she sent to our elders.”

Thomas Leverett, one of the three men who had defended Hutchinson during her November trial, asked the members of the Boston congregation, who would have to decide Hutchinson’s ecclesiastical fate, to gather in one area. They should “draw as near together as they can, as they may be distinguished from the rest of the congregation, that when their consent or dissent is required to the things which shall be read, we may know how they do express themselves….”

Leverett and Oliver were both ruling elders of the church, charged with handling disciplinary matters. According to the church covenant, members were required to “walk…according to the rule of the Gospel, and in all sincere conformity to His holy ordinances.” Members who violated these rules could be admonished—temporarily prevented from receiving the Lord’s Supper—and then, if repentance did not follow, they would be cast out. Any known evildoer or heretic had to be expelled. The congregation of the church could excommunicate a member, unlike in England and Rome, where only a bishop had this power. In other respects, however, excommunication was “wholly derivative,” according to the historian David C. Brown: “The Congregationalists simply adapted a centuries-old disciplinary system which had been painstakingly developed by their Catholic and Anglican forebears.”

The Puritan process of excommunication was as intense and public as that leading to admission to the church, only in reverse. Based on contemporary accounts, redemption (justification) involved, first, a response to the Word, then a sense of remorse, humiliation, and repentance, then the arrival of the Holy Spirit bringing saving grace, followed by the transformation of the soul by faith, justification, sanctification, and assurance of eternal redemption. Puritan divines broke down the process of receiving saving grace into steps: preparation, conviction, humiliation, a will and desire to believe, and, finally, assurance, or the “grace to endeavor to obey His Commandments by a new obedience.” In excommunicating a person, the congregation had to make a similar judgment in reverse, determining if the member in question were still worthy of being in communion with the church.

Leverett turned to Hutchinson and held up the stack of papers gathered by the ministers. “Sister Hutchinson, here are diverse opinions laid to your charge by Mr. Shepard and Mr. Frost [Edmund Frost, a ruling elder of the Cambridge church] and Mr. Weld and Mr. Eliot, and I must”—for he did not wish to—“request you in the name of the church to declare whether you hold them or renounce them as they be read to you.”

He read them out, starting with, “That the souls of all men by nature are mortal.” This first error, to which the ministers would devote much time, was known to all as “mortalism.” It was the idea that the soul of an elect person dies with the body and is then resurrected, with the body, after death. The orthodox view was that the soul is immortal and cannot die. An error related to this was “That our [physical] bodies shall not rise with Christ Jesus at the last day.”

The next error dealt with the question, raised by Hutchinson and Vane and others, of whether the Holy Ghost dwells in the body of a justified person. Leverett read to her, “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.”

He went on, “That the resurrection mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15 is not of our resurrection at the last day, but of our union to Christ Jesus…. That in Christ there be no created graces, nor in believers after union…. That there is an engrafting into Christ before our union with him, from which we may fall away…. That union to Christ Jesus is not by faith…. That you had no Scripture to warrant Christ being now in Heaven in his human Nature…. That the disciples were not converted at Christ’s death.”

Before continuing with this list, one must remember that these errors, which were the focus of her lengthy church trial, were not, finally, its point. The entire controversy, according to historian David Hall, was “not about matters of doctrine but about power and freedom of conscience.” Moreover, according to Charles Francis Adams, author of the first major study of the Hutchinsonian controversy, published in 1892, the many documents of theological controversies “may, so far as the reader of to-day is concerned, best be described by the single word impossible.” Adams concluded that the ministers’ language during this controversy was “a jargon which has become unintelligible”—an over
statement that may reassure readers of the transcript of Hutchinson’s church trial.

The abstruse theological discussions in which the clergymen and Hutchinson engaged are worth exploring if only because they represent the usual form of discussion between Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton as well as among the ministers of the colony. In a community devoted to evangelical preaching, people cited Bible passages at will, from memory, and discussed the resurrection of the body and the evidence of justification in the casual manner that people now chat about sports scores or new films.

Leverett continued reciting her errors. “That there is no kingdom of Heaven but Christ Jesus…. That the first thing we receive for our assurance is our election.”

Some errors dealt with the controversy over the covenant of grace: “That sanctification can be no evidence of a good estate…. 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…. That a hypocrite may have the righteousness of Adam and perish…. That we have no grace in ourselves, but all is in Christ, and there is no inherent Righteousness in us.”

Others involved Hutchinson’s claims of revelations: “That your revelations about future events were as infallible as the Scriptures themselves…. That you were bound to believe them as well as the Scriptures, because the Holy Ghost was the author of both.”

Some of the errors involved Hutchinson’s perceived lawlessness: “That we are not bound to the [earthly] law, not as a rule of life. That not being bound to the law, no transgression of the law is sinful.”

Having recited all the errors on the ministers’ lists, Leverett repeated in a quiet voice, “It is desired by the church, sister Hutchinson, that you express whether this be your opinion or not.” He gazed at the floor, finding himself unable to look at her.

“If this be error, then it is mine and I ought to lay it down,” she replied. “If it be truth, it is not mine but Christ Jesus’, and then I am not to lay it down.” Even in her distress and humiliation, she was as sharp as ever—admitting nothing, denying nothing, and defining herself alongside God and Christ.

In the silence that followed, she asked a question. “I desire of the church to demand, by what rule of the Word these elders [did] come to me, in private, to desire satisfaction in some points” of doctrine, “profess[ing] in the sight of God that they did not come to entrap nor ensnare me, and now…bring it publicly unto the church, before they privately dealt with me? For them to come and inquire [of me] for light, and afterwards to bear witness against it, I think is a breach of church rule.” Lacking sufficient witnesses to make any accusation against the ministers, she pointed out the deviousness of their tactics. She had in mind Matthew 18:15, “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.” She intimated a zone of privacy for conversations and beliefs, which the ministers violated when they cited publicly the errors she had expressed privately. At the time, of course, no such zone existed, and ministers and government officials had multifarious powers and prerogatives that today are divided among police officers, legislators and other elected officials, clergy, parole boards, and judges.