American Jezebel (24 page)

For a minister to attack a convicted heretic on the basis of her gender seems, at the very least, overkill. The ministers aimed their antagonism at her character and her sex because she threatened their notions of “the family, the state, the religion, and the status hierarchy,” according to the historian Lyle Koehler. Thus they “managed to salve the psychological wounds inflicted by this woman who trod so sharply upon their male status and their ministerial and magisterial authority.” Her pride and aggressiveness seemed to them the work of Satan rather than “the more human desire for equal opportunity and treatment” that Hutchinson “never hesitated to assert by example in the intellectual skirmishes she had with her accusers throughout her trials.” The oppression of a male-dominated society “could not destroy her self-respect,” her ability to ally herself with God, and her skill at debating religious matters with the authorities, be they ministers or magistrates.

In the meetinghouse, the Reverend Cotton continued, “And many
unsound
and
dangerous
principles are held by her. If you have drunk in any evil or poison, make speed to vomit it up again, and to repent of it, and do not harden her in her way by pitying of her or confirming her. But pray to God for her, and bear witness against any unsound thing she held forth.”

Now he turned without apparent emotion to his former disciple and dear friend, who was now weakened by her imprisonment, her unsettled pregnancy, and the disruption of her family life. It was necessary, he felt, to establish distance from her. Distance, it now seemed, was the only politic stance. Placing his palms together, he prayed, “The Lord put fit words into my mouth, and carry them home to your soul for good.”

She sat on her bench, hardly ten feet away, quietly observing the minister whom she for more than twenty years had followed and served.

“It is true,” he began, seeming to take her side, “when you came first over into this country, we heard of some opinions that you vented upon the seas in the ship” about which the authorities needed to be reassured before admitting her to church membership. “Since then, you have been an instrument of doing some good. The Lord hath endowed you with good parts and gifts fit to instruct your children and servants, and to be helpful to your husband in the government of the family.” In addition, she had prepared many souls for Cotton to save, and she had spread, especially among women, his condemnation of the covenant of works. “You have been helpful to many to bring them off from building their good estate upon their own duties and performances or upon any righteousness of the law.”

Just as a few saints of Boston began to suspect that he might not admonish Hutchinson after all, he switched his tone. “Yet notwithstanding” all this, he said, “we have a few things
against
you, and in some sense
not
a few, but such as are of great
weight
and of a heavy nature and
dangerous
consequences. Therefore, let me warn you and
admonish
you in the name of Jesus Christ to consider of it seriously—how the dishonor you have brought unto God by these unsound tenets of yours is
far greater
than all the honor you have brought to Him. And the
evil
of your opinions doth outweigh all the good of your doings.” He begged her to “consider how many poor souls you have misled,” and
“that by this one error of yours, in
denying
the
resurrection
of these very
bodies
”—a view associated with the Family of Love—“you do the uttermost to raze the very foundation of religion to the ground, and to destroy our faith!” While it is unlikely that Hutchinson ever denied the resurrection of the body, this was indeed the sole error the ministers had mentioned that merited excommunication for heresy, for it was a denial of a fundamental belief of English Calvinism as stated in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

John Winthrop, who could not but enjoy the Reverend Cotton’s assault on the “obstinate” Mistress Hutchinson, noted later how Cotton “remembered her of the good way she was in her first coming, in helping to discover to diverse [people] the false bottom they stood upon, in trusting to legal works without Christ.” Then, according to the governor, Cotton “showed her how by falling into these gross and fundamental errors she had lost the honor of her former service, and done more wrong to Christ and his church than formerly she had done good.”

Cotton’s litany continued: “Yea, if the resurrection be past, then you cannot evade the argument pressed upon you by our brother Bulkeley and others, that
filthy
sin of the community of women—and all promiscuous and
filthy
coming-together of men and women without distinction or relation of marriage—
will
necessarily follow!” He was saying that her doctrine guaranteed a community of men and women joined in sexual relationships outside marriage—a notion that everyone present, including Hutchinson, found abhorrent.

Noting her look of horror, Cotton prophesied, “And though I have not
heard
—neither do I think—you have been unfaithful to your husband in
his
marriage covenant, yet that
will
follow upon it! Yours is the very argument that the Sadducees bring to our savior Christ against the resurrection, and that which the Anabaptists and Familists bring to prove the lawfulness of the common [sexual] use of all women, and so more dangerous evils and filthy uncleanness and other sins will follow than you do now imagine or conceive!”

Sexual expression in Puritan New England was restricted to marriage. To maintain social control, the ministers forbade and punished sexual activity outside marriage and any other sexual behavior that might damage the structure of the family. Adultery was a capital offense, the General Court decreed in 1631. The death penalty was not
actually imposed in most cases of adultery that came before the Massachusetts court, but offenders usually received a severe whipping or a symbolic hanging—sitting for an hour on the gallows with a rope around the neck—and were then banished. As for other sexual crimes, all “unnatural filthiness [is] to be punished with death, whether sodomy, which is carnal fellowship of man with man, or of woman with woman; or buggery, which is carnal fellowship of man or woman with beasts or fowls.” These words, which the court had made law in 1635, were penned by Cotton himself, after he was asked to write the first code of colonial laws.

Hearing him describe sins of which she could not even conceive, Anne Hutchinson said, “I desire to speak one word before you proceed. I would forbear [wait], but by reason of my weakness I fear I shall not remember it when you have done.”

Grimly, he replied, “You have leave to speak.”

“All that I would say is this, that I did not hold any of these things [opinions] before my imprisonment.” Despite all he had prophesied, she still deflected his reproach. Even the attacks of her minister did not shake her great faith in God. She believed, as the apostle Paul described in 2 Timothy 4:17–18, that “The Lord stood with me, and strengthened me…and I was delivered out of mouth of the lion. And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom.”

Before replying, Cotton considered how his fellow ministers, some of whom still suspected he had supported her all along, would respond. “I confess I did not know that you held any of these things, nor hear, till here of late. Maybe it was my sleepiness, and want of watchful care over you.” Seeming to steel himself, he said, “But you see the
danger
of it, and how God hath left you to yourself to fall into these dangerous evils. For I have often feared
the height of your Spirit
and being
puffed up with your own parts!
” It was all her fault. She was too proud. Exhibiting the very vice for which he was calling down the wrath of God, he said, “Therefore, it is just with God thus to abase you, and to leave you to these desperate falls, for the Lord looketh upon all the children of pride and delights to abase them and bring them low.”

Again he listed all the offensive views she was said to hold—“the mortality of the soul by nature,” “that Christ is not united to our bodies,”
and “that the resurrection spoken of at his appearing is meant of his appearing to us in union.” If these were all true, he asked, “What need we care what we speak, or do, here—if our souls perish and die like beasts?”

She shook her head, for she believed none of them.

“Nay,” he said, “though you not hold them positively, if you do but
make a question
of them, and propound them as a doubt for satisfaction, yet others that hear of it will conclude them positively. And they will think,
Sure there is something in it if Mistress Hutchinson makes a question of it
—if those that have great parts of wisdom and understanding, and such an
eminent
Christian makes a question of them—then there is something that needs further inquiry.”

Summoning his most vivid apocalyptic imagery and self-righteousness, Cotton said, “And so your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the very bowels of religion, and hath so infected the churches that God knows when they will be cured! Therefore, that I may draw to an end”—he raised his arms toward heaven—“I do
admonish
you and also
charge
you in the name of Christ Jesus, in whose place I stand, that you would sadly consider the just hand of God against you, the
great hurt
you have done to the churches, the
great dishonor
you have brought to Jesus Christ, and the
evil
that you have done to many a poor soul. And seek unto Him to give you repentance, and a heart to give satisfaction to the churches you have offended hereby, and bewail your weakness in the sight of the Lord, that you may be pardoned. And consider the great dishonor and reproach that hereby you have brought upon this church, how you have laid us
all
under a suspicion of holding and maintaining errors. And take heed how you did leaven the hearts of young women with such unsound and dangerous principles, and labor to recover them out of the snares which you have drawn them to. And so the Lord carry home to your soul what I have spoken in his name!”

Cotton nodded to Shepard. To ensure that no one would leave the meeting doubting that Hutchinson had lied, Shepard said, “
Lest
the crown should be set on her head in the day of her humiliation, I desire leave to speak
one
word before the assembly breaks up.” He turned to Cotton and said, “It is no little affliction nor grief to my spirit to hear Mistress Hutchinson interrupt you, by speaking in the midst of her
censure, unto which she ought to have attended with fear and trembling. But it was an astonishment to me to hear that she should thus
impudently,
” like Francis Marbury, “affirm so horrible an untruth and falsehood in the midst of such a solemn ordinance of Jesus Christ and before such an assembly. Yea, in the face of the church to
say
she held none of these opinions before her imprisonment, when she
knows
that she used this speech to me, when I was
with
her and
dealt
with her about these opinions, and she had fluently and forwardly expressed herself to me, yet she [even] added [that] if I had but come to her before her restraint she would have opened herself more fully to me and have declared many other things about these very opinions. Therefore, I am sorry that Mistress Hutchinson should so far forget herself. It shows but little fruit of all the pains taken with her. This makes me
more
to fear the unsoundness of her heart than all the rest.”

“It was the same grief also to myself,” the Reverend Eliot affirmed, to which other ministers nodded. In their joint disgust, the ministers were counting on the human tendency to believe what one is told, especially if the teller has authority. If they pinned on her labels of “free love” and “Familism,” “libertine” and “seductress,” few colonists would rise in response to the question, Who will support Mistress Hutchinson now?

While reformation was one goal of the church’s process of examination, reforming Hutchinson was no longer the point. Her judges were making an example of her before the entire church and most of the elders of the colony. Their trial was itself a performance, with the goal of further shrinking her influence. She seemed beyond reform, but she could be forever an example of how not to behave in Massachusetts. Through her, they might frighten others, especially women and the defiant merchant class of men that supported her, into submission. The literary critic Susan Howe wrote that Hutchinson served as “the community scapegoat,” the sacrificial animal that the ancient Jews used to bear away their sins.

Anne Hutchinson was not a feminist, in the modern sense, but her gender was a central issue for the men. The religious doctrine that so frightened them was for her “simply an ideology through which the resentments [she] intuitively felt could be focused and actively expressed,” observed Lyle Koelher. “Her feminism,” such as it was, “consisted
essentially of the subjective recognition of her own strength and gifts and the apparent belief that other women could come to the same belief.” Her rebellion was in no way directed self-consciously against her status or toward its improvement. A woman of her time, she accepted the gender hierarchies of the seventeenth century. There is no evidence that she questioned the rightness of having her husband and sons sign deeds and documents on her behalf or of having her husband, rather than herself, become a member of the government. Our modern concept of equal rights would likely shock her, although one imagines her ultimately embracing it.

In regard to Anne Hutchinson’s failure to reform even under the threat of banishment and excommunication, it is essential to note that she could not reform while maintaining any public power or voice. Unlike her father, who in exchange for outward conformity to Anglican authorities was allowed to return to his pulpit and his teaching, she had neither pulpit nor public place from which to teach. On the one occasion when she did teach in public, during her second day before the General Court at Newtown, she was banished. The moment she opened the door to the parlor that served her as both classroom and meetinghouse, she was finished as a preacher and teacher. For a woman in colonial Massachusetts, to conform to the status quo was to be silent and passive. This was not an option for Anne Hutchinson.