American Jezebel (31 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
THIS AMERICAN JEZEBEL
“Was Anne Hutchinson
really
scalped?” I remember asking my great-aunt Charlotte when I was about nine.
“Of course she was,” replied Aunt Charlotte, never one to mince words, “and all her little children too.”
This was not entirely true. One little Hutchinson child—and the five older ones who were not present—survived the rampage, as my late aunt no doubt knew. Surely she had read Hawthorne’s retelling of Hutchinson’s “impressive story,” with its “awful close”:
Her last scene is as difficult to be portrayed as a shipwreck, where the shrieks of the victims die unheard along a desolate sea and a shapeless mass of agony is all that can be brought home to the imagination. The savage foe was on the watch for blood. Sixteen persons assembled at the evening prayer; in the deep midnight, their cry rang through the forest; and daylight dawned upon the lifeless clay of all but one. It was a circumstance not to be unnoticed by our stern ancestors, in considering the fate of her who had so troubled their religion, that an infant daughter, the sole survivor amid the terrible destruction of her mother’s household, was bred in a barbarous faith, and never learned the way to the Christian’s Heaven. Yet we will hope, that there the mother and the child have met.
Although she was no longer the “infant daughter” that Hawthorne imagines, nine-year-old Susan Hutchinson did indeed survive. While
the Siwanoy warriors were killing and incinerating her mother, siblings, and servants, Susan Hutchinson was out of sight of the house. She had gone out by herself that brilliant late-summer day to pick blueberries on the meadow below the Split Rock. She heard the screams of her family and saw the massive plume of smoke rising from the house. She was terrified to think what would happen to her.
The Siwanoy found Susan Hutchinson hiding, according to Bronx legend, in the crevice of the Split Rock. The girl’s English coif, worn above a light blouse and petticoat, may have been the first clue they noticed that the family they had massacred was not Dutch. The Siwanoy took Susan captive, and the chief, Wampage, adopted her. Wampage also took on Susan’s mother’s name, calling himself “Ann-Hoeck” from then on, for it was customary for a Siwanoy warrior to assume the name of his most illustrious victim. The neighboring land was called Ann-Hoeck’s Neck. The river was given Anne’s surname, and so the modern highway beside it is the Hutchinson River Parkway, known to locals as “The Hutch.”
Susan Hutchinson spent eight or nine years with the Siwanoys and is said to have left the tribe reluctantly. Two and a half years after her capture, John Winthrop reported that “A daughter of Mistress Hutchinson was carried away by the Indians near the Dutch,” and she “forgot her own language and all her friends.” At age eighteen Susan Hutchinson traveled to Boston, where her brother Edward and other relatives still lived. (John Winthrop was now dead.) A few months later, on December 30, 1651, Susan married John Cole, a twenty-six-year-old English settler. Susan and John’s first child was born in Boston in 1653. They moved to Rhode Island and had ten more children. Susan Hutchinson Cole died on Rhode Island, at age eighty, in 1713.
Anne Hutchinson was thus survived by six children—nine-year-old Susan; Samuel, eighteen; Bridget, twenty-four; twenty-six-year-old Faith; Richard, twenty-seven; and Edward, who was just thirty—and eventually more than thirty grandchildren.
Little is known of her sons Richard and Samuel as adults.
Bridget stayed on Aquidneck with John Sanford and their many children. After he died she remarried and moved to Maine.
Faith lived on Mount Wollaston with her husband, the loyal Thomas Savage, and their children, who at the time of Anne’s death
were five-year-old Habijah, three-year-old Thomas, and the newborn, Hannah. Faith gave birth to Ephraim in 1645, Mary in 1647, Dyonisia in 1649, and, on February 17, 1652, a boy named Perez. Three days later Faith Hutchinson Savage died of complications related to the birth. (Thomas Savage later married Mary Symmes, a daughter of the Reverend Zechariah Symmes with whom his mother-in-law had tangled, and had eleven more children.)
Faith and Thomas Savage’s oldest son, Habijah Savage, married Hannah Tyng in Boston in 1661, had several children, served as the captain of an artillery company in Boston, and died at age thirty on Barbados. In Cambridge in 1685, Habijah’s eighteen-year-old daughter Hannah Savage—Anne’s great-granddaughter and my seventh great-grandmother—married the Reverend Nathaniel Gookin (1656–1692), a Harvard graduate and pastor (of the First Church in Cambridge) who was then the president of Harvard College.
The Hutchinsons’ oldest son, Edward, stayed in Boston, where he made peace with the church and held public office. He had seven children with his first wife, Katherine Hamby, who died at thirty-five in Boston in 1650, and four more with his second wife, Abigail Vermaies Button, who appears in 1656 court records giving evidence, ironically, against an accused witch, Eunice Cole of New Hampshire. Yet Edward continued to fight for causes associated with his mother. A supporter of religious toleration, he “deserves honor,” according to the historian James Savage, “for his firmness in opposing cruelty to the Quakers.” Edward’s name appears on a 1668 petition calling for the release of imprisoned Baptists.
Edward Hutchinson became a captain in the colonial army in 1657 and eight years later served in King Philip’s War. King Philip was the settlers’ name for Metacomet, son of Massasoit and chief sachem of the Wampanoags. In this war the English settlers opposed and ultimately defeated the allied Narragansett, Nipmuck, and Wampanoag tribes. On August 2, 1675, according to James Savage, Captain Edward Hutchinson “received a wound from the Indians in a treacherous assault when he was marching to a peaceful meeting with them, of which he died [August] 19th at Marlborough, age 62, as the gravestone says.”
Edward Hutchinson’s fourth child, Anne Hutchinson, had been born and baptized in Boston in November 1643, two months after the
murder of her grandmother. This Anne Hutchinson later became a Quaker and married Samuel Dyer, who in October 1637 had been a two-year-old huddling in a kitchen on Shawmut as his mother, Mary Dyer, delivered her deformed baby. Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Dyer lived on Rhode Island and had eight children. After he died in 1678 she married again, had three more children, and died in 1710. Another daughter of Edward’s, Susanna, who was born in June 1649, married a Newport man, Nathaniel Coddington, one of William Coddington’s sons.
Many of Edward’s progeny became merchants, as Will Hutchinson and his family had been. “The entire clan” in this line, according to historian Bernard Bailyn,
devoted itself to developing its property and the network of trade…. They prospered solidly but not greatly. Their enterprises were careful, not grand. They were accumulators, down-to-earth, unromantic middle-men, whose solid, petty-bourgeois characteristics became steadily more concentrated in the passage of years until in Thomas, in the fifth generation, they reached an apparently absolute and perfect form.
Thomas Hutchinson, Edward’s great-grandson, born in 1711, was a wealthy merchant and historian who became chief justice of Massachusetts and then the Loyalist governor of the colony just prior to the Revolutionary War. It was this “celebrated and unhappy governor,” James Savage noted, who instigated the Boston Tea Party by attempting to enforce English law by landing the cargo of the tea ship
Dartmouth.
Thrown from office by the revolutionaries in 1774, Thomas Hutchinson returned as an exile to England, where he died in 1780. According to Bailyn, Governor Hutchinson inspired “morbid,” “paranoic” distrust and “animosity” in the revolutionary Samuel Adams, who considered him a tyrant and dissembler from whom “the liberties of this country [have] more to fear…than from all other men in the world.”
Like his great-great-grandmother, Thomas Hutchinson “refused to adjust [his] singular convictions to the will of the community,” Bailyn wrote. The Loyalist governor was both “fascinated and chilled”
by Anne Hutchinson’s career: “Her sincere religious passion, he felt, was in itself no more humane than the destructive fervor of her enemies.” Thomas Hutchinson’s own description of her, in his
History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay,
opens in a manner suggestive of a Jane Austen novel, with which it was roughly contemporaneous:
There came over with Mr. Cotton, or about the same time, Mr. Hutchinson, and his family, who had lived at Alford in the neighborhood of Boston. Mr. Hutchinson had a good estate and was of good reputation. His wife, as Mr. Cotton says, “was well-beloved, and all the faithful embraced her conference and blessed God for her fruitful discourses.”
Governor Hutchinson pointed out the “respect” and “notice” that Anne Hutchinson received from Cotton, Vane, “and other principal persons. Her husband served in the general court, several elections, as representative for Boston, until he was excused at the desire of the church.” The “chilling” part follows:
So much respect seems to have increased her natural vanity. Countenanced and encouraged by Mr. Vane and Mr. Cotton, she advanced doctrines and opinions which involved the colony in disputes and contentions…and had like to have produced ruin both to church and state. The vigilance of some, of whom Mr. Winthrop was the chief, prevented, and turned the ruin from the country upon herself and many of her family and particular friends.
According to Governor Thomas Hutchinson, to avoid the ruin of Massachusetts, Massachusetts had to ruin her. Indeed, during Anne Hutchinson’s three and a half years in Boston, she was present mostly as an absence. For the most part the men of power hardly knew of her contributions. She was called up by the court only so she could be removed. The power she held—as prophet, preacher, and leader—was by definition private, outside the public sphere. As a
woman of power,
she was an oxymoron. She had to be cast out.
But her absence was never total. Within a few years of her death, her descendants held public power. Her son-in-law John Sanford was governor of the colony of Rhode Island, as was her grandson Peleg Sanford. Thomas Hutchinson governed Massachusetts less than 150 years after her expulsion. In the twentieth century her sixth great-grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, put Anne Hutchinson at the top of her list of great American women, according to Joseph Lash, the Roosevelts’ biographer. President George H. W. Bush was a ninth great-grandson of Anne’s. Bush’s son, George W., who in 2001 assumed the highest office in the most powerful country in the world, is her tenth great-grandson. Through her powerful male descendants, Anne Hutchinson continues to leave her mark.
Still, an absence remains. In nearly four centuries, not one founder or president has been a woman. Women serve as a minority on the nation’s Supreme Court, in its Congress, and on the president’s Cabinet yet remain outcasts at America’s highest office. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is said to consider running for president, enjoyed remarkable success with her memoir,
Living History,
according to booksellers, because of her “status as a dual symbol of female victimhood and power.” The literary critic Amy Schrager Lang noted that “the gender-specific problem of the public woman prefigures the larger dilemma of maintaining the law in a culture that simultaneously celebrates and fears the authority of the individual,” especially “when the individual is female. The fact that Anne Hutchinson, the classic American representative of a radical and socially destructive self-trust, is a woman…complicates her heresy.” The “problem of Anne Hutchinson,” Lang concludes, “is the problem of the public woman.” Could John Winthrop still be correct in observing that it is not proper or comely for a woman to hold power? No wonder that as a little girl I associated my ancestor Anne Hutchinson with shame.
In colonial Boston in the autumn of 1643, the leading men rejoiced at the news of Anne Hutchinson’s death. Her destruction seemed the act of a just and loving God. “Let her damned heresies, and the just vengeance of God, by which she perished, terrify
all
her seduced followers from having any more to do with her leaven,” remarked Peter Bulkeley, the Concord pastor who had led the Cambridge Synod and
charged her with Familism during her church trial. The Reverend Thomas Weld—now a colonial emissary in London—wrote, amazed, “I never heard that the Indians in those parts did ever before this commit the like outrage upon any one family, and therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman, to make her and those belonging to her an unheard-of heavy example of their cruelty above all others. Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction.”
John Winthrop said of her demise, “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—as no story records the like of a woman since that mentioned in the Revelation.” Winthrop was referring to the passage in the book of Revelation where God tells the angels of the churches, “I have a few things against thee, because thou suffers that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. And I will kill her children with death….”
Following Hutchinson’s death, as Winthrop prepared his account of the controversy whose center she had been, he spent countless hours analyzing the aptness of this familiar biblical comparison. Jezebel was a witch, a whore, a heathen—a false prophet, an enemy of God—a worshiper of false gods who defied the true prophet Elijah, and an arrogant, amoral woman whose death was so violent that hardly a trace of her remained.
At his desk one afternoon, Winthrop dipped his quill in ink and wrote, “This American Jezebel.” He stopped and underlined two words. Then he continued, not stopping again until the end of this breathless, sentence-long paragraph.