The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided

Vol. 15 No.9 (September 2005), pp.824-833

THE TIMES AND TRIALS OF ANNE HUTCHINSON: PURITANS DIVIDED, by Michael P. Winship. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 184pp. Cloth. $35.00. ISBN: 0-7006-1379-x. Paper $14.95. ISBN: 0-7006-1380-3.

Reviewed by Ken I. Kersch, Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University (fall 2005), and Politics Department, Princeton University. Email: kkersch [at] princeton.edu.

One of the paradigmatic artifacts of twentieth century constitutional liberalism is the civil liberties narrative, a sort of moral parable in which a pure-of-heart member of a powerless or minority group, or the holder of unpopular political or religious views, oppressed by the majority or the state itself, courageously fights back – often, in court – in the process teaching us the values of dissent, toleration, and courage. Such narratives ring truest in contexts in which the substantive views held by the dissenter are either approved of by those who tell these stories, or where the threat that their challenge poses is not taken to be genuinely serious. They ring less true in contexts where significant numbers of people (or the relevant policymaking elite) is convinced that the dissenter’s views are immoral or barbaric, and that the threats they pose are real.

THE TIMES AND TRIALS OF ANNE HUTCHINSON, the latest installment in the University Press of Kansas’s Landmark Law Cases and American Society series (edited by Peter Charles Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull), is part of a growing body of revisionist work on civil liberties that succeeds by taking a paradigmatically simple civil liberties morality tale, and complicating it. In most twentieth century treatments, Hutchinson (1591-1643), a charismatic and unorthodox puritan dissenter ultimately tried, excommunicated, and banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony, has been presented as the first great American dissenter (in a line leading through Mollie Steimer, Lillian Gobitis, and onwards), as an early proponent of the rights of individual conscience against the state, and as a proto-feminist unbowed by the insistence that she submit by strong men in positions of power. Calling many of these accounts “little more than polemic” (p.158), and drawing upon (and abridging) his deeply researched study, MAKING HERETICS: MILITANT PROTESTANTISM AND FREE GRACE IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1636-1641 (Winship 2002), Michael Winship, an historian at the University of Georgia, offers us a Hutchinson in context, explaining what the events leading up to her excommunication looked like in their own time, rather than as one of the symbolic texts of twentieth century liberalism. Such an approach, needless to say, complicates things.

To succeed in this endeavor, Winship needs to bring modern readers into the “recondite theological debates” of the Puritans, where most people’s lives (including Hutchinson’s) were centered on questions of God and salvation (p.158). As a consequence, this book ends up being to a significant extent [*825] about Puritan theology and political thought, which necessarily entails a broader cast of characters than Hutchinson herself. Winship argues that Hutchinson was only one of many important figures in this controversy, and he gives those others more than equal time (Hutchinson, in fact, is off-stage for much of the book, and the account of her trial does not begin until two-thirds of the way through).

Winship’s account begins in Elizabethan England, where Anne Marbury (Hutchinson) is born amidst fears of a Roman Catholic plot. At the time, many Englishmen and women – dubbed “puritans” by their critics – were criticizing the Queen for not promoting ministers able and willing to preach powerfully and passionately enough to save souls, and for being insufficiently aggressive in cleansing the Church of England of Roman Catholic rites. Anne Marbury’s minister father, a member of the most radical puritan sect, the Presbyterians, refused to conform to what he took to be the established church’s aberrant practices. In doing so, he argued not in the name of religious liberty, but in the name of theological truth. From an early age, Anne was given a first rate religious education conducive to seeing that truth, including a deep command of the Bible.

The question of “how she could know if she had been saved and would go to heaven” was central to Anne’s life, as to that of all Puritans, who grappled with it while looking out on the world as “a vast cosmic drama, revealed . . . by the Bible” (p.12). In a manifestation of his justice, God (according to Calvinist doctrine) had predestined that most of humanity would go to hell. In a manifestation of his mercy, however, he had also predestined that a small group of the elect would go to heaven. God created the world to “enact this plotline,” covenanting with Adam (and Eve) that as long as they continued to obey God’s will, they and their progeny would continue in perfect happiness (the covenant of works) (p.13). Adam and Eve, however, broke the covenant (which, technically remains in effect) ensuring that all of humanity would be tainted by original sin. Ever since – in a theological point that would be central to the controversy in Massachusetts – the path to hell would be paved by fallen people striving vainly to be saved by their own piety and deeds, their good works. On the other hand, the elect were to be spared hell, not because of anything they did, but by virtue of the covenant of God’s free grace, in which Christ, through his sacrifice on the Cross, assumed the guilt and punishment that these sinners rightly deserved.

Puritans believed that God’s pardon for the elect took place during their lifetime (justification) and that, in its aftermath, a new holiness would follow (sanctification). People could maintain “legal obedience” to God’s laws, though they had not been justified. One of the major disputes of the time amongst puritans involved whether it was possible for one to distinguish between righteous behavior stemming from legal obedience and righteous behavior stemming from holiness – that is, from sanctification. To be able to do so, of course, was to be able to know if one was amongst the elect and had been saved.

The minister of Boston, Lincolnshire, John Cotton (1585-1652) became [*826] famous for his distinctive view that, to answer this question, one should foreswear intense self-scrutiny in search of signs of sanctification in favor of apprehending the delivery of “a personal message from God carried by the Holy Spirit” (“The Seal of the Spirit”) through the medium of a Biblical verse. Many other puritans took Cotton’s teachings on this point to be dangerous, “delud[ing] people into neglecting holiness in pursuit of a sort of mystical bliss, with grave personal and social consequences” (p.16). While still in England, Hutchinson became assured of her salvation through the path set out by Cotton, but shortly thereafter descended into a spiritual crisis over whether she may have been deluded by the teachings of the Antichrist. As she wrestled with these questions as part of a wrenching personal ordeal, Hutchinson and other puritans were increasingly despairing of the possibility of ever reforming the Church of England, and agonizing about turning “separatist” by renouncing it. In the wake of Charles I’s crackdown on Puritanism, Hutchinson, who emerged from her crisis with renewed confidence in her religious views, emigrated with her husband and children to Massachusetts. Even as she was crossing the Atlantic, she was boldly warning fellow passengers that ministers on the boat were preaching false paths to salvation (ominously citing Christ’s speech of John: “I have many things to say but you cannot hear them now.”) (p.20).

Boston, Massachusetts – to which Cotton and others from his church and the surrounding area had immigrated – was then a city of eight hundred, run according to puritan “discipline,” where “virtually every institution within society, from the government to the courts to the schools, to the family,” as well as the churches, was charged with the “maintenance of the moral and spiritual fiber of society.” “Discipline required punishment . . . to maintain order, teach evil of sin and heresy, and avoid God’s wrath, in the form of plagues, famines, invasions, and other disasters.” Its ultimate purpose, however, was not to condemn but “to knit together a Christian community in what puritans understood to be harmony and love” (p.21). Within the various churches (which were not easy to join, as they required application and proof of justification) discipline was an ongoing, active process. Church legal proceedings were an important part of the process of both disciplining and rehabilitating and restoring sinners. Puritans believed that each church was self-governing, and none should have authority over any other. At the same time, the colony (under the leadership of governor John Winthrop) created its own court system, which – understandably in a context in which sin and heresy were thought to have worldly consequences – did not draw clear distinctions between sin and wickedness and ostensibly secular felonies and misdemeanors. These courts also set the admission of wrong and rehabilitation and reintegration as animating goals.

Hutchinson was a known figure in the Massachusetts from the beginning, with Winthrop reporting that “her ordinary talke was about the Kingdome of God,” and that she led women and men both in discussions about the states of their souls “at least as effectively as any minister” (p.33). Much of Winship’s book chronicles the rise in early seventeenth century Massachusetts of what many at [*827] the time saw as “strange theological opinions” on the path to salvation, the bitter divisions these fostered, and the ensuing charges of antinomianism (the belief that those that God has saved out of a manifestation of his love rather than fear of punishment are free from the power of his laws – which risked liberating them from the obligation to struggle against sin), familism (the belief that Christians under the illumination of the Holy Spirit could enjoy perfect union with God – which risked liberating them from the commands of the Bible), and other heresies and blasphemies which Puritans were convinced could bring down upon the struggling colony the impending wrath of God. Winship weaves accounts of the theological positions of key figures in the colony – Roger Williams, James Cotton, Thomas Shepard, John Wheelwright, Henry Vane, Jr., and (later) Hutchinson – with shrewd readings of their personalities, ambitions, strategies, and shifting social standing in the community, in altering contexts. And he charts the clashes between these ministers and their followers, as they intersected with questions of both church and non-church governance, and the relationship between the two.

The central controversy in which Hutchinson became embroiled, the “free grace controversy” (what one colonist later referred to as “Hell’s Cataracts . . . of Errors”) broke out in 1636 (p.137). In that, the relentlessly combative minister Thomas Shepard argued that the mild-mannered and well-liked minister of the Boston Church, John Cotton’s, approach to salvation subtly encouraged revelations which invited listeners to abandon the Bible and end up as familists. Hutchinson, who at the time was closer to the Cotton side in this dispute, launched incendiary charges of her own in the other direction, alleging that “all of Massachusetts’s ministers except Cotton and Wheelwright [a follower of Cotton’s] dangerously taught a covenant of works . . . [encouraging them] to look to their own holiness rather than to Christ for assurance of salvation” (p.46). Early on, however, she was very careful and sly about the ways in which she alleged that the ministers preaching was “not according to the gospel” (p.51) – presenting her views as open questions rather than assertions (as Shepard kept boring forward, she became increasing outspoken and defiant in her views, to the point where Cotton actually made his peace with Shepard).

It fell to Governor Winthrop to deal with these clashes, which involved not only worldly matters of statesmanship and prudence (including mediation), but also the substantive support, through non-church discipline, of truth over error (since error meant the end of the Christianity, and divine retribution for the colony). Winthrop, Winship reports, was “more tolerant and patient than Massachusetts’s most severe leaders” (p.56). But he drew the line at approving the appointment of what he took to be the familist-leaning Wheelwright as a minister (along with Cotton) to the Boston Church. In publicly attacking the prickly Wheelright while doing so, Winthrop crossed a line in a legal context in which insults were considered criminal offenses against the public peace and in which church members were charged with loving, and not attacking one another. This, of course, angered the members of the Boston Church. Ministers who agreed [*828] with Winthrop about Wheelwright’s familist tendencies, of course, supported the move as necessary. These developments prompted a cascade of “slashing sermons” in which the “Boston doctrines” of the “Cotton party” were denounced from other pulpits in the strongest terms. Wheelwright defended himself in a defiant sermon alleging that the teachings of his opponents were the work of the Antichrist. Ominously, he described those teachings in terms that applied to the doctrines expounded by nearly every other minister in Massachusetts.

Strictly speaking, these were church matters, outside the purview of the state. But the line between the two was far from clear. In something akin to the legal doctrine of ultra vires, it was understood that the law might apply if Wheelwright was speaking not as a minister of God, but as a heretic. In the winter of 1637, a group of ministers brought charges against Wheelwright to the (non-church) General Court of Massachusetts, and a trial ensued, steps later defended by Winthrop in his “Apology” as appropriate in light of Wheelwright’s “sedition and disturbance of the publicke peace” (p.69). Wheelwright may have been a prickly and defiant man, hard to like. But his prosecution on doctrinal grounds touched uncomfortably close to Cotton, who was both well-liked and esteemed. And Cotton came to Wheelwright’s defense, subtly but clearly warning that, in effect, an attack on Wheelwright was an attack on him. The Court, which was both insistent on its way, yet self-evidently worried about the reaction to its verdict, found Wheelwright guilty of sedition (for preaching a contentious sermon on a day designated for reconciliation) – but not of heresy. Wheelwright’s supporters, however, were unmollified, and drew up a “remonstrance and Petition” against the Court, a very dangerous move in which such a rebuke to authority, if not phrased in appropriately deferential tones, could be taken as a rebuke of God himself (and thus a prompter of divine retribution). The petition, Winship explains, “was an offer to the Court to make amends for passing an illegitimate sentence under the influence of Satan” (p.75). In a gesture of immense forbearance – and prudent statesmanship – Winthrop responded to the petition with his “Apology” explaining (and justifying) the Court’s actions. This conciliatory gesture, however, had little effect. Henry Vane, the man of the highest aristocratic standing in the colony, and a supporter of Wheelwright, had close connections back in England to the King’s Court, and made moves towards having the General Court’s charter revoked, and intimated that it might be an appropriate time to have the King replace Winthrop with himself. It took all of Winthrop’s political skills to keep this “tinderbox” of contention from igniting into a conflagration that would destroy the fledgling settlement (not to mention deposing him from office).

Historians, Winship tells us, have used the petition protesting the verdict of the General Court in the Wheelwright trial as evidence of the power of the “Hutchinsonians” in the colony at this time. “[B]ut,” he explains, “while it is safe to assume that any follower of Hutchinson would be a follower, in a way, of Wheelwright, there is no reason to assume the reverse. Compared with Hutchinson, Wheelwright was a theological moderate.” (p.76). In the [*829] aftermath of the Wheelwright verdict, key members of the Boston Church veered toward increasing doctrinal extremism. Amongst those in the ascendancy at this point was Hutchinson, a believer in immediate revelations, who began delivering theological lectures to about sixty to eighty Bostonians twice per week (out of a population of one thousand). Sensing a waxing menace, the General Court aggressively began to police the admission of immigrants to the colony to weed out those who might, at this dangerous moment, swell the numbers of the increasingly radical and defiant Boston Church. This, of course, infuriated Cotton and his followers: as they saw it “[t]he magistrates had no problem in admitting blasphemers and profane persons…. But they drew the line at true Christians” (p.87). Frustrated and concerned for their future in Boston, Vane and Cotton made overtures to Roger Williams to arrange for the purchase of land for Boston Church members from the Narragansett Indians. When this deal fell through, Vane left Massachusetts for England (threatening that he would, in due course, return as Governor-General).

At this point, a group of ministers (including Shepard), with the backing of the colony’s non-church officials, called a synod at which they hoped to clarify Christian doctrine on the proper path to salvation – reaffirming the truth, and compiling a list of errors. An interesting turn occurs here, for it is at the Synod (in which Governor Winthrop played an active, but unofficial, mediating role) that Cotton signed on to the list of errors, in the process separating himself from the radicals (like Hutchinson) who had heretofore been associated with his Boston Church. The Synod’s final statement may have been “a masterpiece of equivocation,” (as Winship characterizes it), but it served to reconcile Cotton (along with many of his followers) with the colony’s other ministers (and its government). It also deprived the radicals of their most common line of defense: that they were merely following Cotton’s teachings. With neither Vane nor Cotton to defend her, Hutchison was now a prime target of official efforts to bring the turmoil of the free grace controversy in Massachusetts to a close.

Like Wheelwright before her, Hutchinson was brought to trial in the General Court for sedition, but not heresy, an unusual move, since Hutchinson, though a familiar figure, befitting her status as a women, had stayed out of the public debates, not engaged in any formal preaching, and avoided formal public statements (such as in the General Court or the signing of the Wheelwright “remonstrance and Petition”). The General Court was reduced to charging that she had “harboured” and “countenanced” those who had engaged in these seditious activities (p.105). Hutchinson defended herself with a subtlety and intelligence that was arresting (and, no doubt, to many, Mesphistophelean). Amongst her many clever moves, she suggested that Winthrop had had full powers to put down her puritan conventicles “by authority” if they were troublesome (thus placing him in the role of Laud and the Church of England vis-à-vis the Puritans, whose place she claimed for herself). She all but bested Winthrop in his cross-examination (though jousting with Deputy Governor Dudley, a legal expert, was more difficult). As the trial proceeded, she worked up not only [*830] sharper and sharper arguments, but also a steam of intense theological conviction and incandescently righteous anger. Despite this “extraordinarily bravura performance” (p.111), however, along the way she had all but sealed her conviction: in plain sight, she propounded self-evidently unorthodox views on the path to salvation (inviting a heresy conviction), and she publicly threatened the Court and the colonial authorities (inviting a sedition conviction). After witnessing this performance, Winship argues, it became suddenly apparent to Winthrop that, far from being an obscure off-shoot of the controversy in which Cotton, Wheelwright, and Vane were the driving forces, Hutchinson had been “the ringleader” of the entire agitation, which he now understood as a broad-ranging “sinister conspiracy of heretics [that] had been plotting the ruin of Massachusetts” (p.113). Since Vane was rising in prominence in England, and Cotton had made his peace with his former antagonists, Winthrop’s decision to blame the entire episode on Hutchinson was a savvy political move, most conductive to moving the colony forward (it also affected the subsequent historiography of the episode, which follows Winthrop’s reading – a historiography that Winship here corrects). As a political matter, Hutchinson’s conviction brought the free grace episode in Massachusetts to a close.

And yet the colony remained a tinderbox. For the trial had broadly publicized the extent of Hutchinson’s heresy. Many saw Satan himself as walking amongst them (“Had this sect gone on awhile,” Winship quotes one colonist at the time as saying, “they would have made a new Bible”) (p.119). The General Court at this point felt compelled to disarm many of the colonists, and to move the community’s store of gunpowder and ammunition to safer ground. Hutchinson, who while under house arrest and receiving a stream of visitors (she became pregnant while in jail), set herself to expounding ever bolder theological flights which were familist enough in their outlines that even John Cotton took notice (at this point it was reported that Hutchinson even went so far as to deny the moral basis of the Sabbath). As her moderate supporters dropped away, the Church’s own disciplinary process came into play, setting the stage for a second (church) trial for heresy. Interest was intense, and the audience was large. The proceedings focused on Hutchinson’s teachings concerning Christ, the body, and the soul, as well as her antinomianism. At that trial, the deferential and diplomatic Cotton tried to lead Hutchinson towards acknowledgment of error, and thus towards reconciliation and healing. And the implacable Shepard sought to unmask the starkness of her heresies. Hutchinson gave encouragement to Cotton at various points throughout. But, in the end, she remained defiant, and even contemptuous. The sentence was excommunication. “Better to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ,” she responded (p.135).

Hutchinson then left Massachusetts, continuing her teachings, which tracked an increasingly radical trajectory (she began questioning the Trinity, for example), first in New Hampshire, and subsequently in what is today the Bronx, New York, where in 1643, she and most of her family were massacred by Indians (one of her descendents, George W. Bush, is currently the President of the [*831] United States) (p.146).

In chartering the diaspora of the free grace controversy, Winship explains the ways in which it had “a major impact . . . on the cultural geography of New England” (p.143). Other ministers embroiled in the fight set out to found the New Haven Colony, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Many of the dissenting views of these “exiles” from Massachusetts Bay ultimately dovetailed with the newly developing Quakerism. Cotton stayed, and reconciled himself with Massachusetts Bay. His descendents – especially his grandson, Cotton Mather – played a significant role in defining the distinctive Puritanism of that colony. By the early eighteenth century, Massachusetts itself became more accepting of preachers with diverse teachings of the path to salvation: in an especially “progressive” step, for example, they made property, rather than church membership, the basis for the franchise. (Winship notes that Massachusetts nevertheless was the last state to abolish an established church (1833), and the last state to imprison someone for seditious blasphemy) (p.147).

Winship’s book is a first-rate work of history (though those who devote their careers to the period will doubtless have their quibbles). It is clearly written, and, in remarkably few pages, does an excellent job of introducing readers to the politics and theology of the Massachusetts Bay colony (and Puritanism more generally), as well as of situating Hutchinson within that context. In the work from which this book is derived (and presented here, in abridged form) Winship made a major revisionist contribution to our understanding of New England Puritanism – chiefly by positioning Hutchinson as one of many figures involved in this broader trans-Atlantic theological and political dispute. In the process, he effectively challenges feminist-inspired accounts that presented the trial of Hutchinson as chiefly involving the efforts of a male power structure to put down a powerful and highly intelligent woman, whom they took to be unusually threatening on account of her sex (as a student of the pioneering feminist historian of colonial and early American history, Mary Beth Norton, also a teacher of mine in graduate school, Winship is not out to discredit feminism, but simply to correct the effects of some of its ideological excesses). It seems very clear from Winship’s scholarship, for example, that the authorities were every bit as threatened by Wheelwright and Vane (males both) as they were by Hutchinson.

For law and courts scholars, however, Winship’s book has the defect of its virtues. By virtue of so successfully transforming the traditional historical understandings of the context of Hutchinson’s trial, Winship effectively deprives that trial of its status as a didactic parable, which is the purpose for which many political scientists and legal scholars will want to use it, especially when teaching undergraduates. If Hutchison is not a proto-feminist and proto-civil libertarian, who is she? And if the men persecuting her are not crusading sexists and religious zealots (or not any more so than she is), who are they? Having a deep grasp of the historical context will not be helpful in this regard.

Is this a hopeless case? Perhaps sensing [*832] the problem, Winship (at the behest of his editors?) throws in a few paragraphs at the book’s beginning and end collapsing the story back into the familiar paradigms by drawing a parallel between the actions of Hutchinson’s opponents and efforts of today’s “evangelical political right” associated with George Bush to break down the wall of separation between church and state. He then abruptly presents the dangers of such efforts as the “lesson” of Hutchinson’s trial, characterizing it as providing a unique window on Puritanism’s “long-enduring legacy of high intellectual endeavor, visionary zeal, and coercive, moralistic evangelism” (p.150), as evidenced in the Religious Right. There is certainly some truth to this, and some sort of analogy there. But the analogy may be a lot fuller than Winship’s gratuitous (if mercifully brief) rant seems to apprehend. Suffice it to say that flights “of high intellectual endeavor, visionary zeal, and coercive, moralistic evangelism” that he associates in these paragraphs with Puritanism are not now, and have never been, the sole province of America’s political right.

None of this is to say that there are no “lessons” to be derived from Hutchinson’s story. There are certainly all sorts of dynamics at work here that will be familiar to civil liberties and law and society scholars, especially if one looks at it as implicating more than simple matters of legal doctrine concerning free speech and the separation of church and state. Winship transports us into a world in which the threat felt by the propagation of ostensibly heretical doctrine – in a colony that believed in divine wrath, and that was perched precariously on the edge of a howling wilderness – is very real (which, in the age of terrorism, is a more realistic setting for debating issues of freedom than contemporary civil libertarian bedtime stories, which typically imply that, to the un-hysterical, the threats are minimal, and the choices are easy). In such fearful circumstances, and in a community with a relatively clear set of unifying substantive commitments, we see that the right to “dissent” is not valued particularly highly (in other words, it is a luxury of consensus and safety). On the other hand, nipping dissent in the bud presents its own problems. This is very clear from Winship’s fascinating account of John Winthrop’s efforts to navigate these treacherous waters in a perpetually shifting political context in which both the public peace, and his political power, are threatened. We watch, rapt, as Winthrop does his best – both by resorting to law, and outside of it – to restore social harmony while remaining as true as possible to his religious convictions. His successes and his failures in dealing simultaneously with the visionary Hutchinson, the hell-bent Shepard, and the conciliatory Cotton is a case study in the challenges of prudent leadership in the face of potentially radically de-stabilizing dissent. The efforts at the Synod to draft a list of errors in a way that will satisfy all parties and end the controversy will also ring contemporary to anyone seeking to bring an end to an unusually bitter dispute through some form of textually-articulated agreement. Winship’s account of the refusal of the colonists to accept what they take to be unjust prosecutions and verdicts, and the way in which the colonial authorities attempt to deal prudently with that challenge to their authority (including threats to [*833] replace the prosecuting executive and withdrawing the jurisdiction of the court) will also prove instructive to modern readers.

For those willing to move away from questions of whether Hutchinson should have had the “right” to speak her mind (the standard contemporary civil libertarian question) to the broader political question of how a prudent political leader, in a complicated context of multiple institutional power centers, belief systems, and personalities, and social hierarchies, might best deal with the situation – that is, as law in politics, and law in society, as opposed to as a civil libertarian morality tale – the book is eminently teachable. It is short, and comes with a helpful glossary, chronology, and bibliographical essay (there are no source notes: for those, readers are referred to Winship’s more comprehensive scholarly study). It situates the “trials” of Anne Hutchinson appropriately in her “times,” and, as such, gives the formal legal proceedings their due – but not more than that. It is through studying such contexts closely that we can derive the most genuinely useful lessons about contemporary civil liberties.

REFERENCES:

Winship, Michael P. 2002. MAKING HERETICS: MILITANT PROTESTANTISM AND FREE GRACE IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1636-1941. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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