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Authors: Peter Nichols
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American aristocracy of the first water. There was no more esteemed or solid organization of merchants in America than these whaling Quakers of New Bedford, no group more venerated for their business acumen and their unswerving religious devotion—two attributes that had dovetailed into an apotheosis of wealth, social station, and worldwide fame.
The position had been hard won: an evolution of two centuries of obdurate adherence, by a once tiny band of societal renegades, to a singular code of living, in the face of persistent, often savage persecution by America’s founding authorities. The hounding and mar ginalization of the early Quakers case-hardened them into the tightly knit, clannish society of mutual reliance and unyielding stubbornness that produced this seemingly impregnable plutocracy.
The New England Puritans who fled to the New World because of religious intolerance in England were aware that history was watching them.
“We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill,” John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, told them. “The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
But by crossing an ocean and setting up a new society on its other side, the Puritans metamorphosed from a band of deviants into a state authority more fanatical and uncompromising than the one they had fled. Their heretical beliefs became the new state’s religious orthodoxy, and the new Massachusetts Bay Colony demanded an unyielding conformity to the state religion.
One of their early problems was Anne Hutchinson. The wife of the Bostonian William Hutchinson, she struck Winthrop as “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue.” Mrs. Hutchinson enjoyed the company of ministers, the social luminaries of her day, and her parlor was a popular gathering place for discussions of theological scholarship—a religious salon. She had her favorites among Boston’s ministers and wasn’t timid about suggesting that others lacked a sufficient “covenant of grace” to lead their congregations. At first this was simply talk emanating from the Hutchinson home, but it grew into feuding factions that polarized around Anne Hutchinson.
Part of what rankled her opponents was the fact that she was a woman. John Winthrop, like most men—and hence, the authorities—of his time, believed that women could become mentally ill and stray from the proper direction God had set for them in life as a result of reading books. As the strength of her challenge to the colony’s ruling and religious leaders grew, Anne Hutchinson was brought to trial on charges of sedition and blasphemy, and also of lewd conduct, for the mingling of so many men and women in her home at one time. At her trial, her skill at antagonizing her interlocutors, and her belief that her own communion with God was “as true as the Scriptures,” were plainly demonstrated. Court testimony shows that she had no problem or hesitation puncturing the strained arguments laid against her. A historian writing of the trial two centuries later described it as “one more example of the childish excitement over trifles by which people everywhere and at all times are liable to be swept away from the moorings of com mon sense.”
In 1638, Anne Hutchinson was found guilty and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “After she was excommunicated,” wrote Winthrop, “her spirits, which seemed before to be somewhat dejected, revived again, and she gloried in her sufferings, saying, that it was the greatest happiness, next to Christ, that ever befell her.” Hutchinson, along with her husband and a group of followers, moved to the more tolerant wilderness of Rhode Island, where they founded the town of Portsmouth. After her husband died, Anne
The position had been hard won: an evolution of two centuries of obdurate adherence, by a once tiny band of societal renegades, to a singular code of living, in the face of persistent, often savage persecution by America’s founding authorities. The hounding and mar ginalization of the early Quakers case-hardened them into the tightly knit, clannish society of mutual reliance and unyielding stubbornness that produced this seemingly impregnable plutocracy.
The New England Puritans who fled to the New World because of religious intolerance in England were aware that history was watching them.
“We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill,” John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, told them. “The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
But by crossing an ocean and setting up a new society on its other side, the Puritans metamorphosed from a band of deviants into a state authority more fanatical and uncompromising than the one they had fled. Their heretical beliefs became the new state’s religious orthodoxy, and the new Massachusetts Bay Colony demanded an unyielding conformity to the state religion.
One of their early problems was Anne Hutchinson. The wife of the Bostonian William Hutchinson, she struck Winthrop as “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue.” Mrs. Hutchinson enjoyed the company of ministers, the social luminaries of her day, and her parlor was a popular gathering place for discussions of theological scholarship—a religious salon. She had her favorites among Boston’s ministers and wasn’t timid about suggesting that others lacked a sufficient “covenant of grace” to lead their congregations. At first this was simply talk emanating from the Hutchinson home, but it grew into feuding factions that polarized around Anne Hutchinson.
Part of what rankled her opponents was the fact that she was a woman. John Winthrop, like most men—and hence, the authorities—of his time, believed that women could become mentally ill and stray from the proper direction God had set for them in life as a result of reading books. As the strength of her challenge to the colony’s ruling and religious leaders grew, Anne Hutchinson was brought to trial on charges of sedition and blasphemy, and also of lewd conduct, for the mingling of so many men and women in her home at one time. At her trial, her skill at antagonizing her interlocutors, and her belief that her own communion with God was “as true as the Scriptures,” were plainly demonstrated. Court testimony shows that she had no problem or hesitation puncturing the strained arguments laid against her. A historian writing of the trial two centuries later described it as “one more example of the childish excitement over trifles by which people everywhere and at all times are liable to be swept away from the moorings of com mon sense.”
In 1638, Anne Hutchinson was found guilty and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “After she was excommunicated,” wrote Winthrop, “her spirits, which seemed before to be somewhat dejected, revived again, and she gloried in her sufferings, saying, that it was the greatest happiness, next to Christ, that ever befell her.” Hutchinson, along with her husband and a group of followers, moved to the more tolerant wilderness of Rhode Island, where they founded the town of Portsmouth. After her husband died, Anne
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