Anne Hutchinson’s crime: She thought freedom of religion meant freedom of religion.
...you have spoken divers things, as we have been informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex, ...
— John Winthrop, 1637, in his opening remarks to Anne Hutchinson at her trial at the Court in Newton.
On this date (it's March 22 in Massachusetts) in 1638, Anne Hutchinson, her husband, their 15 children and some 60 of her supporters were banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Most people know almost nothing of Anne Hutchinson beyond her status, alongside Roger Williams, as the first two great exiles from the Massachusetts Bay Colony (which was never supposed to be permanent, but that’s another story). In college, I took a class on early American literature, and one of the books picked for the class was an anthology of, you guessed it, early American literature. As with many anthologies, it was 75 percent literature, 25 percent crucial historical background. And one of the big, sexy topics in early American literature is ridiculous trials. The stock ridiculous trial in early America is, of course, the Salem witch trials (which were not the only witch trials on the continent and were far from the first; witches were tried in New Mexico 60 years before Salem was so much as thinking about bedknobs or broomsticks).
But in terms of sheer back-and-forth assertiveness from the defendant and nonspecific accusations by the prosecution, the trial of Anne Hutchinson is far more entertaining — and far more infuriating. My opinion, having studied this trial pretty extensively for a class project (and this diary), is that Anne Hutchinson was kicked out of the colony because Winthrop et al. had to make an example of her lest other people get the idea that freedom of expression was permissible.
Anne Hutchinson's story is far more interesting the more you know. Her father, Francis Marbury, so "openly deplored this lack of competence from the clergy that he was arrested, and spent a year in jail for his 'subversive' words of dissent."
Marbury wasn't alone in his thought or in being seen as an enemy of the church. A preacher named John Cotton had also come under fire for going against "ceremonial conformity." Cotton either was sent to or elected to go to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was soon accompanied by Anne, husband Will Hutchinson and their 15 children. (Ah, the freedom of religion to act Irish Catholic without being Irish Catholic.)
Anne soon realized that the only place one can have freedom of religion is one's mind. Separation from an oppressive factor often (and, in the case of adults, almost always) results in oppression of the next person who steps out of line in the newfound land. The people in charge of the Massachusetts Bay were having none of the free-thinking stuff Anne Hutchinson had been raised on.
Growing up being allowed to think for yourself means you come to see how useful it is. You also come to base a lot of your self-worth on it, to the point that it is part of you. So when Anne found herself effectively patted on the head and told "You be a good girl and take care of the children; you leave the heavy thinking to us men," she said, in effect, "Rubbish. I'll think for myself, and I'll get together with the women and encourage them to do the same." She was the feminist movement before there was one.
Anne therefore started leading Bible studies. She and some of the other women in the colony would get together to talk about Bible passages, the latest sermon, that sort of thing. Some men also started attending, but the big thing was encouraging women to think for themselves. Yes, I am serious about this as literal as it is. Allowing a woman to think for herself — about anything — was not so much happening. For example, the preface to Anne Bradstreet's book of poetry went to great lengths to assure readers that these independent thoughts came when all the children were safely tucked into bed and all the chores were done:
It is the Work of a Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her Family occasions, and more than so, these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.
Anyway, this Bible study group was bad news to new colony Governor John Winthrop et al. for three reasons:
A) It allowed for the idea that the Bible was open to lay interpretation.
B) Lay interpretation by lots of women.
C) By lots of women who then questioned what the (male) leaders of the colony said.
The group had gotten bigger than Winthrop and colony liked, and he put the kibosh on it. Her trial was fixed from the start, rather like the trials of the Salem "witches."
And what was so bad about what she said? You have to understand how the colony worked to understand what was so damning about her beliefs.
One of the biggest aspects of life and acceptance within the colony was the conversion experience. You had to give a public description of your conversion experience, during which you "realized" various things about your faith. This Web site has it down pretty good:
Beyond the usual confession of faith, the applicant was required to give a satisfactory narrative of his experience of grace. these narratives hardly deserve to be considered autobiography . . . [subjects are reduced to] testifying that their experiences follow a certain pattern of feeling and behavior.
(Bolding mine.)
Note that theoretically, one's conversion experience could be rejected as fabricated on the grounds that, oh, it wasn't enough like everyone else's. This then encouraged people to say they had conversion experiences similar to those of people who were in the colony Puritan church and thus were colony citizens. It also discouraged people from openly exploring their faith. Stifle individual thought and you won't have to handle a reformation.
Well, Anne wasn't about that. And Winthrop, and Cotton before him, came down on her for that. Anne also had thought slavery was bad and thought Bible knowledge was necessary for salvation (the equivalent these days of thinking scientific knowledge is necessary for a position at NASA).
The trial of Anne Hutchinson had nothing to do with actually determining guilt. Winthrop had decided she was guilty. For the sake of maintaining colony order, she had to be. And since John Cotton couldn't very well sail anywhere else (there being nowhere else), he had to pull a John McCain and decide to abandon his principles for the sake of his job. Fittingly, the people who sailed to this continent to show the Church of England how it was done (and who intended to sail right back once they'd done it) were guilty of the same thing the Church of England was guilty of: forced religion.
Anne Hutchinson had to be guilty because she threatened the movement. She encouraged people to actually freely exercise their religion as they saw fit rather than as a group of elders had preordained. She questioned the biblical authority of the conversion experience requirement. And then she played the card even John Cotton had previously made her recant: She said God revealed things to her.
So the Hutchinsons were banished from the colony on March 22, 1638, and sent to Aquidneck Island (where I went to high school, coincidentally) along with 60 of Anne's followers. Five years later, having moved to what would become New York, she was killed in a Native American raid.
For what little it's worth, her banishment was revoked (a little late) in 1945, and in 1987, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis pardoned her.