The Beginners of a Nation

XII

Instability of a theocracy. In its early years Massachusetts had no rest. Three profound disturbances – the expulsion of Williams, the secession of Hooker and his followers, and the Hutchinsonian convulsion – followed one another in breathless succession, and a dangerous Indian war ran its course at the same time. That the early settlements were founded on "rocks and sands and salt marshes" was not the chief misfortune of the Bay colony. Its ecclesiastical politics proved explosive, to the consternation of its pious founders, who like other settlers in Utopia had neglected to reckon with human nature.

XIII

Severity of Puritanism. It has been the habit of modern writers on the subject to dismiss the Hutchinsonian controversy as a debate about meaningless propositions in an incomprehensible jargon. Yet there was in it but the action of well-known tendencies in human nature which might almost have been predicted from the antecedent circumstances. Puritanism had wrapped itself in the haircloth of austerity, it took grim delight in harsh forbiddings, and heaped up whole decalogues of thou-shalt-nots. Nor did it offer, as other intense religious movements have done, the compensation of internal joys for the gayety it repressed. Theoretically Calvinist, it was practically an ascetic system of external duties and abstentions, trampling on the human spirit without ruth.

Reaction toward a subjective joyousness. But the heart will not be perpetually repressed; kept from natural pleasures, it will seek supernatural delights. Men were certain sooner or later to soften the iron rigidity of Puritanism by cultivating those subjective joys for which Calvinism provided abundant materials. While preachers like Hooker were scourging the soul into a self-abasement that could approve its own damnation, and while ingenious scribes were amassing additional burdens of scruple for heavy-laden shoulders, there arose in England a new school of Puritan pietists. These shirked none of the requirements of the legalists, but their spirits sought the sunnier nooks of Calvinism, and they preached the joy of the elect and the delight of a fully assured faith. Magnalia B. III, c. I, 32. Cotton, whose fair complexion, brown hair, and ruddy countenance attested a sanguine temperament, belonged by nature to this new order. Compare Cotton's Fountain of Life, 35. He rejoiced that he had received the "witness of the Spirit" on his wedding day, and he delighted to draw out Scripture imagery to a surprising tenuity in describing the "covenant of marriage" and the intimacy of the "covenant of salt" or of friendship between God and the soul of the believer. Preachers of the same sort brought relief to multitudes in various towns of England. The people, tired of churchly routine on the one hand and of legalism on the other, thronged to hear such divines "filling the doores and windows." It was the evangelicalism of the following century sending up its shoots prematurely into a frosty air. 118 The old-fashioned Puritan had always conceived of religion as difficult of attainment. It was a paradoxical system wherein men were saved by the works they theoretically abjured. 119 Conservative Puritans complained of the preachers who spread a table of "dainties," as though it were meritorious to sustain the soul on a rugged diet of rough doctrine. Shepard's Memoirs in Young, 505. In Thomas Shepard's Memoirs of his own Life we may overhear "a godly company" of the time in familiar "discourse about the wrath of God and the terror of it, and how intolerable it was; which they did present by fire, how intolerable the torment of that was for a time; what, then, would eternity be?"

XIV

Cotton's revivalism. Cotton professed that he loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep. Winthrop's Journal, i, 144. His emotional rendering of Calvinistic doctrines wrought strongly on the people of the new Boston, and his advent was followed by widespread religious excitement. More people were admitted to the church in Boston in the earlier months of Cotton's residence than to all the other churches in the colony. Report of Record Com. ii, 5. Boston Town Records, 1635. Hutchinson Papers, p. 88. Boston seems to have become religious in a pervasive way, and in 1635 measures were taken to prevent persons who were not likely to unite with the church from settling in the town. In this community, which had no intellectual interest but religion, and from which ordinary diversions were banished, there were sermons on Sunday and religious lectures on week days and ever-recurring meetings in private houses. The religious pressure was raised to the danger point, and an explosion of some sort was well-nigh inevitable. Cotton's enthusiasms were modulated by the soft stop of a naturally placid temper, but when communicated to others they were more dangerous.

XV

Mrs. Hutchinson's character. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been one of Cotton's ardent disciples in old Boston. She crossed the sea with her husband that she might sit under his ministry in New England. She was a woman cursed with a natural gift for leadership in an age that had no place for such women. Wonder-working Providence, ch. lxii. "This Masterpiece of Womens wit," the railing Captain Johnson calls her, and certainly her answers before the Massachusetts General Court go to show that she was not inferior in cleverness to any of the magistrates or ministers. 120 Winthrop, whose antipathy to her was a passion, speaks of her "sober and profitable carriage," and says that she was "very helpful in the time of childbirth and other occasions of bodily infirmities, and well furnished with means to those purposes." Short Story, etc., p. 31. In the state of medical science at that time such intelligent and voluntary ministration from a "gentlewoman" must have been highly valued. Almost alone of the religionists of her time she translated her devotion into philanthropic exertion. But a woman of her "nimble and active wit" could not pass her life in bodily ministrations. Power seeks expression, and her native eloquence was sure to find opportunity. Cotton's The Way of the Churches Cleared, Part I, p. 51. Short Story, 31. Mrs. Hutchinson made use of the usual gathering of gossips on the occasion of childbirth to persuade the women to that more intimate religious life of which she was an advocate. It was the custom to hold devotion at concert pitch by meetings at private houses for men only; women might be edified by their husbands at home. Mrs. Hutchinson ventured to open a little meeting for women. Short Story, 34. This was highly approved at first, and grew to unexpected dimensions; fifty, and sometimes eighty, of the principal women of the little town were present at her conferences.

XVI

Mrs. Hutchinson's doctrines. In these meetings she emphasized Cotton's favorite doctrine of "a covenant of grace." Her sensitive woman's nature no doubt had beat its wings against the bars of legalism. Compare Whelewright's Sermon in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1866, 265. Cotton's Sermon on the Churches Resurrection, 1642. She was not a philosopher, but nothing could be more truly in accord with the philosophy of character than her desire to give to conduct a greater spontaneity. Cotton himself preached in the same vein. In addition to the Reformation, of which Puritans made so much, he looked for something more which he called, in the phrase of the Apocalypse, "the first resurrection." Mrs. Hutchinson, who was less prudent and more virile than Cotton, did not hesitate to describe most of the ministers in the colony as halting under a "covenant of works." Her doctrine was, at bottom, an insurrection against the vexatious legalism of Puritanism. She carried her rebellion so far that she would not even admit that good works were a necessary evidence of conversion. It was the particular imbecility of the age that thought of almost every sort must spin a cocoon of theological phrases for itself. Spontaneity of religious and moral action represented itself to Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers as an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the believer and as a personal union with Christ whom they identified with the "new creature" of Paul. Such a hardening of metaphor into dogma is one of the commonest phenomena of religious thought.

XVII

Vane's arrival, 1635. Sir Henry Vane the younger, who had become an ardent Puritan in spite of his father, landed in Boston in October, 1635. He had already shown those gifts which enabled him afterward to play a considerable part in English history. His election as governor, 1636. His high connections made him an interesting figure, and though only about twenty-six years of age he was chosen governor in May, 1636. Ardent by nature, and yet in his youth when he "forsook the honors and preferments of the court to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity," nothing was more natural than that he should be captivated by the seraphic Cotton and that he should easily adopt the transcendental views of Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop, the natural leader of the colony, having given place in 1635 to Haynes, perhaps in order that Hooker's party might be conciliated and the Connecticut emigration avoided, was a second time thrust aside that a high-born youth might be honored. Winthrop was utterly opposed to Mrs. Hutchinson, in whose teachings his apprehensive spirit saw full-fledged Antinomianism, and, by inference, potential anabaptism, blasphemy, and sedition. The Hutchinsonians were partisans of Vane, who adhered to their doctrine. The ministers other than Cotton and Whelewright, stung by the imputation that they were under "a covenant of works," rallied about Winthrop. Political cleavage and religious division unfortunately coincided.

XVIII

Arrogance of the Hutchinson party. Supported by the prestige of the young governor and of some conspicuous citizens and inspired by Cotton's metaphorical and mystical preaching, which was interpreted with latitude, the enthusiasm of the Hutchinsonians tended to become fanaticism. We have to depend mainly on the prejudiced account of their enemies, but there is little reason to doubt that the advocates of "a covenant of grace" assumed the airs of superiority usually seen in those who have discovered a short cut to perfection. The human spirit knows few greater consolations than well-disguised self-righteousness. The followers of Mrs. Hutchinson, if we may believe the witnesses, sometimes showed their sanctity by walking out of meeting when a preacher not under "a covenant of grace" entered the pulpit. They even interrupted the services with controversial questions addressed to the minister. Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, was condemned by them as being under "a covenant of works," and also incidentally criticised for his "thick utterance." Nor can one find that Cotton interposed his authority to protect his less gifted colleague. It is quite conceivable that he looked with some satisfaction on the progress of affairs in Boston. 1636. The heavenly minded young governor who had chosen to suffer reproach with the people of God was his disciple. The brilliant woman who was easily the leader of the town was the very apostle of his doctrine. The superiority of his opinions on a union with Christ that preceded active faith as compared with those of Hooker and the lesser divines was enthusiastically asserted by the great majority of the Boston church, led by Mrs. Hutchinson. Seeing so much zeal and sound doctrine he may have felt that the first or spiritual resurrection of which he was wont to prophesy from the Apocalypse, had already begun in his own congregation, and that among these enthusiasts were those who had learned to "buy so as though they bought not" – those who had been lifted into a crystalline sphere where they had "the Moone under their feet. Cotton's Churches Resurrection, p. 27. And if we have the Moone under our feete, then wee are not eclipsed when the Moone is Eclipsed." Thus did Cotton's imagination revel in cosmical imagery.

XIX

Bitterness of the debate. The arrogance of the elect is hard to bear, and it is not wonderful that the debate waxed hot. The concentrated religiousness of a town that sought to shut out unbelieving residents made the dispute dangerous. In the rising tempest a ballast of ungodly people might have been serviceable. But in Boston there were few even of the indifferent to be buffers in the religious collision. While the covenant-of-grace people made themselves offensive, their opponents, – Winthrop, the slighted ex-governor, Wilson, the unpopular pastor, and the ministers accused of being under a covenant of works – resorted to the favorite weapons of polemics. They hatched a brood of inferences from the opinions Mrs. Hutchinson held, or was thought to hold, and then made her responsible for the ugly bantlings. They pretended to believe, and no doubt did believe, that Mrs. Hutchinson's esoteric teaching was worse than what she gave out. They borrowed the names of ancient heresies, long damned by common consent, to give odium to her doctrine. That the new party should be called Antinomian was plausible; the road they had chosen for escape from Puritan legalism certainly lay in that direction. But Antinomianism had suffered from an imputation of immorality, and no such tendency was apparent, unless by logical deduction, in the doctrines taught in Boston. The hearers of Mrs. Hutchinson were also accused of having accepted the doctrines of the so-called Family of Love which had of old been accused of many detestable things, and was a common bugaboo of theology at the time. The whole town of Boston and the whole colony of Massachusetts was set in commotion by the rude theological brawl. Overthrow of Vane, 1637. Such was the state of combustion in Boston that it was thought necessary by the opponents of Vane and Mrs. Hutchinson to hold the court of elections at the former capital, Newtown. The excitement at this court was so great that the church members, who only could vote, were on the point of laying violent hands on one another in a contest growing out of a question relating to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Vane was defeated, and Winthrop again made governor.

XX

The Synod of 1637. A great synod of elders from all the New England churches was assembled. All the way from Ipswich and Newbury on the east and from the Connecticut on the west the "teaching elders" made their way by water or by land, at public expense, that they might help the magistrates of Massachusetts to decide on what they should compel the churches to believe. Short Story of the Rise, Reign, etc., passim. For more than three weeks the synod at Cambridge wrestled with the most abstruse points of doctrine. Winthrop's Journal, i, 284, and following. The governor frequently had to interpose to keep the peace; sometimes he adjourned the assembly, to give time for heats to cool. Cotton's Way of the Churches Cleared, passim. A long list of errors, most of which were not held by anybody in particular, were condemned. A nearly unanimous conclusion on certain fine-spun doctrines was reached at length by means of affirmations couched in language vague or ambiguous. Cotton, who had been forced after debate to recant one opinion and modify others, assented to the inconclusive conclusions, but with characteristic non-committalism he qualified his assent and withheld his signature.

XXI

The persecution. The field was now cleared for the orderly persecution of the dissentients. Whelewright, Mrs. Hutchinson's brother-in-law, had been convicted of sedition in the preceding March on account of an imprudent sermon preached on a fast day. But his sentence had been deferred from court to court, apparently until after the synod. Mass. Rec., i, 207. At the November court following the synod Whelewright was banished, and those who had signed a rather vigorous petition in his favor many long months before were arraigned and banished or otherwise punished. The banished included some of the most intelligent and conspicuous residents. Not until this November court had her opponents ventured to bring Mrs. Hutchinson to trial. Whelewright, standing by his hot-headed sermon, had just been sentenced; the abler but more timid Cotton had already been overborne and driven into a safe ambiguity by the tremendous pressure of the great synod. Vane had left the colony, and the time was ripe to finish the work of extirpation. The elders were summoned to be present and advise.

XXII

Mrs. Hutchinson's trial, 1637. During a two days' trial, conducted inquisitorially, like an English Court of High Commission, Cambridge presented the spectacle of a high-spirited and gifted woman, at the worst but a victim of enthusiasm, badgered by the court and by the ministers, whose dominant order she had attacked. Hutchinson's Hist. of Mass. Bay, ii, appendix. Cotton, with more than his usual courage, stood her defender. The tough-fibered Hugh Peter, who made himself conspicuous in several ways, took it on him to rebuke Cotton for saying a word in defense of the accused. 121 Endecott and Hugh Peter, mates well matched, browbeat the witnesses who appeared in Mrs. Hutchinson's behalf, and Dudley, the conscientious advocate of persecution, was rude and overbearing. Winthrop acted as chief inquisitor, the narrow sincerity and superstition of his nature obscuring the nobler qualities of the man.

Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself adroitly at first, refusing to be trapped into self-condemnation. But her natural part was that of an outspoken agitator, and her religious exaltation had been increased, doubtless, by persecution, for combativeness is a stimulant even to zeal. On the second day she threw away "the fear of man," and declared that she had an inward assurance of her deliverance, adding that the General Court would suffer disaster. For this prophesying she was promptly condemned. Cotton had prophesied notably on one occasion, Wilson, his colleague, was given to rhyming prophecies, and Hooker had made a solemn prediction while in Holland. In this very year the plan of the Pequot campaign had been radically changed in compliance with a revelation vouchsafed to the chaplain, Stone. But these were ministers, and never was the ministerial office so reverenced as by the Puritans, who professed to strip it of every outward attribute of priestliness. Above all, for a woman to teach and to have revelations was to stand the world on its head. "We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex," etc., said Winthrop severely to Mrs. Hutchinson during the trial. Mrs. Hutchinson is excommunicated. She was sentenced to banishment, but reprieved, that the church might deal with her. On the persuasion of Cotton and others, Mrs. Hutchinson wrote a recantation apologizing for her assumption to have revelations, and retracting certain opinions of which she had been accused. But she added that she had never intended to teach or to hold these opinions. 122 For this falsehood, as it was deemed, she was summarily excommunicated. Yet nothing seems more probable than that her hyperbolic utterances under excitement had not stood for dogmatic opinions. Rise, Reign, Ruine, etc., and Winthrop's Journal, i, 309, 310. Under Cotton's fine-spun system of church government a member could not be excommunicated except by unanimous consent. Many of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends were absent from the colony, others had prudently changed sides or stayed away from the meeting. But her sons ventured to speak in her behalf. Cotton at once admonished them. The effect of putting them under admonition was to disfranchise them; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities of the sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the mother was cast out unanimously – a punishment much dreaded among the Puritans, who believed that what was thus bound on earth was bound in heaven. It was a ban that forbade the faithful even to eat with her. But the melancholy under which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at once, and she said as she left the church assembly, "Better to be cast out than to deny Christ."

XXIII

Omens and auguries. Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled on Rhode Island, where they sheltered themselves at first in caves dug in the ground. Here she again attracted attention by the charm of her eloquent teaching, and some came from afar to hear the "she Gamaliel," as her opponents called her. Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been excommunicated by the authority vested in the church, could be accounted for only by attributing her power to sorcery. Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 313, 316; ii, 11, and Short Story of Rise and Reign of Antinomianism. Winthrop sets down the evidence that she was a witch, which consisted in her frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, who sold oil of mandrakes to cure barrenness, and who was known to be familiar with the devil. At length "God stepped in," and by his "casting voice" proved which side was right. Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed Mrs. Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed stillborn child. Winthrop, i, 316. This fact became known when Mrs. Dyer left the church with the excommunicated Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity exhumed after long burial had rendered its traits difficult to distinguish. He examined it personally with little result, but he published in England incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped in once more, and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after she went to Rhode Island, suffered a maternal misfortune of another kind. The wild reports that were circulated regarding this event are not fit to be printed even in a note; the first editor of Winthrop's journal felt obliged to render the words into Latin in order that scholars might read them shamefacedly. Savage's Winthrop, i, 326. But Cotton, who was by this time redeeming himself by a belated zeal against the banished sectaries, repeated the impossible tale, which was far worse than pathological, to men and women, callow youths, young maidens, and innocent children "in the open assembly at Boston on a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to signalize her error in denying inherent righteousness. The governor, who was more cautious, wrote to the physician and got a correct report, from which the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton made a retraction at the next lecture. We are now peering into the abyss of seventeenth-century credulity. Death of Mrs. Hutchinson. Here are a grave ruler and a divine once eminent at the university, and now renowned in England and in America, wallowing in a squalid superstition in comparison with which the divination of a Roman haruspex is dignified.

Having suffered the loss of her husband, and hearing of efforts on the part of Massachusetts to annex Rhode Island, Mrs. Hutchinson removed to the Dutch colony of New Netherland with her family. 123 Here she and all her household except one child were massacred by the Indians. This act of Providence was hailed as a final refutation of her errors, the more striking that the place where she suffered was not far removed from a place called Hell Gate.

XXIV

Results of ecclesiastical government. This famous controversy lets in much light upon the character of the age and the nature of Puritanism. It is one of many incidents that reveal the impracticability of the religious Utopia attempted in New England. The concentration of religious people undoubtedly produced a community free from the kind of disorders that are otherwise inseparable from a pioneer state and that were found abundantly in New Netherland, in Maryland, and in Virginia and on the eastward fishing coast. "These English live soberly," said a Dutch visitor to Hartford in 1639, "drinking but three times at a meal, and when a man drinks to drunkenness they tie him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in Holland." But while some of the good results to be looked for in an exclusively Puritan community were attained, it was at the cost of exaggerating the tendency to debate and fanaticism and developing the severity, the intolerance, and the meddlesome petty tyranny that inheres in an ecclesiastical system of government. During the lifetime of one generation Massachusetts suffered all these, and it is doubtful whether regularity of morals was not purchased at too great a sacrifice of liberty, bodily and spiritual, and of justice. Certainly the student of history views with relief the gradual relaxation that came after the English Restoration and the disappearance from the scene of the latest survivors of the first generation of New England leaders.