The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.
Not all Puritans who insisted on taking
Puritan ideas to their logical conclusion fared nearly as well as Roger Williams did. Anne Hutchinson, who arrived in 1634,
also rejected what she regarded as the hopeless compromises she saw around her.
If Williams was one of those deeply genial people who are so intriguing because
you always sense that for all their niceness they’re also holding something
back, Hutchinson seemed to have a talent for alienating people wherever she
went. It is an article of faith among modern scholars that this is because she
was a woman, and I have little doubt this was part of the story. But to see her
fate solely in such terms is to miss the profound challenge posed in the deeply
subversive implications of asserting that people should live by their own
lights, a challenge she issued even more directly than Williams did.
Hutchinson was born in 1591 as Anne
Marbury, the daughter of a committed preacher who was repeatedly jailed for
propounding heretical doctrines. She married William Hutchinson, a wealthy
merchant, and bore him 15 children. Around the time of their wedding the
Hutchinsons began attending the sermons of John Cotton; when he emigrated to
America they decided to follow him. Though Cotton criticized Williams’s
radicalism, he was initially approving of the highly learned Hutchinson, very
much her father’s daughter. She soon became part of an influential circle that
included the politically-connected Henry Vane, another recent arrival who
briefly displaced John Winthrop as governor of the colony. (Such factionalism
was an additional reason, along with her gender, why Hutchinson’s status proved
volatile). She soon became known for the brilliant discussion circle she hosted
at home to discuss religious experience.
Perhaps not surprisingly, such events
generated curiosity – and resentment. The flashpoint of conflict centered on
one of the great theological debates of the era: whether the basis of salvation
should rest on a covenant of works or a covenant of faith. For the Puritans,
there was no question it was the latter: grace was the gift of God, not
something one earned by virtue of one’s deeds (an oxymoron, given the
insufficiency and sinfulness of the human heart). Hutchinson reputedly
complained that the preaching she was hearing, Cotton’s excepted, smacked of
crypto-Catholic covenant of works rhetoric (this even though a sixteenth
century Dutch Protestant theologian, Jacobus Arminius, also affirmed a covenant
of works).
Even more provocative were the barely
veiled implications of Hutchinson’s assertions. If, as Puritans ritualistically
affirmed, only God knew who was saved, and if – as seemed quite likely to at least
some observers – civil and clerical authorities were as likely as not agents of
damnation, then why should they be blindly respected, much less obeyed? It was
not hard to hear overtones of what we would call anarchism in such talk (the
Puritans’ term was “antinominianism,” from the Greek anti-nomos, against the law). As such this was a matter of church and state. New Englanders were generally
careful – more careful than most, notwithstanding the common misperception that
the region was as theocracy – to separate the two, in large measure because
they wanted to protect the church from the state. When dissidents were legally prosecuted, it was explicitly
because of the challenge they posed to secular
order, a necessity in God’s fallen world.
In the case of Williams, dealing with such challenges to
social order was reasonably straightforward, since he was a public figure.
Hutchinson’s case was more ambiguous, since it was not clear she could be
prosecuted, or on what basis, particularly given the standard defense of
private personal conscience. But government authorities decided to investigate
and called her before the General Court in 1637. (A separate church inquiry
would follow.)
The surviving trial record suggests that for much of the
inquiry Hutchinson ran circles around her interrogators, sacred and secular (ministers
were invited to participate in the civil hearing), clearly recognizing the
relatively weak hand the General Court was playing and sustained by supporters
who also attended. “I am called here to answer you but I hear no charge,” she
observes at one point in the proceedings.
“I have told you some already and more I can tell you,”
Governor Winthrop replies.
“Name one,” she retorts.
And so it goes. Hutchinson volleys
scripture with the best of them, and looks as if she might really prevail
until, in a moment of overreaching, she was pressed to explain the basis of her
faith in her own conscience, and replies, “by an immediate revelation.” This
was a big mistake: it was an article of faith that God no longer spoke directly
to human beings as he had to the Israelites in days of old, even if, as
philo-Semites, they considered themselves the thirteenth tribe in the new
Promised Land. Hutchinson was branded a heretic, subsequently excommunicated in
her church trial, and banished from Massachusetts. She and her husband made
their way to Rhode Island, where William Hutchinson became embroiled in the
colony’s divisive politics. After his death in 1641 Hutchinson made her way to
Dutch New Amsterdam, where in 1643 she ignored a warning to flee an Indian
attack and was murdered near the highway that now bears her name.
Again: what interests me here is less
the way Hutchinson was a deviant than in the way she captured a core
characteristic of Puritans in particular and New Englanders in general in
colonial America: their tendency – whether recognized, honored, or not – to
rely on their own judgment. This sense of self-reliance in the spiritual realm
clearly carried over into secular affairs, which can help explain not only why
they came to America in the first place but ultimately why the were in the
cockpit of an independence movement in 1776 that was for a long time couched in
terms of defending a 150 year tradition of liberty, one they refused to
sacrifice on an altar of taxation without representation.
My caveat nevertheless bears repeating:
neither Roger Williams, nor Anne Hutchinson, nor any of their contemporaries should
be considered self-made. They
pointed the way, they fashioned new worlds, but they were too deeply invested
in seeing themselves as servants of Christ, devoting their God-given gifts in
the service of that enterprise. Their self-reliance was a process of
elimination – a suspicion others could not be trusted that led them back to
themselves by default.
As they were uncomfortably aware,
however, there were interlopers in their midst who had more avowed confidence
than they did in the power of their own reason. The Puritans loathed these
people – Williams, at the outer perimeter of his tolerance, described them as
“these poor filthy dreamers”[60]– and persecuted them to the point of
execution. They were known, pejoratively, as Quakers, and it is their greatest
American exponent, William Penn, who brings us one step closer to self-making.
Next: The making of William Penn (and his colony)
