Freedom of speech has arguably never been more important in America than it is today, in 2022. The struggle over this fundamental right has shaped American society since the first European colonists arrived on its shores in the early seventeenth century. The remarkable story of Anne Hutchinson, the outspoken Puritan dissident who challenged the religious and political authorities of colonial Boston, resonates today for a variety of reasons. Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel is a gem of a book. It is beautifully written, creatively structured, and exhaustively researched. It far exceeded my expectations, particularly for a book I happened to pick up for a dollar at a library book sale.
Anne Hutchinson was born in 1591 in Alford, England, the daughter of Francis Marbury, a Cambridge-educated Puritan minister. From an early age, LaPlante writes, Hutchinson exhibited “a willingness to question and even to show contempt for authority, a confidence in the rightness of one’s own views, a deep faith in God, and a desire to share that faith through teaching.” She would eventually carry these qualities across the Atlantic to the New World, where her outspoken convictions would soon bring her into conflict with the religious and political authorities of colonial Massachusetts, ultimately leading to her banishment, along with that of her large family.
In 1612, Anne married Will Hutchinson, a prosperous merchant, and settled in her hometown of Alford. The couple became devoted followers of the influential Puritan minister John Cotton, eventually traveling dozens of miles each Sunday with their growing family to hear him preach in the nearby town of Boston. In the early 1630s, Cotton ran afoul of the Church of England’s religious authorities and fled to the New World. In 1634, Anne and Will, accompanied by their eleven children, followed him across the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts.
When the Hutchinson family arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, its population numbered just 5,000 settlers. Educated, prosperous, and well-connected, the Hutchinsons were warmly welcomed into the fledgling community. They built an impressive home in Boston, directly across the street from that of the colonial governor, John Winthrop. Soon after settling in, Anne began inviting local women into her home on Thursday afternoons to study Scripture and discuss the previous Sunday’s sermon. Before long, however, things took a decidedly contentious turn. While such gatherings were a familiar feature of Puritan life, Anne Hutchinson would soon transform these conventional Bible studies into something far more provocative. And, in the eyes of the colony’s religious authorities, it was something profoundly threatening.
Three factors combined to make Anne Hutchinson’s private religious gatherings increasingly threatening to the colony’s leadership. First, she embraced and amplified John Cotton’s teaching that human beings were fundamentally incapable of securing their own salvation. “Under Cotton,” LaPlante writes, “the Boston congregation had split doctrinally from the rest of the churches.” Hutchinson’s Thursday meetings only deepened that divide.
The doctrines associated with Cotton and Hutchinson became central to what was later called Antinomianism, a term that literally means “against the law.” In Christian theology, antinomianism holds that believers, having been saved by divine grace, are no longer bound by religious law as a means of achieving salvation. Taking her cue from Cotton, Hutchinson maintained that “Neither sanctification (the outward appearance of grace) nor justification (actually being saved) can come to one who was not elect from the beginning of time.” Salvation, in other words, was an entirely inward spiritual experience, dependent on God’s grace rather than outward displays of piety or good works. Indeed, “any striving after signs of grace was a sure sign that grace was not present.” Put simply, whether one was destined for salvation or damnation had been determined before birth, and no amount of earthly effort could alter that fate.
Hutchinson went further, accusing the colony’s other ministers, with the support of Governor John Winthrop, of preaching a “covenant of works,” the notion that individuals could earn their way into heaven through virtuous conduct and religious observance. To Hutchinson and her followers, such teachings smacked of Catholicism, a faith that many Puritans associated with the Antichrist. In the fiercely religious world of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, these were fighting words.
Second, Hutchinson’s gatherings quickly became enormously popular, attracting dozens of enthusiastic participants, including, eventually, the husbands of many of the women who attended. According to LaPlante, after just a few years in Boston, “Anne Hutchison possessed the strongest constituency of any leader in the colony.” It was one thing to challenge the religious doctrines of the colony’s most influential ministers; it was quite another to do so before a large, devoted, and rapidly growing segment of the population. Hutchinson was no longer merely a theological dissenter. She had become a formidable rival to the colony’s established religious and political authorities.
Finally, Hutchinson’s gender made her an especially conspicuous and unsettling threat to the established order. In the rigidly patriarchal society of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, women were not expected to assume positions of religious leadership, much less openly challenge men on matters of scriptural interpretation. By asserting her theological authority and attracting a substantial following, Hutchinson was defying not only the colony’s religious orthodoxy but also its deeply entrenched social hierarchy. She was, to put it mildly, stepping well beyond the bounds of what Puritan society considered acceptable behavior for a woman.
Hutchinson and her family had been in Massachusetts for barely three years when, in November 1637, Governor John Winthrop had her summoned before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. There, she faced a tribunal of colonial authorities who effectively served as prosecutor, judge, and jury. The proceedings culminated in her conviction and banishment on charges rooted in her religious dissent, criticism of the colony’s ministers, and claims of personal divine revelation.
Reverend Hugh Peter undoubtedly spoke for many of his contemporaries when he accused Hutchinson of failing to recognize her proper place in Puritan society: “You have rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.” Indeed, it was the forty-six-year-old mother’s extraordinary “pride and aggressiveness” that so shocked and offended Winthrop and his colleagues. Her confidence, intellectual independence, and remarkable composure under interrogation seemed almost unnatural to men accustomed to unquestioned deference from women. To some, such audacity could only suggest the influence of Satan himself.
Perhaps most devastating was the betrayal of John Cotton, Hutchinson’s longtime spiritual mentor, who ultimately turned against her. Condemning her teachings in particularly vicious terms, Cotton declared: “And so your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the very bowels of religion, and hath so infected the churches that God knows when they will be cured.”
Anne Hutchinson was ultimately declared “not fit for our society” and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. With Hutchinson safely removed, John Winthrop could rest assured, as LaPlante writes, “that Antinomianism was discredited, sanctification and justification were linked, and women were again meek.” Religious orthodoxy, political authority, and the colony’s patriarchal social order had all been reaffirmed, at least for the time being.
Following her banishment, Hutchinson, her family, and dozens of loyal supporters relocated to Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Anne had been pregnant with her sixteenth child during her trial and subsequently miscarried while settling into her new home. The pregnancy ended in the delivery of a severely malformed fetus. When news of the tragedy reached Boston, John Winthrop and Hutchinson’s other adversaries seized upon it as unmistakable evidence of God’s displeasure with her. In 1642, Anne suffered another devastating loss when her beloved husband, Will, a leading figure in the founding and early government of Rhode Island, died. She subsequently relocated with her family to an area under Dutch control in what is now New York City. There, in 1643, Hutchinson and six of her children were killed in a raid by Siwanoy warriors. Even this horrific tragedy was interpreted by Winthrop and others as further proof of divine punishment. In their eyes, Hutchinson’s fate had vindicated the very religious orthodoxy she had dared to challenge.
Anne Hutchinson’s legacy is both significant and surprisingly far-reaching. For starters, LaPlante describes her as “the true midwife of Harvard.” In the seventeenth century, colleges and universities were primarily devoted to educating and training the clergy. Although Harvard was founded before Hutchinson’s trial, the religious turmoil surrounding her teachings reinforced the colony’s determination to cultivate a well-educated, doctrinally orthodox ministry. The hope was that better-trained ministers would prevent future challenges to Puritan authority by renegade preachers and their intellectually precocious female followers. More directly, and perhaps even more remarkably, Hutchinson’s legacy includes no fewer than three American presidents among her direct descendants: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
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