American Jezebel (27 page)

“The Lord judges not as man judges,” she said to all her judges. “Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ.”

Hand in hand with Mary Dyer, Anne Hutchinson exited the church.

It was a wintry day in spring when Anne Hutchinson set out on her journey to Rhode Island. The snow on the ground was thigh deep, but the robin had begun its hopeful song, and swallows chippered in the barns.

Although the common route from Massachusetts to the settlements south was by water, around the tip of Cape Cod, Anne Hutchinson decided to walk. Her journey started ten miles south of Shawmut, at the house on the six-hundred-acre Hutchinson farm on Mount Wollaston, in modern-day Quincy, extending east from Wollaston Heights to the sands of Wollaston Beach. Anne and her children had come here by sea on March 28 with their portable goods and then spent a few days visiting with the Wheelwrights.

Mary Hutchinson Wheelwright still lived on Mount Wollaston, near Anne and Will’s farmhouse and her husband’s former meetinghouse, along with her five children—Katherine was now seven and a half—and her and Will’s aging mother, whom Mary would care for until Susan Hutchinson’s death in 1646. Mary was awaiting spring weather before heading north to join John in Exeter, New Hampshire, where the banished preacher lived with twenty other families just north of Massachusetts Bay Colony, across the Merrimack River. Anne had considered going to New Hampshire with the Wheelwrights until her oldest son, Edward, returned from Rhode Island in March with the news that Will had purchased suitable land on Aquidneck on which he and other men were building houses and preparing a new community.

Unlike her sister-in-law, Anne did not have the luxury of waiting for good weather. A few days after her excommunication, the magistrates had informed her that her sentence of banishment would go into
effect by the following month. Until then, she had to stay in her own house. In late March, just before she and her children arrived at their house in Wollaston, more than a foot of snow fell. Winter, it seemed, would not loose its hold.

On the first day of April 1638, accompanied by horses and carts loaded with the family’s goods, Anne Hutchinson began her six-day walk. In addition to twenty-four-year-old Edward, who served as a guide, the group included nineteen-year-old Bridget; seventeen-year-old Francis; Anne, who was almost twelve; ten-year-old Mary; eight-year-old Katherine; William, six; four-and-a-half-year-old Susan; and the baby, Zuriel, who had just turned two. Bridget carried her four-month-old son, Eliphal, who had been baptized in Boston during his grandmother’s imprisonment. Bridget’s husband, John Sanford, who was in his early thirties, held the hands of his two sons by his late first wife, four-year-old John and Samuel, age two (whom he likely also carried). The Dyers—William, who had already been to Rhode Island and back, and Mary and their small children—and several other families accompanied them.

Anne and Will’s son Samuel, who was then thirteen, is often assumed to have been present because a “Samuel Hutchinson” appears in the early records of Rhode Island. However, the records of early Exeter, New Hampshire, suggest that Samuel first went north with his uncle John Wheelwright. A “Samuel Hutchinson” was one of eight men, including Wheelwright, who on April 3, 1638, were granted by the Sagamore Indians a large plot of land along the Merrimack River, east to the Piscataqua. This was likely not Will’s younger brother Samuel, then forty-seven, who in 1638 remained in Massachusetts and died, after 1644, in England. Anne and Will’s son Samuel, at nearly fourteen, may have been close enough to the
de facto
age of a freeman to be included in the Exeter land grant. Within a year or two, this younger Samuel Hutchinson moved from New Hampshire south to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where he held land and voted in the town meeting.

Several older Hutchinson offspring remained in Massachusetts: twenty-two-year-old Richard; twenty-year-old Faith, who was now five months pregnant with her first child; and Edward’s wife, the former Katherine Hamby, a lawyer’s daughter from Ipswich, England, and their infant son.

Anne Hutchinson and her companions walked from Wollaston in Quincy, east of the Blue Hills, through Braintree and Brockton, possibly as far east as Taunton, to what is now Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Along the way they passed countless beaver dams. They crossed the many rivers and streams on the ubiquitous canoes that would soon be their main mode of transportation. Each night they slept in wigwams that they found or made in haste. They built fires for warmth and for cooking.

As they walked, the land gradually flattened and became less rocky and there was more spring growth. Where the snow began to melt, the ground was muddy. This journey from town to country was not unlike her 1612 journey, as a newlywed, from London to Alford, although then she knew her destination and did not have to walk.

On the sixth day, as Anne’s company approached Providence Plantation, they passed out of the territory of the chartered colony of Massachusetts, as the court had ordered her to do. At that moment, according to Edmund Morgan, “Massachusetts lost a brilliant mind.”

The Reverend Roger Williams’s Providence was set on a peninsula at the wide mouth of the Seekonk River, which flows south into Narragansett Bay. This sparsely populated settlement had begun two springs before, after Williams’s death-defying exodus from Massachusetts. One bitter night in January of 1636, Pastor Williams of Salem had received a letter from Governor Winthrop warning him that the General Court had ordered his removal and that soldiers were coming to Salem to put him on a ship to England. At midnight Williams had fled into the deep woods south of Salem. Ill and unable to survive on his own, the minister was sheltered and fed for several winter months by Wampanoag Indians. In the spring he moved south to modern-day Seekonk, where he built beside the river a hut of saplings covered with boughs. His wife, children, and a few followers joined him there. But the governor of the nearby Plymouth Plantation—where Williams had lived six years before while studying Indian languages—accused him of trespassing. Williams and his followers paddled up the Seekonk River to a place at the base of a hill near a spring that the Narragansetts agreed to sell to him in exchange for tools, wampum, and trinkets. He named this settlement for the providence of God.

Roger Williams, a pioneer of the concepts of freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state, had a theological mind not un
like Hutchinson’s. He saw no just cause for an English king to presume to grant Indian territories, a view that alienated the Massachusetts authorities. In his view, civic leaders had no business governing religious worship or doctrine, and church members, not public taxes on all citizens, should pay church expenses. He rejected the then-common idea that God entered into human affairs in making covenants with pious settlers such as John Winthrop. Edmund Morgan, a biographer of both Williams and Winthrop, elucidated this contrast:

When Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of Massachusetts banished heretics like Hutchinson in order to protect their First Church of Christ, Williams replied, “If the New England churches had been truly Christ’s, they would have neither needed nor wanted this kind of protection.”

Hutchinson doubtless shared this view. The historian William McLoughlin theorized that to her Winthrop’s Bible commonwealth was “a retrograde movement that would lead toward a church of hypocrites—people who professed and displayed outward conformity to local norms but who inwardly were not truly one with God. Like all Calvinists, Hutchinson believed that men have been so depraved since
Adam’s fall…that self-interest leads them to…behave well only out of fear of damnation.” In her view, according to McLoughlin, the colony’s founders’ insistence “that God had made a covenant with the settlers of New England to establish a special community” led to “the same kind of formal, spiritually dead established church that they had fled England to escape. Ultimately,” she felt, “this would breed only smugness, complacency, and self-righteousness with outward forms substituted for inward faith.” Moreover, like Williams, she did not believe that God makes covenants with chosen nations, defining their enemies as his enemies.

Her colleague in dissidence, Roger Williams, had been born in London around 1603. The son of a tailor and nephew of a mayor of London, Williams had studied theology at Cambridge, where he became Puritan, and had been ordained a minister of the Church of England at twenty-four. Three years later he turned Separatist and decided to sail to Boston, arriving in December 1630. The Boston church offered him the job that Cotton would later accept—serving as the church’s teacher who would replace John Wilson when he was away in England. Williams refused, choosing to preach instead at Salem, where more congregants shared his Separatist views. Later, after Cotton arrived in Massachusetts Bay, the two ministers engaged in doctrinal battles that they published as pamphlets. Williams’s
The Bloody Tenet of Persecution
argued that it was wrong to punish or remove people for their beliefs. Cotton replied with
The Bloody Tenet Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb,
to which Williams came back with
The Bloody Tenet Made Yet More Bloody by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to Wash It White in the Blood of the Lamb.

Williams’s Providence Plantation, with fewer than a hundred residents, already had a reputation as a maritime center in the spring of 1638, when Anne Hutchinson arrived. She traveled the sixteen miles south from there to Aquidneck by ship, down the Seekonk River to Narragansett Bay and the windswept marsh, beach, pastureland, and pebbled cove of her new home.

Early in the second week of April, she and Will were reunited. They had been living apart for nearly six months, by far the longest separation in their twenty-six years of marriage. He was delighted to
see her but distressed to find her in such a weak state, especially in late pregnancy, a combination he had never observed in her before.

Rhode Island was even more primitive than Boston had first seemed. While it would later join with Providence Plantation under the crown as the chartered Colony of Rhode Island, it was now just the island of Aquidneck. The sixty or seventy men, women, and children who had accompanied her and Will were its only European settlers. It had no houses save those few that these men had begun. Until the houses were completed, the families lived in pits dug in the ground, with floors of planks and dirt walls covered with tree bark. Still, Anne was not discouraged, for—as she had reminded the General Court in November—she knew that the bounds of her habitation were determined by God.

The first settlers of Portsmouth, most of whom arrived a few weeks after Anne Hutchinson in late April and early May, divided up the choice land between the Great Cove and Mount Hope Bay so that each man received a house lot of two or three acres, which he could supplement with larger plots of several hundred acres for farming, slightly to the south. The men paid two shillings per acre for the land. The Hutchinson house lot was on the western beach of the cove, besides the cove’s Little Bay, east of the spring and north of the Great Field and the Calf ’s Pasture, based on a study of the original Portsmouth land grants. The house lots of William Coddington, John Coggeshall, John Clarke, and John Sanford (the Hutchinsons’ son-in-law) were roughly a thousand yards to the north and west, possibly extending northwest to the waters of Mount Hope Bay.

No sign remains of the houses that these men built in the spring of 1638, which appear from contemporary sketches to have been two-story structures with many windows and a large chimney on one end—less comfortable than the settlers’ Boston mansions but far airier and more spacious than the houses at Plymouth Plantation. However, around 1950 a local man walking his dog along a beach on the Great Cove uncovered a midden, or seventeenth-century domestic garbage heap, on the Hutchinsons’ former land. Archeologists excavated this site in the early 1970s. Their finds, many of which are displayed in the Portsmouth Public Library, include scores of clay pipes made in Bristol,
England, in the early seventeenth century, fragments of German and English pottery of the same and even a slightly earlier vintage, Delft-ware pottery, an English earthenware chamber pot, thimbles, buttons, nails and spikes, hooks, lead shot, a spoon, a Jew’s harp, and many animal bones. Based on the bones, the Hutchinsons’ diet appears to have been as pleasant in banishment as it was in Boston. Freshly killed pheasant, hare, turkey, venison, beef, mutton, lamb, quahogs, and oysters were likely accompanied by pottages, stews, corn mush, fresh eggs, and fruit pies and compotes.