As John Winthrop had on more than one occasion to lament, most of the colony’s early troublemakers came not from those of doubtful spiritual condition but from its certified saints. The “godly and zealous” Roger Williams was a prime example. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford described Williams as possessed of “many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment.” Even by Plymouth’s standards Williams was an extreme separatist. He was ready to bring down the wrath of Charles I on New England rather than accept the charters signed by him or his father, even if these documents provided the only legal basis for the governments ofPlymouth and Massachusetts Bay.
Williams had arrived in Massachusetts in 1631. Following a short stay in Plymouth, he joined the church in Salem, which elected him minister in 1635. Well before then, however, his opposition to the alliance of church and civil government turned both ministers and magistrates against him. Part of his contrariness stemmed from his religious libertarianism. Magistrates should have no voice in spiritual matters, he insisted: “forced religion stinks in God’s nostrils.” He also offended property owners (which meant nearly everyone) by advancing the radical idea that it was “a
Detail from a tombstone of a puritan cemetery in Boston. The grim reaper—an angel—prods the skeletal man to his final destiny: Life is but a flickering flame, soon to be extinguished.
Nationale sinne” for anyone, including the king, to take possession of land without buying it from the Indians.
As long as Williams enjoyed the support of his Salem church, there was little the magistrates could do to silence him. But his refusal to heed those who counseled moderation—“all truths are not seasonable at all times,” Governor Winthrop reminded him— swiftly eroded that support. In the fall of 1635, economic pressure put on the town of Salem by the General Court turned his congregation against him. The General Court then ordered him to leave the colony within six weeks.
Williams departed Massachusetts in January 1636, traveling south to the head of Narragansett Bay. There he worked out mutually acceptable arrangements with the local Indians and founded the town of Providence. In 1644, after obtaining a charter in England from Parliament, he established the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The government was relatively democratic, all religions were tolerated, and church and state were rigidly separated. Whatever Williams’s temperamental excesses, he was more than ready to practice what he preached when given the opportunity.
Anne Hutchinson, who arrived in Boston in 1631, was another “visible saint” who, in the judgment of the puritan establishment, went too far. Hutchinson was not to be taken lightly. According to Governor Winthrop, her husband William was “a man of mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by his wife.” (He was not so weak as to be unable to father Anne’s fifteen children.) Duties as a midwife brought her into the homes of other Boston women, with whom she discussed and more than occasionally criticized the sermons of their minister.
The issue in dispute was whether God’s saints could be confident of having truly received His gift of eternal life. Wilson and most of the ministers of the colony thought not. God’s saints should ceaselessly monitor their thoughts and behavior. But Hutchinson thought this emphasis on behavior was similar to the Catholic belief that an individual’s good deeds and penitence could bring God’s salvation. Ministers should not demean God, Hutchinson declared, by suggesting that He would be impressed by human actions. She insisted that God’s saints knew who they were; those presumed “saints” who had doubts on the matter were likely destined for eternal hell.
Pequot War and King Philip’s War Hutchinson suggested that those possessed of God’s grace were exempt from the rules of good behavior and even from the laws of the commonwealth. As her detractors pointed out, this was the conclusion some of the earliest German Protestants had reached, for which they were judged guilty of the heresy of antinomianism (“against the law”) and burned at the stake.
In 1636 the General Court charged Hutchinson with defaming the clergy and brought her to trial. When her accusers quoted the Bible (“Honor thy father and thy mother”) to make their case, she coolly announced that even the Ten Commandments must yield to one’s own insights if these were directly inspired by God. When pressed for details, she acknowledged that she was a regular recipient of divine insights, communicated, as they were to Abraham, “by the voice of His own spirit in my soul.” The General Court, on hearing this claim, banished her.
Hutchinson, together with her large family and a group of supporters, left Massachusetts in the spring of 1637 for Rhode Island, thereby adding to the reputation of that colony as the “sink” of New England. After her husband died in 1642, she and six of her children moved to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, where, the following year, she and all but her youngest daughter were killed by Indians.
The banishment of dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson did not endear the Massachusetts puritans to posterity. In both cases outspoken individualists seem to have been done in by frightened politicians and self-serving ministers. Yet Williams and Hutchinson posed genuine threats to the puritan community. Massachusetts was truly a social experiment. Could it accommodate such uncooperative spirits and remain intact? When forced to choose between the peace of the commonwealth and sending dissenters packing, Winthrop, the magistrates, and the ministers did not hesitate.
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