Anne Hutchinson Quotes

A woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.

In 1970, Danvers town historian Richard B. Trask asked the property owners, Alfred and Edie Anne Hutchinson, for permission to do an archaeological dig there.

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

The names of the compact's signers, including Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Woman's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn - that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the signers were men. Anne Hutchinson wasn't allowed to sign the founding document of the colony she founded.

Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always “falls short of absolute truth.

One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another... But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.

Shocking many, Puritans wore hats in church (following Jewish practice), refused to bow or kneel during worship (which they saw as a violation of the third commandment), and allowed pigs and chickens in the church, and some of them didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.

For Anne Hutchinson, who knew it was illegal for women to teach from the Bible in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but did it anyway, we give thanks. For William Wilberforce, who channeled his evangelical fervor into abolishing slavery in the British Empire, vowing “never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name,”29 we give thanks. For Sojourner Truth, who proclaimed her own humanity in a culture that did not recognize it, we give thanks. For Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in the place of a Jewish stranger at Auschwitz, we give thanks. For the pastors, black and white, who linked arms with Martin Luther King Jr. and marched on Washington, we give thanks. For Rosa Parks, who kept her seat, we give thanks. For all who did the right thing even when it was hard, we give thanks.

The desire for unmediated grace put mystics like Anne Hutchinson in direct conflict with Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay, who sought to contain her challenge to ministerial authority. The molten core of conversion needed to be encased in a solid sheath of prohibitions, rules, agendas for self-control—the precisionist morality that we know as the Protestant ethic. An ethos of disciplined achievement counterbalanced what the sociologist Colin Campbell calls an other Protestant ethic, one that sought ecstasy and celebrated free-flowing sentiment, sending frequent revivals across the early American religious landscape. The two ethics converged in a cultural program that was nothing if not capacious: it encompassed spontaneity and discipline, release and control. Indeed, the rigorous practice of piety was supposed to reveal the indwelling of the spirit, the actuality of true conversion. Yet the balance remained unstable, posing challenges to established authority in Virginia as well as Massachusetts. The tension between core and sheath, between grace abounding and moral bookkeeping, arose from the Protestant conviction that true religion was not merely a matter of adherence to outward forms, but was rooted in spontaneous inner feeling.

Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, pp. 238–39. Hutchinson’s many generations of descendants include Thomas Hutchinson, who later became governor of Massachusetts during the pre-Revolutionary days and whose policies incited the Boston Tea Party (see Chapter 4 ). In the twentieth century, her descendants included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, making this rather extraordinary woman the ancestor of three American presidents.

It is also true that much of the preaching was given over to the inculcation of sobriety and self-control. In the early half of the century, when the tempo of religious zeal was mounting, the clergy strove continually to hold their followers in check. In New England occasional outbursts of enthusiasm, particularly the emotional excitement aroused by Anne Hutchinson, called forth still more ministerial counsels of moderation

Winthrop was arguing for nothing more than the role expected of any seventeenth-century Englishwoman.

Hutchinson’s collective doctrines are now termed Antinomianism, a label Winthrop first attached to her that her nineteenth-century critics adopted and that historians today use without a sense of condemnation. Literally “against or opposed to law,” Antinomianism means in theology that “the moral law is not binding upon Christians, who are under the law of grace,” in the words of David Hall. Had Anne heard this term applied to her, she would have rejected it because of its association with licentious behavior and religious heterodoxy, both of which she opposed.

Pressed by the ministers in private, she had admitted what she believed: that a minister who, in her view, was not sealed with the spirit could not preach a covenant of grace “so clearly as Cotton.

Winthrop’s decision to stay in Boston triggered a feud with Dudley that would last throughout their lives. As a result of this split, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts met alternately in Boston and Newtown during the 1630s, when it convened four times a year. Despite this rift, Winthrop chose in 1637 to wait to try Hutchinson until the court met in Newtown because he enjoyed far more support there than in Boston.

In a world without religious freedom, civil rights, or free speech—the colonial world of the 1630s that was the seed of the modern United States—Anne Hutchinson was an American visionary, pioneer, and explorer who epitomized the religious freedom and tolerance that are essential to the nation’s character.

The members of the Massachusetts Court removed Anne because her moral certitude was too much like their own.

Her detractors, starting with her neighbor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, derided her as the “instrument of Satan,” the new Eve, and the “enemy of the chosen people.” In summing her up, Winthrop called her “this American Jezebel”—the emphasis is his—making an epithet of the name that any Puritan would recognize as belonging to the most evil and shameful woman in the Bible.

Anne Hutchinson’s greatest crime, and the source of her power, was the series of weekly public meetings she held at her house to discuss Scripture and theology.

By this time, increasing numbers of citizens were traders, merchants, sailors, and brokers, who had more commercial and mercantile concerns than the earlier émigrés, who tended to support Winthrop. Ironically, the highest-born immigrant of all—Vane, the idealistic son of a member of the king’s Privy Council—was, together with the free-thinker Anne Hutchinson, the champion of Boston’s burgeoning middle class.

They rejected his novel concept of freedom of conscience

He meant her many allies—such respected men of the colony as the town assessor, William Colburn; William Aspinwall, who was a notary, court recorder, and surveyor; William Coddington, the richest man in Boston; the prominent silk merchant John Coggeshall; the innkeeper William Baulston; William Dyer, the milliner; and the Pequot War hero Captain John Underhill—all of whom faced disfranchisement on account of their recent petition in support of her brother-in-law John Wheelwright.

To his colleagues’ dismay, Cotton did not completely agree with the others on doctrine, and Hutchinson “did conceive that we were not able ministers of the gospel,” the Salem minister Hugh Peter lamented. In sum, “she was a woman not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit.

Her clever, hypothetical riposte was “But put the case, sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents; may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?” That is, should human authority take precedence over the divine? This was a reasonable question in a time and place with little separation of church and state. The very concept of such a separation would not be introduced in Massachusetts society until more than a half century later, following the debacle of the witch trials in Salem Village.

Colonial ministers, despite their vast public power, were not allowed to hold public office, a distinction that kept Massachusetts from being a theocracy.

The summer before Cotton received his divinity degree, he left the relative security of Cambridge to begin his career. His first job was in Boston, one of Lincolnshire’s largest towns, located near the mouth of the Witham River where it meets the Wash, on the North Sea. Boston is set amid the vast, level, isolated land of the Fens, a marshy area extending over thirteen hundred square miles of the shires of East Anglia, Cambridge, Peterborough, and Lincoln, in eastern England. The parish of Boston was England’s largest, making it a plum assignment for a newly minted vicar. The town’s name is a shortened version of “Botolph’s Stone,” the medieval name for its earliest church, founded by Saint Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon monk, in the seventh century.

As Cotton later explained, “Zeal must be according to knowledge, knowledge is no knowledge without zeal, and zeal is but a wildfire without knowledge.

Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston congregation and expelled from the Bay Colony in 1638 for refusing to bend to the authority of the town fathers.

There was and is no written account of most women's lives then, save their birth, marriage, and death dates, usually in parish records. Land deeds were signed only by husbands and, eventually, sons. Practically every historical document of the period was written by a man, quoting his or another man's words. In the paper record of early America, it is almost as though women did not exist.

By trying Hutchinson and carefully recording and saving her extensive testimony, the judges inadvertently gave her what few women of her time enjoyed: a lasting voice.

Marburg