Authors: Eve LaPlante
As was her custom when faced with a crisis or dilemma, she opened the Bible at random in the hope of receiving divine guidance. Her eyes fell on a passage in Isaiah, chapter 30 verse 20, which it “pleased God to reveal himself to me in.” The passage reads, “Though the Lord give thee the bread of adversity, yet thine eyes shall see thy teachers. Thy teachers shall not be removed in a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers.” And then it was revealed to her that she should “go thither also” to the New World, “and that there I should be persecuted and suffer much trouble.”
That November she gave birth to a girl who was baptized Susan, after her deceased older sister, on the fifteenth. Soon afterward, the family began arranging to remove to a new continent. Will sold his Market Square textile business to Anne’s younger brother John Marbury. As required, Will paid in advance the standard price for a ticket to America, a hundred pounds per person. The family packed only those belongings they could easily carry, leaving behind large items such as bureaus and the four-poster bed. Unlike many families, they could afford luxurious building supplies such as windowpanes for the house they would build in the colony.
At the same time, authorities were closing the borders to prospective emigrants on suspicion that the Massachusetts colonists opposed the English king and church. Laud temporarily prevented several ships of Puritans headed for the colony from leaving the harbor. A few months before the Hutchinsons planned to sail, the archbishop set out
guards to catch any man or woman trying to slip away to Massachusetts. If caught while attempting to flee, the Hutchinsons would be prosecuted.
In June 1634, just before their scheduled departure, the king’s council ordered the Massachusetts court to return the 1629 charter to England because various factions were pressing claims to land held by the settlers. The Massachusetts magistrates delayed action, explaining they had to wait until their next meeting, in September. Each time they met, they delayed action. King Charles, diverted by other matters in England and, later, political conflict in Scotland, neglected to pursue the matter of the Massachusetts charter.
In the late spring of 1634 Anne, Will, ten of their children, Anne’s twenty-four-year-old sister, Katherine Marbury Scott, and her husband, and William’s two spinster cousins, Anne and Frances Freiston, set off for London on horses and horse-drawn carts. They traveled three days. In the city they boarded with the Bartholomews and succeeded in eluding the authorities. A few days later they continued east to Thamesside, where they boarded the
Griffin
for the ocean voyage.
Ten weeks later, as the ship sailed into Boston harbor, a familiar dark figure in a skullcap, his gray hair flowing in the salty wind, waited to greet the new immigrants on the pier. Walking up from the dock onto the meadow with the three hills that was now their home, John Cotton pointed out the rustic meetinghouse where he lectured, the marketplace and adjacent town spring, and the “best quarter” of town in which they would live, all within a few hundred yards. Instead of traveling twenty-four miles to hear Cotton preach, the Hutchinsons could now walk a short distance up the road. Cotton’s superior, the Reverend John Wilson, was back in England for at least a year, so Cotton was presently Boston’s principal pastor, lecturing every Thursday and Sunday for as many hours as he was moved.
By the mid-1630s, Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Plantation made up one of the largest European outposts in North America. Massachusetts had roughly five thousand English settlers, mostly from Lincolnshire and East Anglia, in nearly twenty townships from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, including Charlestown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Medford, Watertown, Newtown, Newbury, Ipswich, Salem, Saugus, Marblehead, Weymouth, and Hingham. The colony’s population would
grow to more than ten thousand by 1640, when political change in England caused Puritan emigration to decline dramatically.
Boston, with roughly 20 percent of the colony’s population, was its largest town. It was growing rapidly when the Hutchinsons arrived and already had more than a hundred houses. The previous owner of the half-acre plot that Will purchased on the rocky meadow overlooking the sea was apparently Isaac Johnson, the husband of the Lady Arbella Clinton Fiennes Johnson for whom Winthrop’s 1630 flagship was named. To this plot Will Hutchinson “added certain property purchased of John Coggeshall” so that the Hutchinson land was bounded on the west by “land allotted to Thomas Scottow,” on the north by “the lot of Samuel Cole,” on the east by modern-day Washington Street, and on the south by School Street.
For two months the Hutchinsons lodged with friends and relatives who had preceded them. Will and his older sons supervised the construction of their house by laborers, whom he paid slightly more than two shillings a day. It faced east, so the view would take in the salt marsh below, the town pier, and the harbor with its many islands. The house was ready by November—none too soon on a promontory afflicted with biting ocean winds and temperatures far lower than Lincolnshire’s.
The Hutchinson house, one of the largest on Shawmut, had a timber frame, a central chimney, overhanging gables, several dormers, at least two stories (there may also have been an open attic), and glass windows. The roof was of boards, chinked with mud plaster and covered with thatch. The walls were made of sawed logs and plaster. The kitchen, buttery (pantry), hall, and parlor were on the first floor. The parlor, where Anne held her meetings, was also the bedroom for the family’s two male servants and the older boys, who slept on mattresses that they laid out each night across the wooden floor. The kitchen was the warmest, busiest room, for the hearth glowed all day long and through many cold nights. The children ate and studied at wooden benches, which were dragged into the parlor for use by those attending Anne’s meetings. At mealtime the women set the food on a long table of boards near the fireplace, around which various kettles, skillets, and pots hung. The second floor of the house had at least two bedchambers. Anne and Will and the baby occupied the master bedroom, above the kitchen. The other bedroom served the girls, the younger boys, and the adult
female relatives, on bed ticking laid out across the floor. Rugs and blankets kept the family warm during the cold months. The house was crowded with people and awash in odors—smoke from the fire; drying rosemary, spearmint, and lemon balm; chamber pots not yet emptied; and perishable foods.
Outside, the men dug a privy, which they enclosed with a wooden shed. Every few years they moved the shed, covered the hole with dirt, and dug a new privy in another part of the yard. The Hutchinsons created an orchard from cuttings they had brought from England, which they grafted onto native crabapple trees. They planted Indian corn, peas, barley, carrots, parsnips, onions, turnips, pumpkins, cabbages, lettuces, and other greens, as well as a garden of herbs. Anne dried the herbs on an
I
-shaped wooden frame, laced with twine, that hung from the main beam of the house’s second floor. The family kept a few pigs, sheep, and chickens in the yard, but most of their cattle and swine grazed on the six hundred acres of pasturage that the court granted Will on Mount Wollaston, ten miles south, in modern-day Quincy, below the mouth of the Neponset River. Will Hutchinson’s farmland, which was “betwixt Dorchester bounds and Mount Wollaston river,” extended from the height of Mount Wollaston, now known as Wollaston Heights, to the shore, which is now Wollaston Beach. John Winthrop held land of roughly the same size in Medford, to the north, as did Thomas Dudley, in Cambridge.
In early Boston every man was a farmer in addition to his other work. Except on the Sabbath—twenty-four hours starting at sundown Saturday when the taverns were closed and people did not work—he had almost constant labor fencing land, building structures, and clearing roads. His wife worked too, in the gardens or house, where she cooked at the fire, made soap from boiled ashes, or potash, and cared for the children. The settlers planted in spring, tended fields in summer, and harvested crops and threshed wheat in fall. For entertainment they had skates and sleds, but they avoided swimming, which was not yet considered recreation. The men occasionally hunted. Will continued to sell silks and other fine textiles, which he stored and displayed in a shed that he built beside the house. “For even the wealthiest,” according to Larzer Ziff, “a day in the Massachusetts Bay settlement was a day of toil.”
At the same time, Will’s wallet had expanded just by crossing the sea. At home he was a wealthy member of the gentry, but here he was effectively an aristocrat. Besides his six-hundred-acre farm, he owned an entire island in the harbor, where in some seasons he grazed his sheep. “Taylor’s Island is granted to Mr. William Hutchinson,” the July 8, 1635, court record states, “to enjoy to him and his heirs forever.” In the New World, of course, thousand-acre farms and complete islands were here for the taking, at least by prosperous men. “The founding gentry of Boston,” according to the literary scholar Andrew Delbanco, “acted quickly to reestablish their wealth in land; grants of hundreds of acres were made…to such leading families as the Haughs and Bellinghams and Hutchinsons and Keaynes. Pastor Wilson of the First Church was soon in possession of a six-hundred-acre tract (even as he declared that ‘a man that has competency, may not pray for more enlargement in the world’), and Winthrop himself obtained an expanse of outlying farmland which can only be explained by the prospect of speculative gain.”
The new land was both abundant and wild. The air was clean, and fresh milk cost only a penny a quart. Currants, blueberries, raspberries, and plums were free. Indian corn grew everywhere. The sea was filled with edible delights: crabs, eels, mussels, oysters, lobsters, sturgeon, and cod. Fowl and deer roamed on endless parks of free land, more abundant even than on the lands of the king.
In addition to these natural differences between New England and old, there were artificial ones. The settlers chose not to re-create here many aspects of life that “were commonplace in much of Europe,” according to David Hall. There were no “popish” bishops, no processions of clergy, no altars, no formal liturgy, no tithes paid to clergy, no prayers for the dead, no saint’s days, no elaborate weddings, no Christmas celebrations, no carnival before Lent, no godparents or maypoles, no sacred places, no relics, no fairy tales, no ballad singing, and no dancing on Sundays. Henry James added, in an essay on Hawthorne, that early America distinguished itself from England in having “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy…no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manor, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches….”
With these agreeable subtractions, the Hutchinsons successfully
approximated their comfortable former life. As at Alford, they assumed leading roles in community life. Anne and Will both testified convincingly—he in public before the church, and she in private in writing, which the minister read to the congregation, according to custom—that they had experienced saving grace and were thus elect. Will was accepted as a member of the church of Boston on Sunday, October 26. She followed a week later, the delay due to Symmes’s concerns about her portentous strivings and disrespect during the voyage. Anne quickly gained the trust of many women as their midwife. Within six months of their arrival, the adult men of the family—Will and his sons Richard, nineteen, and Francis, fourteen (the age allowable under the law that lowered the official age of adulthood to sixteen)—took the freeman’s oath, which entitled them to vote in the annual elections for the court. (Their son Edward had already taken the oath.) Two months later, at the May 1635 General Court meeting, Will was elected to the board that regulated taxation and was made a deputy from Boston and thus a magistrate of the court, the highest power in the land.
Two and a half years later, in November 1637, the colonial world to which Anne and Will awoke every morning had changed. She was banished, with her entire family—and as a result many other families felt as though they were banished. For her stalwart supporters, such as the Coddingtons, Coggeshalls, and Dyers, there was never any question whether they would follow her. If the Hutchinsons had to leave Massachusetts, they would too.
A few days after Anne returned from her trial in Cambridge, it was time for her to leave. Outside the house, a cab and horse awaited her on the rutted dirt road that ran through the center of the settlement, dividing Winthrop’s land from Hutchinson’s. Anne bade her family farewell and boarded the carriage for the trip to Roxbury, where she effectively would be out of their reach. She carried only her Bible, her
Herbal
—a guide to medicinal plants—and sufficient clothes for the winter.
The cart headed southwest. The driver, she observed, kept a gun at his feet, as required by the March 1637 decree aimed at protecting the colonists from the natives. But Anne had no fear of the natives. She believed that the true threat was in and among themselves, in the hearts and minds of those who preached a covenant of works, for they could
kill the soul while the natives could destroy only the body. In her attitude toward Indians, Hutchinson was somewhat rare. Even the Reverend John Cotton, who in 1630 at Southampton wharf had admonished the settlers of Massachusetts Bay to “feed the natives with your spirituals,” came after a few years in America to a much altered opinion of its native people: “Blast all their green groves and arbors.”
The cart that carried Anne Hutchinson to Roxbury followed the single road—now known as Washington Street—along the spine that connected Shawmut to the mainland. Blueberries and other bushes covered the uneven landscape, which as it approached the coastline abounded in swamps. Looking out to the right, or northwest, Anne saw cows grazing on the common space that John Cotton and others had created in 1634 from parcels of the departed Reverend William Blackstone’s solitary farm. Just below this common, on the edges of the great marsh that is now Boston’s Back Bay, were fish weirs, set out by natives. To her left, stretching out to the horizon, was the vast harbor of her adopted home. The sea shimmered, making the harbor islands into dark spots.