American Jezebel (30 page)

Finally, on December 10, the court dismissed and banished the young men, who had paid no part of their fines. Collins and Francis were “enjoined to depart out of our jurisdiction immediately after the
Sabbath, at their peril,” and “were not to return again into our jurisdiction at their utmost peril.” At the same court meeting, incidentally, a man named “William Hatchet, for bestiality with a cow, is condemned to be hanged, and the cow to be slain and burnt or buried.” The court also granted the Reverends John Cotton and Nathaniel Ward each six hundred additional acres of land.

Around this time, on a distant part of the globe, an even more famous heretic than Anne Hutchinson passed away. In a rented villa on a hill just east of Florence, seventy-seven-year-old Galileo Galilei died on January 8, 1642. Like Hutchinson, he had recanted his views before his church. During his 1633 trial for heresy before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, in Rome, he had signed a disavowal of his view that the earth moves and circles the sun. Spared execution, he was held prisoner for five months in the archbishop of Siena’s apartment and then allowed to return to his villa, under house arrest.

By the time of Galileo’s death, life on Rhode Island for the Hutchinsons was difficult but stable. Their continuing troubles with Coddington were sometimes alarming, especially after Coddington discussed with the General Court of Massachusetts the possibility of subsuming Newport—and perhaps all of Rhode Island—under the Bay Colony’s control. To Anne, Portsmouth now felt as familiar as Boston once had. She could speak freely of her beliefs and ideas. She and Will were surrounded by children and grandchildren. Bridget Hutchinson Sanford, now twenty-three, had given birth to two little boys at Portsmouth: Peleg in May 1639 and Endcome in February 1641. Faith and her husband, Thomas Savage, who had accompanied the exiles to Aquidneck but decided to stay in Mount Wollaston, had two sons—Habijah, who was baptized in Boston on August 12, 1638, and Thomas, born in May 1640. Edward and his wife, Katherine, who still lived on Shawmut, had their second child, Elizabeth, in November 1639 and then a boy named Elisha, in November 1641. The family welcomed each baby with joy.

In the midst of this new life, a great loss occurred. Anne’s beloved Will died at fifty-five, the same age as Anne’s father at his death. Will was buried in Portsmouth, although no marker remains. His exact date and cause of death are unknown because the settlement had no formal church, which would have been the typical repository of records for
baptisms, marriages, and burials. For some time after Will’s death, Anne retreated from society into mourning, as she had following her daughters’ deaths in Alford, although it is hard to imagine much retreat for a widow with six dependent children.

Hoping to exploit her weakness, ministers from Massachusetts came to visit her on Aquidneck. Anne Hutchinson remained bold despite her recent loss. She refused, once again, to recant. The ministers suggested that Massachusetts would soon take over Rhode Island and Exeter, New Hampshire.

Anne Hutchinson resolved to move again as soon as possible. Her wanderings were not over. In hardly eight years, she had left England and then Boston. Now she would have to leave Rhode Island.

She meditated on the best course to take, although there is no record of what Scripture she considered. Her last recorded revelation from Scripture, according to the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, was that the Lord had prepared a city of refuge for her outside the English jurisdiction. Her aim was to travel far enough from Massachusetts to escape its meddling visits. This journey, unlike those before, would entail separating from her nation of birth. In that sense, it recalled the Scrooby Pilgrims, from west of Alford, who had sailed for Holland in 1607.

Anne Hutchinson and her older children consulted maps and discussed her options. She considered Ossining, New York, on the Hudson River, but decided instead to head southwest to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the Atlantic Ocean at a place called Pelham Bay. Hutchinson sent a letter to the Dutch authorities seeking permission to abide among the Dutch. They granted her request to live within the colony of New Amsterdam. She arranged to purchase land and ordered a contract.

In the summer of 1642 the fifty-one-year-old widow packed once more. She sent her furniture and other heavy belongings over land, on carts, along with her horses, cattle, and hogs. She hired boats to convey her party of sixteen to their new home 130 miles away. They would travel from the northern end of Aquidneck southwest into Narragansett Bay, passing east of Prudence Island and Newport, out to what is now Long Island Sound. Several servants and two of her grown children decided to accompany her in her exodus. Francis, who was now
twenty-one, came along to help, as did her sixteen-year-old daughter Anne and her husband, William Collins.

Moving abroad without Will would be awkward and strenuous, but she still had several children to raise. Little William was ten, Susan was eight, and Zuriel but six. These youngest Hutchinsons were as quick-witted as the rest, with the added sophistication that comes from the presence of older siblings. The house was lively with their antics, and she had much to teach them. The best way to accomplish this, she believed, was to make a new start.

The boats carrying Anne Hutchinson and her party of sixteen from Rhode Island to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam passed many islands clustered in a place that its inhabitants would soon call the Bronx, after its first European settler, Jonas Bronck, who had arrived a few years before. The vessels sailed between two small islands and traveled inland along a river heading north. The land on both sides of the waterway now known as the Hutchinson River was an inviting mix of virgin forest and tidal marsh. Other than the splashing of the oars, all that the Hutchinsons could hear were the calls of innumerable birds.

Blue herons and white egrets fed among the tall marsh reeds. The reeds recalled Lincolnshire, where they were used for roofing and insulation. A half mile up the river, a tributary wended east into the marsh in what is now Pelham Park, the largest green space in the city of New York.

From this tributary a hill rose, gradually at first and then steeply. Atop the hill stood a huge, egg-shaped, glacial rock. As the boat approached the shore, the Hutchinsons could see that the rock was split in two, its halves separated by a crevice. Anne asked the sailors to beach the boat and unload here. On land, several of her younger children, delighted with their freedom after two days on the sea, climbed the hill, picking blueberries as they walked. Near the summit they took turns climbing through the eighteen-inch-wide crevice of what is now called the Split Rock.

Anne and her family camped out on this hillside above Long Island Sound, living in an abandoned farmhouse until they could erect their own house. Of the widow’s twelve living children, seven were with her—Zuriel, Susan, William, Katherine, Mary, Anne, and Francis. Of
the other five, Edward and Richard, now twenty-nine and twenty-six, lived in Boston. Twenty-five-year-old Faith was also in Massachusetts, with her husband, Thomas Savage, and their little boy on Wollaston, now part of Braintree. Bridget and John Sanford had remained on Rhode Island with their sons. Seventeen-year-old Samuel appears also to have stayed on Rhode Island, for he is mentioned in Portsmouth documents during the 1640s and 1650s.

To Anne’s great relief, the Hutchinsons were the only English settlers on Pelham Bay. Dutch settlers had arrived here in 1614 and created a permanent trading center, the Dutch West India Company, near modern-day Albany. In 1626 Peter Minuit, New Amsterdam’s first director-general, had purchased the island of Manhattan—“island of the hills”—from local Indians for beads and trinkets worth sixty guilders, or twenty-four dollars.

In 1642 when the Hutchinsons arrived, New Amsterdam consisted of fewer than a thousand Dutch settlers spread from the tip of Manhattan north to modern-day Westchester County. The majority of them were clustered in rough wooden houses built along narrow dirt streets far south of Pelham Bay. Unlike the New England settlers, the Dutch lacked for skilled farmers and craftsmen, and many drank to excess. At the same time, they and their Dutch Reformed ministers tended to be far more tolerant than the English in matters of religious belief, which explains their welcome to Anne Hutchinson and other dissident Puritans as well as to Quakers, Lutherans, and Jews. However, the general chaos and instability of this community would lead, eventually, to the surrender of the colony, by director-general Peter Stuyvesant to England in September 1664. At that point New Amsterdam would become New York.

In 1642, however, the bellicose Willem Kieft was still the Dutch colony’s director-general. Kieft was a short-sighted, heavy-handed administrator whose cruelty to the natives proved disastrous not only for the Indians but also for the Dutch. When Kieft arrived in 1638, the local Indians—the Mahican, who spoke Algonquian, and the Mohawk, who spoke Iroquois—were already feuding. Kieft entered the fray. In exchange for valuable beaver pelts, he indiscriminately traded muskets and shot to both sides in the natives’ conflict. Moreover, he demanded an annual tribute from the Indians of maize and wampum, which the
natives refused to provide. Dutch livestock invaded the natives’ cornfields, and the natives retaliated by killing and eating the colonists’ pigs and cattle, infuriating the Dutch. Starting in 1640, the Dutch and the Indians had been at war. In intermittent battles over the two years before Anne Hutchinson’s arrival, hundreds of Indians were massacred, and scores of Dutch settlers were killed and their homes and farms burned.

The Hutchinsons lived beside, rather than among, the Dutch. Although both were Protestant, they shared neither language nor culture. Anne’s Dutch neighbors saw her as harmless but odd. For instance, she would not keep firearms in her house. At any moment, the Dutch warned her, the local Siwanoy Indians—Algonquian speakers within the Mahican nation who hunted, fished, and inhabited palisaded villages of wigwams—could go on a rampage. Her neighbors urged her and her sons to keep arms.

Hutchinson replied that she had had no trouble with the natives in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. In Boston she had opposed all English efforts to suppress the natives, including the shameful Pequot War. On Aquidneck the Narragansetts and the English had become friends. Her attitude was later mocked by the same Edward Johnson of Boston who had dismissed her before as “a woman that preaches better Gospel than any of your blackcoats.” Johnson wrote that Hutchinson, “being amongst a multitude of Indians, boasted they were become all one Indian.” According to the scholar Andrew Delbanco, Johnson “found in Anne Hutchinson an even more ‘cunning Devil’ than were the Pequots, and drenched his
Wonder-Working Providence
in frank delight at her suppression. Johnson exemplified…that in order to ratify its godliness New England had had to find its local Satans.” Among Satan’s various forms were the “savage” native, the Antinomian, the Quaker, and the “witch.”

This “local Satan” thrived, even in exile. On January 19, 1643, on Rhode Island, Anne’s daughter Bridget and her husband had a boy they named Restcome, making their brood six boys. Faith expected her fourth child in the summer. Edward’s wife was also pregnant, with a fourth child due in November.

Anne Hutchinson continued to study Scripture, alone and with her children, but she no longer had English-speaking neighbors with whom to meet. She prepared stews of seafood, meat, and fowl and the
usual berry pies. In the spring of 1643 she planted an herb garden like those she had tended in Lincolnshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In “Mrs. Hutchinson,” Nathaniel Hawthorne envisions this Bronx scene:

In March 1643 the Reverend Roger Williams sailed to England to unite under one charter the towns of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick. His goal was to maintain regional independence from Massachusetts. Not long before, the Massachusetts General Court had sponsored the murder of the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo, an admirer of both Williams and Vane who had negotiated the sale of Aquidneck to the Hutchinsonians. Williams feared further incursions on his and the Narragansetts’ territory by the colony of Massachusetts.

The Reverend Williams succeeded in securing from England a charter merging these four towns as “a single colony called Providence Plantations, governed by a President and 4 Assistants,” according to John Sanford, Anne’s son-in-law. Bridget’s husband was at first an assistant of the chartered company, then its head magistrate, and eventually, in 1653, its fifth president.

Meanwhile, Roger Williams and William Coddington continued to feud. Coddington wished to keep the island that contains Newport and Portsmouth independent from the rest of the colony so that he could govern it on his own. Williams refused to give in, and in 1663 the united colony, now generally called Rhode Island, was fully chartered by the crown.

This “Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” issued to Williams and the Reverend John Clarke, who had assisted Anne fol
lowing her miscarriage, guaranteed religious freedom—in keeping with the predilections of its founders. “No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may…freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned.”

This Rhode Island language leads directly to the Third Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which was approved by the First Congress in 1789: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These words and the underlying concept owe as much to the Hutchinsonians on Aquidneck as to Roger Williams in Providence Plantation—as well as to the 1634 charter of the colony of Maryland, the earliest such document in English North America to allow religious toleration.

An early champion of freedom of conscience, Anne Hutchinson supported the notion—now widely accepted in America—that individuals can believe as they wish and question authority. In this respect her contribution is ongoing. In discussing heresies of the ancient world, religious historian Elaine Pagels noted, “Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows that there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Orthodoxy tends to distrust our capacity to make such discriminations and insists on making them for us. Given the notorious human capacity for self-deception, we can, to an extent, thank the church for this. Many of us, wishing to be spared hard work, gladly accept what tradition teaches.” Yet “we have seen the hazards—even terrible harm—that sometimes result from unquestioning acceptance of religious authority.” Anne Hutchinson was one of many determined souls who were not willing to accept religious authority without question.

The Hutchinson family continued to grow. In the summer of 1643 Faith gave birth to her fourth child, Hannah, who was baptized in Wollaston on July 2. In Portsmouth on Rhode Island, Bridget was again pregnant. That baby, who was born the following March, would be
named William, after his grandfather. (Bridget’s only daughter, Anne, did not arrive until March 1652, following eight sons, and she died at age two.)

On Pelham Bay, Anne Hutchinson was soon to turn fifty-two. By mid-July there would be early carrots and turnips to pull, and sage, lemon balm, and feverfew to hang for drying. Most days, the summer heat did not bother her. Breezes blew in from Long Island Sound. On free afternoons she led her younger children along the Indian trails wending throught the woods around her farmhouse, just as she had taken her older children on walks from Alford up into the Wolds. From the hilltop above the Split Rock, she and her children could see the islands of Long Island Sound and watch cormorants dive into the sea.

The weather was clear on the July day that Anne’s Dutch neighbors told her to remove her family from her house. The Siwanoy warriors are coming, the neighbors said. They have sent a warning; we must disappear. The Siwanoy were responding to a surprise attack, ordered by Kieft, on a band of natives camping on Manhattan Island the previous February, in which Dutch soldiers had killed eighty Indian men, women, and children.

Hearing the warning from her neighbors, Anne Hutchinson repeated her long history of good relations with the natives. She would not arm herself, nor would she and her children abandon their home. She had great faith in herself and even more faith in Christ. Should any harm come to her, she would trust in the will of God.

The Siwanoy warriors stampeded into the tiny settlement above Pelham Bay, prepared to burn down every house. The Siwanoy chief, Wampage, who had sent a warning, expected to find no settlers present. But at one house the men in animal skins encountered several children, young men and women, and a woman past middle age.

One Siwanoy indicated that the Hutchinsons should restrain the family’s dogs. Without apparent fear, one of the family tied up the dogs. As quickly as possible, the Siwanoy seized and scalped Francis Hutchinson, William Collins, several servants, the two Annes (mother and daughter), and the younger children—William, Katherine, Mary, and Zuriel. As the story was later recounted in Boston, one of Hutchinson’s daughters, “seeking to escape,” was caught “as she was getting over a hedge, and they drew her back again by the hair of the head to
the stump of a tree, and there cut off her head with a hatchet.” It is not clear if Anne Hutchinson had a moment—before she gave up the ghost—to begin one of the psalms, to utter the words, “I do verily believe that He will deliver me,” or even to say, “Thy will be done.”

The Siwanoy warriors dragged the settlers’ bodies into the house, followed by their cattle. The men set fire to the dwelling, which burned to the ground. There were, it seemed, no survivors, nor any burial or grave for the dead.