by Sarah Vowell
He said:
For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly. For you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.
After enumerating his other Indian allies, he outlines a forthcoming plan of attack. He says, “And when you see the fires that will be made forty days hence in a clear night, then do as we, and the next day fall on and kill men, women, and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat ’til our deer be increased again.”
Miantonomi’s speech foreshadows similar testimony among nineteenth-century American Indians such as Chief Seattle and Tecumseh himself, who would one day try and gather together allied Indian forces invoking the memory of what happened to the Pequot, whom he said had “vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.”
When the English get wind of Miantonomi’s plot, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, and Connecticut form the United Colonies of New England, also called the New England Confederation, to officially act as a collective defensive alliance. (Roger Williams’s heretical colony is purposefully left out of the coalition so Rhode Island’s anything-goes coo-ties won’t rub off on its proper, God-fearing neighbors.)
Meanwhile, Uncas captures Miantonomi and turns him over to the English authorities at Hartford. This prompts a secret meeting among representatives from the United Colonies to decide what to do about the prisoner. Winthrop reports in his journal that they conclude that “there was a general conspiracy among the Indians to cut off all the English and that Miantonomi was the head and contriver of it.” Secondly, they agree that the Narragansett sachem “was of a turbulent and proud spirit, and would never be at rest.”
They agree that Miantonomi should be assassinated, and that Uncas is the man to do it. They send for him, and the Mohegan, according to Winthrop, “readily undertook the execution.” Uncas orders his brother to carry out the task. Winthrop writes that Uncas’s brother “clave [Miantonomi’s] head with a hatchet, some English being present.”
For the English, the Pequot War was a success ratified by God. It became the blueprint for all future Indian wars on the continent conducted by the colonists and the subsequent United States. The Mystic Massacre set a precedent. The mass murder of the Pequot made the mass murder of other tribes possible and therefore repeatable. It was the first of many similar horrors to come: the Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone in 1863 (after the U.S. Army killed a couple of hundred Shoshone men in battle, American soldiers allegedly raped the tribe’s women and murdered children—which happened, with apologies to Owen, in Idaho); the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 (in which the army slays almost two hundred Cheyenne); the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 (when the army gunned down nearly three hundred Lakota Sioux in the South Dakota snow).
Some U.S. Army veterans of the latter Lakota massacre, by the way, would then be dispatched by the McKinley administration to fight guerrilla warriors in the Philippines after we had won the islands from Spain, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, at the end of the Spanish-American War. That year, 1898, was the magic moment when the United States became a true world power, allowing previously isolationist America to return to its Puritan, come-over-and-help-us roots. Soon enough we were helping Europe in two world wars, helping South Korea, helping South Vietnam, just as we are now, as I write this, helping Iraq.
For Captain John Underhill, the co-architect of the Mystic Massacre, having commanded the soldiers who decimated the Pequot was not enough to sustain his hero’s welcome back in Boston. He was a friend of the troublemaker Anne Hutchinson. To the General Court, no amount of Pequot blood could wash off the stain of her beliefs. Underhill was forced to flee the colony he had so stalwartly, and so cruelly, defended.
Anne Marbury Hutchinson, her husband, William, and their whopping brood of fifteen children arrive in Boston on September 18, 1634. In Winthrop’s diary, he notes the arrival of their ship, the Griffin, but not the Hutchinsons themselves. Later on, he would call Will Hutchinson “a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife.”
Anne herself is guided by John Cotton. Cotton is why they’re here. Back in England, the Hutchinsons used to travel routinely over twenty miles just to hear him preach. Anne is Cotton’s groupie, and after he emigrates to America she soon packs up her family and follows.
And hers is one large family. Anne and Will Hutchinson have fifteen children. The daughter of a persecuted Puritan minister who helped her cobble together the best education possible for female children (who were denied university attendance), Anne Hutchinson is one of the brainiest English-women of the seventeenth century. Yet she is no stranger to the goopy fluids of female biology. Besides birthing her own litter, she works as a midwife, delivering babies and no doubt serving the brew imbibed before and after labor, the wonderfully named “groaning beer.”
By aiding Boston’s new mothers, Hutchinson quickly befriends a lot of women. She starts leading the women in a regular Bible study in her large, fine home. (Her husband might be whipped but he sure is rich.) At first, they simply discuss Cotton’s latest sermon.
Unfortunately, Hutchinson didn’t write down or publish any of her commentaries. She suffers the same fate in the historical record as the Pequot; her thoughts and deeds have been passed down to us solely through the writings of white men who pretty much hate her guts.
A ladies’ study group is one of the most ubiquitous social subsets in the history of Christian churches. I attended one regularly with my mother as a child. Once, when I told a member of the fabled East Coast Media Elite that I was raised Pentecostal he asked if that meant I grew up “fondling snakes in trailers.” I replied, “You know that book club you’re in? Well, my church was a lot like that, except we actually read the book.”
Anne Hutchinson is hosting more than a ladies’ study group. Dozens and dozens of Bostonians come to her home to hear her preach. Men start coming, too. And not just any old men—young Governor Henry Vane himself. She has something other people want, some combination of confidence and glamour and hope. She is the Puritan Oprah—a leader, a guru, a star.
Hutchinson, still swooning, spiritually speaking, for Cotton, nevertheless starts departing from her mentor’s lectures and lets rip her own opinions and beliefs.
One person keeping an eye on her, both theologically and literally, is John Winthrop, who lives across the street. (The site of her home would later house Ticknor and Fields, the famous book publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, appropriately, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter, misspells her first name but nevertheless honors Hutchinson by describing a rose bush in bloom said to have “sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door” and symbolizing “some sweet moral blossom.” Nowadays, the place is a jewelry store. Last time I walked by it there were Canadian diamonds in the window with necklaces displayed next to photos of grazing caribou, grazing caribou apparently being a Canadian girl’s best friend.)
On October 21, 1636, Winthrop writes in his journal, “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors.” Her first error, he says, is the belief “that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person.” Puritan orthodoxy prefers to think of said Holy Ghost as hanging around next to a person who has been saved—kind of like a garden-variety ghost, actually. Winthrop will later explain this with the analogy of a marriage: in “a union . . . as between husband and wife, he is a man still, and she a woman.” As opposed to Hutchinson’s version, in which the spirit dwells withi
n, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style.
As Edmund S. Morgan writes in The Puritan Dilemma, Hutchinson’s notion of the Holy Ghost living inside a believer “was dangerously close to a belief in immediate personal revelation.” Earlier, when I was trying to point out that the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had little in common with present-day evangelical Christians, this is what I meant. Hutchinson’s emphasis on “immediate personal revelation”—radical at the time—is now a core value of many American Protestant sects, including the Pentecostal one I was raised in.
For example, my family attended church three times a week. Once, when I was around eight, I complained about having to go to the Wednesday-night sermon because sometimes it went late and I wanted to get home in time to watch my favorite TV show, Charlie’s Angels. Granted, that program’s teachings were often at odds with the teachings of the Wednesday-night sermon, which my mother discovered to her horror when my Barbie started ordering a green cocktail called a “grasshopper” and climbing into bed with Ken, whom she refused to marry because she was more interested in her career.
Anyway, I remember whining, “Why do we have to go to church?”
My mother answered, “We don’t have to go church.”
“Great!” I said.
“We are going to church,” she said. She said we go there “for fellowship” and to learn and pray. But she also said that all one needs to be saved is to believe in Jesus and accept him into your heart. Then she quoted John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
From the perspective of catching the beginning of Char-lie’s Angels, her saying we were still going to church was bad news. But the rest of what she said was a source of self-determination and responsibility all at once. What I took from this revelation was that no one else was responsible for my salvation—that no church, no preacher, not even the Bible, come to think of it, had power over me. My highest authority was the spiritual presence within.
Compare that to standard theological procedure in Massachusetts Bay. Hutchinson’s creed—like my mother’s, of privileging a personal relationship with God over everything else—writes Morgan, “threatened the fundamental conviction on which the Puritans built their state, their churches, and their daily lives, namely that God’s will could be discovered only through the Bible”—a Bible dissected and interpreted by two ordained ministers, the teacher and the pastor, in church services with mandatory attendance.
Hutchinson’s second error, according to Winthrop, is that according to her, “no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” In other words, she rejects the Puritan conclusion that a member of the Elect is a visible saint who seems like a member of the Elect.
Hutchinson and her accusers would agree that one of the basic gists of Puritanism is an argument against a covenant of works, which is to say Puritanism denies everything that’s nice and comforting about Catholicism. Giving alms to the poor? Confessing one’s sins to a priest who suggests the sinner repeat prayers memorized by rote—the “Hail Mary,” for instance—and then feeling better? None of that for the Puritans. Oh, every Puritan is welcome, even required, to do good and be good and show up at church and help the needy—the Bible tells them so. But those actions alone do not admit a believer into heaven. Only God does that, through the grace of His salvation, hence the name covenant of grace. Which, as we have noted, God only doles out to a select few individuals, none of whom are ever entirely certain they have made the cut.
The difference between Anne Hutchinson and her accusers is that Hutchinson believes that anyone, even a nonbe liever, can seem saved. The only way to know one is saved is when one feels saved. Puritans, however, are suspicious of feelings, especially the feelings of a woman without proper theological training from Cambridge University.
“There joined with her in these opinions,” Winthrop writes, “a brother of hers, one Mr. Wheelwright, a silenced minister sometimes in England.” The fate of John Wheelwright, who is married to Hutchinson’s sister, is entwined with Hutchinson’s, partly because he and Cotton are the only clergymen Hutchinson approves of, the only ministers she condones for preaching about the covenant of grace instead of the covenant of works. The other reason Wheelwright is caught up in the momentum of Hutchinson’s controversy with the Bay Colony officials is that she inspires her followers to demand that Wheelwright be put on the payroll as a minister of the Boston church.
That is Winthrop’s own congregation. On October 30, 1636, he writes in his journal, “Some of the church of Boston, being of the opinion of Mrs. Hutchinson, had labored to have Mr. Wheelwright to be called to be a teacher there. . . . One of the church stood up and said, he could not consent.”
This anonymous “one” was most likely Winthrop himself, who goes on to describe the man’s reasoning: “because the church being well furnished already with able ministers, whose spirits they knew, and whose labors God had blessed in much love and sweet peace.” I.e., they’ve got Cotton, they’ve got Wilson; so, minister-wise, they’re all set. Wheelwright, however, is still well within the traditional Bostonian being-talked-out-of-one’s-questionable-opinions grace period, and it is suggested that perhaps he could lead a congregation in nearby Braintree.
The word Winthrop uses to characterize Hutchinson and Wheelwright’s thought is “antinomian,” which means “against the law.” This period is often called by historians the “Antinomian Controversy.” Winthrop, as a magistrate, is on the side of the law.
Like a lot of Puritan disagreements, this one is tricky. Winthrop is by no means opposed to the covenant of grace. He actually shares Hutchinson’s admiration for Cotton, and nurturing the covenant of grace is Cotton’s specialty. Recall that Winthrop praised Cotton for having such a talent for waking lackluster believers from spiritual slumber that the Boston church underwent a boom of enthusiasm after Cotton came to town. Even Winthrop, in the middle of the Antinomian Controversy, admitted to such an awakening, calling it “the voice of peace.”
Anne Hutchinson is merely taking Protestantism’s next logical step. If Protestantism is an evolutionary process devoted to the ideal of getting closer and closer to God, it starts with doing away with Latin-speaking popes and bishops in favor of locally elected but nevertheless highly educated, ordained clergymen, and Bibles translated into the believers’ mother tongues. This is the “New England Way.”
Hutchinson is pushing American Protestantism further, toward a practice approaching the more personal, ecstatic, anti-intellectual, emotional slant now practiced in the U.S.A., especially in the South and Midwest. We call that swath of geography the “Bible Belt,” but that would have been a more accurate description of bookish seventeenth-century New England. While modern evangelicals obviously set store in the Bible, their partiality for alone time with their deity means that a truer name for what we now call the Bible Belt might be something along the lines of the Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ Belt, or the Filled with the Holy Spirit Basket of America.
Protestantism’s evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one’s king. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.
On the other hand, Protestantism’s shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother’s proclamation that I needn’t go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It’s why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good o
l’ boy who’s fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.
By December of 1636, tensions between the two factions of Hutchinson/Wheelwright versus Winthrop/ Wilson (with John Cotton in the middle), take their toll on at least one Bostonian. Winthrop writes in his journal that at a meeting of the magistrates, Henry Vane claims he needs to resign as governor and return to England for “reasons concerning his own estate,” the seventeenth-century version of a politician’s resignation made in the name of spending more time with his family. As this is “a time of such danger” due to the ongoing Indian troubles, Vane’s colleagues chew him out for even considering abandoning a colony in need. He agrees to stick around, but he complains of foreseeing “God’s judgments to come upon us for these differences and dissensions, which he saw amongst us.” Then Winthrop writes that Vane “brake forth into tears.”
In earlier paragraphs devoted to the Pequot War, I have mentioned that Winthrop records that on January 20, 1637, “a general fast was kept in all the churches,” a punishment meant to appeal to God to help the colony with its Indian troubles and “the dissensions of our churches.”
John Cotton preaches a Fast Day sermon meant to scold the colonists for their bickering. He quotes from Isaiah 58:4: “Behold, ye fast for strife and debate.” Then, John Wheelwright asks to preach and, in the spirit of reconciliation, Cotton lets him.
“The only cause of fasting of true believers,” remarks Wheelwright, “is the absence of Christ.” This is a serious accusation. Remember that in Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity,” of seven years earlier, he supposed that in New England, God “will delight to dwell among us as His own people.” But Wheelwright continues that if Christ “be present with his people, then they have no cause to fast.”
