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What I’m Reading Now 15

Posted May 23, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer (2008).
What I Just Finished Reading: American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante published by Harper (2004).

The Hutchinson River Parkway. We drive on it all the time. There is a sign along the road saying that the parkway and the river were name for Anne Hutchinson. The dates given for her life on the sign tell us that she lived during the colonial era, the very early colonial period, in fact. Most of us know that she was thrown out of Massachusetts by the Puritans for her radical views, but most of us are probably puzzled as to why a parkway 120 miles from Boston is named after her.

Anne was the daughter of a Puritan minister who had been put into prison three times by the Anglicans under Elizabeth I. He spent so much time being prohibited from preaching that he was able to give his daughter first-rate instruction in Puritan theology.

Elizabeth, the Protestant Queen, brought not religious liberty to England after the death of her sister Catholic Mary, but a state church with an extensive intelligence system for rooting out both Catholics and dissident Protestants. Anne grew up in a family that took risks for its faith from the earliest days of Puritanism. She absorbed her father’s steadfast courage, and his pig-headedness.

Fairly early in life, Anne caught the attention of other women as particularly religious. Unfortunately, Puritanism had less of an official role for women to play than that which the Anglican or Catholic churches offered. But Anne was fortunate to marry a man of some wealth who understood her gifts.

When Anne came to Boston in the second wave of Puritans to arrive there, she began to gather about her a group of women who listened to her informal lectures in which she analyzed the weekly scriptural readings. Her views were often at odds with the teachings of the ministers. She began to accuse the Cambridge-educated clergy of a crypto-Catholicism because, she said, they taught that people who did good things were likely to be saved.

Now for a little background. the Puritans believed that God selected those he would save before the person was even born. This radical predestinarianism could be demoralizing to believers. If you were selected before birth for salvation, or more likely for damnation, then why go to church, why try to live a moral life at all? The ministers answered that if God had selected you, they called it being ‘elected” by God for salvation, then, as a godly person, you would naturally do good things. So, your good acts did not save you, but they did display to your neighbors that you were likely among the saved.

Anne said that good behavior had nothing to do with salvation, and she claimed that she could tell who among the people of Boston was to saved. Some historians believe that Anne thought she had a gift of prophesy. In fact, while on the ship coming to America she apparently predicted the approximate day the ship would arrive in New England,. She also may have believed that God spoke directly to her from his throne.

Anne got in the faces of a lot of ministers for saying things which would not be particularly controversial today. When one minister told people that by loving each other they “grew in grace”, she denounced him as an incompetent fool since this implied that that humans could increase the amount of God’s grace towards them by loving each other.

Anne was nothing if not annoying.

Boston in the 1630 was a tiny city seemingly filled with people engaged in endless theological disputes. Less than half a decade after it was founded, the Rev. Roger Williams was banished for his beliefs to Rhode Island where he laid the groundwork for modern religious liberty. Just a couple of years later, Anne Hutchinson was tried and banished as well. Her many followers in the colony lost their rights as freemen, and some went with her to found Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

Afraid that Rhode Island would soon fall to the Bostonians, she moved away to the Dutch settlement in the Bronx. Her farm was under the current intersection of the Hutch and I-95. In Boston, Rhode Island, and the Bronx, she had tried to establish respectful relations with the Native Americans, and she refused to arm her family, even though she was living on the frontier.

When the Dutch killed some Indians, she and her family were slaughtered in a retaliatory raid. Her daughter, the sole survivor, was found hiding in the Split Sock on what is now the golf course of the same name.

American Jezebel, a name John Wnthrop gave her, is a popularly written biography of the author’s ancestor. It suffers from a lack of a critical examination of Anne’s extremely confrontational behavior. But it does bring out her, and her male and female followers’, contribution to religious freedom. While she was no doubt a fanatic, albeit a brilliant one, the Portsmouth Compact establishing her community on Rhode Island said that “No person…shall in any [way be] molested, punished, or called into question on a matter o0f religion so long as he keeps the peace.”

But if she was annoying, the men who exiled her were much worse.

The book displays the ungenerousness of Hutchinson’s persecutors, who fancied themselves “visible saints”. The colony’s often elected governor, John Winthrop, found out that Anne, who had been pregnant throughout the ordeal of her trial and banishment to a dangerous wilderness, had miscarried. Hearing of the bloody late term fetal death, he wrote “See how the wisdom of God fitted her sin”. John Cotton, the leading Puritan minister said that the “unnatural birth…signify her error”.

A couple of real nice guys.

Then again, Anne could get down in the dirt as well. She was given to calling the Puritan church “The Whore and Strumpet of Boston”.

After her killing, her followers back in Rhode Island fell to arguing about religion among themselves. As one historian has written “Conflict was intrinsic to the congregational [Protestant] system. Too much was vague, too much was open to interpretation”. Luckily, the Rhode Islanders had agreed to disagree, and not kill one another.

Not so with Boston. The City on a Hill stepped-up persecution of dissenters and eventually began killing Quakers. When the Friends had no place else to go, they went to Rhode Island, founding Newport, just a few miles from Portsmouth.

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew

10. The Renaissance At War by Thomas Arnold

9. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln: Speeches and Wriitings 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln

7. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan

6. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

5. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand

4. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel