American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  With this testimony the case against Hutchinson was about to collapse. The first two specifications against her had been too weakly sustained to warrant any grave condemnation, and now the revered Cotton had practically destroyed the basis of the only remaining charge. Her triumph was too much for her. Hitherto she had been on guard and had dexterously parried every rude thrust of her prosecutors. Had she been content to hold her tongue at this point, her judges might have felt obliged to dismiss the case for lack of evidence, or at best would have passed some vote of censure in order to save their faces. Instead of continuing to rely on her native wit, she proceeded to justify herself by an immediate divine revelation.

  Her prosecutors could not have hoped for a better ground upon which to condemn her. The surviving descriptions of the trial make it clear that the men who were at the same time her prosecutors and her judges had determined her guilt in advance and were merely searching for sufficient evidence on which to convict her. She herself gave them that evidence. By claiming an immediate revelation, she denied the fundamental tenet upon which the Puritan state was founded: that the Will of God was expressed directly only in the Word. Now all the previous charges could be dropped and her conviction based on this alone. And so Winthrop records that

  the Court and all the rest of the Assembly (except those of her owne party) did observe a speciall providence of God, that (while shee went about to cover such offences as were laid to her charge, by putting matters upon proofe, and then quarrelling with the evidence) her owne mouth should deliver her into the power of the Court, as guilty of that which all suspected her for, but were not furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her….

  The Court saw now an inevitable necessity to rid her away, except wee would bee guilty, not only of our own ruine, but also of the Gospel, so in the end the sentence of banishment was pronounced against her, and shee was committed to the Marshall, till the Court should dispose of her.

  Thus ended the trial of Anne Hutchinson, a proceeding that scarcely deserves to be dignified by that name. Our indignation at its unfairness is commendable; for members of a modern state founded on self-government should be acutely conscious of the value of the forms of justice. We should remember, however, that this proceeding took place in an infant community the leaders of which looked on democracy as the worst form of government. This in no way excuses the unfairness of the trial, but it does make it easier to recognize the appropriateness of the sentence. Granted that Hutchinson proclaimed a belief in immediate revelation, it was quite impossible that she should have been retained in the Puritan commonwealth. That our natural sympathies lie with her, rather than with the rulers of the colony, is simply an indication that the Puritan experiment failed. It was because her opinions were repellent to them that the Puritans banished Anne Hutchinson, but they sincerely believed that in thus protecting themselves they were also protecting God’s eternal truth. Winthrop summed up the case in characteristic fashion, with words that have the ring of genuine feeling:

  Thus it pleased the Lord to heare the prayers of his afflicted people (whose soules had wept in secret, for the reproach which was cast upon the Churches of the Lord Jesus in this Countrey, by occasion of the divisions which were grown amongst us, through the vanity of some weake minds, which cannot seriously affect any thing long, except it bee offered them under some renewed shape) and by the care and indevour of the wise and faithfull Ministers of the Churches, assisted by the Civill authority, to discover this Master-piece of the old Serpent, and to break the brood by scattering the Leaders, under whose conduct hee had prepared such Ambushment, as in all reason would soon have driven Christ and Gospel out of New England, (though to the ruine of the instruments themselves, as well as others) and to the repossessing of Satan in his ancient Kingdom; It is the Lords work, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

  —1937

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Puritan’s Puritan: Michael Wigglesworth

  HISTORIANS HAVE LONG SINCE DISCOVERED that the Puritans were much more human than we had once supposed. They ate and drank and fought and loved and even occasionally laughed a little. Perhaps, then, they were (like us) hearty, warmhearted creatures after all. Perhaps. When we begin to think of the Puritans this way, we sooner or later have to reckon with a man like Michael Wigglesworth. The grim pages of his Day of Doom have long been familiar to students of American literature. His diary is even more challenging than his verse to any liberal view of the Puritans. For the man who emerges here calls to mind those stern figures in steeple-crowned hats who represent Puritanism in popular cartoons. So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forebears that he seems more plausible as a satirical reconstruction than as a human being. His very name, to anyone not familiar with its illustrious history, must suggest a caricature, and the suggestion is sadly borne out by the diary and supported by all that can be ascertained about him.

  His biography, as we know it from other sources than the diary, is appropriate. He was one of the first settlers of New England; he attended Harvard, the Puritan college, and taught there for several years; he became a minister and spent the greater part of his life preaching Puritanism to the people of Malden, Massachusetts. He wrote a poem that his fellow Puritans bought by the thousands in order to read in vivid figures about the Day of Judgment. In keeping with the crabbed figure of the cartoon, he was a sickly man, always complaining of ill health; throughout a large part of his life he was an invalid. Yet he fathered eight children, outlived two wives, and had married a third when he died in 1705, in his seventy-fourth year.

  This pattern was not an uncommon one among the first generation of New Englanders: Harvard, the ministry, the ripe and respected old age. Against this familiar backdrop his diary fills in the lines of the caricature with heavy strokes, until the Puritan emerges as his worst enemies would have him, a man with great capacity for survival—but with small reason for wanting to survive. Was the Puritan a killjoy? Wigglesworth thought that all pleasure apart from delight in God’s grace was dangerous. His heart was “sunk with sorrow” when he found his students at Harvard indulging in merriment. Thus he wrote on June 25, 1653,

  I set my self again this day to wrestle with the Lord for my self and then for my pupils and the Lord did pretty much inlarge my heart in crying to him. But still I see the Lord shutting out my prayers and refusing to hear for he whom in special I pray’d for, I heard in the forenoon with ill company playing musick, though I had so solemly warn’d him but yesterday of letting his spirit go after pleasures.

  Since the students at Harvard could not fail to display a certain amount of animal spirits, this type of experience continued to sadden the teacher’s heart. On one occasion he gave a delinquent student a long lecture on the dangers of pleasure, and yet “that very evening,” Wigglesworth confided to the diary, “he was again at play…and when he saw me coming he slinked home and left his game whereby I gather that he is more afraid of me a poor sinful worm than of God and I am sorry that so solemn a warning and so efficacious for the present should have lost its power so soon.” Wigglesworth had no appreciation for the humor in situations of this kind, and he suffered the most innocuous pranks of his students with a ludicrous air of mourning. When he heard some of his admonitions “with derision reiterated among the scolars,” he solemnly sought comfort in his Maker. And when the students displayed a not incomprehensible reluctance to study Hebrew, he saw in their intractability “A spirit of unbridled licentiousness,” and exclaimed, “Lord in mercy heal, or I know not what wil become of New England.”

  If worrying would have saved New England, Wigglesworth would have saved it. One of the most revealing passages in the diary is the one where he records his almost ridiculously painful deliberations about a neighbor’s door swinging back and forth in the wind.

  The wise god who knoweth how to tame and take down proud and wanton hearts, suffereth me to be sorely buffeted with the like te
mptation as formerly about seeing some dores blow to and fro with the wind in some danger to break, as I think; I cannot tel whether it were my duty to giue them some hint that owe them. When I think ’tis a common thing, and that ’tis impossible but that the owners should haue oft seen them in that case, and heard them blow to and fro, and that it is but a trivial matter, and that I haue given a hint to one that dwels in the hous, and he maketh light of it; and that it would rather be a seeming to check others mindlesness of their own affairs, and lastly that there may be special reasons for it that I know not; why the case seemeth clear that ’tis not my duty. yet I am sorely affraid I should regard iniquity in my heart, and god upon this ecclypseth the sweet beam’s of his love, he hideth his face and I am troubled.

  Wigglesworth worried not only about his neighbors’ doors but also, of course, about their souls. He found his spirit “quite discouraged and soul and body both ready to quail, because of my sorrows for what mine eyes daly behould in others sins and mispense of their precious hours.” He resolved “to do more for christ than I haue done by reproveing lightness and mad mirth on Sabbath Evenings and by visitings.” He even became so concerned with saving the souls of others that he found it necessary to reprimand himself for having, as he said, “a greater desire of others finding christ than of my own.”

  In strange company with this solicitude went an unrestrained selfishness, which is revealed in a remarkable series of reflections on marriage. Wigglesworth evidently believed that he was suffering from gonorrhea and accordingly had some doubts about whether or not he should marry. His doubts arose, however, not from any concern for his bride-to-be, but from an apprehension that marriage might impair his own health. The factor that finally determined him to marry was the advice of a physician that marriage might prove beneficial, instead of detrimental. He accordingly resolved “to redeem the spring time for marrying or taking physick or both.” The sad sequel is that his bride died four years after her marriage, from what cause is unknown.

  His crass behavior in this episode never gave Wigglesworth any pangs of conscience, but he was by no means free from a morbid feeling of guilt for other offenses that we should probably consider entirely innocuous. Guilt, in fact, seems to have been a necessary feeling to Wigglesworth. The diary served as a kind of account book in which he rendered up the assets and liabilities of his soul, with the debit side of the ledger receiving almost all the entries. It was not that he ever behaved in a scandalous fashion outwardly; his outward behavior was doubtless exemplary. But Wigglesworth knew that man never achieves righteousness in this world. He knew that within him lay all the guilt of Adam, and he took pleasure in abasing himself for his sinful heart, for his pride, his overvaluing of creature comforts, his neglect of God. The automatic result of the daily examination of his soul was the conclusion that he was a vile worm, indeed the “chief of sinners.”

  The modern reader will rightly discount Wigglesworth’s claim to preeminence in sin, but his frequent protestations of guilt were more than a pose. Wigglesworth was obsessed with guilt. It is perhaps significant that one of the accusations that he most frequently leveled against himself was a lack of natural affection for his father. At one point he confessed himself secretly glad at his father’s death.

  We should scarcely exaggerate, I think, if we described Michael Wigglesworth as a morbid, humorless, selfish busybody. In him the ugly and somewhat absurd, somewhat pathetic figure of the caricature comes to life, a Roundhead to confirm the last prejudice of the Cavalier. And yet historians have been at some pains to erase this very caricature. The popular picture of the Puritans, it has been shown, is grossly overdrawn, for Puritanism did not exclude the enjoyment of the good things of life. The Puritans read books, wrote verses, and had their pictures painted. They were unashamedly fond of beer and wine and even of more ardent spirits. They liked to eat well and live well and made no pretensions to asceticism. They were not prudish; they made no attempt to stifle natural passions in celibacy. They were men of the world, able to deal equally well with an Indian, a Royalist, or a seidel of beer.

  How, then, are we to interpret Michael Wigglesworth? Was he simply an anomaly, one of those eccentric killjoys who can be found in any society? There are surely good reasons for regarding Wigglesworth as exceptional: he never enjoyed good health, and his bodily weaknesses may have been responsible in large measure for his morbid state of mind; furthermore, his preoccupation with his father’s death suggests that he may have had some psychological disorder. But to dismiss Wigglesworth as an unhealthy anomaly is to condemn him without a trial. He did, after all, teach at Harvard College; he did serve as minister to a Puritan congregation; and he did write for New England the most popular book of his time. In his own day no one accused him of heresy or eccentricity. Grant that he was exceptional, which he certainly was, did his singularity constitute a denial, or an intensification, of Puritan values? Was he exceptionally Puritan or exceptionally unpuritan? Puritanism unquestionably made rigorous demands on those who subscribed to it. The fact that Michael Wigglesworth, as revealed in the diary, does not look like the average New Englander of the seventeenth century may mean simply that he accepted the demands of Puritanism more wholeheartedly than most of his countrymen.

  To affirm, then, that Wigglesworth was exceptionally and emphatically Puritan is not to cast doubt on what historians have been saying about the Puritans, but it is to suggest that the popular caricature may be closer to the central meaning of Puritanism than the friends of New England sometimes like to suppose. Although the popular view fails to do justice to the Puritan; although it neglects the strength of his conviction, the integrity of his purpose, and the breadth and subtlety of intellect with which he defended himself; although it overlooks the fact that he was, after all, a human being—nevertheless, it does emphasize the distinctive features of Puritanism as they now appear to a hedonist world. If the cartoonist could study and understand Puritanism in all its complexity, he would probably still draw the same cartoon. For the mark of the Puritan was not his human warmth but his zeal, his suspicion of pleasure, his sense of guilt; and it is these qualities that are satirized in the popular caricature. Michael Wigglesworth, who appears to be a living embodiment of the caricature, was distinctly and thoroughly a Puritan. If we measure him by the precepts of the Puritan preachers, it will be apparent, I think, that his sense of guilt, his hostility to pleasure, and even his minding of other people’s business were not the anomalies of a diseased mind but simply the qualities demanded of a good Puritan.

  To consider the last, most objectionable quality first, did Wigglesworth’s concern with other people’s sins represent merely the tedious petulance of a busybody, or was it the expression of some fundamental part of Puritan belief? In the light of the social and political theory expressed by virtually every articulate Puritan, one cannot escape the conclusion that Puritanism invited, or rather demanded, active cooperation from every member of society in the eradication of sin. It was held up as a sign of regeneration that a man should reform his friends and neighbors. The true convert, Thomas Hooker explained, was one who sought to destroy all sins. “What ever sins come within his reach, he labors the removal of them, out of the familyes where he dwels, out of the plantations where he lives, out of the companies and occasions, with whom he hath occasion to meet and meddle at any time.” The obligation of the convert to reform those around him was grounded in the covenant by which God sealed the salvation of his elect. “If God make a Covenant, to be a God to thee and thine,” John Cotton pointed out, “then it is thy part to see it, that thy children and servants be Gods people.” And again, “when we undertake to be obedient to him [God],” we undertake not only “in our owne names, and for our owne parts, but in the behalfe of every soule that belongs to us,…our wives, and children, and servants, and kindred, and acquaintance, and all that are under our reach, either by way of subordination, or coordination.”

  In a place where every serious person was engaged in
persuading himself of his own conversion such doctrine was probably sufficient in itself to create a community of busybodies. But the desire to produce evidence of one’s own conversion was not the only ground of zeal for the morality of others: The Puritan believed that the outward prosperity of every social group rested upon the prevention of sin among the members. Quite apart from his individual relationship to God through the covenant of grace, every Puritan partook of a more external, social relationship with Him through the societies to which he belonged, through family, church, state, and in Wigglesworth’s case, the college. Every social institution existed for the Puritan by virtue of a special covenant with God in which the members had promised obedience to the laws of God. Consequently every Puritan was bound to obey God not merely as a sanctified man (in order to prove to himself that he was saved) but as a member of every group to which he belonged. If he failed, he not only demonstrated his own damnation but brought the temporal wrath of God upon his family, upon his church, and upon his state. Thus we find Wigglesworth exclaiming over his sins, “ah Lord! I pul down evils upon others as wel as my self. Sicknesses, death of godly ones, wants, divisions have not my sins a hand in these miserys? oh Lord I am affraid of thy judgements upon my self and others.” These ideas penetrated to every level of society in New England. In 1656, the year in which Wigglesworth accepted a call to preach at Malden, a miserable girl, laboring under the name of Tryal Pore, who had committed the sin of fornication, confessed to the Middlesex County Court, “By this my sinn I haue not only donn what I can to Poull doune Jugmente from the lord on my selue but allso apon the place where I liue.”