Words of Wisdom from Anne Hutchinson
“But now having seen him which is invisible I fear not what man can do unto me.”
In England, where she was born in 1591, Hutchinson had followed the teachings of the dynamic preacher John Cotton, from whom she traced some of her antiestablishment ideas. When Cotton was compelled to leave the country in 1633, Hutchinson and her family followed him to New England. There she would live until her death just ten years later, stirring up one fuss after another while serving as an active midwife and caregiver to the sick. That she found the time to do all this while raising fifteen children of her own is a tribute to her energy and passion.
Hutchinson organized discussion groups (“conventicles”) attended by dozens of women and eventually many men, too. This in itself was a bold move. It was empowering especially to the women, who were supposed to remain quiet and subordinate to their husbands, particularly in matters of religion and governance. But Hutchinson’s meetings were full of critical talk about the “errors” in recent sermons and the intolerant ways in which the men of Massachusetts ran the colony. Her influence grew rapidly, and by all accounts Boston became a stronghold of antinomianism while the countryside aligned with the establishment. It was only a matter of time before religious and gender differences spilled over into politics.
In 1636 Hutchinson and her “free grace” allies such as Cotton, Reverend John Wheelwright, and Governor Henry Vale came under blistering attack by the orthodox Puritan clergy. In churches and public meetings, they were assailed as heretics and disturbers of the peace who threatened the very existence of the Puritan experiment in New England. Accusations of immoral sexual conduct, thoroughly unfounded, swirled. Cotton was sidelined by the pressure. Wheelwright was found guilty of “contempt & sedition” for having “purposely set himself to kindle and increase” strife within the colony and was banished from Massachusetts. Vale was defeated for reelection, and a Hutchinson enemy, John Winthrop, became governor in 1637. Despite initial wavering under the intense pressure, Hutchinson held firm.
In November 1637, Winthrop arranged for Hutchinson to be put on trial on the charge of slandering the ministers of Massachusetts Bay. He declared that she had “troubled the peace of the commonwealth and churches” by promoting unsanctioned opinions and holding unauthorized meetings in her home. Though she had never voiced her views outside the conventicles she held, or ever signed any statements or petitions about them, Winthrop portrayed her as a coconspirator who had goaded others to challenge authority. Before the court, with Hutchinson present, he charged: “You have spoken divers things as we have been informed [which are] very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”
Hutchinson mostly stonewalled the prosecution, but occasionally shot back with a fiery rejoinder like this one: “Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women, and why do you call me to teach the court?”
The first day of the trial went reasonably well for her. One biographer, Richard Morris, said she “outfenced the magistrates in a battle of wits.” Another biographer, Eve LaPlante, wrote, “Her success before the court may have astonished her judges, but it was no surprise to her. She was confident of herself and her intellectual tools, largely because of the intimacy she felt with God.”
But on the second day Hutchinson cut loose with this warning:
You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm—for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Saviour. I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands. Therefore take heed how you proceed against me—for I know that, for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state.
What Winthrop and his prosecutors hadn’t yet proved, Hutchinson handed them in one stroke. This was all the evidence of “sedition” and “contempt of court” that they needed. She was convicted, labeled an instrument of the devil and “a woman not fit for our society,” and banished from Massachusetts Bay.
This was the verdict of her civil trial. She would be detained for four months under house arrest, rarely able to see her family, until a church trial that would determine her fate as a member of the Puritan faith. In that trial, because she would not admit to certain theological mistakes, she was formally excommunicated with this denunciation from Reverend Thomas Shepard: “I do cast you out and deliver you up to Satan … and account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican.… I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of this Church as a Leper to withdraw yourself out of the Congregation.”
“The Spirit of Liberty”
Hutchinson, husband William, and their children departed Boston in April 1638. They trudged for nearly a week in the snow to get to Providence, Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams as a haven for persecuted minorities.
In 1642, not long after her husband died, Anne and a number of her children relocated to New Netherland, in what is now the Bronx, New York. On a terrible day in August 1643, Anne and her entire family but for one daughter were massacred by marauding Siwanoy Indians.
The woman who rocked a colony was gone, but as Rothbard writes, “the spirit of liberty that she embodied and kindled was to outlast the despotic theocracy of Massachusetts Bay.”
As America’s first feminist, and a woman of conscience and principle, Anne Hutchinson planted seeds of religious liberty that would grow and help establish a new nation a little more than a century later.
Lessons from Anne Hutchinson
Have the courage of your convictions: Long before “women’s liberation,” Anne Hutchinson spoke and acted with every bit as much courage and candor as any man. She showed no fear in challenging what she regarded as errors from the pulpit and assaults from governing authorities against free thought.
Defend religious liberty: Hutchinson’s resistance led to her banishment, but she set an example that would, long after her death, help make religious liberty a central element of the American founding.
5
Adam Smith
Ideas Change the World
Adam Smith entered a world that his reason and eloquence would later transform. He was baptized on June 5, 1723, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. It’s presumed that he was born either on that day or a day or two before. He would become the Father of Economics as well as one of history’s most eloquent defenders of free markets.
The late British economist Kenneth E. Boulding paid this tribute to his intellectual predecessor: “Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made.”
Economics in the late eighteenth century was not yet a focused subject of its own but rather a poorly organized compartment of what was known as “moral philosophy.” Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in 1759, when he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. He was the first moral philosopher to recognize that the business of enterprise—and all the motives and actions in the marketplace that give rise to it—was deserving of careful, full-time study as a modern discipline of social science.
The culmination of his thoughts in this regard came in 1776. As American colonists were declaring their independence from Britain, Smith was publishing his own shot heard round the world, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known ever since as simply The Wealth of Nations. (One of my most prized possessions is the two-volume 1790 edition of the book, gifted to me by an old friend; it was the last edition to incorporate edits from Smith himself, just before he died in that same year.)
&nbs
p; Smith’s choice of the longer title is revealing. Note that he didn’t set out to explore the nature and causes of the poverty of nations. Poverty, in his mind, was what happens when nothing happens, when people are idle by choice or force, or when production is prevented or destroyed. He wanted to know what brings the things we call material wealth into being, and why. It was a searching examination that would make him a withering critic of the existing political and economic order.
A Bigger Pie
For three hundred years before Smith, western Europe was dominated by an economic system known as “mercantilism.” Though it provided for modest improvements in life and liberty over the feudalism that preceded it, it was a system rooted in error that stifled enterprise and treated individuals as pawns of the state.
Mercantilist thinkers believed that the world’s wealth was a fixed pie, giving rise to endless conflict between nations. After all, if you think there’s only so much and you want more of it, you’ve got to take it from someone else.
Words of Wisdom from Adam Smith
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Mercantilists were economic nationalists. Foreign goods, they thought, were sufficiently harmful to the domestic economy that government policy should promote exports and restrict imports. Mercantilists wanted their nations’ exports to be paid for not with foreign goods but in gold and silver. To the mercantilist, the precious metals were the very definition of wealth, especially to the extent that they piled up in the monarch’s coffers.
In Smith’s contrarian view, wealth was not gold and silver. Precious metals, though reliable as media of exchange and for their own industrial uses, were no more than claims against the real thing. All the gold and silver in the world would leave one starving and freezing if it couldn’t be exchanged for food and clothing. Wealth to the world’s first economist was plainly this: goods and services.
Whatever increased the supply and quality of goods and services, lowered their price, or enhanced their value made for greater wealth and higher standards of living. The “pie” of national wealth isn’t fixed; you can bake a bigger one by producing more.
Baking that bigger pie, Smith showed, results from investments in capital and the division of labor. His famous example of the specialized tasks in a pin factory demonstrated how the division of labor produces far more than if each of us acted in isolation to produce everything himself. It was a principle that Smith showed works for nations precisely because it works for the individuals who make them up.
He was consequently an economic internationalist, one who believed in the widest possible cooperation between peoples irrespective of political boundaries. He was a consummate free trader at a time when trade was hampered by an endless roster of counterproductive tariffs, quotas, and prohibitions.
Smith wasn’t hung up on the old mercantilist fallacy that more goods should be exported than imported. He exploded this “balance of trade” fallacy by arguing that, since goods and services constituted a nation’s wealth, it made no sense for government to make sure that more left the country than came in.
Self-interest had been frowned upon for ages as acquisitive, antisocial behavior, but Smith celebrated it as an indispensable spur to economic progress. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest.” He added that self-interest is an unsurpassed incentive: “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition … is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”
Mercantilists wanted governments to bestow monopoly privileges on a favored few. In Britain, the king even granted a protected monopoly over the production of playing cards to a particular highly placed noble. But Smith showed that this view reflected a misunderstanding of self-interest, the profit motive, and the operation of prices. To satisfy his own desires, a person must produce what others want at a price they can afford. Prices send signals to producers so that they will know what to make more of and what to provide less of. It wasn’t necessary, Smith said, for the king to assign tasks and bestow monopolies to see that things get done. Prices and profit would act as an “invisible hand” with far more efficiency than any monarch or parliament. And competition would see to it that quality is improved and prices are kept low. Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek wrote in his book The Fatal Conceit:
Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His “invisible hand” had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led—for example by the pricing system in market exchange—to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend. In our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of the things which we get.
The Father of Economics placed much more faith in people and markets than in kings and edicts. With characteristic eloquence, he declared, “In the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.” That is why, as Nobel laureate economist Richard Stone explains, “Smith was passionately opposed to all laws and practices that tended to discourage production and increase prices,” and why he “devotes chapter after chapter to exposing the harm caused by the combination of two things he particularly disliked: monopoly interests and government intervention in private economic arrangements.”
Smith displayed an understanding of government that eclipses that of many citizens today when he wrote:
It is the highest impertinence and presumption … in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense.… They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.
Smith wasn’t perfect. He left a little more room for government than many of us are comfortable with, especially in light of what we’ve learned of the political process in the centuries since. Much of what we now know in economics he left to later scholars to correct or discover (the Austrian school’s seminal contributions regarding the source of value and marginal utility being two of the most important). But Smith’s books, as Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted, represented “the keystone of a marvelous system of ideas.”
The last formal job that Smith held in his life was, ironically, commissioner of customs in Scotland. How could such an eminent free trader preside over the collection of the very tariffs he had so eloquently debunked? He certainly evidenced no change of mind on the fundamental virtue of freer trade. E. G. West, in his excellent 1969 biography of Smith, wrote, “To enter the service of the Customs would not be to compromise on his principles. On the contrary, he would be enabled more practically to study further ways of achieving economies.” And achieving economies is exactly what Smith did over seven years in the job. Net revenues to the Treasury, we learn in West’s book, rose dramatically during Smith’s tenure, not from higher rates but from reduction in the costs of collection that Smith had put in place.
Freedom and Prosperity
The ideas of Adam Smith exerted enormous influence before he died in 1790 and especially in the nineteenth century. America’s Founders were greatly affected by his insights. The Wealth of Nations became required reading among men and women of ideas the world over. No one had more thoroughly blown away the intellectual edifice of big go
vernment than the professor from Kirkcaldy.
A tribute as much to him as to any other individual thinker, the world in 1900 was much freer and more prosperous than anyone could have imagined in 1776. The triumphs of trade and globalization in our own time are further testimony to his enduring legacy. A think tank in Britain bears his name and seeks to make his legacy better known.
Ideas really do matter. They can change the world. Adam Smith proved that, and we are all immeasurably better off for the ideas he shattered and the ones he set in motion.
Lessons from Adam Smith
Understand the power of good ideas: Adam Smith demolished the premises of the suffocating system of mercantilism and in so doing planted the seeds for the greatest flowering of the free economy since ancient Rome. His ideas changed the world for the better.
Don’t fall for government promises to “fix” the economy: The experience of the past 240 years has borne out the case Smith made so persuasively: that the “invisible hand” of free prices, competitive markets, and self-interest (properly understood) yields far more economic good for society than the “iron fist” of rulers and their bureaucracies.
6
Mercy Otis Warren
Conscience of Great Causes
Two centuries before “women’s lib,” in the run-up to America’s Revolutionary War, Mercy Otis Warren was already a liberated woman by the standards of her day. And she did the liberating herself.
Real Heroes Page 4