The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

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  Though efforts to retrieve the exiled Hutchinson from the clutches of Satan would continue, she never repented and was still defiant at her violent death in 1643 in New Netherland at the hands of marauding Indians—devils, Cotton said, who had been appropriately sent to punish one who had herself been the devil’s advocate. Cotton, having repudiated his embarrassing disciple, recovered his cherished role as the colony’s leading cleric, though in subtle ways he continued to argue the case against Shepard and Hooker. Shepard never slackened in his zeal and never believed that Cotton’s concession had been sincere. Most of the outspoken dissidents, including Wheelwright, sooner or later came to terms with the establishment, and those who did not left the colony, mainly to settle in Rhode Island, where they joined Gorton or turned Quaker or simply lived in isolated hamlets where they were free to practice their esoteric faiths. And so, though Boston’s churchmen still felt threatened by the “wandring sheepe” to the south, the center, saved from implosion by the colony’s open boundaries, had held. And from the turmoil of those critical years, an orthodoxy supple enough to absorb some of the radicals’ aspirations emerged in the form of New England’s nonseparating Congregationalism, which would be codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648.12

  But the cost had been high. Abroad, as word of the struggle reached England, the colony gained a reputation for both extreme radicalism and suppressive intolerance. And at home, the rupture revealed, as nothing else could have done, the failure of Winthrop’s dream of an organic community disciplined by the encompassing commitment to Puritan ideals.

  The ostensible struggle had been fought over doctrine, over the most exquisite details of attaining salvation and the role of human intermediation in that great effort. But while the clerics and the more learned laymen understood the issues in those terms and felt the world tremble when they believed a word or phrase of scripture had been misconstrued, the majority of the participants, as Winthrop knew, had no such understanding, however sincere their beliefs. Yet they too were fervently engaged, equally willing to commit themselves to abstruse theological positions that put them at risk. For they, no less than the most abstracted theologian, had much at stake. In a culture so deeply permeated by religion, personal interests were naturally expressed in theological terms. And though, as R. H. Tawney has written, “the vulgar categories of class and income” do not as such shape religious zeal and moral enthusiasm, “experience proves, nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux.”13

  It was precisely the varying needs of different social and economic groups, derived from the complex demography of the Puritan migration, that shaped the divisions in the antinomian struggle. The numbers are striking. In all, 187 men (and there were at least as many women) can be said to have been sympathetic to the Hutchinsonian movement—no less than 12 percent of Massachusetts’s entire adult male population; half of them (96) were residents of Boston. Of the 187 male sympathizers, 38 can be said to have been deeply involved—a core group formally committed by word or deed to the antinomian cause. That the English origins of both the overall group and the core participants were centered not in central East Anglia and the West Country, as was the migration as a whole, but in Lincolnshire and London (32 percent overall, 53 percent of the core) may not be surprising. Cotton’s and Hutchinson’s connections and influence were strongest in Lincolnshire, and there were more Londoners in Boston than in any other New England town. But it is surprising that, while the occupations of the overwhelming number of the immigrants to Massachusetts were in agriculture or in labor in some form, 40 percent of the antinomian group as a whole were merchants or craftsmen, and more than half (55 percent) of the core group can be similarly classified. And almost all of the core group and over half of the larger group were church members, most of them also freemen; several of them were magistrates.14 This was no collection, like Gorton’s sect, of enraptured zealots, ignorant laborers, or feckless wanderers. Though among them were excitable, impressionable, hot enthusiasts who thrilled at Hutchinson’s eloquence and Cotton’s prophetic flair without considering the implications of their arguments, most of the antinomians were well-established, respectable men and women, substantial if not affluent members of the community—merchants, like Hutchinson’s husband William, who was deeply involved in developing networks of Atlantic commerce, tradesmen at various levels, and “many of the most wise and godly” people in the community. In turning to Hutchinson and Cotton rather than to the mainstream “preparationist” clerics “for counsel about matter of conscience,” they were responding less to the technical substance of antinomian doctrines than to the aura the movement carried of a looser, more personal, more individualistic, and more self-expressive form of worship.

  This was especially true for the women, who had been Hutchinson’s initial and most numerous constituents. For them her doctrines, exemplified in her personal prominence, fortitude, and independence of mind and spirit, were inspirational in equating men and women as recipients of God’s revelations and in expressing freely and flagrantly otherwise suppressed aspirations. Again and again in her trials she had been reproved for violating the constraints appropriate for women’s lives. Hugh Peter: “You have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.” John Winthrop: Your assemblies are “a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” Indeed, “we do not mean to discourse [debate] with those of your sex.” John Cotton: Though you may not as yet have been unfaithful to your marriage, such is the “highth of your Spirit … that will follow upon it.” Shepard: With your “fluent Tounge and forwardnes in Expressions” you “seduce and draw away many, Espetially simple Weomen.”15

  The dangers to the social order of “simple Weomen” transcending the mildness, meekness, and subservience expected of their sex to enter masculine domains were obvious, and every effort was made to suppress the disorders they threatened. Cotton told the “sisters” of the church that they had been “too much seduced and led aside by [Hutchinson].” No doubt she had some good to offer. Then take whatever good she may have given you, but do not think everything of hers is good, “for you see she is but a Woman and many unsound and dayngerous principles are held by her.” Therefore “if you have drunke in with this good any Evell or Poyson, make speed to vomit it up agayne and to repent of it.”16

  Others took more direct action against overly assertive or strangely affected females. Jane Hawkins, Hutchinson’s closest friend, a midwife and herbalist given to trance-like states in which she spoke Latin, was declared to be familiar with the devil and “a prime Familist”; the General Court ordered her never again to meddle with medicines of any kind and never “to question matters of religion.” Eventually she would be banished, to join Hutchinson in exile. Mary Oliver, said to be more eloquent and zealous even than Hutchinson, was imprisoned for insisting on being made a member of the Salem church, and when she argued for open membership and other “very dangerous” opinions, she was whipped and clapped in the stocks, her tongue clamped with a cleft stick.

  And a series of other prosecutions followed in Hutchinson’s wake: the maidservant Smith, cast out of the church for persisting in “sundry Errors”; Katherine Finch, whipped for disrespect to the authorities; Phillipa Hammond excommunicated for defending Hutchinson and for slandering and reviling church and state; and Sarah Keayne, Dudley’s daughter, excommunicated for “irregular prophesying in mixed assemblies.” There seemed to be no end to the women who responded to Hutchinson’s inspiration. The Salem church expelled four “sisters” who denied the validity of the colony’s churches. And Dorothy Talby, for justifying rebellion by an “immediate revelation” similar to Hutchinson’s and for beating her husband “to the danger of his life,” was cast out o
f the church, chained to a post, and whipped. When, on instructions from heaven, she murdered her young daughter, whom she had named Difficult, to save her from future misery, she was hanged (though she preferred beheading)—whereupon the Rev. Hugh Peter “gave an exhortation to the people to take heed of revelations.”17

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  But the suppression of the antinomian dissenters and the agitators inspired and energized by them was one phase of a bitter and extended struggle. An orthodoxy had emerged from the turmoil of the mid-1630s, but there was no final stability. Such was the protean, fluid character of Puritanism, so strong were its inner dynamics, and so broad the range of its possible interpretations that the fragile structure of “the New England way” would continue to come under pressure from both left and right, as newcomers to the region brought with them competing claims and as developments in England fed back across the Atlantic. So long as New England was not physically sealed off from the world, so long as new ideas, challenging ideas, could be borne into the community by arriving voyagers, the new orthodoxy would be embattled, forced to defend itself, by whatever means: by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary.

  FOR WINTHROP and his first-generation allies in the mid-1630s, antinomianism, seemingly indistinguishable from anarchic “Familism,” had measured the dark and deadly depths to which Puritanism could sink under the pressure of semimystical enthusiasm. But their immediate successors soon discovered that there were depths below depths—a truly absolute debasement of their faith, with respect to which Williams’s disagreements were rational explorations, Wheelwright’s challenges were verbal exaggerations, and Hutchinson’s heresies were manageable if dangerous aberrations.

  Winthrop, Dudley, Cotton, Hooker, and even Shepard were safely dead when in 1656 the first of the itinerant Quakers—two Englishwomen from Barbados—arrived in Boston harbor to spread the word of the impending end of the world and the need for all to recognize the Inner Light that God had instilled in them. The Puritan authorities, like the Dutch, were horrified, but for them the dangers of Quakerism were more profound and their reaction was far more severe than Stuyvesant’s. For New England’s leaders knew that in the great cacophony of factions and sects that had exploded in the upheaval of England’s civil war, Quakerism had emerged as the ultimate descent from rational, Biblicist, clerical Protestantism into subjective, anticlerical, nonscriptural millennialism that threatened the basic institutions of civilized life—church, family, and social hierarchy—that they were struggling to preserve. However deviant the dissidents of the 1630s had been, they had not challenged such fundamentals as the sanctity of Scripture, the principles of predestination and original sin, and the propriety of religious “ordinances”: the sacraments, scripted orders of worship, structured preaching, and the formalities of prayer. With all of this the Quakers had broken, substituting belief in a universally shared Inner Light of God’s benevolence as the ultimate guide, wide-open participation in unstructured worship, and contempt for both parochial jurisdictions and the hierarchy of deference and social organization. Yet—and in this lay their ultimate threat—despite their rejection of the substance and structure of organized Protestantism, they shared with the more radical Puritans a mystical strain and a fervent millennialism that blurred the boundaries between them, and that for some could make translation to the new faith attractive. Quakerism for them was therefore doubly dangerous: utterly defiant and disparaging of organized, rational religion, yet associated with familiar radical doctrines of the immanence of the Holy Spirit. The Quakers were thus as demonic as the devilish Indians, to whom they were frequently compared, and as terrifying in their “spiritual phrenzy” and “frantick passions” as the bloody anarchists of Münster, who, some said, were their exact predecessors in promoting chaos. And the worst of it, for the local authorities, was that some of the Quakers’ seeds fell on fertile ground.18

  Despite the formal success of the new and tenuous Congregational orthodoxy, there were here and there groups peculiarly susceptible to the Quakers’ message. In Salem, amorphous radicalism had smoldered below the surface ever since Roger Williams had left the town, and it had flared up repeatedly—in the agitations of the “wise and anciently religious woman” Lady Deborah Moody, who in her resettlement in New Netherland would provide refuge for persecuted Quakers; in the outbursts of the obstreperous Mary Oliver, silenced and exiled in 1648; and in the fierce egalitarian protests of the town’s alienated farmers and artisans. Plymouth’s separatist, sectarian tradition with its emphasis on the indwelling Spirit, spreading out through its satellite towns on Cape Cod, made that sprawl of pious communities also “ripe” for Quaker revelations. And in Rhode Island the self-intensifying radicalism of its exiled population had long since anticipated Quaker-like forms of worship. Led by such once-respectable but now fallen Puritans as Coddington and inspired by such free spirits as Hutchinson’s devoted friend Mary Dyer and the “bold, though ignorant” Nicholas Easton, who believed in man’s natural unity with God, many in the hamlets around Narragansett Bay had forsaken organized forms of worship for extemporized expressions of their individual spiritual yearnings. Some were professed Anabaptists, some Gortonish spiritists, some isolated advocates of free grace, but all were prepared to welcome the itinerant Friends, to identify with them, and to endorse their assault on the fortress of the Bible Commonwealth.19

  That assault proceeded rapidly, despite the treatment of the first two women missionaries, whom the authorities had strip-searched for signs of demonism, had deprived of books and pamphlets, and had isolated in a windowless cell for five weeks before shipping them out of the colony. Eight more missionaries followed as the two women left. The reprisals now were savage, inflicted upon self-sacrificial devotees alight with Truth and burning with zeal by men fearful of impending chaos. Repressive laws of increasing severity were passed in most of the New England colonies. In Massachusetts, anyone professing the “pernitious opinions & practices” of those “quaking and trembling anthusiasts” who

  take uppon them to be immediately sent of God, and infallibly asisted by the spirit to speake & write blasphemouth opinions, despising government & the order of God in church & commonwealth, speaking evill of dignities, reproaching and reviling magistrates and ministers, seeking to turne the people from the faith, & gaine proselites to theire pernicious wayes

  —all such blasphemers were to be severely whipped, locked up in jail, and then shipped out of the colony. Those who returned would have an ear cut off; those who appeared yet again, another ear; and the women among them would be “severely whipt.” For a third offense “they shall have theire toungues bored through with a hot iron.” If after all of that and other punishments they still persisted, they would be banished “on paine of death.”20

  And so it was. Half-naked women were flogged, men’s ears cropped and their bodies savagely beaten. Finally, with Boston patrolled by a special guard of thirty-six soldiers, four of the proselytizing Quakers, defiantly testifying to the Truth in Boston and passionate for martyrdom, were taken from jail and hanged—among them Mary Dyer, after she had deliberately rejected a “benevolent” reprieve and had defiantly appeared in Boston for the fourth time.21

  By then, in the early 1660s, at least forty-three Quakers, from England, Barbados, and Rhode Island, had invaded the Bible Commonwealth, and though battered and bruised and repeatedly jailed and banished, in their prophetic zeal they had sufficiently convinced dozens of New England radicals to see the beauty of the Quakers’ absolute subjectivity and creedless illumination and to profess the prohibited faith. Many if not most of Rhode Island’s population who were not biblical literalists embraced the new confession and began to organize their community’s business in the distinctive style of monthly and yearly meetings, the latter a gathering of Quakers from all over New England. Faced with this spreading contamination, the Massachusetts authorities felt driven not only to increase the severity of the punishments but also, sensitive to New England’s reputatio
n at home, to publicly justify their persecution.22

  After commissioning the Rev. John Norton to write and publish a formal refutation of “the evill of [the Quakers’] tenets and dainger of theire practises,” the General Court itself issued a vindication of its proceedings against “the cursed sect.” Their punitive laws, they wrote, were simply efforts to secure peace and order in the face of people known “by the example of theire predecessors, in Münster,” to be determined to destroy both. The Quakers’ destructive purpose was clear: “to chainge and alter the received laudable customes of our nation in giving civill respect to aequalls or reverence to superiors … also to destroy the order of the churches, by denying all established formes of worship.” Banishment on pain of death was nothing new in English law, the General Court pointed out; it had been used against a similarly destructive and demonic cabal, the Jesuits. Accusations of excessive severity were unjustified, for the Quakers had become “felons de se,” against whom the sovereign law of “salus populi” should properly prevail. What was at stake were the fundamentals of Christian civilization: “the sacred Trinitie, the person of Christ, & the Holy Scriptures, as a perfect rule of faith & life.” The Quakers’ shocking belief that they were

  perfectly pure & without sinne, tends to overthrow the whole gospell & the very vitalls of Christianitie, for they that have no sinne have no neede of Christ, or of … his blood to cleanse them from theire sinne … no neede of repentance … no neede of growing in grace … no neede of Christian watchfulnes against sinne … no need to purify themselves dayly, as all Christians should.

  Therefore, the General Court concluded, “the commandment of God is plaine … he that presumes to speake lyes in the name of the Lord, & turne people out of the way which the Lord hath commanded to walk in, such an one must not live, but be put to death.”23