One Nation, Under Gods Read online

  Despite his eagerness to find echoes of the Christian faith within Narragansett mythology, Williams at other times was content to let native beliefs speak for themselves. He did not insist that the Narragansett were Jews who had wandered far afield of the Holy Land or followers of a form of proto-Christianity. Instead, he recognized that they had a religion all their own, and were open to many manifestations of divinity. Williams claims to have counted thirty-seven deities but names only a dozen: “They branch their Godhead into many Gods,” he wrote. Foremost among these was “Kautantowwit, The great South West God.” The southwest, Williams records, was the direction in which all souls go, and from which all came. Other gods included: “Wompanand, The Easterne God. Chekesuwand, The Western God. Wunnanameanit, The Northern God. Sowwanand, The Southern God. Wetuomanit, The house God. Keesuckquand, The Sun God. Nanepaushat, The Moon God. Paumpagussit, The Sea God. Yotaanit, The fire God…”

  His Puritan counterparts would try endlessly to fit the natives of New England into their own black-and-white theology, but Williams was willing to acknowledge the complexity of this alien faith. “Even as the Papists have their He and Shee Saint Protectors as St. George, St. Patrick, St. Dennis, Virgin Mary,” Williams noted, the Indians had their own gendered and familial notions of divinity: There was “Squauanit, The Womans God,” for example, and “Muckquachuckquand, the Children’s God.” Of this last, Williams makes a poignant observation: “I was once with a Native dying of a wound, given him by some of the murderous English, who robbed him and run him through with a Rapier.… This Native dying called much upon Muckquachuckquand, which of other Natives I understood, (as they believed) had appeared to the dying young man, many years before, and bid him whenever he was in distress call upon him.”

  For all this variety of belief, Williams could find no moral fault in them. “I could never discern that excess of scandalous sins amongst them which Europe aboundeth with. Drunkenness, and gluttony generally they knew not what sinnes they be; and although they have not so much to restrain them both in respect of a knowledge of God and the laws of men, as the English have, yet a man shall never hear of such amongst them as robberies, murthers, adulteries, etc., as amongst the English.”

  Among the Puritans, Williams had been a mere critic; his interactions with these Indians led him to the earliest statement of religious toleration on the American continent. To force conversion on such people, he wrote, would be like using coercion or violence to make “an unwilling spouse to enter into forced relations.”

  Ultimately, as a Christian clergyman, Williams would have preferred to see Indians converted of their own free will, but he understood that they, too, could make a religious choice while respecting the religious choices of others. “They will generally confess that God made all,” he writes. “Although they deny not that Englishmen’s God made English men, and the heavens and earth, yet their Gods made them, and the heaven and the earth where they dwell.”

  The natives of America, Williams discovered, had also built communities they considered divinely ordained and ordered. No less than John Winthrop, they lived in their own cities on a hill.

  Of all the spiritual dissenters in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, none shook Governor Winthrop as significantly as Anne Hutchinson. She was “a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit,” as Winthrop himself said, and to his chagrin she used that wit to argue in favor of her right to interpret religion as she saw fit. She suggested that overconcern with the law amounted to a denial of the necessity of divine grace for salvation, which was most vexing to those charged with encouraging upright behavior and morality in the fledgling community. The notion that God’s favor could be earned by humanity was, in Hutchinson’s estimation, a belief in the power of “works.” This was no minor allegation, but implied sympathy for a Catholic system of moral accounting that had its most shameless expression in the sale of indulgences—the very issue that had sparked the Reformation.

  Like Dorothy Talbye, Hutchinson had begun her life in New England as a respected and godly woman. She had brought her family across the ocean to be nearer to the preacher John Cotton, under whose thrall she had fallen in Lincolnshire before his emigration. Aligned with Cotton, she was at the center of Boston society. Hutchinson’s apparent defection from the straight and narrow to more heterodox views was thus a major blow to New England’s spiritual status quo.

  Hutchinson was the focal point of the antinomian controversy, which amounted to a dispute over how and why individuals might consider themselves saved, and, more importantly, who should be allowed to voice their opinions concerning this process. Winthrop held that it was beyond the role of women to speak of such things. Hutchinson begged to differ, and many others took her side. Her followers, mostly women, also included men such as Henry Vane, who himself served as governor for a time. Though she had based her own view of salvation on the inefficacy of “works,” it is likely that it was precisely her own works that made her such an influential figure in the colony. She served as a midwife, and so had access to women of the colony when they were perhaps most in need of the kind of spiritual comfort no male clergyman could provide.

  As Thomas Weld assessed her place within a genealogy of the spiritual “infections” suffered by the colony:

  The last and worst of all, which most suddenly diffused the venom of these opinions into the very veins and vitals of the people in the country, was Mistress Hutchinson’s double weekly lecture, which she kept under a pretense of repeating sermons, to which resorted sundry of Boston and other towns about, to the number of fifty, sixty, or eighty at once. Where, after she had repeated the sermon, she would make her comment upon it, vent her mischievous opinions as she pleased, and wreathed the scriptures to her own purpose; where the custom was for her scholars to propound questions and she (gravely sitting in the chair) did make answers thereunto.

  The great respect she had at first in the hearts of all, and her profitable and sober carriage of matters, for a time made this her practice less suspected by the godly magistrates and elders of the church there, so that it was winked at for a time (though afterward reproved by the Assembly and called into Court), but it held so long, until she had spread her leaven so far that had not providence prevented, it had proved the canker of our peace and ruin of our comforts.

  Because the source of her authority could be found in the intensity of the relationships she had fostered as a midwife, the first attacks against her were made concerning this very work, implying that her spiritual “infection” could be seen in the infants whose mothers she assisted at birth. Weld continued, “God Himself was pleased to step in… by testifying His displeasure against their opinions and practices, as clearly as if He had pointed with His finger.” This divine displeasure could be seen, it was claimed, in God’s causing pregnant women in Hutchinson’s care “to produce out of their wombs, as before they had out of their brains, such monstrous births as no chronicle (I think) hardly ever recorded the like.”

  One of these afflicted mothers, Mary Dyer, was in Winthrop’s estimation “a very proper and fair woman,” yet she was also “notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson’s errors, and very censorious and troublesome.” Adding a classic assessment of a man believing a woman should know her place, he added that, “being of a very proud spirit,” Dyer was “much addicted to revelations.”

  While under Hutchinson’s care, Dyer had delivered a stillborn baby girl, two months premature, apparently suffering from a number of birth defects. Among those already suspicious of the midwife’s influence, rumors quickly spread that the infant was “a monster” composed of “a fish, a beast, and a fowl, all woven together in one, and without an head.” As the body had been buried before anyone but Hutchinson, another midwife called Mrs. Hawkins, and a third unnamed woman had seen it, the leaders of the colony interrogated Mrs. Hawkins until she produced a sufficiently monstrous description:

  It was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head, and the ears st
ood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp; two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter; the eyes standing out, and the mouth also; the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales, like a thornback; the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be, and the back and hips before, where the belly should have been; behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.

  The credulous leaders of the colony had Dyer’s child exhumed six months after the day of her birth and death. In Winthrop’s view, there were signs of some deformity but nowhere near, it seems, the level described by the midwife. They could not ask her to clarify, however, as she had disappeared after her interrogation, perhaps to avoid further investigations, for she was known to give the women in her care potions that might have had less than positive effects on the unborn. Nonetheless, Winthrop and others aligned against Anne Hutchinson preferred another explanation for the unfortunate events. No man had been present for Mary Dyer’s labor, yet Winthrop wrote confidently of a scene he imagined as a moment of demonic possession:

  When it died in the mother’s body, which was about two hours before the birth, the bed whereon the mother lay did shake, and withal there was such a noisome savor, as most of the women were taken with extreme vomiting and purging, so as they were forced to depart; and others of them their children were taken with convulsions, which they never had before nor after.

  In his account years later, Thomas Weld added the detail that Anne Hutchinson herself had given birth to monsters—not just one, as Mary Dyer did, but “thirty monstrous births or thereabouts at once, some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another, few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as far as I could ever learn) of human shape.” Needless to say, neither Weld nor any man was ever present at Hutchinson’s laboring bedside.

  For her supposed crimes, Anne Hutchinson was brought to trial at the General Court at Newton, the highest in authority in Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1637. Performing the interrogation of this one woman were Governor Winthrop as Chair of the Court, the Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, five assistants, and five other deputies. Also in attendance were several of Boston’s religious notables, including the preacher Hutchinson had followed from England, Reverend Cotton. Though he remained her minister and had inspired her troublemaking behavior, he had never faced anything remotely like Hutchinson’s trial. Eventually he turned on his acolyte, preserving enough respectability that over time he and his family became symbols of New England piety.

  Five decades before his grandson and namesake Cotton Mather would inspire another scare over troublesome women in nearby Salem, John Cotton watched as Hutchinson sat alone and debated the full force of the Puritan establishment. Her interrogation by Governor Winthrop and his associates reads today like a drama scripted to illustrate the intersection of sanctioned religious authority and willful individual rights, all framed within the barely spoken assumptions of the appropriate roles of women and men.

  After a lengthy preamble in which Winthrop accused Hutchinson of having “troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here” and of speaking “divers things, as we have been informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers” and finally of having held instructive gatherings in her home, an act “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex,” Hutchinson responded as if the governor had not spoken at all.

  “I am called here to answer before you,” she said, “but I hear no things laid to my charge.”

  Winthrop, apparently fuming, replied, “I have told you some already and more I can tell you.”

  “Name one, Sir,” Hutchinson said.

  “Have I not named some already?” Winthrop replied.

  “What have I said or done?” Hutchinson demanded.

  “Why, for your doings,” Winthrop sputtered. “This you did harbor and countenance those that are parties in this faction that you have heard of.”

  “That’s matter of conscience, Sir.”

  It was her conscience, she told them, that brought her to lead Bible studies in her home. In this small rebellion were the seeds of a form of quiet dissent that threatened the very basis of Puritan society. Despite what the Reformation had established, Winthrop believed it was not up to each individual to determine what was just and right in the eyes of God. That duty belonged to the community, he maintained, as led by men chosen for that task by the knowledgeable consent of other men. If every woman who thought she knew something about holiness began instructing the impressionable, he feared, it would lead to spiritual lawlessness. This was the underlying reason for Winthrop’s seeming incomprehension in the face of Hutchinson’s obstinance. As the covenantally sanctioned leader of the colony, he believed he knew what was best for her, and it was certainly not the promulgation of heterodox views.

  After observing the verbal sparring between Winthrop and the accused, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley entered the fray. He put it plainly: Hutchinson had been a danger to Massachusetts Bay from the moment she arrived, and possibly before.

  “About three years ago we were all in peace,” Dudley said. “Mrs. Hutchinson, from that time she came hath made a disturbance, and some that came over with her in the ship did inform me what she was as soon as she was landed.… Within half a year after, she had vented divers of her strange opinions and had made parties in the country.”

  Her strange opinions—that was the real issue here, because, as it happened, her opinions were not merely strange but tremendously attractive.

  “Mrs. Hutchinson hath so forestalled the minds of many by their resort to her meeting,” Dudley continued, “that now she hath a potent party in the country.”

  She was guilty, in other words, of establishing an alternate spiritual authority. People—women especially—had come to seek her out at the expense of their allegiances to more conventional religious voices. In this, Hutchinson was the foundation of a rising tower of spiritual dissent, rivaling the city upon a hill in its height. The only solution was to cast her out. “We must take away the foundation,” Dudley said, “and the building will fall.”

  The expulsion of Anne Hutchinson was far from the end of the problem of religious diversity. Mary Dyer, “the woman which had the monster,” in Winthrop’s words, at first followed her teacher and friend from Massachusetts but later reappeared as if to haunt the men who had so abused the memory of her unfortunate child. When she returned, she was no longer merely a participant in a nameless protest against Puritan authority. She had become a member of the Quakers, at the time the most hated religious group in England and America because of their belief in an “inner light” that made teachers of all Christians and led to ceaseless questioning of the professional religious class. Along with three others, she was hanged from a tree in 1660, making Winthrop’s Boston more like Calvin’s Geneva than was perhaps intended.

  Even after such harsh response, heterodoxies, heresies, and blasphemies bloomed and spread like spores across New England and then beyond in the years following. Even with rabble-rousers like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson gone more than ten years, fears of theological error were so widespread in 1651 that the Massachusetts General Court called for a day of repentance. The official reason was a succinct statement of the two most pressing dangers Puritan society believed it faced: witchcraft and strange opinions, both of which were simply synonyms for the kinds of religious differences that eventually showed themselves to be not aberrations but the norm.

  John Winthrop’s city upon a hill turned out to be built on a veritable volcano. Like the colonies and the nation it would come to represent, it was from the very start filled with heterodox religious practices, idiosyncratic beliefs, and doubts
about the reigning doctrinal assumptions the Puritans had brought across the sea. With the force of heat and energy hidden just beneath the surface, this volcano blew more than once in the decades following the birth of the colony, exploding to rubble any hope of uniformity, and in the process redistributing the English population on the continent. Roger Williams responded to his exile by establishing a new colony in Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson and her family traveled to Dutch New York. Killed in an Indian attack, she was said by her Puritan opponents to have gotten what was coming to her, but her death did not come before she had brought her message of individual religious insight beyond the jurisdiction of those who would suppress it. Of course, Mary Dyer never left Massachusetts again after her decision to return brought her to the gallows, but her willful incitement of the colony’s wrath created the atmosphere in which the Quaker William Penn would establish a colony built on religious freedom—Pennsylvania—a generation after her death. The ideas brought to each of these colonies all fell away from the Puritan theocracy like debris from a crumbling city on a hill, spreading as if by gravity the true gospel of the American experiment: not religious agreement but dissent.

  An Act Concerning Religion, 1649. Maryland’s law has been remembered as an “Act of Toleration,” but it made blasphemy a crime punishable by death.

  CHAPTER 4

  Blasphemy

  1658

  When Jacob Lumbrozo sailed for North America in the winter of 1656, the Province of Maryland must have seemed a good choice for a man such as himself. A Portuguese Jew whose family had once fled the anti-Semitism of the Iberian Peninsula, he perhaps would have been drawn to the colony’s rhetoric of religious toleration. While its actual policies on that front were far from perfect, as he soon would discover, it nonetheless may have appeared slightly more enlightened than most other options at the time. If Christians elsewhere in America terrorized each other over minor differences in doctrine, what might they do to those who had not much use for Jesus at all?