XXII
Mrs. Hutchinson's trial, 1637. During a two days' trial, conducted inquisitorially, like an English Court of High Commission, Cambridge presented the spectacle of a high-spirited and gifted woman, at the worst but a victim of enthusiasm, badgered by the court and by the ministers, whose dominant order she had attacked. Hutchinson's Hist. of Mass. Bay, ii, appendix. Cotton, with more than his usual courage, stood her defender. The tough-fibered Hugh Peter, who made himself conspicuous in several ways, took it on him to rebuke Cotton for saying a word in defense of the accused. 121 Endecott and Hugh Peter, mates well matched, browbeat the witnesses who appeared in Mrs. Hutchinson's behalf, and Dudley, the conscientious advocate of persecution, was rude and overbearing. Winthrop acted as chief inquisitor, the narrow sincerity and superstition of his nature obscuring the nobler qualities of the man.
Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself adroitly at first, refusing to be trapped into self-condemnation. But her natural part was that of an outspoken agitator, and her religious exaltation had been increased, doubtless, by persecution, for combativeness is a stimulant even to zeal. On the second day she threw away "the fear of man," and declared that she had an inward assurance of her deliverance, adding that the General Court would suffer disaster. For this prophesying she was promptly condemned. Cotton had prophesied notably on one occasion, Wilson, his colleague, was given to rhyming prophecies, and Hooker had made a solemn prediction while in Holland. In this very year the plan of the Pequot campaign had been radically changed in compliance with a revelation vouchsafed to the chaplain, Stone. But these were ministers, and never was the ministerial office so reverenced as by the Puritans, who professed to strip it of every outward attribute of priestliness. Above all, for a woman to teach and to have revelations was to stand the world on its head. "We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex," etc., said Winthrop severely to Mrs. Hutchinson during the trial. Mrs. Hutchinson is excommunicated. She was sentenced to banishment, but reprieved, that the church might deal with her. On the persuasion of Cotton and others, Mrs. Hutchinson wrote a recantation apologizing for her assumption to have revelations, and retracting certain opinions of which she had been accused. But she added that she had never intended to teach or to hold these opinions. 122 For this falsehood, as it was deemed, she was summarily excommunicated. Yet nothing seems more probable than that her hyperbolic utterances under excitement had not stood for dogmatic opinions. Rise, Reign, Ruine, etc., and Winthrop's Journal, i, 309, 310. Under Cotton's fine-spun system of church government a member could not be excommunicated except by unanimous consent. Many of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends were absent from the colony, others had prudently changed sides or stayed away from the meeting. But her sons ventured to speak in her behalf. Cotton at once admonished them. The effect of putting them under admonition was to disfranchise them; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities of the sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the mother was cast out unanimously – a punishment much dreaded among the Puritans, who believed that what was thus bound on earth was bound in heaven. It was a ban that forbade the faithful even to eat with her. But the melancholy under which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at once, and she said as she left the church assembly, "Better to be cast out than to deny Christ."
XXIII
Omens and auguries. Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled on Rhode Island, where they sheltered themselves at first in caves dug in the ground. Here she again attracted attention by the charm of her eloquent teaching, and some came from afar to hear the "she Gamaliel," as her opponents called her. Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been excommunicated by the authority vested in the church, could be accounted for only by attributing her power to sorcery. Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 313, 316; ii, 11, and Short Story of Rise and Reign of Antinomianism. Winthrop sets down the evidence that she was a witch, which consisted in her frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, who sold oil of mandrakes to cure barrenness, and who was known to be familiar with the devil. At length "God stepped in," and by his "casting voice" proved which side was right. Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed Mrs. Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed stillborn child. Winthrop, i, 316. This fact became known when Mrs. Dyer left the church with the excommunicated Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity exhumed after long burial had rendered its traits difficult to distinguish. He examined it personally with little result, but he published in England incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped in once more, and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after she went to Rhode Island, suffered a maternal misfortune of another kind. The wild reports that were circulated regarding this event are not fit to be printed even in a note; the first editor of Winthrop's journal felt obliged to render the words into Latin in order that scholars might read them shamefacedly. Savage's Winthrop, i, 326. But Cotton, who was by this time redeeming himself by a belated zeal against the banished sectaries, repeated the impossible tale, which was far worse than pathological, to men and women, callow youths, young maidens, and innocent children "in the open assembly at Boston on a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to signalize her error in denying inherent righteousness. The governor, who was more cautious, wrote to the physician and got a correct report, from which the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton made a retraction at the next lecture. We are now peering into the abyss of seventeenth-century credulity. Death of Mrs. Hutchinson. Here are a grave ruler and a divine once eminent at the university, and now renowned in England and in America, wallowing in a squalid superstition in comparison with which the divination of a Roman haruspex is dignified.
Having suffered the loss of her husband, and hearing of efforts on the part of Massachusetts to annex Rhode Island, Mrs. Hutchinson removed to the Dutch colony of New Netherland with her family. 123 Here she and all her household except one child were massacred by the Indians. This act of Providence was hailed as a final refutation of her errors, the more striking that the place where she suffered was not far removed from a place called Hell Gate.
XXIV
Results of ecclesiastical government. This famous controversy lets in much light upon the character of the age and the nature of Puritanism. It is one of many incidents that reveal the impracticability of the religious Utopia attempted in New England. The concentration of religious people undoubtedly produced a community free from the kind of disorders that are otherwise inseparable from a pioneer state and that were found abundantly in New Netherland, in Maryland, and in Virginia and on the eastward fishing coast. "These English live soberly," said a Dutch visitor to Hartford in 1639, "drinking but three times at a meal, and when a man drinks to drunkenness they tie him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in Holland." But while some of the good results to be looked for in an exclusively Puritan community were attained, it was at the cost of exaggerating the tendency to debate and fanaticism and developing the severity, the intolerance, and the meddlesome petty tyranny that inheres in an ecclesiastical system of government. During the lifetime of one generation Massachusetts suffered all these, and it is doubtful whether regularity of morals was not purchased at too great a sacrifice of liberty, bodily and spiritual, and of justice. Certainly the student of history views with relief the gradual relaxation that came after the English Restoration and the disappearance from the scene of the latest survivors of the first generation of New England leaders.
XXV
The New Haven colony. During the period of the greatest excitement over the Hutchinson case John Davenport, a noted Puritan minister of London, had been in Massachusetts. Like many other emigrant divines of the time he brought a migrant parish with him seeking a place to settle. Davenport arrived in June, 1637, and took part against the Antinomians in the synod. After examining every place offered them in Massachusetts, he and his friends refused all and resolved to plant a new colony. The people were Londoners and bent on trade, and Massachusetts had no suitable place for their settlement left. The bitterness of the Hutchinson controversy may have had influence in bringing them to this decision, and the preparations of Laud to subject and control Massachusetts perhaps had weight in driving them to seek a remoter settlement. Davenport had ideals of his own, and the earthly paradise he sought to found was not quite Cotton's nor was it Hooker's. He and his followers planted the New Haven colony in 1638. In this little colony church and state were more completely blended than in Massachusetts. The government was by church members only, to the discontent of other residents, and in 1644 New Haven adopted the laws of Moses in all their rigor. The colony was united with Connecticut by royal charter at the Restoration, after which the saints no longer sat upon thrones judging the tribes of Israel.
CONCLUSION
Later English emigrations to New England. The emigration to New England from the mother country was quickened by the troubles that preceded the civil war. In 1638 it reached its greatest height, having been augmented perhaps by agricultural distress. Fourteen ships bound for New England lay in the Thames at one time in the spring of that year. There was alarm at the great quantity of corn required for the emigrants, lest there should not be enough left in London to last till harvest. "Divers clothiers of great trading" resolved to "go suddenly," in which we may see, perhaps, evidence of bad times in the commercial world. Some parishes it was thought would be impoverished. Lord Maynard to Laud, 17 March, 1638, in Sainsbury. Laud was asked to put a stop to the migration; but the archbishop was busy trying to compel the Scots to use the prayer book. Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 319, 320, 322. Most of the lords of the Council were favorable to New England; the customs officers purposely neglected to search for contraband goods, and the ships, twenty in all, got away with or without license, and brought three thousand passengers to Boston. Rushworth, i, Part II, 409, 718. But the tide spent itself about this time, and by 1640 emigration to the New England colonies had entirely ceased. Josselyn's Rarities, 108. About twenty-one thousand two hundred people had been landed in all.
Cavalier emigration to Virginia. The swing of the political pendulum in England that served to check the Puritan exodus gave impetus to a new emigration to Virginia and Maryland. During the ten years and more before 1640 few had gone to that region but bond servants. There were in that year not quite eight thousand people in Virginia. It is the point of time at which the native Virginians began to rear a second generation born on the soil. Petition to House of Lords, 15 Aug., 1648. Royal Hist. MS., Com. Rept., vii, 45. The waning fortunes of the king sent to the colony in the following years a large cavalier emigration, and the average character of the colonists was raised. Better ministers held the Virginia parishes and better order was observed in the courts. Sainsbury, 360. In 1648 four hundred emigrants lay aboard ships bound for Virginia at one time, and in 1651 sixteen hundred royalist prisoners seem to have been sent in one detachment.
Prospective ascendency of the English colonies. By the middle of the seventeenth century the English on the North American continent were in a fair way to predominate all other Europeans. From the rather lawless little fishing villages on the coast of Maine to the rigorous Puritan communes of the New Haven colony that stretched westward to pre-empt, in advance of the Dutch, land on the shores of Long Island Sound, the English held New England. English settlers "seeking larger accommodations" had crossed to Long Island and were even pushing into the Dutch colony. The whole Chesapeake region was securely English. Already there were Virginians about to break into the Carolina country lying wild between Virginia and the Spanish colony in Florida. The French and the Dutch and the Spaniards excelled the English in far-reaching explorations and adventurous fur-trading. But the English had proved their superior aptitude for planting compact agricultural communities. A sedentary and farming population where the supply of land is not limited reaches the highest rate of natural increase. At a later time, Franklin estimated that the population of the colonies doubled every twenty-five years without including immigrants. The compactness of English settlement and the prolific increase of English people decided the fate of North America. The rather thin shell of Dutch occupation was already, by the middle of the seventeenth century, feeling the pressure under stress of which it was soon to give way. A century later collision with the populous and ever-multiplying English settlements brought about the collapse of the expanded bubble of New France.