USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 25
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
woman, to whose person and conduct there attaches no stain. She first became known for her kind and helpful services, friendly and medical, to her own sex in their needs. She is described as a woman of " nimble wit" and a high spirit, gifted in argument and ready speech. She was inquisitive and critical, -perhaps censorions. But her most alarming quality was that she " vented her revelations ; " i. e., in a form of prophecy sometimes threatening and denunciatory gave utterance to forebodings of judgment and disaster to come upon the Colony, as revealed to her by special divine communications. While no claim to such privileged illumination could for a moment stand with the Puritans as even possible of proof, the assertion of it was of the very essence of fanaticism. Yet the weak and credulous might be ensnared by it, and then there was no setting limit or restraint to the ruin and woe which might come upon them.
Having made herself trusted and esteemed by many of the principal women of the town, Mrs. Hutchinson drew groups of them around her to discuss the sermons delivered by the elders.1 It soon appeared that by her judgment most of these preached a " covenant of works." The theme of earnest debate, and the vehicle which it found in tongues not always discreet or charitable, soon made itself a power outside of the women's meetings. The spark was set to inflammable materials. The whole community was in a fever of mutual distrust, jealousy, and dread of impending catastrophe. Had Boston at the time been the only local settlement in the colony, or isolated from connection through the Court with others, it seems as if its goodly birth and hope would have been darkly and dismally succeeded by a most gloomy blight and extinction. It was saved from absolute ruin by . its neighbor settlements, which had not been so stirred by the matter of strife. As the dealings of the Court and the Church with Mrs. Hutchinson and her party became more and more embittered and stern, it was found that she had a very strong following. The two associate elders Cotton and Wilson, and the two Governors, Winthrop and Vane, cach respectively took dif- ferent sides in the contest. Many of the principal inhabitants of Boston warmly espoused the views of Mrs. Hutchinson.2 As the dispute came to
1 [Mrs. Hutchinson lived at, or rather her husband's lot formed, the corner of the pres- ent Washington and School streets, where the "Old Corner Book-store " stands, nearly oppo- site Governor Winthrop's house, which was on the other side of Washington Street. William Aspinwall, one of her adherents, was a near neighbor, and lived on Washington Street, just south of School Street, his land extending back to the Common. Snow, Boston, p. HIS. - ED.]
2 [Among them was William Coddington,
W Coddington
who had come over with Winthrop, and for some years had been a prominent resident and merchant of Boston. 1Ie is said to have built the first brick house erected in the town. He was dropped from the government when Win- throp was elected over Vane in their memorable contest, but the freemen immediately returned him as a Deputy. In April, 1638, he, with others, removed to the island of Aquidneck, and founded the State of Rhode Island. A portrait of him hangs in the Council Chamber at Newport, and is engraved in Bryant and Gay's United States, ii. 44. For Coddington's origin, see N. E. Ilist. and Gencat. Reg., January, 1874. P. 13. Ile was from Lincolnshire, and the Ply- mouth Dr. Fuller, in his letter to Bradford, calls him a " Boston man," -as Dr. Haven explains in his chapter. - ED.]
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
the knowledge of the " common sort of people," it gained new elements of fear and passion, partly because there were real elements of lawlessness involved in it, and for the rest because so many who were heated by the strife had really no intelligent idea of the terms and significance of the controversy, so that they could distinguish between its practical and its panic qualities.
The sentence against Mrs. Hutchinson stands thus in the Court record, that, " being convented for traducing the ministers and their ministry in this country, she declared voluntarily her revelations for her ground, and that she should be delivered and the Court ruined with their posterity ; and there- upon was banished," &c. The Church excommunicated her for " having impudently persisted in untruth." Two of her followers were both dis- franchised and fined, eight disfranchised, two fined, and three banished. Seventy-six inhabitants of Boston, in sympathy with her, were disarmed.1 The reason given by the Court for this last sentence of disarming was, - " as there is just cause of suspicion that they, as others in Germany, in former times, may, upon some revelation, make some sudden irruption upon those that differ from them in judgment."
The special and distinguishing feature in the matter of this Antinomian controversy as presented by Mrs. Hutchinson, her friends and opponents, was that the civil and ecclesiastical penalties of Puritanism were inflicted in their full severity upon members of their own community ; most of them also in full church covenant. Other of the sufferers by the Puritan dis- cipline were for the most part strangers and intruders, who had neither part nor lot here, and whose presence and disturbing influence were regarded as simply acts of effrontery and wanton interference with what did not con- cern them. The Antinomians, so called, had been in kindly neighborly relations, fellow-believers, under the freeman's oath to the Commonwealth, and bound with them in " the fellowship of the saints." The more harrowing and distressing, therefore, was the antagonism that rose up between them. We apply the terms " intolerance and persecution" to the party which car-
1 [The lists of the disarmed and of those who recanted, as shown by the enu- meration in Ellis's Anne Hutchinson and in Drake's Boston, embrace some of the leading townsmen, a few of whom we can note with interest in their own autographs. Underhill was the same who had done good
William Ospinawatts
Fr: Raynfort
service in the Pequot war. Savage was the progenitor of the late James Savage, the editor
Thomas Saway LO Jo Iso-fil
of Winthrop, and we shall read more of him in the chapter on Philip's war. Raynsford was an elder of the church and the head of a respect- able family, and an island in the harbor still preserves in its name the record of his former ownership. Aspinwall is a name not yet died out among us. Cf. Savage, Genealogical Dic- tionary. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
ried with it the balance of power. But the magistrates and the elders would not have regarded those terms as fitly characterizing their measures. And it might be questioned which party was the more intolerant; for certainly neither of them was tolerant. It was the dread of those " revelations " from which there was no telling what might come that overbore the conflict of opinions. Though Mrs. Hutchinson's ultimate fate in another colony - fall- ing with all her family save one child in an Indian massacre - was most deplorable, it is pleasant to know that most of those who suffered with her expressed their regret and penitence and were restored.
In defending the order of the Court in 1637, to the effect that " nonc should be allowed to inhabite here but by permission of the Magistrates," and in thus vindicating the banishment of the Antinomians, Winthrop dis- tinctly fell back upon what he believed the proprietary right conferred by the Charter, previously defined. The incorporators, he urged, had secured a common interest in land and goods and in means for securing their own welfare; and without their full consent no other person could claim to share in their privileges. The welfare of the whole could not be hazarded for the advantage of any individuals. No one, without permission of the proprietors, could come on their soil, take land, or intermeddle with their affairs. It followed, of course, that the proprietors were free, and indeed were bound to keep out and to expel from their society any persons who would be harm- ful or ruinous to them. "A Commonwealth," he added, " is a great family," and as such is not bound to entertain all comers, nor to receive unwelcome strangers. To this defence Sir Henry Vane wrote a strong and adroitly argued answer, but Winthrop backed his former plea with a rejoinder. By the expansion and warrant of the liberal views which we have reached, through the failure of all restrictive measures for controlling or suppressing perfect religious liberty, we should, of course, assign to Vane the nobler argument. But Winthrop had in view the security of an imperilled State, rather than restraints on conscience.1
1 [The original authorities of this contro- versy are these : Winthrop's New England, with Mr. Savage's appendix of papers ; an anonymous book, issued in 1644 in London, as Antinomiaus and Familists, and the same year reissued from the same type, but with the changed title of A short story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines that infected the Churches of New England ; and another edition, the type new set, was issued the same year. The order of these issues and the purpose of the changes has occa- sioned some diversity of opinion, and the curi- ous controversy is traced in the Bulletin of the Harvard College Library, No. 11, p. 287. The Rev. Thomas Weld, of Roxbury, furnished a preface to it, and this has led Savage and others to assign the authorship of it to him ; but Mr. Deane gives reasons and proofs for supposing Winthrop to have been the main writer of it, as
growing out of his connection with the synod for confuting the heresy, accounts of which are found in Winthrop's New England, i. 237; Cotton's Way Cleared, &c. p. 39; Johnson's Wonder- working Providence; Mather's Magnalia, vii. ch. iii., &c. The proceedings of the General Court, which pronounced banishment upon Mrs. IHutchinson and Wheelwright, are given in Win- throp, i. 248, and in the Records of Mass. i. 207.
John Tohel: wright
Contemporary documents are given in Hutchin- son's Collection of Papers, 1769, reprinted by the Prince Society, 1865. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's trial, the Short Story account is not so full as that in Hutchinson's Massachusetts Bay, Appen- dix. The Fast Day sermon of Wheelwright, for which he was adjudged guilty of sedition, is
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
The next class of persons, in the character of heretics or " troublers of their peace," to receive grievous treatment from the magistrates of the Pu- ritan Commonwealth, is represented among us now by the denomination of the Baptists, who charge themselves with the grateful obligation of redeem- ing the memory of the victims from reproach, while exposing the wrong and cruelty visited upon them. Here, again, we must make large allowance for the ill associations connected with names once borne by persons of offensive antecedents in previous years and in other lands, and for the dread of a repetition here of deplorable experiences the tale of which was to the Boston Puritans distressing and horrifying. "Anabaptists " is the word used in our records to define this class of victims. The prefix Ana to the name, with only which we are familiar, designates those who had been baptized anew, or a second time. The first who bore the name having been baptized as in- fants, and having come to regard the rite at that time as unscriptural, fol- lowed the rule of their conscience in seeking its benefit at the time of their " conversion," in mature years, as a token of their Christian profession. Of course this repetition of the rite was a reflection upon the way of those who practised infant baptism. The proceedings against the innovators here were instituted just about the time when our rulers were most perplexed and dismayed by the experience already referred to, namely, the alarming in- crease in the number of persons growing up in the colony as unbaptized, because their parents were not members of a church. One might have supposed that the principles of the new heretics would have furnished in some sort a welcome relief under that sad perplexity presented by the growth of a heathen element in the community. But "Anabaptism " was a word which brought with it portentous associations of fanaticism, licentious- ness, and utter lawlessness and anarchy to the Puritans. Among the masses
in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., August, 1866, with a note by Mr. Deane, and also in the Historical Magazine, April, 1867, these following an ancient MS. in the Historical Society's cabinet. An early transcript is preserved among the Hutch- inson papers at the State House, and this is followed in C. H. Bell's John Wheelwright, his Writings, &c., published by the Prince Society in 1876; and in the memoir attached Mr. Bell follows the controversy, and ascribes to Wheel- wright a reply to the "Short Story," which was entitled Mercurius Americanus, London, 1645, which is reprinted by Bell from the Harvard Col- lege copy. Dr. Ellis does not ascribe this book to Wheelwright, and Savage and Felt think the "John Wheelwright, junior," of the title to mean a son of the author of the Fast-Day ser- mon. There was a remonstrance of members of the Boston Church against Wheelwright's sen- tence, and this is given in Dr. Ellis's Life of Anne Hutchinson, printed in Sparks's series of biog- raphies, which gives one of the best of the later accounts of the controversy. Of other contem- porary books bearing on the matter, there may
be named : Samuel Groom's Glass for the People of New England, 1676 (cf. G. HI. Moore in Hist. Mag. xiii. 28) ; Ward's Simple Cobler of Agawam (reprinted in Force's Tracts, iii., and edited, 1843, separately, by D. l'ulsifer) ; Thomas Shep- ard's Autobiography, first printed 1832, also in Young's Chronicles of Mass., and used by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia, iii. ch. v. Among the later authorities may be named, additionally, Hubbard's New England ; Neal's New England, 1720; C. Chauncy's Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion, 1743; Backus's New England, 1777; Dawson's Life and Times of Anne Hutch- inson : Anderson's MMemorable Women of Puritan Times : C. W. Upham's Life of Sir Henry Vane ; Peleg W. Chandler's American Criminal Trials, i., for the legal aspects ; Lunt's Two Discourses at Quincy, 1839; John A. Vinton's defence of the prosecution in Congregational Quarterly, April, July, October, 1873; and the general histories of Bancroft, Grahame, Palfrey, Barry, &c. Dr. Albro covers the controversy in his Life of Thomas Shepard, prefixed to Shepard's Works, 1853, ch. viii. - ED.]
VOL. I. - 23.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
of pamphlets and tractates dealing with the wild sectaries with which the time was so rife - mentioned on a previous page - was one little volume, copies of which we may be sure had found their way here. Of one of these now before me I transcribe the title: The Dippers dipt, or, The Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Earcs, &c .: The famous History of the frantick Anabaptists, their wild Preachings and Practices in Germany, &c. By Daniel Featley, D.D. London ; 1651. With special and minute detail in its repulsive narration it tells of the frantic and delirious excitements wrought among the peasants by Thomas Muncer, the " Prophet John," of Leyden and other fanatics, - " an illiterate, sottish, lying, and blasphemons sect, falsely pretending to divine Visions and Revelations: .. . also an impure and carnall Sect, a cruell and bloudy Sect, a prophane and a sacrilegious Sect, &c." Nor does the fiery tractate fail to give illustrations of each of these epithets.
This is a specimen of the numerous volumes whose now time-stained paper was fresh and white as read by the Boston Puritans, and when in- stead of lifeless ashes the pages glowed with fire. The word " Anabap- tists," to those who put it into our Court records, was one to them thus weighted with dread and dismay and horror. Happily they had no answer- ing experience of the sort even from the most heated of the zealots with whom they dealt under that name. Cotton Mather wrote, " many of the first settlers in Massachusetts were Baptists, and they were as holy, and watchful, and fruitful and heavenly a people as any perhaps in the world." There was no complaint, no interference with any individuals espousing the Baptist principles, until they denounced the doctrine and practice of Infant Baptism, threatened divisions in the churches, and set up separate conventi- cles. Dunster, the President of the College, was proceeded with and dis- placed only because of an offensive obtrusion of his principles. The Court Record, under date of May, 1646, states that at the County Court at Salem, the previous year, William Witter of Lynn was presented by the grand jury for saying " that they who stayed whiles a child is baptised doe worshipp the devil." Nor would he atone for this grievous affront. It is alleged that Witter was a member of the Baptist Church at Newport, though living at what is now Swampscott, and that being infirm and having sought the sympathy of his brethren, two of them, Holmes and Crandall, with the Pas- tor, Clarke, had come to pay John Clarka from the prison This 1. 6:59 him a religious visit, in 1651. Arriving on Saturday even- ing, they held a separate relig- ious service in Witter's house on Sunday, inviting in a few neighbors. Witter was then under censure of the Court for having called infant baptism " a badge of the whore." Boston had had previous trouble with these visitors. Holmes was " excommunicate," and they came into the jurisdiction at their own
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
peril, adding to their offence by holding a separate conventicle. The in- truders were arrested, and being compelled against their will to attend the public meeting in the afternoon, they behaved unseemly. They contrived to hold another meeting at Witter's the next day. The Court senteneed the offenders to pay respectively a fine of five, twenty, and in the case of Holmes, thirty pounds, " or to be well whipped." The fines of Crandall and Clarke were paid, against their wishes, by friends. Holmes, not allow- ing this in his own case, was cruelly whipped. He had previously been in trouble in Plymouth, and was regarded as a nuisance herc. The of- fences charged on the records of the Court against Clarke, Crandall, and Holmes are as follows: for being " at a Private Meeting at Lin, upon the Lord's day, exercising among themselves ; ... for offensively disturbing the peace of the Congregation at their coming into the Publique Meeting,"- which, however, they were forced to attend; " for saying and manifesting that the church of Lin was not constituted according to the order of the Lord," &c. There was also a "suspition of having their hands in the re- baptising of one, or more, among us."
So far from regarding themselves as "persecutors " in thus dealing with Baptists, our authorities maintained that they were but simply and rightfully defending their own most precious religious principles and institutions from reproach and contempt by contumelious strangers. In 1644 they had by a law sentenced to banishment all persons who " shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptising of infants, or go about secretly to seduce others from the approbation or use thercof, or shall purposely depart the congre- gation at the administration of the ordinance, or shall deny the ordinance of magistracy, &c." There had been an carnest " Petition and Remonstrance " against this law; but it stood in force. The consequence was that if any person in a congregation flouted at the ordinance of infant-baptism, or walked out when it was to be observed, he was proceeded against, and if under cove- nant might be excommunicated. And then, if those who had been cxcom- municated set up a " conventicle " of their own, they committed another grievous trespass: It is a sad story. Most pure and excellent and otherwise inoffensive persons were the sufferers, and generally patient oncs. But the struggle was a brief onc. The Baptists conquered in it, and came to equal esteem and love with their brethren. Their fidelity was one of the needful and effective influences in reducing the equally needful but ineffective in- tolerance of the Puritan Commonwealth.
Of the then new outburst of heresy exemplified by those who " in con- tempt were called Quakers " the magistrates and elders of Massachusetts had heard, to their dread and horror, as causing an "intense stir" in England, nearly ten years before any one of them appeared in this colony. To the Puritan exiles their speech and behavior marked them as fanatics of the wildest, most reckless, and pernicious sort. They, too, had " illuminations," " inspirations," and " revelations," the impulses and directions of which they implicitly followed ; and, what to the Puritan turned even their sweetest and
ISO
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
most edifying rhapsodies into " ravings and blasphemies," they assigned to the "impellings of the spirit" in them an authority above that of "the written Word." It will always be a stumbling-block to the unskilled student of our history that the term " Quaker," borne for the last two centuries on this continent, as elsewhere, by a fellowship of men and women eminent for the quietude and loveliness of their graces and virtues, should have come into our local annals first as designating the offenders against charity, modera- tion, justice, and decency who were dealt with here from 1656 to six years onward. The Boston magistrates, being well-informed about the notions and doings of the "Ranters " in the mother country, dreaded a visit from them with as much dismay as that which apprehended the first coming hither of the cholera. There were many letters of warning received here, like one addressed two years before the first of the sect reached Boston to President Dunster of the College, containing such sentences as these: " A sect called Quakers doe much increase rayleing much att the ministry and refuseing to sho any reverence to magestrates. We hope they wilbe con- founded and ashamed off their Tenetts; butt I could desire thatt some stricter course were taken than is."1 Travelling from place to place, the widest journeyings, even beyond the limits of Christendom, "under the leadings of the Lord," with special illumination as to the testimonies they should bear, was the mission of these enthusiasts. As they swayed and shivered under the pent fires of their inspiration, they received in contumely the name of "Quakers." The prophet trembling from head to foot under his own burden of spirit often acted as a battery on those who listened to and looked on him. It can hardly be considered strange that the Puritan folk, in- disposed to take the word of these Quakers as to their special illumination and inspiration in uttering divine rebukes and warnings, regarded them simply as nuisances and firebrands. Their objurgatory denunciation of magistrates and ministers ; their bitter revilings; their contempt of preaching and ordi- nances; their dismal prophesying of awful divine judgments to come upon the colony in the black pox, in pestilences and all dreaded calamities ; and their unseemly and indecent behavior, designed to have a symbolic mean- ing, -exasperated those whom they denounced, beyond the limits of pa- tient endurance. Just a fortnight before the first two Quakers arrived in the Bay a Fast Day had been observed in the colony, in dread of them among other troubles.
They were all of them of low rank, of mean breeding, and illiterate. A magistrate, in rebuking one of them, told him that if he was under " inspir- ation " he ought at least to use good grammar, " for Balaam's ass did that." Yet we may wonder whether the thought ever occurred to one of the Puri- tans, stung and goaded by the objurgations and indecency of the Quakers, that the wildest of them said nothing and did nothing for which he had not the full warrant and example - in denunciatory speech and in symbolic meaning of the aet of throwing off clothing and smearing the person - of
1 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii. 195.
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THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.
one or another of the Old Testament Prophets. Of these heaven-prompted and heaven-guided rebukers of sin and prophets of righteousness the Pur- itan read in his Bible with awe-stricken reverence. But a strict and exact imitation of them, in testimony and in uttering the " Burden of the Lord," roused the Puritan to anger and scorn. And why should it not have done so? The Puritans sincerely believed that they had come here under Divine guid- ance by a holy covenant to plant a city of God in the wilderness. The first generation of their seed was growing up under stern discipline. It was hardly reasonable to ask them to believe also that God was following them up to thwart and overwhelm them by sending in among them a company of erratic prophets, to revile them with all manner of invectives and reproaches against magistrates and churches, and with awful denunciations of judgments and catastrophes. This dread experience would be a repetition to them of what they read in the Gospel narrative, that "Jesus was led up by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be put to trial by the Evil Spirit." Nor was it of any use to quote Scripture to the Quakers, or to remind them of the Master's direction to those whom he sent on his work, " that if they were persecuted in one place they should flee to another." This was the very thing the Quakers would not do. They insisted upon being persecuted by staying where they knew they would be persecuted, and by returning over and over again if forcibly driven out. The Puritan being the extremest literalist in the interpretation of the Bible, with no skill or fancy in catching from it the gleams and enlargings of high spiritual insight, through which, not infre- quently, an illiterate Quaker would soar into realms of the loftiest and sere- nest truth, would turn away his car from listening to what to him was blas- phemy. The Quaker, in his turn, was stiffened into reproach and daring defiance, by which he made himself an equally tormenting and damaging foe as he would have been if the energy and spite which he threw into his words had gone into his muscles and fists as a pugilist. Perhaps an ordinary reader of the minute details of the antagonism between our original Puritan- ism and Quakerism would find himself alternating between an amused feel- ing over the ludicrous incidents in the conflict, and pangs of profound regret over the wrong and passion which it involved. The issue presented seemed to have a resemblance to the mechanical problem of what will be the effect if an irresistible body strikes an immovable body. The Quakers, either of set purpose, or by the consistent working out of the mission to which they believed themselves divinely called, planted themselves on the resolve that, through whatever penalties of punishment, pain or death, the faithful dis- charge of their duty should lead them, they would break down the intolerant spirit of Puritanism. Not till they had done that would they keep silence from prophesying, or care much about selecting soft and gentle terms of utterance, or for staidness and inoffensiveness of demeanor. Candor will hardly go wide astray in judgment, if, using the light of those times to see by, and having in view the actual circumstances and the relations of parties, the blame and censure for what was done be equally apportioned between
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