History is usually his story, and that is certainly the case with our collective memory of Puritan New England, a society that puts the “P” in patriarchy. So, as penance for knowing so little about the colonial women in the Lettin/Lattin saga, let’s devote a few pages to Anne Hutchinson — the fiery Boston midwife, pioneering prophetess and convicted heretic.
Like Richard Lettin, Hutchinson left England in the 1630s and set sail for the fledging Massachusetts Bay Colony. Both Richard and Anne were soon chased out of the colony by their Puritan overlords. And both sought shelter in southern New England, only to be banished again, forced to finally find refuge in Dutch-controlled territory shortly before their deaths.
Anne Hutchinson was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1591. Her father, Francis Marbury, was an Anglican clergyman and Puritan reformer whose clashes with church authorities and the crown led to his own heresy trial and imprisonment. In 1612, a year after her father died, Anne married a wealthy cloth merchant named Will Hutchinson.
Like Richard Lettin and his first wife in England, Anne and Will lost two of their children before coming to America. For the Hutchinsons, it was Susan, sixteen, and Elizabeth, eight, who died in a bubonic plague outbreak in 1630.
In 1634, four years before Richard Lettin set sail, Anne and Will Hutchinson came to the colonies with their eleven surviving children. The large family settled in Boston, building a large house across the street from the powerful governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, with whom Anne Hutchinson would soon clash.
Anne’s role as an experienced midwife — one of the few trades open to women — added to her prestige in Puritan New England. Many mothers died in childbirth, and only half of the children born in the colonies lived to see the age of five, so having Hutchinson at one’s side could literally be a matter of life or death.
Her confrontation with Winthrop began when growing numbers of women — and then some men — started attending religious meetings in the Hutchinson home, where Anne would open up her Bible to a random page and offer her own interpretation of the word of God. Word soon got out that Hutchinson’s message was livelier and more inspiring than the sermons of the undereducated male ministers preaching from the colony’s official pulpits. There were even reports that this uppity woman was mocking the male “black coats.”
Citing New Testament verses admonishing women to leave the preaching to men and remain subservient to their husbands, Winthrop condemned her meetings as “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” But it was not just Hutchinson’s gender that made her dangerous. It was the nature of her prophesy and her theology.
At issue in these early Puritan disputes was the all-important question of how believers could achieve eternal salvation. Was it through “grace” or “works?” Would they be united with God and Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven because of some innate “indwelling of the spirit,” as Hutchinson taught. Or, as Winthrop preached, were one’s chances of salvation measured by how they lived their lives, by how well individual Puritans adhered to the colony’s strict moral codes and social roles.
To Hutchinson, the Puritan ethic of constantly striving to show one was in God’s good graces revealed exactly the opposite — that one does not have that divine blessing. Hutchinson advised against seeking “comfort in duties.” To Winthrop, quietly waiting for divine revelation would “quench all endeavor.”
But the colonial governor had special condemnation for Hutchinson’s view that she herself had some special ability to peer into the souls of men. Indeed, there seems to be some truth to the charge that Hutchinson thought of herself as someone with the rare ability to “infallibly know the election of others.”
Orthodox theologians in Puritan New England found Hutchison guilty of “antinomianism,” which literally means “against or opposed to law.” They saw this heretical view as the first step toward religious anarchy and licentiousness.
In her trial, and in later commentaries by Winthrop and other Puritan leaders, Hutchinson was — falsely, it appears — accused of witchcraft, sexual promiscuity and falling into the hands of Satan. But she admitted that she did have the power of “immediate revelation,” to divine the will of God apart from the mediating influences of scripture or a male minister guiding her toward the truth. She claimed that she, like the ancient prophets, had a direct line to the Almighty “by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.”
Today, we can view Hutchison as a pioneering female theologian and someone who opened the door to the “spiritual but not religious” movement, a religion based more on personal spiritual experience than dogma, doctrine or denominationalism.
Winthrop and the male Puritan elders “saw God in the Law and in the Word, their root metaphors focused on maintaining the covenant and on the idea of the commonwealth as a family.” As a woman, Hutchinson “saw God in the intimate relationship with Christ, the indwelling spirit…(with) a consistent emphasis on intimacy, inspiration, and moments of light.”
In her own time, Hutchinson was accused of being an agent of one of the most despised sects of the sixteenth century, the “Family of Love” led by the Dutch spiritualist Hendrik Niclaes. This sect was accused of both promoting free love and establishing a community of women with power over men.
In her trial, Hutchinson was questioned by the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, who was known as one of the “stiffer” Puritans and was among those who founded the settlement at Concord, where my ancestor Richard Lettin would try to establish himself in just a few years.
“I desire to know,” Bulkeley said, “of Mistress Hutchinson whether you hold that foul, gross, filthy, and abominable opinion, held by the Familists, of the community of women.”
Hutchinson denied that she was a secret agent of the dreaded Family of Love, but it was a rumor she could not shake — not unlike accusing someone of being a Communist during the McCarthy era.
Like Niclaes, Anne Hutchinson was seen as “a most dangerous spirit, and likely with her fluent tongue and forwardness in expression to seduce and draw away many — especially simple women of her own sex.”
Hutchinson and her followers were dangerous, one scholar writes, because they “rejected the colonists’ view of themselves as a chosen people, bound by covenant to fulfill God’s work in the New World, and offered in its place the notion of a mystical community of the elect.”
One of Anne Hutchinson’s descendants, the writer Eve LaPlante, said her ancestor had “a pioneering sense of her self and her destiny, which is extraordinary in a woman of the seventeenth century.” In her biography, American Jezebel, LaPlante see Hutchinson as presaging both the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the New England Transcendentalists.
Perhaps the most vicious attacks on Hutchinson were from those critics who cited her valuable work as a healer, herbalist and midwife as evidence of her ties to Satan. Her presence at the stillbirth of a frighteningly deformed baby and her own miscarriage late in life were cited as evidence that she was in cahoots with the Devil, that she being punished by God. Or as Governor Winthrop so cruelly put it, “she had vented misshaped opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.”
In the decades leading up to the infamous Salem witch trials of 1690, more than a hundred colonists were accused or convicted of witchcraft.
“Witches were linked to licentiousness and female sexuality,” writes LaPlante. “Hunting witches reaffirmed the orthodox male authority whenever it was questioned, as by an Anne Hutchinson. Healers and fortune-tellers were often accused because of their social power. Women, especially those over age forty, were singled out and sanctioned disproportionally.”
In separate proceedings in 1637, Hutchinson was convicted of heresy, banished and excommunicated from the Church of Boston. In 1638, the same year Richard Lettin sailed to Boston, the Hutchinsons and thirty other families who voluntarily accompanied her into exile made their way down to the new settlement of Rhode Island.
Eighteen men, including representatives of the Hutchinson clan and the Rev. Roger Williams, got a toehold in what is now Rhode Island by purchasing the island of Aquidneck from the Narragansett Indians for twenty hoes, ten coats and a large stash of wampum beads.
One of the first written rules laid down by the Rhode Islanders was a sentence that 150 years later would form the basis for the freedom of religion clause in the U.S. Constitution. “No person within said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise [ways] molested, punished, disquieted or called into question on matters of religion — as long as he keeps the peace.”
Rhode Island became a haven for some of the most despised Protestant sects of the sixteenth century — including Anabaptists and Quakers. Roger Williams briefly identified with the Anabaptists before declaring himself in 1639 to be a “Seeker,” making him another forebearer of the Skeptical Universalism.
Despite the rules to protect religious dissent, the Aquidneck Island settlers and those in the nearby Providence Plantation immediately resumed the theological infighting that was endemic among these ever-splintering Protestant sects.
Will Hutchinson, elected to serve as Rhode Island’s first governor, died in 1642. Anne, who was still being hounded from afar by the Boston Puritans, decided to leave the colonies under English control and moved with her younger children to New Amsterdam, the Dutch territory that would later be taken over by the English and re-named “New York.”
Anne’s family started a farm in what is now known as Pelham Bay. Her farm was on the eastern end of the Long Island Sound, not far from the Lattingtown settlement my ancestors, Richard and his son Josiah, would establish a decade later.
Hutchinson arrived in what is now the northwestern edge of New York City in 1642, just sixteen years after an agent for the Dutch West India Company bought the isle of Manhattan for beads and trinkets worth an estimated twenty-four dollars. In twenty-two years the Dutch would surrender New Amsterdam to the English.
In the two years before Hutchinson arrived at Pelham Bay, the Dutch had been battling with various Indian tribes. There had been disputes over tributes that were supposed to be paid by the Indians. Dutch cattle damaged the natives’ cornfields, and the Indians responded by seizing and eating the colonists’ livestock. In retaliation, hundreds of Indians were slaughtered in village massacres, and scores of settlers were then killed in Indian raids.
In 1643, the Hutchinson’s Dutch neighbors warned them that the Siwanoy tribe was on the rampage, but Anne ignored their advice to heavily arm themselves or leave their farm. Hutchinson, who had opposed the colonial decision to declare war on the Pequot Indians, had always had good relations with the native tribes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
But the Siwanoy, perhaps not realizing that they were invading an English farm rather than a Dutch settlement, descended on the Pelham Bay property, scalping Anne and her six children and burning down their house. That July raid followed a February attack ordered by the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Willem Kieft, on a group of Siwanoy camping on Manhattan island. Eighty men, women and children were killed in that surprise massacre.
Careful readers of the previous chapter may recall that Richard Lettin’s business partner, Richard Ogden, had built a meeting house for Kieft that same year. They acquired properties on Long Island in the 1650s, when Ogden built the Richard Latting House.
Despite their similar pilgrimages across New England and into New Amsterdam, it’s unlikely that Richard Lettin ever crossed paths with Anne Hutchinson. Richard arrived in Boston the same year that Anne was banished, and she died in 1643, the same year that Richard and “the Goodwife Lettin” were trying to establish themselves and their young family in Concord.
But we’ve included Anne’s story to give some context to my ancestor’s opening chapter in the American colonies, especially since we know next to nothing about my eighth great-grandmother. Her name may or may not have been “Christian,” but she was the woman who gave birth to Josiah and Thomas, the founders of the Lattin/Latting family in the New World.