American Jezebel Read Free Page A

others,” including “some of the magistrates, some gentlemen, some scholars and men of learning, some burgesses of our General Court, some of our captains and soldiers, some chief men in towns, and some eminent for religion, parts, and wit.” Anne Hutchinson had “stepped out of [her] place,” in the succinct phrase of the Reverend Hugh Peter, of Salem—she “had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.”
    It was painfully clear to Governor Winthrop, who had an excellent view of her comings and goings from his house directly across the road from hers in Boston, that Anne Hutchinson possessed the strongest constituency of any leader in the colony. She was, he confided in hisjournal, “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and an active spirit, and a very voluble tongue.” Her name was absent (on account of her sex) from every offensive political act and document, he observed, but she was behind them all. “More bold than a man,” she was Virgil’s dux foemina facti, “the woman leading all the action”—the breeder and nourisher of all the county’s distempers, the sower of political and religious discord. Before Mistress Hutchinson had arrived in America, in the fall of 1634, all was sweetness and light, he recalled. Now that she was here, all was chaos.
    Through a side door of the meetinghouse, the forty magistrates of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts filed into the dimly lit room. This court of no appeal, the only court available to the fledgling colony’s roughly seven thousand settlers, comprised the governor, a deputy governor, seven of their assistants (chosen by the freemen to serve as the colony’s board of directors), and thirty-one deputies, prominent freemen chosen by the colony’s fourteen towns (forerunners to the state’s legislators). The judges that day included the assistant Simon Bradstreet, of Cambridge, thirty-three, who as colonial secretary was expected to take notes; Salem’s John Endicott, the righteous, forty-nine-year-old former soldier who had recently tried to pass a law forcing all women to wear veils, as in the Old Testament; and Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, who at sixty-one was the oldest judge.
    Eight ministers in black robes also joined the procession, not to judge the defendant but to give testimony, as witnesses. Colonial ministers, despite their vast public power, were not allowed to hold public office, a distinction that kept Massachusetts from being a theocracy. These divines included the Reverend Zechariah Symmes, with whom Anne had sparred over theological matters during the grueling trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and John Wilson, Boston’s senior pastor, who had recently called Anne out of that meetinghouse on account of her heresies. In England these Puritans had been hounded by church authorities, silenced, and in a few cases imprisoned, but here in Massachusetts they ran the state church. Still, most had come reluctantly to this land where, an anonymous female colonist admitted, “the air is sharp, the rocks many, the trees innumerable, the grass little, the winter cold, the summer hot, the gnats in summer biting, the wolves atmidnight howling.” Back in 1629, while planning their first trip here, the founders had put ministers first on their long list of “supplies.”
    Just that morning, there had been a last-minute change in the roster of men arrayed before Anne Hutchinson. Governor Winthrop had hastily appointed two new judges to replace three who had expressed support for Mistress Hutchinson. Notwithstanding the change, this group of ministers and magistrates possessed the “highest concentration” in the colony of wealth, intelligence, and power.
    To a man, they wore greatcoats, leather gloves, and hats against the cold, in addition to their standard loose white linen shirts, knickers, and thick stockings tied with cloth garters. All had leather shoes, and most