Have We Returned to Colonial Times?
I have been thinking this week of Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan woman who stood trial in 1637 for troubling the commonwealth of New England.1
Hutchinson was a strong woman, a natural leader who refused to bow to the patriarchal dictates of her time. Her conviction at the Court of Newton on what we might now regard as specious charges, and her subsequent banishment from the community, conjures the specter of John Winthrop, the Governor, also presiding as Judge and quoting Scripture as evidence of Hutchinson’s crimes.
Hutchinson’s story speaks to many present-day concerns, but the thing that has been nagging me is the slip that sealed her fate: a belief that God spoke to her through an “immediate revelation” – “by the voice of his own spirit to [her] soul.” I hear unsettling echoes of Hutchinson’s story in Donald Trump’s recent victory and in the continued collapse of structures we once relied upon to distinguish feelings from facts.
That is a big bite to chew, but let’s see how we do. If you’d like a brief intro to Hutchinson, this clip might help you follow along.
A Kangaroo Court
It is perhaps too much to expect Puritan trials to meet our standards for jurisprudence today, but the courts were a joke long before Salem. The accused were presumed guilty, convicted on hearsay, and summoned before a judge largely as a warning to others.2
Then, as now, you stood a better chance at mercy if you seemed penitent, if you yielded to the authorities. That seems to be what Winthrop hoped to accomplish by summoning Hutchinson in the first place. “We have thought good to send for you,” he said, “to understand how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we may reduce you that so you may become a profitable member here among us.”
But Hutchinson almost immediately cast Winthrop on the defensive, claiming that she had heard no specific charges against her.
This dramatization is a little tame, but captures the gist.
Mrs. Hutchinson: I am called here to answer before you but I hear no things laid to my charge.
Gov.: I have told you some already and more I can tell you.
Mrs. H.: Name one, Sir.
Gov.: Have I not named some already?
Mrs. H.: What have I said or done?
Gov.: Why for your doings, this you did harbor and countenance those that are parties in this faction that you have heard of.
Mrs. H.: That's matter of conscience, Sir.
Gov.: Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you.
They went on like this, gradually circling the crux of the matter, which was that Hutchinson had been holding meetings in her home, where she had preached to both men and women. This was not a problem merely because of her sex (she acquitted herself admirably on this count), but because she was ostensibly sowing sedition by pitting ministers against one another.
In particular, she was alleged to have claimed that the majority were preaching a “covenant of works” — that one could be saved through good deeds rather than grace. This would have been a grievous error, since the Puritans were Calvinists who believed no one was saved but by grace alone. If you thought good deeds could get you into heaven, you were assuredly going to hell. The stakes were not small.
The trial transcript is the only record we have of Hutchinson’s voice, which is a shame, because she was a sharper mind than Winthrop. He kept trying to pin her down, hoping she’d just apologize so he could show some tough love and move on, but she gave a masterclass in legal reasoning.
Mrs. H.: Did I ever say they preached a covenant of works then?
Dep. Gov.: If they do not preach a covenant of grace clearly, then they preach a covenant of works.
Mrs. H.: No, Sir. One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another, so I said....
But the game was rigged and Hutchinson knew it. Presumably she could have yielded, endured the resulting humiliation, and remained in the community with a lower profile. Whether she knew she was speaking to readers yet unborn, contributing to a struggle with a long historical arc, or whether she just couldn’t surrender her integrity and would rather be cast out than compromise, we might never know. Certainly the latter was true, as it was for other dissenters like Roger Williams.
I have always found Hutchinson’s defiance admirable, even inspiring. Who doesn’t love the conscientious objector? But I’m thinking again about that turning point, when she effectively gives herself away. I cannot help but believe that we are living in Anne Hutchinson’s world. I’m not sure I like it much.
Immediate Revelation
Hutchinson lived to fight a second day. She had at least two witnesses in her corner that morning, including one Mr. Cotton, whom she had praised as a more able minister than the rest.
But it turned out that Cotton wanted no part of it. He claimed ignorance as to “how the comparison sprang” between himself and his fellow clergymen and denied that there was any faction or wedge in the community. To his credit, Cotton tried to clear Hutchinson of suspicion, swearing that he never heard her say what the others alleged, and there might yet have been hope for it all being written off as a giant misunderstanding.
Whether Hutchinson thought that Cotton was washing his hands of her or that he was chickening out of a righteous fight, she soon erased all doubt in her accusers’ minds. After a lengthy review of her separation from the Church of England, Hutchinson says it plain:
I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong…. Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord.
When pressed to explain, she compares herself to Abraham, who knew it was acceptable to violate the Sixth Commandment by sacrificing his son Isaac because God spoke to him directly, and also to Daniel, whom God miraculously freed from the lion’s den.
That was all Winthrop and the others needed to brand her as a danger to the commonwealth. Hutchinson was subsequently banished from Massachusetts Bay along with her family. They and 30 other families joined Roger Williams in Rhode Island, where Hutchinson died five years later.
The American Rorschach Test
The moral of Hutchinson’s story lies in the eye of the beholder. It is unavoidably a story about misogyny, since Winthrop and others ran a smear campaign against Hutchinson long after she left, claiming that she gave birth to a demonic child and that the babies she delivered as a midwife were monstrous.3 But many men suffered similar fates for resisting Puritan authorities, so it is also a story about freedom of speech. The Puritans were better than anyone at canceling those who ran afoul of their doctrines.
John Winthrop was an insufferable hypocrite, because the premise for his sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” was almost identical to Hutchinson’s claim to authority. Winthrop claimed that God had given the Puritans a “special commission,” a contract or covenant to make New England into a New Jerusalem – the famous “city upon a hill” that set a moral standard for the world. Winthrop did not explicitly say that God whispered this directive into his ear, but there can be no other basis for his certainty than a depth of conviction, an abiding faith. Based on what? A particular interpretation of the Bible, some lived experience of persecution, and the visceral feeling that results. That foundation, more or less, was all that Hutchinson claimed, too.
I completed my PhD in a time when it was fashionable to read against the grain of patriarchy, whiteness, and wealth, to amplify voices like Hutchinson’s. After the 2016 election, I added a prompt to a final exam asking students to make arguments for or against America’s “greatness.” The most memorable essay of the bunch was broken into two parts.
The first began, “America is not great. America has never been great.” This argument traced the worst examples of colonialism, slavery, and sexism, concluding with Handsome Lake’s “How America Was Discovered.” In that retelling, the devil instructs a young man to take cards, money, a fiddle, whiskey, and disease across the sea, so he can subdue an “honest and simple-minded” people. The young man teams up with Columbus to execute the plan, but the results are so horrendous that even the devil “lamented that his evil had been so enormous.”
The second half of the essay began, “America is great. America has always been great.” That argument featured Catholic dissenters, courageous women, abolitionists, and people of color, contending that for every evildoer in American history there has been a reformer. It was not at all the argument for American exceptionalism that you’ll hear from Christopher Rufo or others who prefer a return to the Puritan theocracy. But dissent remains one way of defining greatness, and Anne Hutchinson looms large in that formulation. I never set out to steer my students toward particular conclusions, but we all teach a hidden curriculum, and that essay was perhaps the clearest mirror I ever saw of my own training as an Americanist.
There is no single way to see America. I wonder now if any of us has more evidence for our interpretation of the American experiment than Winthrop or Hutchinson had. Or are we all doing more or less what they did: beginning with a feeling, a fiercely held conviction, and then marshaling all the evidence we can to support it?
Robert Pinsky once said at a Breadloaf workshop that American identity is like jazz: we’re making it up as we go. That metaphor seems far too generous now, except for the making it up part.
The Attention Economy
Winthrop’s line to Hutchinson explains a great deal about the way we receive information today. Whether it’s Fox, MSNBC, or your favorite commentator on Substack, the loudest voices are variations of “Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you.”
Anne Hutchinson wins the sympathy of contemporary readers because she seemed to be speaking truth to power. But she openly told Winthrop and others that they were preaching a false gospel of good deeds. How did she know? God had told her so. Winthrop felt similarly convinced of her error and used his power accordingly.
Both of them would have thrived in the attention economy, because they had already mastered its playbook, which is to stoke your followers while poking an enemy in the eye. I know of no better illustration than Matt Taibbi’s “Eat Me, MSNBC,” first published in April, 2023, reposted this week as a victory lap.4 That’s a great strategy for personal gain. But it spells the death of a commonwealth.
I’ve had conversations this week with people who have made sweeping claims about how this election proves America’s inherent racism and sexism, or how it shows that liberal elites are so out of touch that they couldn’t see this coming. Each view has a grain of truth, but they stem largely from feelings like Hutchinson’s conviction that the Holy Spirit spoke directly to her soul or Trump’s sense that God spared his life for a reason. These are premonitions which then harden into firmly held beliefs. They are not facts.
I’d like to think that our facts are not governed by whether we sit at the judge’s bench or in the defendant’s chair. If that is true, we’ve lost the plot of a republic and it’s all gone back to colonies — Massachusetts Bay or Rhode Island — and the information ecosystems that go with them.5
Questions for the comments: Where do you go to test your feelings against facts? How do you know a fact when you see it?
Read more essays on early American literature ⬇️
I’ve been fascinated by the many reflective essays on American history this week. If you haven’t read
’s “The Age Beyond Fear,” where he argues that Trump is more like Andrew Jackson than Adolf Hitler, I recommend it.This is perhaps unfair to the Puritans, since most courts of the time operated this way. But the trials of dissenters were particularly ridiculous, as the case of Thomas Morton also shows.
If you think I’m making a case here for Winthrop being more careful about his facts, think again. He just had more followers than Hutchinson did.
If you think I’m cherry picking or overstating the case, consider that Matt Taibbi’s “Racket News” has 478,000+ subscribers. The examples are legion. While many celebrate the autonomy that journalists are finding from Substack, I cannot shake the sense that the journalistic code of ethics is incompatible with an explicit profit motive. Legacy media lost our trust by monetizing web traffic and playing to those algorithms. But that’s the same playbook here.
The term “information ecosystem” was first used by librarians to describe databases and other content streams that were curated by and for scholars. I will need to save more thoughts on that subject for another time, but the fact that we’re using a term that once characterized a thriving and restorative web of relationships to explain our fragmented and often contradictory sources of information perhaps speaks for itself.
Thanks Josh; very nice piece.
I couldn't' agree more that "I’d like to think that our facts are not governed by whether we sit at the judge’s bench or in the defendant’s chair." Debates over the role of post-modernist academic trends on "post-truth" politics aside (which were all the rage the first time he won back in 2016), it is clear that as a country the interpretation of facts is wildly different. For me -- somebody who's first premise is that social life is not so distinct from nature as to be immune from the same scientific inquiry we apply to the rest of nature -- it is really hard to fathom how such seemingly basic perceptions are so radically different. A correspondence theory of truth is philosophically quaint in some corners, but for most basic inquiry about "what" type questions, it serves pretty well.
So just to be crystal clear: I think Trump is a shyster and clown; I think he's mean spirited and narcissistic and lies at every turn, saying whatever he thinks a crowd wants to hear. He's demonstrably criminal, and found so by judges and a jury, and unfit on any moral dimension to serve as president. While reasonable people can disagree, his stated policy preferences are not mine and, I think, more damaging than good.
I also believe this belief is well justified empirically - based on my memory of his first term, reading/hearing the stuff he says, the long string of obvious untruths, reports of his own close-confidants and in-depth reporting and court cases. I think the things he says are patently self-contradictory and obviously bad.
And yet, so many others see something entirely different. I think there's an obvious range -- from hard-right proud-boy types who actually want the worst of what he says (I think a small minority), to others who see him as saving America from an evil left that "wants to destroy America," to those who champion him the same way they do a sports-team regardless of what he says. Plus a host of enabling "leaders" who support out of plain political self-interest (which then creates the future they fear and reinforces the need to support him). And a group of nominally undecideds who are not paying much attention and vote on whim?
So how do we explain radically different perceptions of the same things? Information exposure is clearly part of it. But are those bubbles so tight as to really not let anything else in? Feels like, in this case, access to the revelations about Trump's character are pretty easy to find, and explanations that turn on the people you disagree with being dolts always seem suspect. So I remain at an honest loss.
At a deeper level, more people need critical self reflection -- I love your "SMELL" test for that, and I fear that's not happening much.
Sorry for the long post...
Tiny Rhode Island has always been a harbor for contrary thinkers. Put together, their voices ring like a discordant free jazz composition, but if you listen carefully your hear jewels among the riffs.