Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson engaged a diverse group of powerful men as well as the disenfranchised during the mid-1630s in Boston’s so-called Antinomian Controversy, the name given to the theological battle between John Cotton, who emphasized free grace, and other clerics who focused upon preparation for those seeking salvation. Hutchinson followed Cotton’s position, presented his theology in meetings in her home, and inspired her followers, male and female, to reject pastors opposing Cotton’s position. Hutchinson’s followers included leading men who opposed John Winthrop’s leadership of Massachusetts Bay Colony; this dispute also became an arena where Winthrop reasserted his power. Hutchinson represents the Puritans’ drive for spiritual development within, including her claim of revelation. She is best understood within a transatlantic framework illustrating both the tools of patriarchal oppression and, more importantly, the appeal of Puritan spirituality for women.

Manufacturing in Puritan rural towns in New England 1630–60: ‘A Miller Never Goes to Heaven’

This article is an analysis of the influence of blacksmiths, and saw and grain millers on the development of Puritan communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1660. During this period these artisans played a significant role in defining the physical form of the rural Puritan town and its economic development, without intent and in a social and cultural climate where they were often disliked and distrusted. This article focuses on the impacts of these manufacturers on the formation and physical character of Puritan communities in New England.

Plymouth and the Bay

During the 1620s the colony faced various challenges, some centering on a settlement to the north that came to be dominated by Thomas Morton. Morton was accused of selling guns and liquor to Natives and carrying on revels around a maypole he had erected. Plymouth sent Myles Standish and a small armed force to arrest Morton, and they sent him back to England. In 1628 the first settlers of what was to be the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in Salem. These puritans were not separatists but turned to Plymouth for advice on how to organize their religious life. Samuel Fuller, Plymouth’s physician and a deacon of the church, visited Salem to aid those suffering from scurvy, but also persuaded John Endecott, the settlement’s leader, of the congregational principles on which the Plymouth congregation was based. The Salem settlers thereafter drew up their own covenant and subsequently chose their own ministers.

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Dudley Bradstreet (b. c. 1612–d. 1672) emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony with her extended family in 1630 and remained there until her death. In 1650 a volume of her poems appeared in England under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America and attributed to “a Gentlewoman of those parts.” An expanded edition, Several Poems, was published in Boston, Massachusetts, six years after her death. Because she was the first published “American” poet, Bradstreet’s work has always been in the public eye, although assessments of its quality and ideas about which pieces merit attention have fluctuated over time.

New England

This chapter focuses mainly on developments in the law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded as a Puritan utopia to display to rest of the world how a society should be governed. Although Massachusetts incorporated elements of the common law into its legal system, the dominant source of law was the word of God. But the divine word, which was enforced by the magistrates of the Court of Assistants, sometimes met resistance from local juries. A major issue throughout the 1630s and 1640s was whether the magistrates or local people would have final authority to determine the substance of the law; the issue was resolved in 1649 by providing for appeals in all cases of judge-jury disagreement to the General Court sitting as a unicameral body in which representatives of localities outnumbered the magistrates and thus had final authority. The chapter ends with a brief look at legal developments in Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Rhode Island.

Anne Bradstreet's War Upon Tyranny

In matters of religion, Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to tread carefully. If they strayed from orthodox beliefs, they ran the risk of reproach and even excommunication. This was especially true of women. Ann Hutchinson is a prime example. She was initially highly popular for her home meetings, but she began to draw notice from the powerful men in the colony. Hutchinson was preaching that people could speak to God directly, essentially disempowering the church and the clergy. To one Puritan leader, John Winthrop, this kind of message was a direct threat to their power; therefore, Winthrop made it his mission to bring Hutchinson to trial and banish her from the colony. She was not the only unfortunate female that fell victim to the stone-like oppression of the Patriarchy. Anne Bradstreet’s sister, Sarah Keayne, suffered a similar fate. She spoke out publicly against the injustices the Patriarchy committed against women. However, she failed to keep her social image intact. Winthrop and the other leaders stepped in to assert their authority against Keayne. As a result, Sarah Keayne was rejected by her husband and excommunicated from the church. Due to the fate of both women, the Puritan community was fearful that they, too, would become the next victims of the Patriarchy. Ann Hutchinson’s and Sarah Keayne’s social demise weighed heavily on Bradstreet’s mind. Given that Anne Bradstreet’s father and husband served on the court of magistrates that convicted Hutchinson, Bradstreet would have been all too aware of the dangers of criticizing the Patriarchy. Even though she was aware of these dangers, she did it anyway. But Bradstreet needed to be careful to remain well liked by her community, by both men and women. One social misstep would lead to her own excommunication, and women would be left with no one to fight for their basic rights. As Wendy Martin notes in An American Tritych, Bradstreet was a protofeminist who sought to change the power disparity between men and women to break the bonds of oppression for all women. This is particularly evident in the poems Martin does not examine. In “To Her Father with Some Verses,” Bradstreet acknowledges that women are indebted to the Patriarchy but turns this debt to her advantage by making the Patriarchy acknowledge her value as a female writer.

“Hee Had Lost a Great Many Men in the Warr”

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

Contested Passages

This chapter examines the area around Boston Harbor and how Algonquians as well as Massachusetts Bay colonists engaged in contestations beginning in the seventeenth century. It begins by unpacking how Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples understood such geographies, including the meanings of rivers, maritime spaces, and islands, drawing upon deep-time oral traditions and archaeology. It then follows the arrival of John Winthrop and Puritans into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and how that colonial enterprise began to exert pressures on Native people through epidemic disease, land loss, and imbalanced diplomatic relationships. The arrival of Protestant missionaries such as John Eliot also transformed certain Natives’ relationships to kin networks, homelands, and spiritual affiliations. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Christian-affiliated Natives around the “Praying Town” of Natick, situated on the Charles River, were forcibly rounded up and removed from Natick to an incarceration site on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they suffered large casualties. The chapter tracks how survivors of Deer Island navigated a challenging postwar landscape and rebuilt their lives and communities. It also examines New England forms of commemoration in the seventeenth century onward, including literary as well as physical types of memorialization.

The Marketplace and Religion in America

There is a long and complicated relationship between religious activities and marketplace activities in the United States. Despite popular expectations that these spheres of life, the sacred and profane, ought to be completely separate, the two are often intimately related. Further, the relationship is messy, multifold, and complex. In contemporary American life, the connections are readily visible. Churches employ branding experts, while tech companies forgo profit to promote disruptions that promise to save the world. Christians organize financial seminars and corporations sponsor spiritual retreats. According to the Supreme Court, some companies have religious beliefs. Meanwhile, the spiritual-but-not-religious express their spirituality with practices of ethical consumption. Advertisers promise “your best life now,” as do prosperity preachers. The sacrament of marriage is worth billions, built on the belief that the special day deserves and requires special expense. Holidays are big business, and so are Bibles. This is not a new phenomenon, either. It was a religious group that invented corn flakes. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a joint stock company before it was a model for Christian charity. The Quakers made an economic argument for religious freedom. Revivalist preachers were often as skilled in advertizing as they were in sermonizing. The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced religious persecution in Ohio in the 1850s, but were also opposed because of their wildcat bank. It was economic interests that brought the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, who challenged Protestant dominance of American life. End-to-end, American culture is chockfull of case studies of the manifold, mutual, and often highly contradictory forms of interaction between religion and marketplace. Religion-and-the-marketplace studies examine these interactions. The field is quite diverse, and includes a number of different disciplines that ask different questions. There are, broadly speaking, three approaches to religion-and-the-marketplace studies. One looks at the market conditions that shaped or influenced religious movements. One makes use of economic terms to explain religious diversity in America. One looks at the underlying assumptions that unite religious activity and market activity.

Of Paper

This chapter discusses the history of paper money. The history of paper money issued by a government belongs to the Americans. Bank paper and government paper share many things in common. Bank notes retain full parity of purchasing power with the gold or silver to which they promise title so long as they can be exchanged for the metal. Moreover, as British experience during the Napoleonic Wars showed, bank notes by no means lose all or even most of their value when convertibility into gold or silver is denied. The chapter examines the circumstances that account for the pioneering role of the American colonies in the use of paper money. It also considers the first issue of paper money by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690 and the rise of banks and banking during the colonial period.