Antidisestablishmentarianism in Cambridge -- Monday

To explain the history of Antidisestablishmentarianism in Cambridge I decided not to untangle the interwoven stories of religious pluralism, the Disestablishment movement and the history of Unitarianism in Cambridge. I think it is in the spirit of the lengthy title of this post. If you're just interested in finally learning what the word means, head to the bottom of the full post (appearing on Friday), but the full story is more complex and richer, which is why it's here.

This is by far the longest post you ever will find at Cambridge Considered. Because of this, I am serializing it, so this week, there will be a new piece every day, but after this week, they will appear on the blog as one post.

Church and State Before the Revolution

Longtime readers will already know that it's nearly impossible to look at the early history of Cambridge or anywhere in New England without looking at the role of religion in social and political affairs. (See my posts on the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, and three posts on Anne Hutchinson). Religion and government were tightly intertwined for the Puritan settlers – they had different leaders, but the church was supported by taxes, and the qualification for voting in the government was being a member in good standing of the church. In 1648, the New England churches broke away from the Christian reform movement the settlers had been a part of in Europe. The New England Puritans created the Cambridge Platform, which outlined the congregational model in which individual congregations are autonomous and have no higher church hierarchy to answer to. The churches following this model were called Congregationalist.

In 1690, the General Court of Massachusetts extended voter eligibility to all adult men who met financial criteria and “possessed good character.” Previously, only men who owned a very large amount of land or who were full church members could vote. This change gave new rights to those were not a part of the established church.¹ The religious establishment in New England was taking a different form from that in Europe, but Massachusetts was still incorporated by the English crown. In 1692, a royal charter made Massachusetts into a British colony rather than a corporation, making the residents subject to British rule. One effect of this change was that while the system in which Congregationalist churches were supported by taxes was maintained, the Charter also required a policy of tolerance for minority religions, mostly Baptists, Anglicans, and Catholics.²

The difference between the parish and the church is key to understanding the politics of religion in early New England. The parish consisted of every resident of a specific geographic area. In Cambridge, the distinction between the town government and the parish as an incorporated legal entity in the town was made formal in 1733.³ For legal purposes, it was assumed that you attended your parish's church. There was one church per parish, a Congregational church, that satisfied the legal requirement for towns to support religion. This church was the established church.

Church membership was more complicated, and up to the clergy or governing body of the church itself. The process of achieving membership in full communion, and the implications of church membership, changed over time. What was unchanging was that this was a small, elect group of people who were practicing members of the established faith and who had received confirmation of this by the church itself. If you were a dissenter, a practicer of a different religion, or someone who had not met the requirements your church set, you were a part of the parish but not a member of the church.

The Great Awakening -- and a Great Divide

In the first several decades of the 18^th century, public involvement in religion in Massachusetts was waning. A minority of people were full members of their churches. Puritanism's strict codes for a moral life were no longer socially enforced. For example, more than a third of first children in the 1730s were conceived out of wedlock.⁴

In the 1730s, a movement came along to counteract this waning interest in religion. A few ministers began preaching that having a conversion experience, in which the individual feels powerfully connected to God, was essential for salvation. The idea would have been familiar to their Puritan ancestors. Then, beginning in Northampton in 1734, the idea of conversions suddenly caught on and began spreading like wildfire.⁵ By 1740, religious revival was all over Massachusetts, and in that decade the movement, called the Great Awakening, spread over the English colonies. The people whose religious views were transformed as part of the revival, sometimes called New Lights, supported an emotional connection with religion. Like in many religious revivals, they advocated worship that was was fervent, passionate, and emphasized emotion over reason.⁶ This group revitalized belief in Calvinist doctrines.

However, the movement did not spark change everywhere. The Old Lights, those who were more conservative during the Great Awakening, emphasized order and reason. Later on, some of the Congregationalists who emphasized reason became the most radical and liberal in the church.⁷ In many places in New England, churches began to split along pro-revival and anti-revival lines. It fractured the unity of the church that had once been so closely connected with the state. While the divided churches all called themselves Congregationalists, never again would religion in Massachusetts be as monolithic as it had originally been.⁸

1Breen, T.H. Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Page 95.

2Brown, Richard, and Jack Tager. Massachusetts: A Concise History. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Page 49.

3http://www.firstparishcambridge.org/FirstParishHistory

4Brown 53.

5Brown 53.

6Brown 54.

7Harris, Mark. Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism. Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004. Page 222.

8Brown 55.

Cambridge Cowpaths

Welcome to the first post of the Getting Around in Cambridge series. In these posts, I will be writing about the the history of transportation, particularly public transit, in Cambridge, from toll roads to the horse-drawn street railway to the Red Line. If there's something you want to see covered in this series of posts, please let me know here.

In response to my post, “Getting Around in Cambridge: what do you want to know?” a reader commented, “I often hear people say that the roads are so terrible because they were laid on old cow paths. I never really questioned this because it made a certain amount of sense, but I'd like to know how much truth there is to it.” If you've ever read a guidebook to the area, you may have heard this legend, and if you've ever tried to find your way in Cambridge or in most other places in the Boston area, you may well be able to sympathize. The first official streets in Cambridge were laid out rather deliberately by the first settlers, and the other early roads were the routes to specific places, laid to avoid natural obstacles and follow the boundaries of established tracts of land. However, cows were much more relevant to town planning in 1630's Cambridge than they are today.


The Massachusetts Bay Company, with a charter from England to settle a new colony, settled Salem, Boston, Watertown, and the land they then called Newtowne in 1630. Newtowne, which was to become Cambridge, was settled by several groups authorized by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay.1 In his History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877, Lucius Paige details the founding of Cambridge based on early town records, and he explains, “the division of lands and the establishment of highways were among the first necessities.”2  The Town Meeting, made up first of stakeholders in the Massachusetts Bay Company and later of all of the residents who were members of the church, passed laws and did all the other necessary tasks of new government.


Cambridge was organized in a pattern that was typical of English settlements. The public buildings were in a small village in the center,  with residences surrounding the village. Private and public farmland and grazing land made up the rest of the settlement.3 The basic layout of the first official streets in Cambridge was a rough grid. Four streets ran east-west, and four ran north-south;  they have been replaced by wider streets with different names, but that area kept its original arrangement.4  The northwest corner of the village was in what is now Harvard Square.5


Paige describes about twenty additional streets which arose out of necessity, connecting people to important places on the outskirts of town.6  Generally, these roads moved out from the village in a somewhat spoke-like fashion, and became a number of the major streets that exist today. For example, the road to the settlement in present-day Arlington extended from the village out to the North, and the “highway to the Great Swamp,” or Fresh Pond,  extended Northwest. The two approach the village, and each other,  at an angle. These two roads were the predecessors of Massachusetts Ave. and Garden Street, respectively.7 Later streets were constructed in a roughly grid-like pattern to fill in the space inside the angle.  In addition to the highways leading to ponds, the oyster-bank by the river, and neighboring towns, Paige's count includes small streets connecting these highways.8


Unlike the village streets, many of the highways were irregular and crooked, in part because they had to wind around natural obstacles. There were several small creeks and marshy areas in the town.  Additionally, Cambridge had some small hills in the seventeenth century, later leveled out in order to fill in the marshy areas of the Charles (see Time and Tide in Cambridge for more about this project).9


The other obstacles that guided where the roads were placed were the borders of tracts of land.10  In 1692, the inhabitants of New Town agreed on how the land was to be impaled – that is, divided into major tracts  (the term “pale” referred to a fence that denoted a land boundary, thus, setting the boundaries was called “impaling.”).11


Individuals were responsible for the care of the roads by their property, and the town Surveyor enforced the cleaning and upkeep of all roads.12 One law that was on the town books beginning in 1633 stated that anyone who felled a tree and left it lying across the highway for more than one day forfeited the tree.13 For settlers facing the tasks of constructing buildings and keeping a ready supply of firewood in an area that was not thickly forested, the fallen tree was as valuable as having a clear roadway.


 Like many English towns at the time, the layout of early Cambridge included tracts of land set aside as common grazing grounds. The tract that is between present-day Garden and Linnaean streets, bounded by North Avenue, was the “cow-common,” and it was undivided for nearly a century.14 The early layout of the town gave rise to a “Cow-Yard Lane,” which separated the housing lots from the grazing lots near what was to become Harvard Yard, and “Cow-Yard Row,” presumably named for a similar reason.15 It is not clear that either of these streets have present-day equivalents.


In many ways, Cambridge was settled in a very intentional manner. In the first few years of settlement, the Cambridge Town Meeting worked hard to make the area livable and workable. Historian Roger Thompson, author of Cambridge Cameos: Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England, describes the first decades as “the initial frenetic period of establishing Town infrastructure” including roads, bridges, fences, and gates.16  A town that began more organically may have been more truly defined by its cow-paths. In Cambridge, cows were taken into account in the division of land and even the naming of a few of the streets, but they did not have a hand, or a hoof, in the layout of the streets themselves.

 

1 Paige, Lucius. History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877. (H. O. Houghton and company, 1877), 10.

2 Paige 11.

3 Thomson, Roger. Cambridge Cameos: Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005), 20.

4 Paige 14.

5 Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976), 14.

6 Paige 15.

7 Sutton 21.

8 Paige 15.

9 Sutton 11.

10 Paige 14.

11 Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newetowne) Massachusetts, 1630-1703, quoted in Paige 10.

12 Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newetowne) Massachusetts, 1630-1703, quoted in Paige 20.

13 Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newetowne) Massachusetts, 1630-1703, quoted in Paige 19.

14 Paige 13.

15 Paige 15.

16 Thompson 5.

Hutchinson and Harvard

  Some Cantabrigians believe that Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter who was among the first prominent settlers of Rhode Island, should also be credited with causing the Puritans to found Harvard. The General Court of Massachusetts decreed that there would be a school, then called “the College at New Towne,” in 1636. Anne Hutchinson's trial by the church leaders did not begin until 1637. However, until 1638, the school had no buildings, professors, or courses; it was merely an idea. That year, the year that John Harvard willed his library and half his fortune to the school, the first building was erected. Was Anne Hutchinson responsible for the transformation from idea to reality? The short answer, although some find it surprising, is yes. Of course, as with almost every historical question, the full story is more nuanced than yes or no.

Part 1 of this three-part series looks at who Anne Hutchinson was and what she believed. Part 2 explores her influence on Puritan Boston and Cambridge. Part 3 will examine her relationship to the founding of Harvard.

Hutchinson and Harvard

    One thing that can be learned from the controversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson is that the leadership of 1630's Massachusetts were absolutely determined to remain in power. They led their new religious community with the doctrine that there is only one right way to practice their faith. It is natural, then, that they would want to establish a theology school, where those who were already in power and in the mainstream could mold the next generation of leaders. Puritans had always advocated an educated ministry – they preferred university-educated ministers who had received extensive training in how to interpret the bible, and they complained that the Anglicans did not prioritize such training.¹

    The General Court passed an act in October 1636 declaring that the colony would found a school. At the time, the Court included Hutchinson's followers and her opponents. The Governor was Henry Vane and the Deputy-governor was John Winthrop. William Hutchinson was also a member.² The act stated that 200 pounds would be given to found “a school or college” by the government the next year (1637), and 200 more pounds would be given at a later date, and that the court would decide on the locations and building plans in the following session. The language of the act was vague – “a school or college” did not necessarily mean a university.³

     The General Court did not decide on a location or building plans in the following session, in December of 1636. It had a much more pressing matter on its hands: many people believed that the young colony was not going to survive the religious controversy that had overtaken it. the Anne Hutchinson trial. On December 10, 1636, William Hutchinson, Anne's husband, was discharged from his office as a deputy of the General Court at the request of a number of churches.⁴ Around the same time, John Winthrop and several of the mainstream Puritan ministers had a meeting with Anne Hutchinson, privately examining her and asking her directly what she believed about their religious teachings. The debate that she had with them solidified many ministers' belief that she was an enemy and a heretic, but she continued in her role as a dissenting leader until she was put on trial the following year.

    In the meantime, the political leadership of the colony did quite a bit of shuffling around. For the May 1637 elections, the anti-Hutchinsonians had a slim but real majority, and they ensured that the court be transferred to Cambridge (then Newtowne), where they truly had a majority. The vote happened on the Cambridge Common, and some of the members stood in the area that is now Harvard Yard. John Winthrop was elected Governor, and Thomas Dudley, another anti-Hutchinsonian, became Deputy-governor.⁵ That summer, some of William Hutchinson's family arrived in Massachusetts. As a response, the court passed the Alien Act, stating that newcomers to Massachusetts needed the court's permission to stay longer than three weeks.⁶

    On November 2, 1637, the General Court of Massachusetts met in Newtowne. It discharged several of its lower officials – all strong Hutchinson supporters – on technicalities that were legally not related to the Hutchinson case.⁷ It banished a few more of her supporters. It also swore in a few new members of the Court, recent immigrants, including one John Harvard. The last order of business for the day was picking up where they had left off the previous December, and arraigning Anne Hutchinson.

    In Massachusetts at the time, a woman was not entitled to any legal counsel. Hutchinson was to be her own lawyer. She did not try to convince the court that she was justified in criticizing the ministers or that her criticism was correct. If after three years of her influential religious leadership in the community, she hadn't converted these men to her her beliefs, she would not have been able to do it in her trial. Instead, she focused on the fact that only her actions and not her private views could be a basis for convicting her, her belief that the ministers could not prove their claims, and her claim to a right to host religious discussion in her home.⁸

     Governor Winthrop requested testimony from the ministers Hutchinson was supposed to have maligned, but they were all hesitant, perhaps fearing that she could out-argue them. Six ministers did testify, but of course, they had not been present at those meetings in her home where the bulk of the criticism took place. Although a transcript had been taken of the first time she spoke before the court, the previous year, and the ministers claimed she had maligned them that day, none of them could produce that transcript. ⁹

     When Winthrop asked Hutchinson how she could deny that she had spoken against Puritan ministers, when those ministers had just testified that she had slandered them, she would not relent. Her response seems almost childish in its simplicity, but it was very effective: she told him to prove it.¹⁰ The court was struck by the defiance of this woman telling men to prove their claims, and (perhaps more importantly) of this layperson telling ministers to prove their claims. However, if you consider her demand for what it was, it was quite reasonable by our modern sensibilities. She expected the burden of proof to be on her accusers, not on the accused.

    It is very likely that Hutchinson could not have avoided being convicted. She argued eloquently and with just as much knowledge of the Bible as her adversaries, and yet she did not sway them. Partway through the trial, though, she made a claim that almost certainly worked against her. Pressed to explain how she could know that her reading of scripture on the matter of grace was correct, she swore that God himself had revealed religious wisdom to her on several occasions.¹¹ There are religious traditions that accept the idea of an ordinary person talking with God, but Puritanism was not one of them. To her opponents, and possibly even to her friends, Hutchinson's claim of personal revalation was blasphemous.¹²

    Late in the trial, John Cotton, the very minister that Hutchinson had spent so many of her meetings defending and bolstering, turned on her. He claimed that while he had once sympathized with her, she had gone too far.¹³ It is not clear whether he sincerely felt this way or whether he felt he could no longer stand on the side that he saw was losing, but he famously castigated Hutchinson, “Your opinions frett like a Gangrene and spread like a Leprosie, and will eate out the very Bowells of Religion.” ¹⁴

     While Hutchinson still had supporters, they were dwindling because of banishment or because they saw how powerful the opposition was. As was expected, the General Court got behind Governor Winthrop, who called her revelations “delusion” and who felt that eliminating her as a leader was the only way to protect the colony from corruption and controversy.¹⁵ As it was not technically a religious institution, the court could not convict her of heresy; she was banished from the colony for “being a woman not fit for our society.”¹⁶

     Later in November, the court followed through on its year-old plan to decide on a location for the school, and it passed an order that the college would be at Newtowne. One of the reasons for this choice of location was the local pastor. Thomas Shepard was a strong and charismatic preacher who disagreed with Hutchinson, and he may have been the reason that Cambridge was an anti-Hutchinson stronghold.¹⁷ At its following session, the court chose the group that was to become the school's Board of Overseers. There was heavy overlap with the leadership of the Colony; the Board included both Winthrop and Dudley, and some personal friends of Thomas Shepard. Perhaps most interestingly, the newly anti-Hutchinson John Cotton was on the board as well.¹⁸

    The college opened in late summer of 1638. In September of that year, John Harvard died and left his books and half of his estate to the new school. John Harvard had arrived in Massachusetts in 1637.¹⁹ While no record exists of Harvard's views on the Hutchinson controversy, it is very likely he sided against her. John Harvard lived in Charlestown, and he and his wife were members of the church there. At some point in the year after Harvard arrived in Massachusetts, he began assisting with ministerial work at that church, although he was never ordained.²⁰ The minister of that church was none other than Hutchinson's early nemesis Zechariah Symmes.

     The information in the historical record can't prove that Harvard was founded because of Hutchinson, or even that the form it took was influenced by the controversy surrounding her. The initial idea and act to create a school in Massachusetts did come before Hutchinson's trial. However, many of her biographers and many historians of Harvard support the idea that she was the impetus that got the school going.²¹ She was perhaps the most serious threat to the homogeneous religious community that the Puritan leaders envisioned, and a colony-sponsored school for ministers could help them regain control. The shift in political balance from 1636-1637, which occurred largely in reaction to the Hutchinson controversy, probably also made a difference in the religious character in the new school.

      Hutchinson was certainly not the only Puritan dissident. John Cotton was very influential; in fact, Hutchinson's ideological role was largely as his supporter. However, he was more willing to reconcile with Puritan leaders, which made him less of a threat. John Wheelwright caused quite a stir, and it's possible that his case, or future cases such as his, would have inspired Massachusetts to start a university to prevent future Wheelwrights from taking over.

     Of course, it may also be argued that Harvard was inevitable: a growing settlement in the New World that was invested in its future and valued education was bound to start a university at some point. History has no absolutes. However, based on what did happen, it seems that Anne Hutchinson, who taught religion in her home to a growing crowd of admirers and defended herself in court with scripture and good rhetoric, was vital to the timing and the character of Harvard's founding.

1 LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, (New York: HarperCollins, 2004)

22.

2Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935) 166.

3Morison 170.

4LaPlante 10.

5Morison 177.

6LaPlante 110.

7LaPlante 132.

8Anne Hutchinson trial transcript. 

9LaPlante 61.

10Anne Hutchinson trial transcript.

11Anne Hutchinson trial transcript.

12LaPlante 119.

13LaPlante 128.

14Quoted in LaPlante 190.

15LaPlante 137.

16Anne Hutchinson trial transcript.

17Morison 182.

18Morison 196.

19Morison 151.

20Morison 218.

21Including LaPlante, Morison, Peter G. Gomes (author of “Anne Hutchinson: brief life of Harvard's midwife,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2002), and others.

Anne Hutchinson's Powerful Influence

Dear readers -- starting this week, Cambridge Considered officially updates every other Sunday instead of every other Saturday. Back to Anne Hutchinson for two more posts!

    Some Cantabrigians believe that Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter who was among the first prominent settlers of Rhode Island, should also be credited with causing the Puritans to found Harvard. The General Court of Massachusetts decreed that there would be a school, then called “the College at New Towne,” in 1636. Anne Hutchinson's trial by the church leaders did not begin until 1637. However, until 1638, the school had no buildings, professors, or courses; it was merely an idea. That year, the year that John Harvard willed his library and half his fortune to the school, the first building was erected. Was Anne Hutchinson responsible for the transformation from idea to reality? The short answer, although some find it surprising, is yes. Of course, as with almost every historical question, the full story is more nuanced than yes or no.

Part 1 of this three-part series looks at who Anne Hutchinson was and what she believed. Part 2 will explore her influence on Puritan Boston and Cambridge. Part 3 will examine her relationship to the founding of Harvard.

Anne Hutchinson's Powerful Influence

     The Puritans who settled in Boston, Cambridge, and the surrounding areas in the 1630s were governed by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As was common for colonies at the time, the founders of the colony obtained a charter from the King of England to run a settlement that was legally a company, and the voting members were technically shareholders. The General Court consisted of men admitted individually to the governing body. They had to be members of a puritan church. The governor, deputy-governor and lesser offices were elected annually from the members. In theory, the general court and the church elders were fully separate organizations, however, the members of the court and of the churches were the same, and they elected similar groups. ¹ (For more information on early Cambridge, see this post.)

     The original leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony, including Governor John Winthrop, shared a more or less agreed-upon set of Puritan views. These are the “established” religious views discussed in "Anne Hutchinson, Heretic". Followers of the established form of Puritanism had a majority in the General Court of Massachusetts, but not a strong one. In the first several years of immigration from England, there were a number of religious leaders, all of whom had disagreements with the Anglican church. They were all Puritans, but they were also all dissenters, and they were not as unified in their views as their leaders might hope. Cambridge (then Newtowne) had considerable representation in the “traditional” form of Puritanism (such as it was), but Boston had a growing population of ministers and laypeople who taught religion outside of the mainstream. In church, they were lead by the Reverend John Cotton, but Anne Hutchinson, with no formal religious education, was just as much a leader of the movement. 

     By 1636, Boston had a strong dissenting population. Just as she had in England, Hutchison hosted weekly religious study for women in her home, and as time went on, she began adding her own commentary to her explanations of religious topics. Her following grew until women almost filled the room, and the women began inviting men to join them. Like many early New England homes, hers only had one chair, which she sat in while her listeners sat on the floor or stood. When men began attending Hutchinson's sessions, some political and religious leaders, John Winthrop in particular, took notice. They began to fear her powerful influence. Her enemies included some of the most prominent men in the colony – but so did her following. Henry Vane, who became governor of the colony in 1636, regularly attended her meetings. When he attended, someone brought an extra chair so he would not be on the floor; whether or not the symbolism was intentional, Hutchinson and the governor were seated side by side.²

  
  Ministers without Hutchinson's favor felt a strong loss of support. They believed, often correctly, that it was Hutchinson's doing when parishioners walked out during a sermon. Some, including John Wilson, also complained that church attendees asked questions after the sermon that challenged the minister's authority, on Hutchinson's urging. However, this may have been an exaggerated complaint, as Puritan worship traditionally included an opportunity for men to ask questions after the sermon.³

     The theological debate that Hutchinson sparked in the gatherings in her home is often called New England's Antinomian controversy. In Protestantism, Antinomianism is the belief that some religious laws have exceptions, or that they do not apply to everyone. Hutchinson's beliefs could be called Antinomian because she believed in a salvation by grace alone. This effectively meant that a person who had God's grace could not be damned for his or her actions. So, while Hutchinson did not argue that a saved person had no need for religious laws, some people felt that she did. Within Protestant tradition, calling a viewpoint Antinomian can be akin to calling it heresy, and this is what Hutchinson's contemporaries meant by applying the term to her.

     The colony was dividing itself into two camps, and many leaders began to worry that the colony would be ripped apart by controversy.⁴ In March of 1637, the General Court censured Reverend John Wheelwright, a Hutchinsonian, for contempt of state and sedition. At a later meeting, a group brought a petition in support of Wheelwright, and the ensuing argument actually came to blows.⁵ At a General Court meeting in 1636, it was suggested that Vane was to blame for the growing conflict over Hutchinson and for other conflicts in the colony. The governor resigned, reportedly after bursting into tears.⁶
 

    By 1637, trouble was truly brewing in Massachusetts, as the General Court became increasingly divided over Hutchinson and the rest of the dissenters. Finally, they put her on trial. At the same time as they were debating a covenant of grace and a covenant of works, Puritans were starting to consider establishing a colony-wide school of some sort. As a group, they valued education, and so far the New World had no way of educating its new ministers -- they all had to immigrate from England. However, the type of school and where it would be located were yet to be determined. Anne Hutchinson's trial was almost certainly a strong influence on what happened with the school that would become Harvard.

1Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935) 155.

2 LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) 47.

3Morison 173-174

4Morison 175.

5LaPlante 109.

6LaPlante 10.

Anne Hutchinson, Heretic

     Some Cantabrigians believe that Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter who was among the first prominent settlers of Rhode Island, should also be credited with causing the Puritans to found Harvard. The General Court of Massachusetts decreed that there would be a school, then called “the College at New Towne,” in 1636. Anne Hutchinson's trial by the church leaders did not begin until 1637. However, until 1638, the school had no buildings, professors, or courses; it was merely an idea. That year, the year that John Harvard willed his library and half his fortune to the school, the first building was erected. Was Anne Hutchinson responsible for the transformation from idea to reality? The short answer, although some find it surprising, is yes. Of course, as with almost every historical question, the full story is more nuanced than yes or no.

Part 1 of this three-part series will look at who Anne Hutchinson was and what she believed. Part 2 will explore her influence on Puritan Boston and Cambridge. Part 3 will examine her relationship to the founding of Harvard.

Anne Hutchinson, Heretic

    Anne Hutchinson came from a family of religious dissenters. Her father, Francis Marbury, was an Anglican minister. As a young man, he was convicted of heresy by a church court and imprisoned several times, because he disagreed with the choices of many Anglican bishops.¹² Her mother, Bridget Marbury, (nee Dryden), had relatives who were dissenters. 
    Bridget Marbury was a midwife, and she taught this skill to her daughter. Anne and her siblings were taught at home, and she became quite well-read.³ Anne married Will Hutchinson, whose family owned a textile business, in 1612.

     Despite her husband's relatively affluent income, Anne Hutchinson earned money as well, as a midwife. Both of them were well-respected within the community, and by the 1620's, Hutchinson had begun leading a religious study group in her home.⁴ These groups were not unusual among like-minded Anglicans. As Eve LaPlante, a biographer of Hutchinson's, has noted, leading religious discussions seems to have sprung naturally out of counseling patients through the life-and-death moments inherent in seventeenth-century childbirth.

     While living in England, the Hutchinsons became admirers and friends of the Reverend John Cotton. Cotton and a number of others in the area were growing frustrated with the Anglican establishment, believing that a number of their practices were sacrilegious. This group took Old Testament rules very seriously; they even considered Christmas celebrations to be inappropriately festive. Orthodox Anglicanism did not take kindly to these nonconformists, and they were often persecuted. The established church referred to this group as Puritans, meaning that they wanted to purify the church. Most dissenters rejected the name, because they felt that they were practicing true Christianity and the larger group of Anglicans were straying from their religion. This was a common theme in nearly all religious controversy of the period: each group believed that theirs was the one true Christianity.

      Puritans felt less and less safe in the Church of England in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, and it eventually pushed them to establish a settlement in the New World. In 1634, the Hutchinsons left their home to join this group in Massachusetts. During her transatlantic voyage, Hutchinson paid careful attention to the sermons of Reverend Zechariah Symmes. She began to disagree with Symmes's messages on a few important points, and soon, she spoke up about it. The minister was uncomfortable with being challenged by a layperson, and by a woman at that. When they arrived in Massachusetts, he reported her to the Deputy Governor. The only consequence at the time was that Hutchinson had to wait a week longer than her husband to be accepted as a member of the Boston church, but her opponents remembered this disturbance later on, during her trial. ⁵ In her new home Hutchinson soon took on the community roles that she had held in England: women turned to her for her help as a midwife and gathered in her home to discuss religion. The meetings started out simply as an opportunity for reflection on that Sunday's sermon in church, but as time went on, Hutchinson began to criticize the sermons more and more. In 1637, she was tried in the Massachusetts General Court for “traducing the church leaders” – essentially, she was charged with heresy. The trial took place at the meetinghouse in Cambridge.

     In her disagreements with local ministers, Hutchinson stretched the Puritan idea of “God's elect.” Puritans believed that they were only allowing those who God had saved, or “the elect,” into their churches. New members had to apply, and church leaders could grant them membership.⁶ This practice implied that church leaders had knowledge of who the elect were; however, Puritan leaders denied that laypeople could also see who was and was not saved. Hutchinson felt that if a minister was teaching religion incorrectly, he could not possibly be a member of God's elect. Thus, she began to argue that laypeople such as herself must also have access to some knowledge of who was and was not elect.⁷ This belief probably would have been heretic enough to get her tried on its own, but in fact, it was a symptom of a bigger issue. Hutchinson felt that some Puritan leaders were not elect, and were teaching a false version of Christianity.

     The distinctions than Hutchinson and the established church argued over can seem very fine to outsiders. One of the ways Hutchinson disagreed with the orthodox Puritan teachings was that she believed that they were emphasizing a covenant of works more than was appropriate. A covenant of works is the doctrine that actions during a person's lifetime can effect whether the person is saved. Its alternative is a covenant of grace, the doctrine that God has already chosen who is saved, and only God's choice can determine who has salvation. A large part of Hutchinson's trial was over the question of whether she ever stated that local ministers preached a covenant of works more than a covenant of grace. Hutchinson denied that she had ever made that claim. 

     The problem was that Hutchinson was not attempting to start a new sect that believed in a covenant of grace to the exclusion of a covenant of works. The problem was that the Puritans they had already done that, and reluctantly. In fact, the entire religious framework that both Hutchinson and her opponents operated within rejected the idea of starting new sects. All of them believed that there was one right set of rules to Christianity, and they believed that these were the rules they followed and anyone else was a dangerous heretic. Hutchinson felt that certain influential Puritan ministers were teaching incorrectly, and in this way, she could be described as being more Puritan than the Puritans.

  In the next post at Cambridge Considered, I'll take a look at why Anne Hutchinson's dissent shook seventeenth-century Boston and Cambridge, and how this disruption helped lead to the creation of Harvard.

1 LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) 22.

2LaPlante 33.

3LaPlante 31.

4LaPlante 86.

5 LaPlante 64.

6 LaPlante 91.

7 LaPlante 105.

A Very Brief History of Cambridge: 1630-1700

       In the spirit of a fresh start after leaving old England, and in keeping with their governor John Winthrop's vision of a "city on a hill" that would be a role model to the world, the Puritans gave the simple name "Newtowne" to the settlement that they chose to be their capital in 1630. In 1638, two years after the Great and General Court of the colony founded the college at Newtowne, the settlement was renamed Cambridge after the English university town. The college, in turn, was renamed after John Harvard, who graduated from Cambridge University in England, and settled in Charlestown, MA. When he died in 1638, Harvard left the college 500 pounds, his library of 400 volumes, and his name. While it never became the capital of Massachusetts, Cambridge did become the intellectual center of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

      While it was a fresh start for the Puritans, they were not the first inhabitants of the area. The Massachusett people lived throughout what is now the Massachusetts Bay region. Their population was rapidly reduced by foreign diseases when Europeans began settling here. Because they did not use written language until European settlement began, the recorded history of this area begins in the 1600's, rather than when they arrived. The original Cambridge, as settled by the English, covered most of present-day Arlington, Bedford, Brighton, Lexington, and Newton, and pieces of Belmont and Winchester.¹

        The Puritans came to the New World because they believed that the Church of England was corrupted and that religion had to be purified to be more true to original Christian teachings. They established Salem in 1630, and several other towns, including Charlestown, Watertown, Boston, and Cambridge. The Massachusetts Bay Company, officially a trading company, had a royal charter from England to settle Massachusetts. It was originally run by stockholders, but eventually expanded to include anyone in church communion. Early Cambridge was very nearly theocratic; the church and state were closely intertwined. The first meeting house, both a house of worship and a place for community business, was built in 1632. All church members could vote, and they created a religious society where interdependence was highly valued and the good of the community was supposed to come before the good of the individual.² However, this did not mean that the Puritans were egalitarian. Church officials assigned seats in the meeting house based on family status, age, and property. Men and women sat separately. Sunday worship services included prayer, unaccompanied singing, and a reading and expounding of Scripture. Sermons were expected to last one hour, but it was not unheard of for a minister to take longer.³ Despite a religion that emphasized work above material success, clergymen often had more household luxuries than their neighbors.⁴

In the seventeenth century, Cambridge often lagged behind Boston, and even smaller neighbors such as Watertown. The first settlers farmed the land and raised animals, and as such, each family had a house in the village, planting fields outside, and a share in the common grazing land. As a general rule, the wealthier a family was, the closer their land would be to the center of town.⁵ With sandier, rockier soil and more salt marshes than most of the nearby towns, Cambridge sometimes struggled in agriculture. Boston had a stronger economic base because of its access to the sea, and so to increase its trading opportunities, Cambridge had to become connected with Boston. The first landing for a ferry to go back and forth over the Charles was built in 1635.⁶ Even better, the Great Bridge between Cambridge and Boston was completed in 1662.^† In the later part of the century, Cambridge began to gain a foothold in tanning and other small industries.⁷

Cambridge once had a near-monopoly on the spread of ideas in the New World. From 1638, Harvard had been home to the only printing press in the colonies, brought from England by Henry Dunster, president of the school. However, in 1674, a printing press arrived in Boston, which was quite a blow to Cambridge.⁸ Still, Harvard remained the only college in Massachusetts until after the Revolution, and the only college in the colonies until 1693 with the founding of the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Harvard was also many locals' best bet for a steady income – they catered to the more affluent student population by selling school supplies and clothes, repairing shoes, serving food and drink, and acting as hired help at the school itself. Those who worked for the college, cleaning the halls and making the beds, were often given “country pay” – that is, they were paid in goods such as grain rather than in cash.⁹

In 1686, King James II of England took the colony of Massachusetts under direct rule: it was no longer to be governed by an independent charter. The governor was now appointed by the king, rather than chosen by local civil and religious bodies. This set the stage for the following century, when the colony began to move away from its separatist roots. The towns that had been founded with the “city on a hill” idea, including Cambridge and Boston, would see an influx of immigration by wealthy Anglicans who held much more English attitudes than the original settlers. The changes that took place because Massachusetts was now governed directly by England eventually led Cambridge, with the rest of Massachusetts and the other colonies, toward revolution.

1 Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001), 13.

2 Seaburg 17.

3 McKenzie, Alexander. “Some Thynges of Ye Olden Tyme.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 5.

4 Thomson, Roger. Cambridge Cameos: Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2005), 37.

5 Thomspon 20

6Martin, Mary L. and E. Ashley Rooney. Cambridge, Massachusetts Past and Present. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2008), 6.

†While Cambridge and Boston have many well-known bridges today, the Great Bridge is no longer standing.

7Thompson 35.

8Rooney 7.

9Thomson 57.