Though this expression of opinion, for it was after all but little more, on the part of the synod was aimed at the special case of Mrs. Hutchinson, it is none the less of some general interest in its broad statement. Evidently the Puritans were at one with St. Paul in his opinion that women should be silent in the churches.
None the less for the fulminations of the synod did Mrs. Hutchinson continue to hold the meetings that were so repugnant to the elders of the colony; and by this time she had become a real power. That she was entirely convinced of the truth of her tenets, of the divine source of her "revelations," and of the honesty and purity of her own purpose is certain; that she was considerably influenced by a love of notoriety and an intense natural combativeness is at least probable. Opposition, especially that which took the form of contempt for her sex and intelligence, only inflamed her the more; and soon she became really turbulent in her denunciations of the ruling powers. Matters became so grave, threatening not only the orthodoxy but the peace of the colony, that drastic methods were decided upon. John Wheelwright was first disfranchised and banished, and then Mrs. Hutchinson was summoned before the Court. The proceedings on the occasion of her arraignment may best be set forth in the words of Winthrop, that prejudiced yet trustworthy chronicler:
"The Court also sent for Mrs. Hutchinson, and charged her with divers matters, as her keeping two public lectures every week in her house, whereto sixty or eighty persons did usually resort, and for reproaching most of the ministers (viz., all except Mr. Cotton) for not preaching a covenant of free grace, and that they had not the seal of the Spirit, nor were able ministers of the New Testament: which were clearly proven against her, though she sought to shift it off. And after many speeches to and fro, at last she was so full as she could not contain, but vented her revelations, amongst which this was one, that she had it revealed to her that she should come into New England and should here be persecuted, and that God would ruin us and our posterity, and the whole State, for the same. So the Court proceeded and banished her; but, because it was winter, they committed her to a private house, where she was well provided, and her own friends and the elders permitted to go to her, but none else."
To the modern mind there is in that account merely the picture of an excitable, overwrought, hysterical woman, keyed to the pitch of rejoicing in martyrdom and "venting her revelations" to this end and under an impulse of enthusiasm. It seems impossible that she should be taken seriously; yet perhaps the Court was in the right, for such a woman, at once intelligent and fanatical, may have been a greater threat to the community than it is possible for us to realize at this day.
Excommunication followed the sentence of the court, and her bearing under this ban confirms the opinion above expressed concerning her happiness in finding martyrdom; for we are told by Winthrop that "after she was excommunicated, her spirits, which seemed before to be somewhat dejected, revived again, and she gloried in her sufferings, saying that it was the greatest happiness, next to Christ, that ever befel her." She was to have plenty of that kind of "happiness" in her life, for Mr. Cotton, once her firm ally, pronounced against her the censure of the church, and even one of her sons deserted her in her adversity and took sides with her enemies; her husband appears to have been from the first either a very feeble ally or a silent disapprover of her methods. She was persecuted in many ways, even after her removal to Providence, Rhode Island, and certain maternal troubles, the result of physical causes, were gleefully taken advantage of by her enemies and chronicled as divine punishments for heresy. The latter part of her life must be written down a failure, though it held a brave struggle to maintain a gallant front to her foes; and when, in August, 1643, she fell one of the victims of an Indian massacre even her best friends must have felt that there was little cause to regret her fate. She had been in the colonies about two years before she began to preach, about four before she was excommunicated, and about nine before her death. In that time she had proved a firebrand and a disturber of the peace such as had not before been known and she had threatened to disrupt the colony of Boston and rend it into lasting separation. She had failed; but she had made manifest a danger.
She had done more than this. She had proved the possibility of woman as an element in the polity and progress of the State. In her way she was a pioneer. She was the first American woman to take a decided lead in matters of general interest. She was the first to hold meetings, to claim for her sex the privilege of freedom as claimed by the men of the Pilgrims. She was the first American woman to uprear the banner of her sex in the matter of independence; she may be said to have been the prototype of all the succeeding upholders of "women's rights." When Winthrop, at her trial, brought up the accusation of having held women's meetings, she quoted "a clear rule in Titus, that the elder women should instruct the younger." Then Winthrop asked her if she would instruct an hundred men if they desired it, to which she replied that she would not, but would instruct any one man who might so wish. She insisted positively upon her right to teach in her own way, and asked: "Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women, and why do you call me to teach the Court?" She may have been somewhat hazy as to her real theological creed, but she assuredly held clear ideas as to the rights of her sex.
Above all, and in this she was highly typical of the American woman of later days, she was an enthusiast. Contrary though the theory be to the general belief, the most salient and persistent trait among the Puritans was enthusiasm, however it hid itself behind a cold and contained exterior. It was their enthusiasm that made them what they were, that enabled them to found their portion of a mighty nation; they were the most intensely enthusiastic people that ever went to the making of a nation; not a Cavalier, not a Frenchman, not a Castilian, ever held the fire that burned in the spirit of these old Puritans, even though the stroke of iron was needful visibly to call it from their flint. In Anne Hutchinson that overpowering quality of enthusiasm was to be found in a superlative degree, and thus, above all, we find in her the type of the coming woman of America.
Hardly had the echoes of the Antinomian controversy died away when there came to New England a yet more rending cataclysm, in which women were again the leading spirits. This was the "intrusion" of the Quakers. To us it may seem as absurd as wonderful that the noble doctrines of the Society of Friends should once have been regarded as especially dictated by the Father of Lies; but when the Quakers reached at last the shores of New England with their "pernicious doctrines," it seemed to the Puritans that the devil had been unchained in their midst. When on July 11, 1656, there arrived in the port of Boston a ship which among other passengers brought to the colony two women, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, who were known to be members of the accursed sect, there ensued a general consternation which was well satirized by Bishop in his New England Judged, when he writes: "Two poor women arriving in your harbour so shook ye, to the everlasting shame of you, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders." It would require little less than a volume to set forth the reasons which caused the Puritans so to hate and fear the Quakers; but it is enough for our present purpose that we understand that not a plague of small-pox or cholera could have created such consternation as did the coming of these two feeble women. Mary Fisher, a most enthusiastic follower of Fox, had already undergone martyrdom in the attempt to spread the faith of her co-religionists, having been imprisoned in England for months and whipped "until the blood ran down her body." She was later to travel even as far as the dominion of the "Grand Turk" and hold speech with that potentate, and at last to die, an old woman, at Charleston, South Carolina. When she and Ann Austin made their appearance in the harbor of Boston--more terrible to the Puritans than the sea-monster to Andromeda--they were promptly imprisoned and their tracts, with which they were of course provided, were burned in the market-place. They were held in bondage for some weeks and were then placed on board their ship and exiled. But they had done their work, if only in exciting terror, and the fire that consumed their tracts was to be a spark that lighted a great conflagration. When the General Court met, it passed a long and incendiary law against the coming of the Quakers, telling of their "divilish opinions," and providing for the fining and whipping of offenders. This did not keep away the detested sect, who believed that they were intrusted by God with a message to the world and would not be silenced. There were among them many devoted men; but there were yet more devoted women, and the second, like the first, "intrusion" of the Quakers was by women, Ann Burden and Mary Dyer. In August, 1657, arrived a pioneer in Mary Clark, who boldly proclaimed that she came with "a message from the Lord," and who found her welcome in the receipt of twenty stripes and banishment. Salem began to be known as a stronghold of the Quakers or at least of their admirers, and among others one Cassandra Southwick, an old woman, was imprisoned for sympathy extended to the Friends. Perhaps there was other reason as well, for under the date of March 9, 1660, we find that "Major Hawthorne, at dinner with the Gov. and Magistrates at a Court of Assistants, said that at Salem there was a woman, called Cassandra Southwick, that said she was greater than Moses, for Moses had seen God but twice, and his back, and she had seen Him three times, and face to face, instancing the places." Probably Cassandra--ominous name!--was a fanatic who had become insane from a sense of self-importance, as was too often the case with religious enthusiasts, and had made herself obnoxious to the powers of the colony by her claims. We hear no more of her after her imprisonment; but she too was typical of a certain phase of New England femininity in those days.
It is in Mary Dyer, however, that we find the true type of the New England Quakeress--a type which persists in more than one aspect of the American woman. Believing that she was sent by God with His words to mankind, she would not be hushed from uttering them. Sent away from Boston on her first appearance there, she soon returned and preached the "infamous" doctrines of her sect--"peace and goodwill toward men." In the interval between her visits the offence of which she was guilty in preaching the creed of the Quakers had been made capital--one of the deepest blots that rest upon even this speckled period of New England history. Mary Dyer felt that in returning to Boston to preach she was going to her death; but she held it her duty, and she did not shrink. On September 14, 1659, she was condemned to banishment or death, if she did not leave within two days; but it was no desire to escape the ultimate penalty that led her on this occasion to return to her Rhode Island home, for on October 8th she once more appeared in Boston. She was at once arrested and with two other Friends was condemned by the Court "to suffer the poenalty of the lawe (the just reward of their transgression) on the morrow." One sees a twinge of conscience in the clause in parentheses, as excusatory of themselves to posterity. Mary Dyer, however, though included in the original sentence, was, on the intercession of her son, reprieved from death and her sentence commuted to banishment, "to be forthwith executed if she returned. In the meanwhile she was to go with the other two condemned to the place of execution, and to stand upon the gallows with a rope about her neck till her companions were executed." She went to her ignominious punishment "as to a Wedding Day" and heartened her companions for their trial--though they needed no encouragement. Moreover, she did not wish to accept her own life at the hands of those who had made the unjust law under which her companions suffered, she probably believing that the already large number of Quaker sympathizers would be enlarged by the spectacle of a woman put to death for her faith. Probably, too, she was of the same enthusiastic spirit as Anne Hutchinson, that rejoiced in martyrdom. At all events, though once more banished, she reappeared in Boston, and in little more than six months from the date of her last sentence she was once more before the Court upon the charge of "rebelliously returning into this jurisdiction, notwithstanding the favour of this Court towards her," and she was sentenced to die on June 1st. On that day she accordingly went to her death, as calmly and triumphantly as to the crown of her life, as indeed the moment probably seemed to her.
It is difficult to gauge the character of Mary Dyer, who may be taken as the type of the New England Quaker of her day, even though she was of alien birth. That she was a woman of pure and holy spirit there can be no doubt; and though her persistent affronting of death may seem to savor of fanaticism, it was fanaticism, if at all, of that sort which inspired the early Christian martyrs. She was utterly sincere; and sincerity may plead forgiveness for any mere error.