Scoundrels Who Made America Great

Chapter One

Anne Hutchinson

"Puritan Jezebel"

Death came on the heels of barking dogs. Anne Hutchinson and her family were going about their daily chores at their farm at Pelham Bay, New Netherland, when she heard a commotion. Shielding her eyes against the bright August sun, she spotted the family’s two big mongrels racing down the old Indian trail, headed straight for a group of Siwanoy warriors striding toward the farmhouse. Hutchinson called out to her son-in-law Will Collins to round up the dogs. The intrusion was not entirely unexpected. Neighbors had warned Hutchinson that the Siwanoy were on a vengeful spree. They had attacked several local homesteads in retribution for the massacring of 80 Siwanoy by Dutch soldiers the previous February. Despite the warriors’ ominous painted faces, Hutchinson was confident that she and her family were safe. She trusted that God would protect them.
Most Puritans considered natives “savages,” but Hutchinson believed that in God’s eyes all people were one. As far as Hutchinson was concerned, the Siwanoy had no reason to harm her family, and she had no reason to fear them. She welcomed the warriors as she would any guest visiting on a summer afternoon. When the sachem, Wampage, asked her to tie up the dogs, she complied. Once the dogs were restrained the warriors sprang into action. Brandishing hatchets and knives, they attacked Hutchinson, Collins, her eight children, and the servants. The unarmed settlers had no chance. After the bloodletting, the Siwanoy dragged their victims’ mutilated bodies into the farmhouse and set it on fire.
Nine-year-old Susanna Hutchinson was picking blueberries in a meadow a short distance from the farmhouse when she heard the screams of her family and the bloodcurdling whoops of the warriors. Terrified, she hid in a crevice of an ancient granite rock in the center of the field. But it was too late; she had been spotted. A warrior yanked her out of the hiding place and threw her on the ground. She covered her eyes and waited for the end, but the deadly hatchet blow did not come. In the retelling of the story, many believe it was her red hair that saved her, for, rather than killing her, the Siwanoy took Susanna captive and renamed her “Autumn Leaf.” Susanna assimilated into the tribe and remained with them until, several years later when relatives from Boston ransomed her.
In Massachusetts Anne Hutchinson’s enemies rejoiced at the news of her death. Her fate, they said, was just retribution for her sins. Concord pastor Peter Bulkeley spoke for many when he said, “Let her damned heresies, and the just vengeance of God, by which she perished, terrify all her seduced followers from having any more to do with her leaven.” The Reverend Thomas Weld wrote from London “Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction.” John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony delivered a pitiless epitaph: “Thus it has pleased the Lord to have compassion of his poor churches here, and to discover this great imposter, and instrument of Satan so fitted and trained to his service for interrupting the passage [of his] kingdom in this part of the world and poisoning the churches here….”
The depth of the scorn heaped on Hutchinson is puzzling. What misdeeds could a fervent Puritan wife of a successful textile merchant, the mother of 15 children, possibly commit to reap such venom? There was no violence, enmity, or rancor in her heart. Rather, Anne Hutchinson was an outlier. In the male-dominated culture of Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, she spoke her mind freely and fearlessly and would not bend to the will of the elite men who governed the colony.