The Wordy Shipmates Part 6

"Mercy they did deserve for their valor," Underhill admits of the Pequot. Not that they get any. William Bradford was told by a partic.i.p.ant that "it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof."

The Englishmen escape the flames and then guard the two exits so that no Pequot can escape. According to Underhill, those who try to get away "our soldiers entertained with the point of the sword; down fell men, women, and children."

Mason summarizes, "And thus . . . in little more than an hour's s.p.a.ce was their impregnable fort with themselves utterly destroyed, to the number of six or seven hundred." That's right-as many as seven hundred people, some of them babies, some of them those babies' mothers, were burned alive in their homes.

Two Englishmen die and about twenty are wounded.

Mason is triumphant. After all, this is the will of a righteous G.o.d. He praises the Lord for "burning them up in the fire of his wrath, and dunging the ground with their flesh: It is the Lord's doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes!" That might be the creepiest exclamation point in American literature. No, wait-it's this one: "Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies!"

Underhill has read enough of the New Testament to at least pretend to stop and question this human barbecue. He asks, "Should not Christians have more mercy and compa.s.sion?" Answer: Nope. The Bible offers reasoning enough: "When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against G.o.d and man . . . there He hath no respect to persons, but harrows them and saws them and puts them to the sword and the most terriblest death that may be." Even children? Yes. "Sometimes," Underhill continues, "the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents." He concludes, "We had sufficient light from the word of G.o.d for our proceedings."

For Underhill, biblical justification is enough of an air freshener to erase the smell of burning human flesh. But the Narragansett and Mohegan, whom Underhill calls "our Indians," were shaken by the viciousness of the English and the horror of the carnage. Especially the Narragansett. Recall they had explicitly asked before the campaign, via Roger Williams, "that it would be pleasing to all natives, that women and children be spared."

"Our Indians," Underhill writes, "came to us and much rejoiced at our victories, and greatly admired the manner of Englishmen's fight, but cried 'Mach it, mach it,' 'Mach it, mach it,' that is, 'It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slays too many men.'" The word "naught," to a seventeenth-century English speaker, meant "evil." that is, 'It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slays too many men.'" The word "naught," to a seventeenth-century English speaker, meant "evil."

In 1889, a statue of Mason drawing his sword was erected on the site of the Mystic Fort ma.s.sacre, in the present-day town of Groton. In 1992, a Pequot named Wolf Jackson pet.i.tioned the town council to remove the statue. According to the Hartford Courant, Hartford Courant, in one of the meetings in which the statue's fate was debated, one citizen proclaimed "that the statue on Pequot Avenue is about as appropriate as a monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the n.a.z.is' Final Solution." As a compromise between the faction who wanted the statue destroyed and boosters who wanted to keep it in place, in 1996 the statue was moved away from the site of the ma.s.sacre to nearby Windsor, which was founded by Mason. The in one of the meetings in which the statue's fate was debated, one citizen proclaimed "that the statue on Pequot Avenue is about as appropriate as a monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the n.a.z.is' Final Solution." As a compromise between the faction who wanted the statue destroyed and boosters who wanted to keep it in place, in 1996 the statue was moved away from the site of the ma.s.sacre to nearby Windsor, which was founded by Mason. The New York Times New York Times reported that nine protestors attended the rededication ceremony: "'No Hero,' said one sign; 'Remember the Pequot Ma.s.sacres,' said another." A few weeks later, vandals doused the bronze Mason with red paint. reported that nine protestors attended the rededication ceremony: "'No Hero,' said one sign; 'Remember the Pequot Ma.s.sacres,' said another." A few weeks later, vandals doused the bronze Mason with red paint.

After the Mystic Fort Ma.s.sacre, there are a few more dwindling skirmishes here and there in the Pequot War. Individual Pequot are hunted down by other Indians, who decapitate their corpses and send their severed heads along to the English, including the head of the princ.i.p.al sachem, Sa.s.sacus, who is beheaded by Mohawks. These grisly trophies, reports Mason, "came almost daily to Windsor or Hartford." But Mystic more or less marks the end of the Pequot War, as well as the end of Pequot power.

Captured Pequot are divvied up as spoils among the victors. Boston sells some of its share of Pequot survivors into slavery in Bermuda. (Many Pequot descendants still live on Bermuda's St. David's Island, their Indian slave ancestors having intermarried with their African slave ancestors.) In 1638, the Connecticut English host a treaty party in Hartford where a few remaining Pequot are divided among Uncas, Miantonomi, and the leaders of other tribes that had been English allies. The treaty mandates that the Pequot are to be absorbed into their adoptive tribes, their own tribal ident.i.ty outlawed. "The Pequots were then bound by covenant," writes Mason, "that none should inhabit their native country, nor should any of them be called Pequots any more, but Mohegans and Narragansetts forever." After trying to physically annihilate the Pequot, the English attempt to wipe out the Pequot linguistically, forbidding the tribe to refer to themselves as Pequot.

The Pequot absorbed into Uncas's tribe later became known as the Mashantucket Pequot. In 1976, this tribe successfully sued the state of Connecticut for recovery of some of its land in Connecticut and received federal recognition from Ronald Reagan in 1983. This is the home to the tribe's wildly profitable Foxwoods Resort Casino.

On our Plymouth-bound vacation, my sister Amy, my nephew Owen, and I visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, a stone's throw from Foxwoods. It's an impressive facility with a tower where visitors can look across the tree-tops and admire the landscape and the casino's teal roof. The museum features life-size dioramas with mannequins depicting the Pequot way of life, including a caribou hunt and a wigwam village enclosed in a palisade like the one at Mystic. Inside, a child naps on a bed of animal skins, a woman guts a fish, an elder teaches a teenager how to make an arrow.

We sit in the museum's theater and watch a film-a dramatic reenactment of the ma.s.sacre at the Mystic fort. Owen is seven. His knowledge of seventeenth-century New England derives entirely from what he learned in his school's Thanksgiving pageant the previous fall and repeated viewings of s...o...b..-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, s...o...b..-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, in which a cartoon dog and his teenage friends visit a haunted New England town. in which a cartoon dog and his teenage friends visit a haunted New England town.

When the film shows the Pequot clashing with Connecticut settlers, Owen whispers, "I don't get it. Why are they fighting? They eat together on Thanksgiving."

When Uncas shows up at Fort Saybrook and bestows upon the English his offering of Pequot heads, Owen is outraged. He screams, "What?!"

Cut to the Pequot fort, where we have already seen a little girl around Owen's age playing with a cornhusk doll while being teased by her brother. The reenactor playing Captain Mason yells, "Burn them!" As the wigwams catch fire, Pequot kids are shrieking and holding on to their mothers. The English shoot at the Pequot who flee the flames. Horrified, Owen tugs my sleeve, demanding, "Aunt Sarah! When do they have Thanksgiving?"

"The one with the Pilgrims?" I whisper. " That happened sixteen years earlier."

Owen closes his eyes and refuses to watch the rest of the movie. When the lights go up, he asks his mother, "Who won?"

" The English," she replies.

One answer to Owen's question-When's Thanksgiving?-might be June 15, 1637. Winthrop writes in his journal that in Boston "There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequot." To the Puritans, days of thanksgiving were not annual events. Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by U.S. calendars calling for a holiday, Thanksgiving, with a capital T, on the fourth Thursday of November every year. What if we didn't deserve it? What if a day of fast was called for instead, days of fast being occasional days of punishment to repent for wayward collective behavior or as an act of prayer to call for G.o.d's help in precarious situations. In fact, Boston had held a fast the day before the ma.s.sacre at Mystic, and Winthrop credits that one day's missed dinner for the resulting "general defeat of the Pequot." Thus did they earn the day of thanksgiving after the victory.

If the idea of putting on a picnic to celebrate seven hundred people being burned alive sounds cra.s.s, it was nevertheless not unheard of in the seventeenth century. In fact, during the English Civil War, when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell led his army to sack the Irish village of Drogheda on September 11, 1649, at least two thousand people died, including some who barricaded themselves inside a church that Cromwell set on fire, thus burning them alive like the Pequot in their fort. Cromwell prosecuted this holocaust in the same manner Captain Underhill applauded his men at Mystic-"without compa.s.sion." Though, according to Cromwell's biographer Antonia Fraser, "Oliver's own mercy was said to have been stirred by the sight of a tiny baby still trying hopelessly to feed from the breast of its dead mother." And what was the verdict on Drogheda back home in England? Fraser writes that the news was met with "delight and rejoicing. The ministers gave out the happy tidings from the pulpits; 30 October was set aside to be a day of public thanksgiving."

After the Mystic ma.s.sacre movie ends, Amy and Owen and I leave the museum and repair to our nearby hotel, the Mohegan Sun Casino, operated by the Mohegan tribe. It looks like it was designed by Ralph Lauren, Bugsy Siegel, and w.i.l.l.y Wonka after a night of peyote. Which is to say that I kind of like it.

The registration desks are nestled under a half-dome, meant to evoke a wigwam. Inside, amidst the standard gambling accoutrements, like c.r.a.ps tables and slot machines, the building is done up in woven wood and birch bark. Support columns look like trees with candy-colored leaves. Mu rals depict Mohegan mythology. There's a display featuring a giant replica of Shantok cookware-the pottery a.s.sociated with Uncas's nearby village-and it makes me wonder if four hundred years from now my nonstick frying pan will be made into a colossal sculpture for gamblers to admire. A charming statue of the late Mohegan anthropologist Gladys Tantaquidgeon is facing a sign that tallies up the "slot jack-pot paid today." Uncas would undoubtedly get a kick out of his tribe presiding over such an impressive edifice built for the sole purpose of taking white people's wampum.

The three of us sit outside by the pool and Owen does a martial arts-influenced interpretive dance to d.i.c.k Dale's "Misirlou" while quizzing me on the story of the Pequot War.

"Don't tell me!" he says. "No, tell me."

I hit the highlights, starting with the Dutch murdering the Pequot chief and the Pequot avenging his death by mistakenly killing an Englishman and how the whole thing just kind of escalated into war. He says that sounds stupid. I say that most wars are. Then he asks me what state we're in.

"Connecticut," I tell him.

"And that war was here?" he asks.

Yes, I answer.

"Name a state where there was never a war," he says.

Flipping through various Indian skirmishes and the Civil War in my head, I reply, "I'm not sure I can."

"Then name a state where there was the least amount of war."

"I don't know," I say. "Idaho?" (I looked it up later; turns out I was unaware of the Battle of White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce War.) The next morning, we drive around in search of Uncas, walking around his headquarters, now Fort Shantok State Park. Then we drive to Norwich to look at Indian Leap, a chasm next to a waterfall where Uncas supposedly chased some Narragansett to their deaths in 1643.

"Was he trying to cut their heads off?" asks Owen.

No, I tell him. The sign says, "They plunged to their death into the abyss below."

In Norwich, we stop to look at the Uncas Monument, an obelisk, at the "Royal Mohegan Burial Ground." A plaque notes the monument was dedicated by President Andrew Jackson in 1833.

"Figures," my sister says. "One a.s.shole honoring another." (For his Indian-removal policies Jackson is not remembered kindly by my family and our fellow Cherokee descendants.) Amy and Owen can't get past Uncas decapitating those Pequot and taking part in the Mystic Ma.s.sacre. Not that I find his behavior particularly uplifting, but I can understand the desperation behind Uncas's every lick of an English boot. He was ruthless in the pursuit of one goal, Mohegan survival. Standing in that cemetery, looking at the grave of Uncas's great-grandson, reading a plaque that states the Mohegan "descendants reside in Norwich today," it appears that Uncas succeeded in keeping his people intact and in proximity to the graves of their ancestors. What he did wasn't pretty. It wasn't even right. But it worked.

In a famous ill.u.s.tration from John Underhill's book on the Pequot War, the situation couldn't be more clear. Concentric circles depict the overwhelming force of the English and their allies surrounding the Pequot fort. The lesson? You're either burning or getting burnt.

We leave the Mohegan cemetery and stop off at the Mystic Aquarium to take a break from Indian troubles. But an exhibit devoted to algae living inside giant clams reminds me of Uncas's relationship with the English nonetheless.

In order to survive, giant clams and zooxanth.e.l.la have adopted a mutualistic relationship (one that benefits both partners). Zooxanth.e.l.la (plant-like algae) live inside giant clams to receive protection and a home. In turn zooxanth.e.l.la provide the giant clam with the nutrients it needs to survive.

Obviously, the English are the clam and the Mohegan are the algae. If that a.n.a.logy sounds unfair and one-sided and insulting to the Mohegan, that's because it is. Uncas simply decided that the only way to live was to live off the biggest giant clam around.

After the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi took the exact opposite course of action from Uncas, with disastrous results. Horrified by the Mystic Ma.s.sacre, Miantonomi could only conclude that the English were h.e.l.l-bent on native annihilation. So he set out to build a coalition of tribes to fight back, just as Tec.u.mseh would at the turn of the nineteenth century.

In 1642, Lion Gardener, one of the officers from Fort Saybrook, was pa.s.sing through Long Island when he witnessed a speech Miantonomi delivered to a local tribe.

He said: For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly. For you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the gra.s.s and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the gra.s.s, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.

After enumerating his other Indian allies, he outlines a forthcoming plan of attack. He says, "And when you see the fires that will be made forty days hence in a clear night, then do as we, and the next day fall on and kill men, women, and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat 'til our deer be increased again."

Miantonomi's speech foreshadows similar testimony among nineteenth-century American Indians such as Chief Seattle and Tec.u.mseh himself, who would one day try and gather together allied Indian forces invoking the memory of what happened to the Pequot, whom he said had "vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun."

When the English get wind of Miantonomi's plot, Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, and Connecticut form the United Colonies of New England, also called the New England Confederation, to officially act as a collective defensive alliance. (Roger Williams's heretical colony is purposefully left out of the coalition so Rhode Island's anything-goes coo-ties won't rub off on its proper, G.o.d-fearing neighbors.) Meanwhile, Uncas captures Miantonomi and turns him over to the English authorities at Hartford. This prompts a secret meeting among representatives from the United Colonies to decide what to do about the prisoner. Winthrop reports in his journal that they conclude that "there was a general conspiracy among the Indians to cut off all the English and that Miantonomi was the head and contriver of it." Secondly, they agree that the Narragansett sachem "was of a turbulent and proud spirit, and would never be at rest."

They agree that Miantonomi should be a.s.sa.s.sinated, and that Uncas is the man to do it. They send for him, and the Mohegan, according to Winthrop, "readily undertook the execution." Uncas orders his brother to carry out the task. Winthrop writes that Uncas's brother "clave [Miantonomi's] head with a hatchet, some English being present."

For the English, the Pequot War was a success ratified by G.o.d. It became the blueprint for all future Indian wars on the continent conducted by the colonists and the subsequent United States. The Mystic Ma.s.sacre set a precedent. The ma.s.s murder of the Pequot made the ma.s.s murder of other tribes possible and therefore repeatable. It was the first of many similar horrors to come: the Bear River Ma.s.sacre of the Shoshone in 1863 (after the U.S. Army killed a couple of hundred Shoshone men in battle, American soldiers allegedly raped the tribe's women and murdered children-which happened, with apologies to Owen, in Idaho); the Sand Creek Ma.s.sacre in 1864 (in which the army slays almost two hundred Cheyenne); the Wounded Knee Ma.s.sacre of 1890 (when the army gunned down nearly three hundred Lakota Sioux in the South Dakota snow).

Some U.S. Army veterans of the latter Lakota ma.s.sacre, by the way, would then be dispatched by the McKinley administration to fight guerrilla warriors in the Philippines after we had won the islands from Spain, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, at the end of the Spanish-American War. That year, 1898, was the magic moment when the United States became a true world power, allowing previously isolationist America to return to its Puritan, come-over-and-help-us roots. Soon enough we were helping Europe in two world wars, helping South Korea, helping South Vietnam, just as we are now, as I write this, helping Iraq.

For Captain John Underhill, the co-architect of the Mystic Ma.s.sacre, having commanded the soldiers who decimated the Pequot was not enough to sustain his hero's welcome back in Boston. He was a friend of the troublemaker Anne Hutchinson. To the General Court, no amount of Pequot blood could wash off the stain of her beliefs. Underhill was forced to flee the colony he had so stalwartly, and so cruelly, defended.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson, her husband, William, and their whopping brood of fifteen children arrive in Boston on September 18, 1634. In Winthrop's diary, he notes the arrival of their ship, the Griffin, Griffin, but not the Hutchinsons themselves. Later on, he would call Will Hutchinson "a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife." but not the Hutchinsons themselves. Later on, he would call Will Hutchinson "a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife."

Anne herself is guided by John Cotton. Cotton is why they're here. Back in England, the Hutchinsons used to travel routinely over twenty miles just to hear him preach. Anne is Cotton's groupie, and after he emigrates to America she soon packs up her family and follows.

And hers is one large family. Anne and Will Hutchinson have fifteen children. The daughter of a persecuted Puritan minister who helped her cobble together the best education possible for female children (who were denied university attendance), Anne Hutchinson is one of the brainiest English-women of the seventeenth century. Yet she is no stranger to the goopy fluids of female biology. Besides birthing her own litter, she works as a midwife, delivering babies and no doubt serving the brew imbibed before and after labor, the wonderfully named "groaning beer."

By aiding Boston's new mothers, Hutchinson quickly befriends a lot of women. She starts leading the women in a regular Bible study in her large, fine home. (Her husband might be whipped but he sure is rich.) At first, they simply discuss Cotton's latest sermon.

Unfortunately, Hutchinson didn't write down or publish any of her commentaries. She suffers the same fate in the historical record as the Pequot; her thoughts and deeds have been pa.s.sed down to us solely through the writings of white men who pretty much hate her guts.

A ladies' study group is one of the most ubiquitous social subsets in the history of Christian churches. I attended one regularly with my mother as a child. Once, when I told a member of the fabled East Coast Media Elite that I was raised Pentecostal he asked if that meant I grew up "fondling snakes in trailers." I replied, "You know that book club you're in? Well, my church was a lot like that, except we actually read the book."

Anne Hutchinson is hosting more than a ladies' study group. Dozens and dozens of Bostonians come to her home to hear her preach. Men start coming, too. And not just any old men-young Governor Henry Vane himself. She has something other people want, some combination of confidence and glamour and hope. She is the Puritan Oprah-a leader, a guru, a star.

Hutchinson, still swooning, spiritually speaking, for Cotton, nevertheless starts departing from her mentor's lectures and lets rip her own opinions and beliefs.

One person keeping an eye on her, both theologically and literally, is John Winthrop, who lives across the street. (The site of her home would later house Ticknor and Fields, the famous book publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Th.o.r.eau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, appropriately, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter's first chapter, misspells her first name but nevertheless honors Hutchinson by describing a rose bush in bloom said to have "sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door" and symbolizing "some sweet moral blossom." Nowadays, the place is a jewelry store. Last time I walked by it there were Canadian diamonds in the window with necklaces displayed next to photos of grazing caribou, grazing caribou apparently being a Canadian girl's best friend.) On October 21, 1636, Winthrop writes in his journal, "One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors." Her first error, he says, is the belief "that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person." Puritan orthodoxy prefers to think of said Holy Ghost as hanging around next to a person who has been saved-kind of like a garden-variety ghost, actually. Winthrop will later explain this with the a.n.a.logy of a marriage: in "a union . . . as between husband and wife, he is a man still, and she a woman." As opposed to Hutchinson's version, in which the spirit dwells within, Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers style. style.

As Edmund S. Morgan writes in The Puritan Dilemma, The Puritan Dilemma, Hutchinson's notion of the Holy Ghost living inside a believer "was dangerously close to a belief in immediate personal revelation." Earlier, when I was trying to point out that the Puritans of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony had little in common with present-day evangelical Christians, this is what I meant. Hutchinson's emphasis on "immediate personal revelation"-radical at the time-is now a core value of many American Protestant sects, including the Pentecostal one I was raised in. Hutchinson's notion of the Holy Ghost living inside a believer "was dangerously close to a belief in immediate personal revelation." Earlier, when I was trying to point out that the Puritans of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony had little in common with present-day evangelical Christians, this is what I meant. Hutchinson's emphasis on "immediate personal revelation"-radical at the time-is now a core value of many American Protestant sects, including the Pentecostal one I was raised in.

For example, my family attended church three times a week. Once, when I was around eight, I complained about having to go to the Wednesday-night sermon because sometimes it went late and I wanted to get home in time to watch my favorite TV show, Charlie's Angels. Charlie's Angels. Granted, that program's teachings were often at odds with the teachings of the Wednesday-night sermon, which my mother discovered to her horror when my Barbie started ordering a green c.o.c.ktail called a "gra.s.shopper" and climbing into bed with Ken, whom she refused to marry because she was more interested in her career. Granted, that program's teachings were often at odds with the teachings of the Wednesday-night sermon, which my mother discovered to her horror when my Barbie started ordering a green c.o.c.ktail called a "gra.s.shopper" and climbing into bed with Ken, whom she refused to marry because she was more interested in her career.

Anyway, I remember whining, "Why do we have to go to church?"

My mother answered, "We don't have have to go church." to go church."

"Great!" I said.

"We are are going to church," she said. She said we go there "for fellowship" and to learn and pray. But she also said that all one needs to be saved is to believe in Jesus and accept him into your heart. Then she quoted John 3:16: "For G.o.d so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." going to church," she said. She said we go there "for fellowship" and to learn and pray. But she also said that all one needs to be saved is to believe in Jesus and accept him into your heart. Then she quoted John 3:16: "For G.o.d so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

From the perspective of catching the beginning of Char-lie's Angels, Char-lie's Angels, her saying we were still going to church was bad news. But the rest of what she said was a source of self-determination and responsibility all at once. What I took from this revelation was that no one else was responsible for my salvation-that no church, no preacher, not even the Bible, come to think of it, had power over me. My highest authority was the spiritual presence within. her saying we were still going to church was bad news. But the rest of what she said was a source of self-determination and responsibility all at once. What I took from this revelation was that no one else was responsible for my salvation-that no church, no preacher, not even the Bible, come to think of it, had power over me. My highest authority was the spiritual presence within.

Compare that to standard theological procedure in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. Hutchinson's creed-like my mother's, of privileging a personal relationship with G.o.d over everything else-writes Morgan, "threatened the fundamental conviction on which the Puritans built their state, their churches, and their daily lives, namely that G.o.d's will could be discovered only through the Bible"-a Bible dissected and interpreted by two ordained ministers, the teacher and the pastor, in church services with mandatory attendance.

Hutchinson's second error, according to Winthrop, is that according to her, "no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification." In other words, she rejects the Puritan conclusion that a member of the Elect is a visible saint who seems like a member of the Elect.

Hutchinson and her accusers would agree that one of the basic gists of Puritanism is an argument against a covenant of works, which is to say Puritanism denies everything that's nice and comforting about Catholicism. Giving alms to the poor? Confessing one's sins to a priest who suggests the sinner repeat prayers memorized by rote-the "Hail Mary," for instance-and then feeling better? None of that for the Puritans. Oh, every Puritan is welcome, even required, to do good and be good and show up at church and help the needy-the Bible tells them so. But those actions alone do not admit a believer into heaven. Only G.o.d does that, through the grace of His salvation, hence the name covenant of grace. Which, as we have noted, G.o.d only doles out to a select few individuals, none of whom are ever entirely certain they have made the cut.

The difference between Anne Hutchinson and her accusers is that Hutchinson believes that anyone, even a nonbe liever, can seem seem saved. The only way to know one is saved is when one saved. The only way to know one is saved is when one feels feels saved. Puritans, however, are suspicious of feelings, especially the feelings of a woman without proper theological training from Cambridge University. saved. Puritans, however, are suspicious of feelings, especially the feelings of a woman without proper theological training from Cambridge University.

"There joined with her in these opinions," Winthrop writes, "a brother of hers, one Mr. Wheelwright, a silenced minister sometimes in England." The fate of John Wheelwright, who is married to Hutchinson's sister, is entwined with Hutchinson's, partly because he and Cotton are the only clergymen Hutchinson approves of, the only ministers she condones for preaching about the covenant of grace instead of the covenant of works. The other reason Wheelwright is caught up in the momentum of Hutchinson's controversy with the Bay Colony officials is that she inspires her followers to demand that Wheelwright be put on the payroll as a minister of the Boston church.

That is Winthrop's own congregation. On October 30, 1636, he writes in his journal, "Some of the church of Boston, being of the opinion of Mrs. Hutchinson, had labored to have Mr. Wheelwright to be called to be a teacher there. . . . One of the church stood up and said, he could not consent."

This anonymous "one" was most likely Winthrop himself, who goes on to describe the man's reasoning: "because the church being well furnished already with able ministers, whose spirits they knew, and whose labors G.o.d had blessed in much love and sweet peace." I.e., they've got Cotton, they've got Wilson; so, minister-wise, they're all set. Wheelwright, however, is still well within the traditional Bostonian being-talked-out-of-one's-questionable-opinions grace period, and it is suggested that perhaps he could lead a congregation in nearby Braintree.

The word Winthrop uses to characterize Hutchinson and Wheelwright's thought is "antinomian," which means "against the law." This period is often called by historians the "Antinomian Controversy." Winthrop, as a magistrate, is on the side of the law.

Like a lot of Puritan disagreements, this one is tricky. Winthrop is by no means opposed to the covenant of grace. He actually shares Hutchinson's admiration for Cotton, and nurturing the covenant of grace is Cotton's specialty. Recall that Winthrop praised Cotton for having such a talent for waking lackl.u.s.ter believers from spiritual slumber that the Boston church underwent a boom of enthusiasm after Cotton came to town. Even Winthrop, in the middle of the Antinomian Controversy, admitted to such an awakening, calling it "the voice of peace."

Anne Hutchinson is merely taking Protestantism's next logical step. If Protestantism is an evolutionary process devoted to the ideal of getting closer and closer to G.o.d, it starts with doing away with Latin-speaking popes and bishops in favor of locally elected but nevertheless highly educated, ordained clergymen, and Bibles translated into the believers' mother tongues. This is the "New England Way."

Hutchinson is pushing American Protestantism further, toward a practice approaching the more personal, ecstatic, anti-intellectual, emotional slant now practiced in the U.S.A., especially in the South and Midwest. We call that swath of geography the "Bible Belt," but that would have been a more accurate description of bookish seventeenth-century New England. While modern evangelicals obviously set store in the Bible, their partiality for alone time with their deity means that a truer name for what we now call the Bible Belt might be something along the lines of the Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ Belt, or the Filled with the Holy Spirit Basket of America.

Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's king. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.

On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance-along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy-namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.

By December of 1636, tensions between the two factions of Hutchinson/Wheelwright versus Winthrop/ Wilson (with John Cotton in the middle), take their toll on at least one Bostonian. Winthrop writes in his journal that at a meeting of the magistrates, Henry Vane claims he needs to resign as governor and return to England for "reasons concerning his own estate," the seventeenth-century version of a politician's resignation made in the name of spending more time with his family. As this is "a time of such danger" due to the ongoing Indian troubles, Vane's colleagues chew him out for even considering abandoning a colony in need. He agrees to stick around, but he complains of foreseeing "G.o.d's judgments to come upon us for these differences and dissensions, which he saw amongst us." Then Winthrop writes that Vane "brake forth into tears."

In earlier paragraphs devoted to the Pequot War, I have mentioned that Winthrop records that on January 20, 1637, "a general fast was kept in all the churches," a punishment meant to appeal to G.o.d to help the colony with its Indian troubles and "the dissensions of our churches."

John Cotton preaches a Fast Day sermon meant to scold the colonists for their bickering. He quotes from Isaiah 58:4: "Behold, ye fast for strife and debate." Then, John Wheelwright asks to preach and, in the spirit of reconciliation, Cotton lets him.

"The only cause of fasting of true believers," remarks Wheelwright, "is the absence of Christ." This is a serious accusation. Remember that in Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity," of seven years earlier, he supposed that in New England, G.o.d "will delight to dwell among us as His own people." But Wheelwright continues that if Christ "be present with his people, then they have no cause to fast."

Then Wheelwright, clearly alluding to his and Hutchinson's beleaguered little faction, proclaims that "the saints of G.o.d are few, they are but a little flock." Then, alluding to Winthrop's side, he continues, "Those that are enemies to the Lord, not only paganish, but antichristian, and those that run under a covenant of works are very strong."

With this sermon, Winthrop writes, Wheelwright "stirred up the people . . . with much bitterness and vehemency." Hutchinson's followers start "frequenting the lectures of other ministers" to "make much disturbance by public questions, and objections to their doctrines." Thus the Hutchin sonians from Boston become an irreverent peanut gallery, traveling the colony to interrupt the sermons of other towns' ministers. Such outrageous questioning of authority is an obvious violation of the Fifth Commandment, as it dishon ors church fathers.

At the next meeting of the General Court, Winthrop writes that Wheelwright is found "guilty of sedition, and also of contempt, for that the court had appointed the fast as a means of reconciliation of the differences . . . and he purposefully set himself to kindle and increase them."

Vane, who is still governor at the start of the meeting, protests in vain. Wheelwright's sentencing is postponed until the next court in May, though it will be postponed again. By the end of the meeting, Winthrop is reelected governor, which is a rebuke of Vane, and, by extension, of Wheelwright and Hutchinson.

Also in May 1637 the court issues an order, writes Winthrop, "to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth." And who will be the arbiters of which persons are or are not dangerous? The magistrates, of course. This outrageous immigration policy is meant expressly to bar the Hutchinson and Wheelwright camp from importing supporters to their cause. Vane, who was voted out as governor but remains as one of the deputies (and one of Anne Hutchinson's best friends), is infuriated by this policy. After Winthrop defends it, Vane writes in response, "This law we judge to be most wicked and sinful." Among his objections to the law, Vane includes the fact that it gives the power "to expel and reject those which are most eminent Christians, if they suit not with the disposition of the magistrates." Vane's point is dangerously close to Roger Williams's recognition that Christianity is inherently divisive and when it is the state religion, the Christians in power tend to persecute other kinds of Christians with whom they disagree. One of Vane's more basic, and legally correct, arguments against the law is that it could theoretically bar the king himself from setting foot in this part of his own kingdom. Which is a violation of the Charter's charge for the colonists to make no law "repugnant to the laws of England."

The Bay Colony's reactionary immigration legislation is not unlike reactionary immigration legislation throughout history: it exposes a people's deepest fears. For example, the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, pa.s.sed by Congress to bar anarchists from the United States after an anarchist a.s.sa.s.sinated President McKinley. Or the not particularly Magna Carta-friendly clause in the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowing for illegal immigrants to be detained indefinitely and without legal counsel for up to six months if they are suspected of terrorism, or simply have terrorist "ties."

Behind every bad law, a deep fear. And in 1637, the two things panicking the leaders of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony the most are the Pequot and Anne Hutchinson. After the Pequot are burned alive in May, Winthrop and his fellow magistrates have one down and one to go.

In August, Vane sails home to England for good. It must have been a relief to go where an Englishman is generally allowed to just show up unannounced, without court approval.

In the years to come, Vane will stand out as a rare man during the English Civil War, an actual moderate. He is in the minority of Puritan Members of Parliament who argue against beheading Charles I, writing later that the king's execution "will be questioned whether that was an act of justice or murder." ("The most interesting thing about King Charles I," reports Monty Python, "is that he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign, but only 4 foot 8 inches tall at the end of it.") Vane's friend Oliver Cromwell had commanded his army to defeat a king in the name of Parliament only to then make himself Lord Protector and dissolve Parliament like the king before him. Vane becomes such an outspoken critic of Cromwell's despotism that Cromwell is said to have cried, " The Lord deliver me from thee, Henry Vane!"

Forced to retire from public life during Cromwell's dictatorship, Vane takes to writing. Like Roger Williams, Vane believes in religious liberty, gently insisting that when freedom of worship is denied, people "are nourished up in a biting, devouring, wrathful spirit, one against another, and are found transgressors of that royal law which forbids us to do that unto another which we would not have them do unto us." In other words, required membership in one religion, like that in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, is a violation of the golden rule called for by Jesus, the King of Kings, in the Sermon on the Mount.