A History of the American People

York State. There, all but one daughter were killed by Indians in 1643. The violent death of Mrs
Hutchinson and her brood was promptly interpreted as providential, and New England orthodoxy
produced pious literature about the American Jezebel,' initiated by a violent pamphlet from the pen of Winthrop himself. Anne Hutchinson's vindication, which has been voluminous and imaginative, had to wait for the women's movement of the 1960s. The Hutchinson story showed that even the most radical dissent was possible, albeit dangerous. The practice in Massachusetts was to warn people identified as religious troublemakers to move on. If they insisted on staying, or came back, they were prosecuted. In July 1641, for instance, Dr John Clarke and Obediah Holmes, both from Rhode Island, were arrested in Lynn by the sheriff for holding an unauthorized religious meeting in a private house, at which the practice of infant baptism was condemned. Clarke was imprisoned; Holmes was whipped through the streets. Again, on October 27, 1659, three Quakers, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, having been repeatedly expelled from the colony, the last time under penalty of death, were arrested again aspestilential and disruptive' and sentenced
to be hanged on Boston Common. Sentence on the men was carried out. The woman, blindfolded
and with the noose around her neck, was reprieved on the intervention of her son, who
guaranteed she would leave the colony forthwith. She did in fact return, and was finally hanged
on June 1, 1660. Other women were hanged for witchcraft-the first being Margaret Jones,
sentenced at Plymouth on May 13, 1648 for administering physics' with themalignant touch.'
Severe sentences were carried out on moral offenders of all kinds. Until 1632 adultery was
punished by death. In 1639, again at Plymouth, an adulterous woman was whipped, then dragged
through the streets wearing the letters AD pinned to her sleeve: she was told that if she removed
the badge the letters would be branded on her face. Two years later, a man and a woman,
convicted of adultery, were also whipped, this time at the post,' the letters ADplainly to be
sewn on their clothes.'
To buttress orthodoxy in Boston, a college for training ministers of religion was founded on
the Charles River at Newtown in 1636, according to the will of the Rev. John Harvard. He came
to the colonies in 1635 and left £780 and 400 books for this purpose. Three years later, the
college was named after him and the place rechristened Cambridge, after the university where he
was nurtured. The event was an index of the way in which the colony was achieving its primary
objects. As one of the Harvard founders put it, After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livlihood, rear'd convenient places for God's worship and settled the Civill Government; One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and Perpetuate it to Posterity."' But the college never had a monopoly of religious education, when dissenters could move off and found other establishments for teaching, without any need for a crown charter. In April 1638, for instance, the Rev. John Davenport led a congregation of pious Puritans from Boston, a town they claimed had become corrupt,' to settle in Quinnipiac, which they renamed New Haven. Davenport brought with him
some successful merchants, including Theophilus Eaton and David Yale, the latter a learned
gentleman whose descendant, Elihu Yale, was to found another historic college. Two months
later, on May 31, 1638, another dissenting minister, Thomas Hooker, arrived at Hartford on the
Connecticut, with l00 followers, marking the occasion by preaching them a sermon stating that
all authority, in state or religion, must rest in the people's consent. Thus, within New England,
there was a continuing diaspora, often motivated by religious dissent and the urgent desire for
greater freedom of thought and action.