38 Chapter 1 Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas
Nationale sinne” for anyone, including the king, to take
possession of land without buying it from the Indians.
As long as Williams enjoyed the support of his
Salem church, there was little the magistrates could
do to silence him. But his refusal to heed those who
counseled moderation—“all truths are not seasonable
at all times,” Governor Winthrop reminded him—
swiftly eroded that support. In the fall of 1635, eco-
nomic pressure put on the town of Salem by the
General Court turned his congregation against him.
The General Court then ordered him to leave the
colony within six weeks.
Williams departed Massachusetts in January
1636, traveling south to the head of Narragansett
Bay. There he worked out mutually acceptable
arrangements with the local Indians and founded the
town of Providence. In 1644, after obtaining a char-
ter in England from Parliament, he established the
colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
The government was relatively democratic, all reli-
gions were tolerated, and church and state were
rigidly separated. Whatever Williams’s temperamental
excesses, he was more than ready to practice what he
preached when given the opportunity.
Anne Hutchinson, who arrived in Boston in
1631, was another “visible saint” who, in the judg-
ment of the puritan establishment, went too far.
Hutchinson was not to be taken lightly. According to
Governor Winthrop, her husband William was “a
man of mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by
his wife.” (He was not so weak as to be unable to
father Anne’s fifteen children.) Duties as a midwife
brought her into the homes of other Boston women,
with whom she discussed and more than occasionally
criticized the sermons of their minister.
The issue in dispute was whether God’s saints
could be confident of having truly received His gift of
eternal life. Wilson and most of the ministers of the
colony thought not. God’s saints should ceaselessly
monitor their thoughts and behavior. But Hutchinson
thought this emphasis on behavior was similar to the
Catholic belief that an individual’s good deeds and
penitence could bring God’s salvation. Ministers
should not demean God, Hutchinson declared, by
suggesting that He would be impressed by human
actions. She insisted that God’s saints knew who they
were; those presumed “saints” who had doubts on
the matter were likely destined for eternal hell.Detail from a tombstone of a puritan cemetery in Boston. The grim reaper—an angel—prods the skeletal man to his final
destiny: Life is but a flickering flame, soon to be extinguished.