Ann Hutchinson and the economics of antinomian selfhood...

Anne Hutchinson and the Economics of Antinomian
Selfhood in Colonial New England.

Summary:
The Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was the first large-scale social and
theological crisis to generate documents insisting on
the colony's stability.

Burnham, Michelle

If American literary histories so often begin with the New England Puritans, it is because
histories with such a starting point are able to tell an appealing national story of coherent
community and religious freedom. So, at any rate, suggests T. H. Breen when he notes that
beginning the national narrative instead with John Smith and the Virginia colony would
require telling a far less pleasing tale of American greed, domination, and exploitation.
Philip Gura has likewise wondered how Sacvan Bercovitch's model of an "American self,"
formulated from exclusively Puritan New England materials, might be complicated by
John Smith's mercantilism. Why, Gura asks, have the "economic origins of the American
self" been overlooked, and where might we locate the sources of this alternative notion of
selfhood?(1) These suggestions were made a decade ago, and have been followed by a
series of similar challenges to the continuist, exceptionalist, regionally narrow, and
prevailingly religious terms that have dominated the enframement of colonial American
studies. A number of critics have joined in the call to displace the cultural and geographic
privilege of the Puritans and New England, often explaining such privilege as one effect of
a retrodetermined paradigm which imposes on colonial American literature the role of
anticipating later events, such as the American Revolution or American
Romanticism.(2) But by setting John Smith against John Winthrop, and Virginia against
New England, Breen and Gura run the risk of perpetuating the impoverishment and
imbalance they otherwise hope to remedy within studies of colonial America. For the
dominant narrative whose terms they seek to revise has historically tended to suppress
attention not just to John Smith, but to the pressures of economic conflict, class struggle,
and colonial exploitation within early American literature generally, including those
Puritan New England texts that have otherwise seemed to represent America's origins in
a coherent community dedicated to religious and civil liberty.

Among studies which have suggested alternative models for American literary history, I
find Houston Baker's shift away from implicitly accumulative literary histories structured
around a religious "errand into the wilderness," toward an emphasis on the economics of
exploitation and "commercial deportation,"(3) particularly suggestive for colonial America.
While Baker's reformulation successfully foregrounds minority and subaltern texts and
peoples, it should also prompt a reconsideration of dominant literary texts and figures within
specifically economic terms. New England's Antinomian Controversy, the earliest
large-scale social, political, and theological crisis in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
generated a significant number and variety of documents that are noteworthy for their
anxious insistence on the stability of the colonial community of Massachusetts and the
coherence of its religious mission. Indeed, American exceptionalism might be said to
emerge in the aftermath of the Antinomian crisis, when figures such as John Winthrop,
John Cotton, Thomas Weld, Thomas Shepard, and Edward Johnson struggled -- in print, in
public testimony, and under the discerning gaze of England -- to define New England by
opposing and exiling what New England was not. As Amy Schrager Lang notes, their
writings worked to produce the long-dominant cultural consensus that "declared
Americans a peculiar people inhabiting a wilderness theirs by promise."(4) To read the
political gesture of exile as well as the language of the Controversy in economic terms is to
confront a culture that was fraught with much more than just a glitch in its religious errand.
At the center of the Antinomian Controversy was, I shall argue, a tense and fractious
contest over the economic terms of selfhood in early modern New England. This contest,
between the competing economic ideologies of patrimonialism and mercantile capitalism,
was largely played out through attempts to define the highly overdetermined figure of Anne
Hutchinson, both as a body and as a subject. At the same time, this debate generated two
radically different conceptions of the colony as a body, and of colonial subjectivity: one that
imagined a coherent and reproductive community secure from penetration, and one that
imagined an unbounded site marked by arrivals, departures, profit, and exchange. Anne
Hutchinson's performance of a startlingly modern subjectivity that threatened the very
ethos of the Puritan orthodoxy depended on the relations that produced the latter,
mercantilist model of coloniality.

1. The Economics of Rhetorical Excess

Virtually every record from and account of the Antinomian Controversy is characterized by
startling rhetorical moments that, in their excessive outrage and hostility at the heterodoxy
in general and Hutchinson in particular, can only be read as symptomatic. Thomas Weld's
fear for the integrity of both individual colonial bodies and the colony itself as a body
provides one example. In his preface to John Winthrop's 1644 Short Story of the Rise,
reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Weld describes antinomian ideas as a "Physicke"
secretly administered to unsuspecting strangers in "stronger & stronger potions, as they
found the Patient able to beare."(5) Prompted by "a spirit of pride, insolency, contempt of
authority, division, sedition," the antinomians posed a danger that for Weld put at risk
nothing less than the political and religious future of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: "It was
a wonder of mercy," he notes, "that they had not set our Commonwealth and Churches on
a fire, and consumed us all therein" (211). Weld's characterization of New England
antinomianism as a menacing and seductive epidemic gone out of control repeats, even
several years after the crisis had passed, the tone of panic and urgency evident in earlier
descriptions of Anne Hutchinson, her ideas, and her supporters. During Hutchinson's trial,
for example, the Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley declared himself "fully persuaded that
Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the devil" and feared that her notions would inspire her
"hearers to take up arms against their prince and to cut the throats one of another" (343).
The Cambridge pastor Thomas Shepard called her "a verye dayngerous Woman to sowe
her corrupt opinions to the infection of many" (353), who was "likely with her fluent Tounge
and forwardnes in Expressions to seduce and draw away many, Espetially simple Weomen
of her owne sex" (365). John Wilson saw her "as a dayngerus Instrument of the Divell
raysed up by Sathan amongst us," and he warned against "the Misgovernment of this
Woman's Tounge" (384). John Cotton, who in the four months between Hutchinson's civil
and church trial turned from her defender to her opponent, told her that "your opinions frett
like a Gangrene and spread like a Leprosie, and infect farr and near, and will eate out the
very Bowells of Religion, and hath soe infected the Churches that God knowes when thay
will be cured" (373). Winthrop himself characterizes her as "the breeder and nourisher of all
these distempers," as "a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active
spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold then a man," who "easily insinuated her selfe
into the affections of many" (263). He calls her an "American Jesabel" who was given the
chance to repent, but instead "kept open a back doore to have returned to her vomit again"
(310). The verdicts of banishment and excommunication which resulted from the
examinations of Hutchinson at, respectively, the court in Newtown in 1637 and the church
in Boston in 1638, are certainly reminders that such rhetoric was accompanied by actions
that had profound material consequences for Anne Hutchinson as well as many of her
supporters. But those verdicts are reminders as well that the Puritan orthodoxy was
convinced that the antinomians posed a profound material danger to the colony.

Clearly, the extraordinary hostility and anxiety evidenced in these characterizations are
symptomatic of concerns that extend beyond the well-known theological dispute, whose
terms were foregrounded in the long lists compiled by Hutchinson's examiners of her
so-called "Erors" of religious opinion. They objected primarily, of course, to her support of a
covenant of grace theology in which assurance for one's salvation was located within
oneself, in an internal and invisible experience of grace. She claimed that John Wilson and
other "legalist" ministers were preaching instead a covenant of works, which accepted
external markers such as moral and law-abiding behavior both as evidence of an
individual's salvation and as a way of preparing for the arrival of grace.(6) As several
commentators on the Antinomian crisis note, however, Hutchinson's ideas were not so
radically inconsistent with orthodox Puritanism as the legal and rhetorical responses to
them would suggest. Indeed, she was simply advocating -- in part through weekly meetings
held in her home -- ideas preached by John Cotton, whom she had followed to
Massachusetts from England two years before the Controversy erupted. Hutchinson
repeated and emphasized Cotton's own insistence that works and words were not the
same as spirit and grace, and that faith could not be assured without "the seal" of the
latter.(7) As Andrew Delbanco explains, "Anne Hutchinson was saying absolutely nothing
at odds with Puritan biblicism" and "was in fact speaking firmly within the Pauline
tradition."(8) But if the difference between Hutchinson's ideas and those of other Puritans
on both sides of the Atlantic was, as Philip Gura notes, "only a matter of degree,"(9) why
was this woman convicted of conspiring to destroy the stability of the entire Bay Colony and
of undermining the most central tenets of its church? Why was she perceived as a danger
so extraordinary that only imprisonment, banishment, and excommunication could
preserve the commonwealth from the perils that she posed? In other words, how are we to
read the striking excess -- of anxiety, rage, and panic-in the response of New England's
ministers and magistrates to Anne Hutchinson, her weekly meetings to discuss sermons,
and her espousal of a covenant of grace?

Antinomian acts of political resistance and rhetorical statements of spiritual resistance can
account only in part for the Puritan orthodoxy's fear. The antinomians did express their
support for ousted governor Henry Vane and beleagured minister John Wheelwright by
refusing to participate in and support the colony's Pequot War efforts, primarily in protest
over the newly elected governor Winthrop and the minister assigned to the Boston militia,
John Wilson.(10) Meanwhile, Wheelwright called in his controversial Fast-Day sermon for
"a spirituall combate" which required that "the children of God, . . . have their swords redy,
they must fight, and fight with spirituall weapons" (158). If such a battle "will cause a
combustion in the Church and comon wealth," Wheelwright insisted, "what then?" He
summoned the image of a "Spiritual burning" akin to the "externall burning of Rome" (165)
and suggested that such conflict was both necessary and justifiable. Winthrop, for one,
read Wheelwright's rhetoric literally. He even defended his literalist reading later in the
Short Story by arguing that the minister consistently referred to material "swords and
hammers" as figures for "spirituall weapons" (293). Winthrop responded to the sermon by
ordering the forcible disarming of all antinomian supporters, and instituting a general
ordinance against aliens aimed "to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the
commonwealth" (1:224), namely those sympathetic to the heterodoxy. Winthrop's
interpretation of Wheelwright's language might be read as an instance of what Patricia
Caldwell, in her analysis of Hutchinson's trials, has called the "antinomian language
controversy." Caldwell perceptively reads the conflict between Hutchinson and her
adversaries as a linguistic one, in which "Mrs. Hutchinson was speaking what amounts to a
different language" that was incomprehensible to her interrogators.(11) But the very words
deployed by the Puritan orthodoxy evidence another, related conflict that divided the two
groups along more specifically economic lines. Ultimately, the theological, linguistic, and
economic dimensions of this crisis cannot be treated in isolation, not only because they
each repeat the others' terms, but because together they represent a complex articulation
of a crisis in subjectivity that registered its effects in all of these domains.

John Winthrop initiates what is arguably the angriest characterization in any account of the
Controversy, when he describes Hutchinson's typological self-alignment with the biblical
figure of Daniel as "too too vile": "See the impudent boldnesse of a proud dame," he writes,
"that Athaliah-like makes havocke of all that stand in the way of her ambitious spirit," and
who "vented her impatience with so fierce speech and countenance, as one would hardly
have guessed her to have been an Antitype of Daniel, but rather of the Lions after they were
let loose" (275). His account of Hutchinson "vent[ing] her impatience" employs a verb that
occurs with remarkable frequency in the texts of the trials and subsequent accounts of the
antinomian affair. In fact, the various social, political, and economic tensions that inform the
Antinomian Controversy might be said to meet and overlap in the multiple senses of this
word. For example, Thomas Weld's description of the arrival from England of those who
would eventually make up the antinomian faction invokes an image that, by using a different
definition of the verb "to vent," highlights an economic subtext to Winthrop's and others' use
of that word. Weld notes that "some going thither from hence full fraught with many
unsound and loose opinions, after a time, began to open their packs, and freely vent their
wares to any that would be their customers; Multitudes of men and women,
Church-members and others, having tasted of their Commodities, were eager after them,
and were streight infected before they were aware, and some being tainted conveyed the
infection to others" (201-202; emphasis added). Strategically mixing the metaphors of
commerce and disease, Weld associates the antinomians with the infectious relations of
mercantile capitalism by classifying their "unsound and loose opinions" as "wares" or
"Commodities" sold to "customers." His use of the word "vent" to describe this circulation is
particularly suggestive. When this verb appears elsewhere either in the trial records or A
Short Story, it is invariably associated with Anne Hutchinson: "she had thus vented her
mind" (273), "she vented her impatience" (275), she displayed "impudency in venting and
maintaining" her "delusions" (309), she "vented divers of her strange opinions" (317; all
emphases added). Among the many usages for this verb in the seventeenth century, two
predominated. On the one hand, it meant uttering, discharging, or emitting words. On the
other, it meant to sell or vend, to dispose of commodities by sale, by finding purchasers in a
market. Often, these two senses of the word mutually inform each other, as in Edward
Johnson's description of the antinomians in Wonder-Working Providence as "daily venting
their deceivable Doctrines."(12)

A similar doubling informs the word estate," which also occurs with extraordinary regularity
in accounts and documents of the Controversy. Indeed, the dispute between the two
camps over the relationship between justification and sanctification hinged precisely on
how a "good estate" (263) might be evidenced and apprehended. It is with this sense -- of
one's condition in relation to the experience of conversion or election -- that the word is
most often used in writings about Hutchinson. Yet even such pointed references to
"spirituall Estates" (370) summon up the contemporary resonance of property or wealth, of
a more specifically economic condition. Such ambiguity informs, for example, Winthrop's
description of Anne Hutchinson's husband William as "a very honest and peaceable man of
good estate," particularly considering that on this same page he remembers her son,
Edward Hutchinson, declaring in court just before he was fined "that if they took away his
estate, they must keep his wife and children" (262). The son is clearly objecting to the loss
of wealth, but the father is less clearly being described as either wealthy or as a respectable
member of the church, as one of the elect. Winthrop, who had cause to be concerned with
both his spiritual and material estates throughout his years in New England, regularly
employs the word in both contexts. Just before his first reference to Hutchinson and her
"dangerous errours" in his History, he mentions the burning of a house owned by Shaw,
who was discovered to have "concealed his estate, and made show as if he had been
poor," despite the fact that he had been "the day before admitted of the ... [Watertown]
church" (1:200). Elsewhere, words with unexpectedly economic import, such as
"purchase," "prosper," or "credit," are used to formulate theological questions or to
represent relations with the divine. Winthrop accuses Hutchinson of mistakenly believing
"that the souls of men are . . . made immortal by Christ's purchase" (254), just as Cotton
reprimands her for assuming that "this Imortalety is purchased from Christ" (355).
According to Thomas Weld, the antinomians attempted to swell their ranks by convincing
others that those who evidenced "their good estate by Sanctification . . . never prospered"
(205). Weld furthermore accuses them of saying one thing and doing another, and "By this
kinde of Jesuiticall dealing, they did not onely keepe their credit with them, as men that held
nothing but the truth; but gained this also, viz. that when, afterwards, they should heare
those men taxed for holding errors, they would be ready to defend them" (207). Financial
accusations that place the antinomians within scenarios of commercial exchange and
monetary accountability echo within such statements and complaints.(13)

Just as these charges of theological error are conveyed in economic language, so is the
Antinomian Controversy and its rhetoric undergirded by emergent conflicts over economic
ideology. The threat embodied by Hutchinson and her ideas may have been most overtly
characterized as theological and political, but those dangers contained and concealed
another, almost inarticulable, source of fear: the emergence of a conception of selfhood
that was tightly interwoven with the Hutchinsonians' class alignment, particularly their
participation in mercantile practice. The vehemence with which her accusers depicted,
condemned, and punished Anne Hutchinson can only be understood in the context of the
challenge this new articulation of selfhood posed to the dominant modes of ideology and
authority in seventeenth-century New England. In other words, the antinomian threat,
which became increasingly embodied in the figure of Hutchinson, was the threat of an
emergent model of subjectivity -- a model constituted in terms of a covenant of grace
theology that located religious authority in an invisible experience and, by doing so,
divorced the realm of words and works from the world of things and grace. But this selfhood
was constituted also in terms of the relatively new world of mercantile capitalism, a world
represented by the class to which the Hutchinson family, among others, belonged.

2. Merchants and Gentry in Massachusetts

When Thomas Weld opened his preface to A Short Story with the evocative description of
antinomians "venting" their "wares" from open packs, he may very well have intended to
remind his readers of the predominant class identity of the group who, like the Hutchinson
family, consisted in large part of merchants and tradespeople. As Emery Battis notes in his
study of the sociology of Hutchinson's supporters, conflicts between the merchant class
and the gentry were particularly tense during the years of the Antinomian crisis.(14) But it
was differences in economic ideology more than differences in wealth that separated
families like the Hutchinsons from those like the Winthrops in 1630s Massachusetts. The
two families, who lived across the street from each other in downtown Boston, could both
boast signs of affluence such as substantial property holdings and several household
servants. What distinguished the Winthrops from the Hutchinsons instead was the means
of acquiring and handling wealth and, even more importantly, incompatible attitudes toward
social and political authority that followed from their differences in economic ideology. John
White's concerned 1636 letter to Winthrop about the "Superfluity of Shopkeepers Inholders
etc." in New England, suggests the source of these ideological differences. White warns
that those who reap a profit by "retailing wares" challenge a production-oriented economy
"wherein their labours might produce something for the common good"; merchants instead
"drawe only one from another and consequently live by the sweat of other mens brows,
producing nothing themselves by their owne endevours."(15) White's objection to
mercantile commerce, and his suggestion "that I should reduce it if I were to advise in the
government," reflects the patrimonial economics of the gentry class, an ideology John
Winthrop shared. When he is approached in the early years of settlement by the Indian
Chickatabot, for example, the governor carefully distinguishes between himself and those
who regularly trade commodities when he explains to the Indian "that English sagamores
did not use to truck" (1:53). The Hutchinsons, on the other hand, owned and operated a
successful mercer shop, and their economic success depended on a trans-Atlantic network
of family ties and mercantile interests in London, the West Indies, Boston, and inland.(16)

As Darrett Rutman succinctly states, for Winthrop such "commerce was corrupt."(17)
Winthrop's wealth and class status as a member of the English landed gentry derived from
a very different set of economic relations. In England, he had presided over the family
estate at Groton Hall where he leased land to tenant-farmers, before receiving an office to
serve as an attorney in the Court of Wards. There his duties continued to be fully consistent
with the patrimonial economics of the aristocracy, since he most often defended clients
who were making claims on family inheritances.(18) Only after losing his office, signing on
as one of the undertakers for the Massachusetts Bay Company, and emigrating to New
England, did he have his son sell the Groton estate, for which he received a disappointing
sum.(19) John Winthrop has often been accused of having poor financial sense, of steadily
acquiring debts that threatened to outrun his funds, of dying land poor. But his economic
decisions, his adherence to the principle of what John White called "Bonum publicum not
Privatum Commodum,"(20) his application of the benevolent rule of mercy to debts which
could not be justly repaid, and his considerable landholdings throughout the
commonwealth, might all be seen as consistent with the socioeconomic ethos of the gentry
class.(21) If the Puritans were, in Stephen Innes' apt phrase, "moving `crab-like' into the
new capitalist world -- looking backward in alarm even as they were advancing forward with
dispatch," then Winthrop simply appeared to be looking backward more determinedly than
most.(22)

The social model espoused by the gentry during the seventeenth century not only valued
social cohesion and the common good as its preeminent goal, but premised that cohesion
on a hierarchy that distinguished the governing authority from those it governed. This
sociopolitical dividing line was, for Winthrop, precisely commensurate with the line which
divided "rich" and "poore," as he expressed it in his famous lay sermon "A Modell of
Christian Charity." But when Winthrop drew the line between the governors and those they
governed, even the richest merchants invariably fell into the latter group. For example,
although Winthrop allowed deputies to represent the interests of the freemen to the
Massachusetts General Court, he insisted that ruling power remain vested in the minority of
magistrates. Magistrates, like Winthrop, were invariably members of the gentry and
yeoman class, while deputies -- one of whom was William Hutchinson -- were consistently
of the merchant class.(21) The commensurability of this economic fault line with the
theological fault line dividing the Hutchinsonians from the Puritan orthodoxy is striking,
and the frequent use of the word "vent" by the latter to describe the antinomians might be
seen as a way of inscribing and remarking that doubled line.

According to Battis, proponents of the traditional patrimonial system like Winthrop saw the
antinomians' espousal of the covenant of grace as allowing "an anarchistic subjectivism"
which "elevated the individual conscience above all external authority and exempted the
believer from any considerations of conduct."(24) In this view, merchants were presumably
attracted to Anne Hutchinson's theological position since, by rejecting a covenant of works,
it permitted them to engage in self-interested profit-seeking without guilt, and provided
them religious tenets with which to counteract the censure of ministers and magistrates
who, like John Winthrop, advocated government regulation of wages and fixing of prices as
a way of maintaining the public good.(25) Battis thus locates the perceived threat of
antinomianism in the law-defying opportunities -- such as charging prices that exceeded the
"common" and therefore just price -- made possible by the privileging of justification over
sanctification. Yet here, too, the orthodoxy's response seems in vast disproportion to the
supposed dangers they seek to control. Rather than locate Hutchinson's threat, as Battis
and others do, in her privileging of the internal and the ineffable over the external and the
visible, I locate it instead in her more radical alienation of these two realms from each other.
That splitting introduced a gap between the internal and the external self, just as her
comments in court presumed a gap between the words and the spirit of scripture. What
emerges from the texts of Hutchinson's trials therefore is a contest between a form of
selfhood that acknowledges -- indeed, is founded on -- that gap, and one for which that gap
is a source of terror and confusion.

3. Subjectivity and Mercantile Theory

It has generally been acknowledged that the climactic moment in Hutchinson's first trial is
her claim to have received "an immediate revelation" which arrived, she says, "[b]y the
voice of [God's] own spirit to my soul" (337). But despite the surprised "How!" with which
Thomas Dudley responds to her announcement, the court as a whole only gradually, and
over the course of several pages of further testimony, works itself into a horrified
consensus about the danger represented by this claim and therefore the necessity of
banishing the defendant. The movement toward that verdict begins when Winthrop clarifies
that "the ground work of her revelations is the immediate revelation of the spirit and not by
the ministry of the word, and that is the means by which she hath very much abused the
country that they shall look for revelations and are not bound to the ministry of the word ...
and this hath been the ground of all these tumults and troubles" (341-42). The profound
error here, for Winthrop, is not just that Hutchinson experienced a revelation, but that "it is
impossible but that the word and spirit should speak the same thing" (342). To claim
otherwise, he rather melodramatically insists, "overthrows all" (343). Though several
speakers subsequently came to her defense, none was able to turn back the tide of opinion
against Hutchinson after the governor's assertion.

Emphasis on the defendant's "revelation" in the 1637 courtroom has tended to obscure the
climactic moment in Hutchinson's second trial, which followed her intervening
imprisonment at a home in Roxbury. If the admission of her revelations was the climax of
the Newtown trial, then Hutchinson's curious retraction of an earlier statement marks the
turning point in the Boston trial. Here, too, Hutchinson's own words appear to invite, almost
to necessitate, her conviction. But in both cases, it is not Hutchinson's words that condemn
her so much as the failed relation that she posits between words and their referents. The
momentum that ends with John Wilson's pronouncement of excommunication begins
pages earlier, when Hutchinson is asked to respond to a series of "errors" with which she
has been charged. She accepts Thomas Shepard's correction to her understanding of the
"Inherence of Grace" (378), by responding that "I doe not acknowledge it to be an Error but
a Mistake. I doe acknowledge my Expression to be Ironious but my Judgment was not
Ironious, for I held befor as you did but could not express it soe" (361). Much later in the
examination, she responds similarly to a question put to her by Shepard: "I confess, my
Expressions was that way but it was never my Judgment." When asked to clarify, she
repeats: "My Judgment is not altered though my Expression alters" (378). Her defense in
both instances relies on the same principle as her theological distinction between the spirit
and the word; that is, for Hutchinson words are representations or "Expressions," that
cannot be equated with "Judgments," with the things they represent. It is this alienation of
representation from the thing itself that leads Shepard, despite the fact that Hutchinson is
conceding to him at these moments, to take her response as evidence that she is after all "a
Notorious Imposter" (383), while Wilson declares "This you say is most dayngerous" (378).
They do so not because she retains the heretical misunderstanding of grace they thought
she held, but because she has torn signs loose from that which they signify.

By insisting on a potentially radical distinction between "Expression" and "Judgment,"
Hutchinson here insists that her words could and did misrepresent her self. As Patricia
Caldwell has argued, this examination reveals a conflict between what amounts to two
different and incompatible notions of language. But those differences correspond also to
two profoundly different models of selfhood.(26) When Anne Hutchinson insists that her
words bear no necessary or organic relationship to her ideas, she speaks within the terms
of a remarkably modern subjectivity, and by doing so she throws the most basic
assumptions of New England's Puritan orthodoxy into crisis. Her understanding of
language remains, however, perfectly consistent with her theological position and with the
economic ideology associated with the merchant class.

Hutchinson continued to argue, in both trials, that the word and the spirit could, indeed,
speak different things, an argument not unlike that advanced by writers on commerce that
the weight and the value of a coin need not correspond. Such a notion undercut the most
fundamental assumptions of the world view articulated by the religious and political
orthodoxy in seventeenth-century New England, who defended Winthrop's refusal to
separate the word from spirit as well as his periodic refusals, by instituting fixed prices, to
allow prices to fluctuate by unseen market forces. What emerges in the documents of these
debates is a portrait of Hutchinson as a subject whose distinctively modern depth and
interiority derive from her introduction of a potentially irreconcilable gap between an
external, social self on the one hand and an internal, invisible self on the other. It is above all
to this "monstrous" subjectivity(27) that the anxiety and hostility of her examiners is
directed.

Contemporary economic debates both in England and New England reveal the emergence
of economic principles, derived from the operation of mercantile capitalism, that coincide
with the radical innovation of subjectivity I have associated with Anne Hutchinson and New
England antinomianism. The massive expansion of commerce, facilitated largely by an
exploding Atlantic trade and attendant colonizing ventures, led over the course of the early
seventeenth century to the emergence of a new economic paradigm which -- in ways that
strikingly parallel Anne Hutchinson's religious notions -- appeared to challenge the
sovereign authority of the king as well as traditional principles of social cohesion and the
common good. Joyce Appleby's history of seventeenth-century economic thought locates
the development of these ideas in a series of pamphlets written by merchants such as
Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden. In Mun and Misselden's discussions, the sphere of
economics became divorced from that of the state just as monetary values became
divorced from a presumed "order of real things."(28) Against the views of an economic
writer in the patrimonial tradition like Gerald de Malynes, for example, who defended the
sovereign's power to set prices and emphasized the metallic value of coin, Misselden
emphasized instead the fluctuating price of commodities determined only by the buying and
selling of goods, and implied that the laws of the market were distinct from the laws of the
king. As Appleby notes, these pamphlets described a world in which "a sinuous course of
things real, felt, imagined, and calculated had replaced the terrafirma of weight, purity, and
sovereign statement."(29) Another way of describing this shift is to emphasize that these
writers had, like Anne Hutchinson, introduced a split into a once organic system, and that
split opened up a troubling gap between, for example, the static value of a coin as
measured in metallic weight, and its fluctuating value in the marketplace. What was
troubling about this split were the hidden dynamics that inhabited this new fissure.

As a result, the new mercantile world seemed a world of secrets, secrets that resided in this
gap and that were all but invisible to the common observer, who consequently needed
experts to discern and explain the workings of commerce.(30) At the same time, the moral
imperatives behind a merchant's economic decisions became equally invisible. Adherents
of patrimonialism, for whom the production of goods had the virtuous and evident role of
sustaining the general good of the commonwealth, saw such invisibility as cause for alarm,
as John White's 1636 letter reveals. The case of Robert Keayne, a successful and
upwardly mobile New England merchant, illustrated precisely those fears expressed by
White and others. Convicted of price gouging in 1639 for selling a bag of nails above the just
price, Keayne was accused of exploiting economically the disjunction between price and
value, a disjunction analogous to the one that Anne Hutchinson seemed also to be
exploiting when she insisted that her expressions did not always or necessarily match her
judgment, and that works and words could not be taken as evidence of grace or spirit. Not
surprisingly, Keayne was a supporter of Hutchinson.(31)

The rhetorical excess in the New England orthodoxy's response to antinomianism cannot
be understood outside the contemporary developments and effects of mercantile
capitalism, paticularly when one considers that conflicts between Massachusetts'
merchant and gentry classes over issues such as the General Court's regulation of prices
and wages coincide with, as well as bear striking parallels to, the theological conflicts
associated with Anne Hutchinson. When Hutchinson proclaims in the Newtown courtroom
that "having seen him which is invisible I fear not what man can do unto me" (338), she
places herself -- as one whose seal of grace gives her privileged access to the invisible
world -- in a position analogous to that of a commercial expert. More importantly, by doing
so she robs her questioners of authority, just as market experts were perceived as
challenging and usurping the authority of the king.

As a result of this splitting of word and spirit, of external and internal selves, possibilities for
secrecy, deception, and dissimulation suddenly loom large. For example, in a particularly
revealing description, Weld claims that "it was so frequent with [the antinomians] to have
many darke shadowes and colours to cover their opinions and expressions withall, that it
was wonderfull hard matter to take them tardy, or to know the bottome of what they said or
sealed" (207). As a result of this sense of bottomless depth -- a striking description of the
interiority of the modern subject -- he ascribes to them generally the habit of "fearfull lying"
(216) which they share with Hutchinson herself. Winthrop too argues that "shee cunningly
dissembled and coloured her opinions" (263), while Shepard accuses her of playing "a
Tricke of as notorious Subtiltie as ever was held in the Church" (383). Wilson, too, notes
that "she sayth one Thinge to day and another thinge to morrow: and to speake falsely and
doubtfully and dullye wheras we should speake the Truth playnly one to another" (384).
These expressions of frustration indicate her examiners' failed attempts to locate and fix
Anne Hutchinson as a subject. While these statements are made in the specific context of
her self-defense at the Boston trial, they might also be read as characteristic concerns of
early seventeenth-century society generally in response to emergent principles derived
from the market. Dangers of dissimulation were associated with the world of commerce,
and Hutchinson, repeatedly accused of "venting," is portrayed also as a liar holding secrets
from the court. John Wilson's outraged rejection of Hutchinson's explanation exemplifies
the orthodoxy's response, as he urges the church "to Ease our selves of such a member,
Espetialy for her untruth or Lyes, as that she was allways of the same judgment, only she
hath altered her Expressions. Therefor I leave it to the Church to consider how safe it is to
suffer soe eronius and soe schismaticall and soe unsound a member amongst us, and one
that stands guiltie of soe foule a falshood" (385). In his verdict of excommunication, Wilson
proclaims her guilty not just of holding erroneous opinions, but of lying.

4. Reproduction and Colonialism

While investors in joint stock companies such as John Winthrop tended to come from the
gentry and nobility, and to operate within patrimonial social relations, a group of smaller and
newer merchants emerged during the seventeenth century who took advantage of trade
increases and did not subscribe to traditional socioeconomic principles such as the
limitation of trade. Robert Brenner traces the shift in power, during the decades preceding
the outbreak of Civil War in England, from large merchant companies such as the East
India Company which relied on government favor, to an emergent group of new merchants
-- many of them shopkeepers, artisans, or small producers -- who tended to take greater
economic risks and, when successful, to enjoy rapid social and economic advancement.
According to Appleby, merchants such as these were often described as
"promiscuous,"(31) a term that resonates with certain characterizations of Anne
Hutchinson.

Amy Schrager Lang has argued that the figure of Hutchinson marks the first site in
American culture in which dissent becomes associated with female empowerment, and
more specifically with the speaking public woman. Indeed, Hutchinson's gender figures
prominently in the rhetoric of her opponents, who accuse her of stepping out of her place, of
encouraging other women to do so, and even of practicing a promiscuous sexuality which,
they suggest, must certainly accompany such behavior. Therefore Hutchinson is accused
of circulating not only her ideas but her body too freely and too publicly. Cotton warns her
that "though I have not herd, nayther do I thinke, you have bine unfaythfull to your Husband
in his Marriage Covenant, yet that will follow upon it" (372). Thomas Weld similarly
compares the antinomians' seductive strategies to the "Harlots" in Proverbs 7.21: "with
much faire speech they caused them to yeeld, with the flattering of their lips they forced
them " (205). Descriptions of Hutchinson's circulation often betray an economic subtext in
their diction as well as their figures. Weld notoriously equated her religious ideas with her
so-called "monstrous birth," for example, explaining that "God fitted this judgement to her
sine every way, for looke as she had vented mishapen opinions, so she must bring forth
deformed monsters; and as about 30. Opinions in number, so many monsters" (214;
emphasis added). Here the corruptive force that John White and others associated with
commerce and the practice of "venting" leaves its marks on Hutchinson's body as well as
on her theological ideas. For Weld, these multiplied monsters embody the damaging
effects of excessive circulation on an economy of (re)production. Similar fears are
expressed in Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, where antinomian "Errours"
are described as "their bastardly brat," as a "bastardly brood," and as the multiplying heads
of "Hidra" which "as fast as one is cut off two stand up in the roome."(33)

Various seventeenth-century definitions of venting were associated with emissions from
the body, but such definitions resonated also in the civic realm, where the nation was often
figured as a body.(34) The years of the Antinomian Controversy in New England were
years of economic crisis in old England, when poverty rates were high and wages low. The
literature advocating emigration tended to highlight, for English wage laborers in particular,
the possibilities for improved prosperity in New England. Interestingly, the word "vent" and
variations on it often appeared in texts encouraging emigration to the colonies. An early
report submitted to the House of Lords, for example, offers the "deducing of colonies" as
one means by which to "vent the daily increase" in population that will otherwise "surcharge
the State." Failure to do so, the author of the report warns, will mean that in England, "as in
a full body, there must break out yearly tumours and impostumes as did of late." This same
report advocates, in defense of land enclosures in England, that "[l]eaving the employment
of the ground to the discretion of the occupants" will improve opportunities for "the vent of
such their commodities."(35) In the rhetoric of colonization, expelling people comes into
linguistic alignment with the market circulation of goods. The poem-prose piece Good
News from New-England likewise mixes its descriptions of emigration and trade. It
specifically invites those readers whose "earnings are but small," to "venter to this
new-found world, and make amends for all." A page later, the poem pictures these "poore
Christians" as they "packe to Sea-ports ships to enter,/ A wonderment, in streets they
passe, dividing their strange venter." This same tract goes on to tell a brief history of the
antinomian affair, indicating that those who supported Hutchinson and her "grosse errors"
included "certain persons more affecting trade than truth."(36)

While cloth merchants in England were having a difficult time finding a market or "vent" for
their product, in New England the prices of goods were soaring, as Winthrop's journal entry
for September 1636 notes: "Cattle were grown to high rates; -- a good cow, 25[pounds
sterling] or 30[pounds sterling]; a pair of bulls or oxen, 40[pounds sterling]. Corn was now at
5s. the bushel,.. .. Bread was at 9 and 10s. the C.; carpenters at 3s. the day, and other
workmen accordingly" (1:206). Such inflation represented the dangers of relaxed wage and
price controls while permitting the social advancement of those new merchants who
nourished during the 1630s, provoking considerable resentment among others in New
England. In 1637, after Winthrop ousted Henry Vane in the election for governor, he
immediately passed an order that required any persons arriving in Massachusetts to
receive the magistrates' approval. A strategy for ensuring that the antinomian faction would
not receive additional reinforcements, this alien law was also defended by Winthrop as an
attempt to seal the borders of the commonwealth to prevent strangers from penetrating and
violating "the wellfare of the body" (1:224) of the colony. Edward Johnson turns to similar
metaphors of boundary building when he opposes those who remove to New England for
"the increase of Trade, and traffique," to those magistrates who functioned as "stones" to
"build up the walls of Jerusalem (that his Sion may be surrounded with Bulworkes and
Towres)."(37) Winthrop's notoriously bizarre description of Hutchinson's "monstrous birth"
as "twenty-seven several lumps of man's seed" (1:271) suggests the dangers to
reproduction posed by circulation among and penetration by strangers, dangers linked
consistently in contemporary accounts of the Antinomian Controversy with the mixed
economic, theological, and social associations of venting.

Narratives of the crisis and its place in New England history written by Johnson, Winthrop,
and Weld tell similarly anxious but insistent stories of a religious and communal enterprise
whose success was briefly threatened by a "Master-piece of Womens wit."(38) But these
histories also reveal that Hutchinson and her followers challenged dominant social,
economic, and spiritual authority in New England by invalidating the significance of visible
evidence, undercutting the covenant of works preached by authorized Puritan ministers
as well as the organic social and economic models subscribed to by the ruling authorities in
Massachusetts. By locating authority instead in an internal and invisible self, and by
insisting and demonstrating that this self could be inconsistent with and misrepresented by
the visible self, Anne Hutchinson performed in her trials a very early and extremely modem
notion of selfhood -- one crucially linked with the relations of mercantile capitalism and one
that provoked panic among the orthodoxy. As Stephen Innes and others have observed,
the attitudes and practices of seventeenth-century New Englanders reflected a profound
ambivalence toward emergent capitalist relations. Indeed, economic practice in Puritan
New England tended to disable the social order whose stable hierarchy it was meant to
support, thus producing the very things it most feared.(39) This ambivalence helps to
account for the excessive hostility that characterizes so many accounts of New England
antinomianism. Hutchinson herself almost seems to be suggesting that those who exiled
her played a role in producing her ideas, when she insists under examination in Boston that
she "did not hould any of thease Things" (372) prior to the imprisonment imposed on her by
the magistrates following the Newtown trial. The orthodoxy's exile of Hutchinson aimed to
banish the "monstrous" possibilities set loose by the world of trade and commerce in which
colonialism necessarily situated them, even while repeating the gesture of venting which
they otherwise sought to curtail. A rather different story -- of class tensions, commercial
profit, and mercantile interests -- presses within and against the narrative of religious
community and freedom these texts anxiously tell, a narrative that has been perhaps too
easily repeated in subsequent literary histories of colonial America.(40)

Notes

(1.) T.H. Breen, "Right Man, Wrong Place," New York Review of Books 33, no. 18 (Nov. 20,
1986): 50; Philip F. Gura, "John Who? Captain John Smith and Early American
Literature," Early American Literature 21 (1986/87): 265. See also Sacvan Bercovitch,
The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

(2.) For critiques of the continuist, exceptionalist, ecclesiastical, and regional biases of
American literary histories, see, for example, Philip F. Gura, "The Study of Colonial
American Literature, 1966-1987: A Vade Mecum," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.,
45 (1988): 305-51; William Spengemann, A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea
of American Literature (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989); R.C.
DeProspo, "Marginalizing Early American Literature," New, Literary History 23 (1992):
233-65; and Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A
Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

(3.) Baker, 24.

(4.) Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent
in the Literature of New, England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 16.

(5.) David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History,
2d ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 206. Future references to this
collection will be cited parenthetically within the text.

(6.) As Edmund Morgan notes, when pushed too far the emphasis on preparation came
dangerously close to the heresy of Arminianism, which held that individuals could by force
of will invite salvation (The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop [Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1958] 136-37). For analyses which interpret the Controversy as a
debate over preparationism, see Perry, Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth
Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 57-67; and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 118-48, n.279.

(7.) Cotton insisted, for example, in his Treatise of the Covenant of Grace, that there "is
more than the Letter of the Word that is required ... [for] spiritual grace [to be] revealed to
the soul" (qtd. in Delbanco, 135).

(8.) Delbanco, 135.

(9.) Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England,
1620-1660 (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press), 258.

(10.) The antinomians refused also to attend the new governor with due ceremonial
conventions, requiring Winthrop to hire his own servants to attend him to public meetings
and to signal his arrival into town (John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to
1649, ed. James Savage [Boston, 1825], 1:224-25). Considering that, as Larzer Ziff notes,
the success of trade in New England relied on sustaining political alliances with Native
American tribes, one might read a suppressed economic incentive within the antinomians'
Pequot War resistance effort (Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World [New
York: Viking Press, 1973], 74). Further references to Winthrop's History are cited
parenthetically in the text by volume and page numbers.

(11.) Patricia Caldwell, "The Antinomian Language Controversy," Harvard Theological
Review 69 (1976): 346.

(12.) Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England
(1654), ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), 25.

(13.) The crisis over antinomianism was not the only arena in which economics and
theology shared rhetorical space. For a discussion of "the imagery of finance" within
Puritan covenantal theology, for example, see Delbanco, 61.

(14.) Other commentaries focus on the relationship between the merchant class and
antinomianism, including Ziff and Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the
Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1955). Like Battis's, however, these
studies all read this relationship as a causal one that enabled merchants to legitimize their
pecuniary interests. I am claiming instead that mercantile capitalism and antinomianism
provided shared discourses within which a modem subjectivity became articulated.

(15.) John White to John Winthrop, 16 November 1636, Winthrop Papers (Boston:
Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 3:322.

(16.) Emery Battis notes that William Hutchinson left the mercer shop in the charge of his
sons while he pursued other investment opportunities and fulfilled public responsibilities
(75). Hutchinson's brother Richard exported manufactured goods from London to members
of his family living in Boston, who not only sold those goods in the Bay colony and further
inland, but also exported them to the West Indies where another member of the Hutchinson
family exchanged them for sugar and cotton (see Bailyn, 88-89).

(17.) Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait o a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (New
York: Norton, 1965), 6.

(18.) Robert Charles Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown,
1866), 219-20.

(19.) In exchange for a promise to return the original investors' principal within seven years,
Winthrop and the other undertakers accepted the company's assests and debts and were
to receive control over the transport of goods and emigrants, a percentage of the beaver
trade, a monopoly on salt manufacture, and control over a magazine of provisions to be
sold at fixed prices (see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change,
Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993], 151). For John Winthrop Jr.'s account of the not very lucrative sale
of the Groton estate, see R.C. Winthrop, 169-74.

(20.) Winthrop Papers, 3:322.

(21.) For a survey of Winthrop's landholdings, see Rutman, 87-89. Winthrop's "A Modell of
Christian Charity" is of course one central source for his economic ideas, particularly
concerning how the rules of mercy and justice govern loans and debts (Winthrop Papers,
2:282-295).

(22.) Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New
England (New York: Norton, 1995), 28.

(23.) For a discussion of the exclusion of merchants from direct involvement in governing
institutions, and the political conflicts between gentlemen and merchants in the context of
the inflationary prices during the 1630s, see Bailyn, 19-40. Rutman refers to the group of
wealthy Boston merchants -- including the antinomian supporters William Hutchinson,
Coggshall, Colborne, Aspinwall, Baulston, Keayne and others -- as "lesser members of the
gentry" (75) or a "new breed of gentry" (246). Such classifications, however, by blurring the
distinctions between material wealth and economic ideology that I am emphasizing, risk
confusing such men with Winthrop and other gentlemen. I prefer instead to classify these
wealthy citizens who were never members of England's landed gentry within Robert
Brenner's category of "new merchants," who emerged during the seventeenth century,
distinct both from the colonizing aristocracy and London company merchants (111-12,
159). I thank Jim Holstun for bringing Brenner's book to my attention.

(24.) Battis, 286.

(25.) I concur with Louise A. Breen's assessment of Battis's reading as an "unsatisfying"
explanation for the class conflicts that underlie the Antinomian crisis ("Religious Radicalism
in the Puritan Officer Corps: Heterodoxy, the Artillery Company, and Cultural Integration
in Seventeenth-Century Boston," New England Quarterly 68 [1995]: n.15). Furthermore,
Battis's interpretation fails to accommodate Cotton's consistent denunciations of
profiteering and his support of fixed prices, as well as Hutchinson's own declarations
condemning the association her examiners made between her religious beliefs and the
sanction of lawlessness.

(26.) For a good discussion of subjectivity, language, and violence in the Antinomian
Controversy, see Ross Pudaloff's "Sign and Subject: Antinomianism in Massachusetts
Bay," Semiotica 54 (1985): 147-63, which locates the event, pace Foucault, in the historical
moment of a shift from Renaissance organicism to Classical contractualism.

(27.) In describing Hutchinson's subjectivity as "monstrous," I deliberately invoke the word
used by Winthrop, Cotton, Weld, and Johnson to describe the deformed fetuses of
Hutchinson and Mary Dyer. For a consideration of this aspect of the Controversy, see Anne
Jacobson Schutte, "'Such Monstrous Births': A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian
Controversy," Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 85-106.

(28.) Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century
England Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 44.

(29.) Ibid., 46.

(30.) Ibid., 49.

(31.) See Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Apologia of Robert Keayne: The Self-Portrait of a
Puritan Merchant (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), in which Keayne's insistence that
his possessions and estate be assessed "according to the common worth and value that
such goods and lands shall bear at that time in this country" (4) reads as deathbed support
for the anti-mercantilist notion of just price.

(32.) Bremer, 112; Appleby, 106.

(33.) Johnson, 126, 146, 125.

(34.) According to the OED, the verb "to vent" also signified the discharge or evacuation of
organs from a body, while the noun "vent" referred to the opening by which blood issues
from the body, or the anus or vulva of an animal.

(35.) Joan Thirsk and J.P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 109, 108. This image of the state as a body which
overpopulation will drive to disease helps to put into context the language of disease and
infection used by Weld, Cotton and others to describe the antinomian threat to the
Massachusetts commonwealth. For other studies of representations of the body politic and
its metonymic links with the bodies of women and Indians during the Antinomian crisis, see
james Schramer and Timothy Sweet, "Violence and the Body Politic in
Seventeenth-Century New England," Arizona Quarterly 48, no. 2 (summer 1992): 1-32;
and Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric,
Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

(36.) [Winslow, Edward?], Good news from New-England (London, 1648), 1, 2, 20
(emphases added). The idiosyncratic spelling and usage of words in Good news makes it
difficult to determine unequivocally the precise meaning of the second use of "venter." My
interpretation, that it is used to suggest a division of goods, relies on context as well as on
the assumption that the preceding verb "to divide" is employed in a conventional sense.

(37.) Johnson, 146, 141.

(38.) Ibid., 132.

(39.) Innes, 101. I would likewise argue that the hostility aimed at the Hutchinsonians by
dominant magistrates and ministers is precisely a function of the likenesses -- perhaps
especially economic similarities -- between the two groups as much as it is of the
differences between them.

(40.) This paper was first presented at the Group for Early Modem Cultural Studies
Conference in Dallas, October 1995. I would like the thank conference participants and
organizers, as well as Brooks Appelbaum, Chip Hebert, Margaret Kouidis, and Ross
Pudaloff for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.