Quotes from Eve LaPlante

Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always "falls short of absolute truth.

Ten years after lending a man from Barbados ten pounds, he wrote to him in 1700, "Sir, I presume the old verity 'If knocking thrice, no one comes, go off ' is not to be understood of creditors in demanding their just debts. The tenth year is now current since I let you ten pounds, merely out of respect to you as a stranger and scholar…. I am come again to knock at your door to enquire if any ingenuity or honor dwell there….

Shocking many, Puritans wore hats in church (following Jewish practice), refused to bow or kneel during worship (which they saw as a violation of the third commandment), and allowed pigs and chickens in the church, and some of them didn't even know the Lord's Prayer.

Winthrop was arguing for nothing more than the role expected of any seventeenth-century Englishwoman.

In a world without religious freedom, civil rights, or free speech—the colonial world of the 1630s that was the seed of the modern United States—Anne Hutchinson was an American visionary, pioneer, and explorer who epitomized the religious freedom and tolerance that are essential to the nation's character.

As Cotton later explained, "Zeal must be according to knowledge, knowledge is no knowledge without zeal, and zeal is but a wildfire without knowledge.

The members of the Massachusetts Court removed Anne because her moral certitude was too much like their own.

Her detractors, starting with her neighbor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, derided her as the "instrument of Satan," the new Eve, and the "enemy of the chosen people." In summing her up, Winthrop called her "this American Jezebel"—the emphasis is his—making an epithet of the name that any Puritan would recognize as belonging to the most evil and shameful woman in the Bible.

Anne Hutchinson's greatest crime, and the source of her power, was the series of weekly public meetings she held at her house to discuss Scripture and theology.

By this time, increasing numbers of citizens were traders, merchants, sailors, and brokers, who had more commercial and mercantile concerns than the earlier émigrés, who tended to support Winthrop. Ironically, the highest-born immigrant of all—Vane, the idealistic son of a member of the king's Privy Council—was, together with the free-thinker Anne Hutchinson, the champion of Boston's burgeoning middle class.

They rejected his novel concept of freedom of conscience

He meant her many allies—such respected men of the colony as the town assessor, William Colburn; William Aspinwall, who was a notary, court recorder, and surveyor; William Coddington, the richest man in Boston; the prominent silk merchant John Coggeshall; the innkeeper William Baulston; William Dyer, the milliner; and the Pequot War hero Captain John Underhill—all of whom faced disfranchisement on account of their recent petition in support of her brother-in-law John Wheelwright.

Pressed by the ministers in private, she had admitted what she believed: that a minister who, in her view, was not sealed with the spirit could not preach a covenant of grace "so clearly as Cotton.

To his colleagues' dismay, Cotton did not completely agree with the others on doctrine, and Hutchinson "did conceive that we were not able ministers of the gospel," the Salem minister Hugh Peter lamented. In sum, "she was a woman not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit.

Winthrop's decision to stay in Boston triggered a feud with Dudley that would last throughout their lives. As a result of this split, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts met alternately in Boston and Newtown during the 1630s, when it convened four times a year. Despite this rift, Winthrop chose in 1637 to wait to try Hutchinson until the court met in Newtown because he enjoyed far more support there than in Boston.

Colonial ministers, despite their vast public power, were not allowed to hold public office, a distinction that kept Massachusetts from being a theocracy.