This woman was executed as a witch because she complained about her carpenters
Her story is the inspiration behind ‘The Scarlet Letter’
They overcharged her by more than double, she claimed. All she wanted was a fair rate for a remodeling project in her house.
The carpenters refused. The work was done. She owed them money.
Not going to happen, she said. Then she sued them. After she won the lawsuit, the local church began its own investigation into this “restless” and “abrasive” woman (a nasty woman, if you will). In short order, she was excommunicated. But it wasn’t until her husband died years later that the carpenters really had their revenge.
After the carpenters completed work on Ann Hibbins’ Boston house in the late 1630s, they naturally sent her a bill. But Ann found the fee too high and asked her husband William for permission to pursue the matter. The carpenters wouldn’t lower their rate, so Ann took them to court.
Her dogged pursuit of the case — which she ultimately won — concerned the Puritan church, which ruled alongside local government and enforced rigid codes of conduct on community members and especially women. The 1640 transcript from Ann Hibbins’ excommunication hearing does not focus on the carpenters’ wrongdoing. Instead, church officials castigate Ann for transgressing the authority of her husband.
“She stirs in it, as if she were able to manage it better than her husband, which is a plain breach of the rule of Christ,” says one. “That is indeed observed…as a great aggravation of her sin; in so much that some do think she doth but make a wisp of her husband,” says another.
When he took the witness stand, her husband didn’t help matters, saying she should be over the whole mess by now and keep quiet. Women, amirite?
Ann was excommunicated from the church that day.
Within months of William’s death in 1654, the General Court began proceedings accusing Ann of witchcraft. This was almost 40 years before the Salem Witch Trials.
Little documentation has been found or filed related to Ann Hibbins’ trial. However, piecing together various accounts show a town turned against an “outspoken” woman.
“Losses in the latter part of her husband’s life had reduced his estate and increased the natural crabbedness of his wife’s temper, which made her turbulent and quarrelsome, brought her under church censor, and at length rendered her so odious to her neighbors as to cause some of them to accuse her of witchcraft,” wrote Governor Hutchison in 1765, more than a century later. His tone is patronizing but circumspect, tinted with a touch of embarrassment at Ann’s verdict.
Hutchison goes on to say that no concrete evidence was found against the woman: “Search was made upon her body for teats, and in her chests and boxes for puppets, images, etc.; but there is no record of anything of that sort being found.” (It was thought witches had extra teats to feed “imps,” and that these creatures would come to a witch every day for sustenance. One way to collect this evidence was for an official to “watch” the accused over a period of 24 hours.) The identity or existence of witness testimony in Ann Hibbins’ trial is a mystery.
Nonetheless, a jury found her guilty in 1655, but the magistrates set the verdict aside. When the General Court heard it the following year, they sentenced her to death.
In her will, an estate worth £344, Ann had named curious benefactors: a deputy of Boston’s General Court, two selectmen, and other “leading citizens of the town.” She had attempted to bribe good words from “friends” in high places.
Instead, one of her beneficiaries apologized for defending her: “I am cordially sorry that anything from me, either in word or writing, should give offence to the honored Court, my dear brethren in the church, or any others.”
On June 19, 1656, Ann Hibbins became the third woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Boston.
Ann Hibbins’ story would go on to inspire a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Mistress Hibbins invites Hester Prynn to the forest to meet the “Black Man.” The narrator calls her “sour and discontented.” She is sister to Governor Bellingham and lives with him in a large mansion, a symbol of the hypocritical relationship between church and state in Puritan America.
Roughly 80 people in New England were accused of witchcraft between 1648 and 1663. Thirteen women and 2 men were executed. During the Salem Witch Trials between 1692 and 1693, 20 people were executed and 5 died in jail. Some were convicted because they’d had too many miscarriages, others because they made herbal remedies for sick people.
What made Hibbins different from most of the other women eventually executed was her high social stature. She was sister-in-law to the governor and married a wealthy merchant. Apart from a bit of stubbornness against the church, she was an upstanding citizen.
According to Minister John Norton, a friend of Ann who came to her defense, “[She] was hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbors.”
In other words, she was a smart woman who wanted to remodel her house.
