Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.                                                                                                                       John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony                          November 7, 1637

On this date 374 years ago, Anne Hutchinson was convicted of heresy and subversion and banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony by its governing authorities, headed by John Winthrop.  The trial that led to Mrs. Hutchinson’s sentence offered little suspense.  Its outcome was never in doubt.  To the clerical authorities in Boston, Mrs. Hutchinson was a very dangerous woman, whose presence in the colony posed a real threat to the Puritan hierarchy.  She needed to be removed from society forthwith.

What, exactly, was Anne Hutchinson’s crime?  She had the gall to interpret the words of the Bible for herself, and she was willing to express publicly her interpretation of scripture.  Soon after her arrival in Boston, she began hosting a Bible study in her home.  Initially, these study groups were almost exclusively composed of women.  The women would review the most recent Sunday sermon, and discuss how to apply the minister’s words to their daily lives. 

There was really nothing unusual about women’s Bible study groups like this.  They were common among the Puritans, especially those who had immigrated to America.  It did not take long, however, for Anne Hutchinson’s study group to morph into something quite different.  Mrs. Hutchinson did not simply elaborate on the words of her Puritan elders.  She actually began to offer her own interpretation of scripture.  Before long her weekly meetings attracted both men and women, and several clergymen attended to gain insights from Mrs. Hutchinson’s understanding of scripture.

Many of the Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been subject to severe persecution before leaving England.  Their refusal to adhere to the legalistic precepts of the Anglican Church was seen as dangerous to the established order of the realm.  In England, the Puritans merely wished to cleanse the Anglican Church of its Catholic tendencies.  Foremost among the Puritans’ complaints was the established Church’s belief that good works and celebration of the sacraments were the tickets to salvation.  To the Puritans, this view of salvation ignored a much more important factor:  Salvation is the product of an individual’s personal faith.  To the English authorities, the Puritan emphasis on individual salvation at the expense of the established clergy was subversive.

Sadly, once established in their new homes in America, many Puritan leaders fell victim to the same authoritarian tendencies as their Anglican persecutors.  That was certainly the case with John Winthrop and many other leading citizens of Massachusetts.  They who had once been persecuted for their individual religious interpretations were themselves now the persecutors.  Comfortably situated in positions of authority, the Puritan elders proved to be extremely circumspect in the degree of religious toleration they would grant others.  Already, many colonists whose religious views differed from those of Boston’s leading clergy had begun to establish new colonies, such as New Hampshire and Rhode Island.  To live in Massachusetts during the first half of the 17^th century, it was expected that one would quietly accept the teachings of Winthrop and the other elders, just as the Anglican Church had expected all Englishmen should adhere to the authority of its clerical hierarchy.

Anne Hutchinson’s crime was two-fold.  First, she questioned Puritan elders’ authority to dicatate her individual path to salvation.  Second, she was a woman.  In the eyes of these powerful Puritan men, women were the morally inferior inheritors of Eve’s original sin.  It was Eve, after all, who had first bitten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  It was Eve, corrupted by sin, who tempted Adam and led him astray.  To allow women too much leeway in religious matters was to play with fire.  Just as Eve had done in the beginning, the women of Boston would no doubt lead their men to damnation if they were allowed to form their own thoughts and make their own decisions.  Anne Hutchinson was a dangerous woman, indeed!

And what did Mrs. Hutchinson profess that was so dangerous to the Puritan establishment?  Central to her faith was the idea that salvation did not rely on good works, but on a personal “intuition of the Spirit.”  Good works would follow naturally for one infused with the Holy Spirit, but works in and of themselves were not necessary for salvation.  While the Puritans had de-emphasized the role of works compared to the Anglicans, they still held a legalistic view that works, combined with personal faith, were necessary for admittance into Christian fellowship.  Anne Hutchinson went much further by stating works were utterly irrelevant to salvation.

It should come as no surprise that Anne Hutchinson’s views regarding women would differ substantially from what the Puritan elders espoused.  She took her concern for individual rights beyond gender, though.  She was an early supporter of Native American rights, another position at odds with the ruling authorities.  During the first major conflict between English colonists and Native Americans (the Pequot War), many of Hutchinson’s followers refused to take arms against the Native American tribes.  She was also a vocal opponent of the enslavement of natives.  Slavery had existed in Massachusetts since 1624, and John Winthrop himself owned three native Pequot slaves.   Anne Hutchinson’s opposition to slavery implied a moral judgment against Winthrop and other elder slaveholders.

For casting doubt on the moral authority of her Puritan elders, Anne Hutchinson was jailed and then banished from Massachusetts.  She was invited to come to Rhode Island by John Willliams, the founder of that colony and another early dissenter from Puritan authoritarianism.  She remained there with her family and many of her followers for several years.  In 1642, fearing a possible union between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the Hutchinson’s and several other families moved to New Netherland, in the present day Bronx, where they would be outside the jurisdiction of the authorities in Boston.  The timing of the move proved unfortunate.  The Dutch authorities in New Netherland had treated the native tribes harshly, and in the summer of 1643 several of the tribes fought back.  Among the victims were Anne Hutchinson and five of her children.  One child, a nine-year-old daughter, was spared, possibly due to her red hair.

The authorities in Boston viewed the massacre with self-congratulatory smugness.  Referring to her as an “American Jezebel”, John Winthrop and the leading Massachusetts clerics applauded Anne Hutchinson’s death as the just vengeance of God against Satanic heresy.

Anne Hutchinson’s death represents the end of one of the earliest battles in the ongoing struggle for civil rights in America.  What America has become must surely come closer to the model envisioned by Anne Hutchinson than the authoritarian religious Utopia preached by John Winthrop.  The words Mrs. Hutchinson spoke in her defense during the trial are far more lasting than those uttered by her accusers, and stand up well next to the public professions of faith made by men like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, Thomas More, and countless others who have fought for religious liberty through the ages:

You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harme, for I am in the hands of the eternall Jehovah my Saviour, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further doe I esteeme of any mortal man than creatures in his hand, I feare none but the great Jehovah.