Anne Hutchinson

Jun 24, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

Anne Hutchinson finds that the staunch Puritans of New England and the Massachusetts clergy considered her words to be an attack on their rigid moral and legal codes.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson was born in Alford, England in 1591. At the age of twenty or twenty one, in 1612, she married William Hutchinson. During their thirty years of marriage Anne bore her husband 14 children. Upon the instigation of their firstborn son, Anne Hutchinson and her family migrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony at Boston in America in 1634.

In Boston, Hutchinson's gentle nature and exceptional intelligence resulted in her becoming a leader amongst her peers. She began to organize meetings among Boston women that many community leaders later attended. At these meetings she "preached a doctrine of salvation realized through the intuition of God's indwelling in grace."

Hutchinson's preaching, like that of Roger Williams , appeared to not hold with the traditional Puritan religious doctrines. The staunch Puritans of New England and the Massachusetts clergy considered her words to be an attack on their rigid moral and legal codes.

Because Hutchinson's teachings differed from the traditional Puritan beliefs a great political and religious controversy was created in the colony. It was a situation that dangerously split the community.

Hutchinson's downfall, at least in Puritan eyes, came just prior to 1637. The governor, Sir Henry Vane, who supported Hutchinson's cause, lost his office to Hutchinson's staunch religious and political opponent, John Winthrop.

That year, 1637, Anne Hutchinson was tried by the General Court of Massachusetts that was, of course, presided over by Winthrop. The charge against Hutchinson was that of "traducing the ministers," that is she was basically accused of disagreeing with the Puritan religious leaders who took to mean she was calling them all liars.

Hutchinson was found guilty. She was excommunicated from the church and banished from the colony. With her husband and family, she moved to the island of Aquidneck, which is now a part of Rhode Island .

Following the death of Anne Hutchinson's husband in 1642, she and her family settled in what is now Pelham Bay, the Bronx, New York. The following year, in August, Anne Hutchinson and all but one member of her family were killed in an Indian massacre.

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Sources:

Sachs, William S. and Ari Hoogenboom. The Enterprising Colonials: Society on the Eve of the Revolution. Argonaut, Inc., Publishers, Chicago, 1965.

Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, Vol. 13. Funk & Wagnalls, Inc.

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