Anne Hutchinson, the Antinomian Controversy

Anne Hutchinson began her Boston meetings by gathering women in her home to go back over the previous Sunday's sermon. Within a couple of years the gatherings had grown to include men as well, sometimes sixty or more attendees, and Hutchinson had begun offering her own theological judgments on which of the colony's ministers preached the gospel rightly. She held that only John Cotton, and briefly her own brother-in-law John Wheelwright, taught salvation as a free covenant of grace; every other minister in her account preached a covenant of works that made good conduct the sign, and in her more forceful moments the cause, of salvation, a position her opponents heard as undermining the whole disciplined social order Puritan Massachusetts was built on. Governor John Winthrop, who named the crisis the antinomian controversy, led the 1637 trial. Hutchinson defended herself skillfully for most of the proceeding, until she stated that she knew her positions were true by immediate revelation from the Holy Spirit rather than by scripture alone, a claim that gave the court the opening it needed. She was convicted, then examined again and excommunicated by her own congregation, and banished from the colony in the winter of 1638. She and a group of supporters bought land from the Narragansett and founded a settlement at Portsmouth, one of the towns whose founders later secured a royal charter for Rhode Island on a foundation of religious liberty that stood in deliberate contrast to Massachusetts. Hutchinson herself never saw that colony fully take shape: after her husband's death she moved her household to Dutch territory near what is now the Bronx, and in 1643 she and most of her family were killed in a raid during a conflict between Dutch colonists and the Siwanoy.