Anne Hutchinson

English-born colonial American religious leader

• Born: July 20, 1591 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Alford, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: August 20, 1643
• Place of death: Pelham Bay, New Netherland (now in New York)

By challenging the orthodox theology of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hutchinson precipitated the Antinomian Crisis of 1637, which questioned the very basis of the New England theocracy.

Early Life

Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, a small town northeast of Boston in Lincolnshire, England. At the time of her birth, her father, Francis Marbury (1556-1611), was master of Saint Wilfred’s School in Alford, having been deprived of his pulpit for his unorthodox preaching. Thus, Hutchinson was born into the very species of religious repression that would drive her out of New England half a century later. Her mother, Bridget Dryden Marbury (1563-1645), was a midwife and the great-great-aunt of poet John Dryden (1631-1700).

Anne learned to read by studying publications (two plays and three sermons) written by her father, a Cambridge scholar whose library of theological texts soon became Anne’s refuge. Francis begged to have the ban on his preaching lifted, and by 1602, he was preaching again at Alford. Three years later, when Anne was fourteen, the family moved to London, where Marbury was made rector of Saint Martin’s Vintry. Anne left behind everyone she had ever known, including a nineteen-year-old merchant tailor named William Hutchinson. When Anne’s father died in 1611, however, Hutchinson moved to London, and on August 9, 1612, they were married at the chapel-rectory of Saint Martin’s.

Returning to Alford with his bride, William resumed his tailoring business and Anne her mother’s practice of midwifery. Over the next two decades, Anne bore and raised thirteen children in Alford. The same year the Hutchinsons returned to Lincolnshire, a young pastor named John Cotton began preaching in nearby Boston, and Anne soon heard about his teaching, reminiscent of her father’s. When Cotton immigrated to New England in 1633, Anne convinced her husband to turn his shop over to his brother. The following year Anne, William, and their eleven surviving children sailed for America.

Life’s Work

The New England Puritan theocracy into which Cotton and Hutchinson immigrated was no more open to religious diversity than was the Anglican England they had left behind. Although founded on the premise that the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Church of England was contrary to the “freedom of the gospel,” the Congregationalist ideal of the Massachusetts Bay still depended on the deliberations of its ministers to ensure the proper interpretation of Scripture. Ministers who deviated from the teachings of the synods—periodic meetings of church elders—were deprived of their pulpits, just as Hutchinson’s father had been.

One of the major sources of controversy in Hutchinson’s time was Antinomianism, a doctrine involving the individual’s role in salvation. The Roman Catholic Church taught that salvation was achieved by a combination of faith and good works. That is, Catholicism held that practices such as giving alms and penance prepared a sinner for salvation, and the Puritans of New England believed that remnants of this error persisted in English Protestantism. The orthodox Calvinist position, by contrast, was that God’s grace alone brought salvation. The practical concern for the American Puritan was this: If I know I am saved by God’s grace, why do I need to live a moral life? One Boston theologian, Thomas Shepard (1605-1649), put forward an answer that came to be called preparationism. Preparationists believed that if salvation were freely given by God, through no merit of one’s own, then one could at least meet God halfway by preparing oneself spiritually for the gift.

By the mid-1630’s, however, Hutchinson and some others in New England extended the role of the individual in salvation well beyond the approved limits of the colony’s leading ministers. Hutchinson became a target of these ministers not only because they considered her position to be Antinomian, but also because she was teaching it to others in increasingly well-attended prayer meetings at her home. Her teaching was problematic for colonial authorities for two reasons. First, it bordered on preaching, which was strictly licensed (and forbidden to women under any circumstances). Second, both women and men were present at these meetings, an intermingling thought improper in a private home.

Hutchinson’s threat to ministerial authority was not theoretical but direct, particularly after 1636, when colonial governor Sir Henry Vane the Younger began attending her meetings and defending her views. With such important political backing, Hutchinson herself began to move beyond simply defending her views and openly attacked the views of her opponents as constituting a Covenant of Works. She accused every minister in New England, with the exception of her brother-in-law John Wheelwright, of preaching error.

Beginning with the colony’s elections in May of 1637, circumstances began to turn against Hutchinson. Former governor John Winthrop , one of her most prominent opponents, was reelected, defeating Vane in the governor’s race, and immediately afterward, the ministers called a synod to define the errors of the Antinomian teachings. Armed with the synod’s theological findings, which in Puritan New England had legal status, the Winthrop administration called a special election in October and turned Hutchinson’s supporters out of the General Court. This ecclesiastical-political purge gave Winthrop’s court the clout to banish Wheelwright, who had preached sermons against his sister-in-law’s opponents, and, in November, 1637, to bring Hutchinson herself to trial.

Hutchinson was charged with sedition, because an attack on church authority was an attack on the government in theocratic New England. The only minister who spoke in Hutchinson’s favor was John Cotton, who testified that her conversations with him on the covenant of grace had been more nuanced than the Antinomian diatribes reported by her detractors, suggesting that Hutchinson had been quoted out of context, and with prejudice. When Hutchinson herself was called to testify, however, she defied the authority of the church leaders and claimed “immediate revelation” from God as her authority—a concept directly forbidden by Calvinist orthodoxy.

The court found Hutchinson guilty. She and her family, as well as many of her followers, were banished to Rhode Island, and in March, 1638, she was formally excommunicated. When William Hutchinson died in 1642, their older children having moved on, some with families of their own, Anne moved her six youngest children with her to Long Island (then part of New England) and later in the year to Dutch New Netherland (now New York). She died there in an Indian attack on August 20, 1643, along with five of her six remaining children.

Significance

Hutchinson has been called the first feminist in the New World. The laws of Puritan New England did not allow for religious freedom in the sense that we think of it today, and the concept would not have legal status in America until a century and a half after her death. Despite these facts, however, Hutchinson’s assertion of the primacy of conscience in religious discourse and the right to hold that discourse in public anticipated the principles of religious toleration enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Hutchinson is remembered mostly as a model for American religious freedom, but her clash with Puritan theocracy also demonstrated the need for two other basic freedoms many Americans take for granted: the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech. In American religious history, moreover, she represents one of the earliest proponents of personal revelation, which, while antithetical to the Calvinism of the 1630’s, would sweep New England a century later in what would be called the Great Awakening.

Bibliography

Hall, David D., ed. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638. 2d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Updated version of what had already been, in the first edition (1968), the most complete collection of primary sources on Hutchinson’s trial.

Huber, Elaine. Women and the Authority of Inspiration. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985. A detailed analysis of the religious background to Hutchinson’s conflict with church authorities as a paradigm for similar conflicts in later times.

Hutchinson, Thomas. History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936. A republication, for the three hundredth anniversary of Hutchinson’s trial, of her grandson’s account of the history of that era, first published in 1865 by her great-grandson John Hutchinson. Includes transcripts of the trial.

LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper, 2004. An exhaustive biography by a twenty-first century descendant of Hutchinson.

Lewis, M. J. “Anne Hutchinson.” In Portraits of American Women, edited by G. J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Presents new information on Anne Hutchinson’s death.

Pagnattaro, Marisa Ann. In Defiance of the Law: From Anne Hutchinson to Toni Morrison. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. The historical case of Anne Hutchinson is used as a foundation to explore the fates of similar fictional women in American literature.