Hutchinson, Anne

HUTCHINSON, ANNE (1591–1643), was the central figure in the antinomian controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636–1637. A native of Alford, Lincolnshire, Anne Marbury married William Hutchinson, an affluent merchant of that town, and mothered a large family. Around 1630 she came under the religious influence of John Cotton, vicar of Saint Botolph's in nearby Boston, and four years later she and her family followed him to the newly settled town of Boston in New England.

The Puritans of the English Congregational churches had sought to leaven John Calvin's harsh predestination decree by incorporating a concrete assurance of election that would be contingent on the moral responsibility of the elect. They asserted that the hopeful believer could prepare his or her soul for the reception of God's saving grace through a life of purity that might offer evidence of salvation. John Cotton, however, warned that this innovation imperiled the basic Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. The believer must receive "witnesse of the Spirit itselfe," he wrote, before being able to advance his or her moral condition as evidence of a state of grace.

Anne Hutchinson incautiously distorted Cotton's doctrine by asserting that the gift of grace implied the actual indwelling of the spirit of the Lord, mystically uniting the elect to himself, thus rendering superfluous all other evidence of salvation. This conclusion verged perilously on the antinomian heresy, which held that Christians are freed from the moral law of the Old Testament by the new dispensation of grace proffered in the gospel.

Hutchinson communicated her beliefs in the guise of an informal exegesis of Cotton's weekly sermons. Large numbers of people attended these doctrinal discussions at her home in Boston, and a majority of the local congregation, including most of the town's political and mercantile leaders, became enthusiastic disciples. When, at last, she accused all the Massachusetts clergy except Cotton of preaching a covenant of works, she precipitated a factional division that aroused the colony. Soon the religious breach assumed political dimensions and threatened the public safety.

The orthodox leaders, seeing the future of the colony at stake, regained political ascendancy by enlisting the support of outlying agricultural communities. A clerical synod declared Hutchinson guilty of holding numerous erroneous opinions, most of them inferential extensions of her central doctrine. Arraigned before the General Court in November 1637, Hutchinson unguardedly boasted that she had received revelations from the Holy Spirit, a heretical claim that horrified all orthodox Puritans. Repudiated by Cotton, excommunicated from the Boston church, and banished from the colony, she fled with family and friends to neighboring Rhode Island. Further dissension prompted her removal to New Netherland where, in 1643, she and her younger children were massacred by Indians.

Hutchinson left behind neither a religious organization nor a fixed system of belief. Although a remarkably intelligent and courageous woman, she seems to have been intolerant of religious doctrines other than her own. But the struggle of such sectarians who sought freedom of conscience for themselves prompted a diversity of beliefs that paved the way to a general freedom of religion for later generations.

Basic documentation can be found in Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636–1638 (1894; reprint, New York, 1967), edited by Charles Francis Adams, and in Winthrop's Journal, "History of New England," 1630–1649, 2 vols. (1908; reprint, New York, 1966), edited by James K. Hosmer. The most satisfactory brief account, although skeptical of the religious issues, is in Charles Francis Adams's Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, rev. ed., 2 vols. (1896; reprint, New York, 1965). My own book Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962) is a more detailed study. Criticism of the modern tendency to see Hutchinson as a "prophet of liberalism" is made by Edmund S. Morgan in "The Case against Anne Hutchinson," New England Quarterly 10 (December 1937): 635–649. Essential to an understanding of the issues of the antinomian controversy are two works by Perry Miller: The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939) and Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (1933; reprint, Gloucester, Mass., 1965).