Anne Hutchinson

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1639, pregnant for the sixteenth time, Anne Hutchinson delivered what her contemporaries described as a mass of shapeless tissue rather than a child, almost certainly a hydatidiform mole in modern medical terms, a documented obstetric event distinct from the theological trial and banishment her first article covers. Governor John Winthrop, already the man who had presided over her 1637 conviction, learned of the miscarriage and wrote to her physician, John Clarke, pressing for details rather than offering sympathy, a documented correspondence distinct from the antinomian controversy itself.

Winthrop recorded the result in his journal in explicitly providential language, describing "monstrous births" of no single or perfect shape and reading the miscarriage as God testifying his displeasure against Hutchinson's opinions as plainly, in Winthrop's own words, as if he had pointed with his finger, a documented theological interpretation distinct from the legal reasoning that had convicted her two years earlier. Puritan ministers repeated the story from the pulpit as evidence that Hutchinson's doctrine of free grace bred monstrous consequences, spiritual and literal alike, and the same providential reading was applied soon after to a stillbirth suffered by her follower Mary Dyer, tying the two women's bodies together in a single piece of anti-antinomian propaganda.

That the same colony which had already banished Hutchinson for a doctrinal claim went on to publicize the private details of her miscarriage as further proof of that same claim's danger, marks the 1639 monstrous birth as a documented case where Hutchinson's body, not only her preaching, was made to carry her opponents' argument against her, years after the courtroom had already ruled.