She argued doctrine to the governor for two days. He banished her for being a woman who knew too much.
A Note on the New Category: Colonial Conscience
The first twenty-six entries in this series ranged widely — across centuries, continents, and causes. We now turn to a tighter frame.
Colonial Conscience examines the figures who, in the century before the American founding, tested the boundaries of belief and authority on this continent. They were not revolutionaries. They had no Constitution to appeal to, no Bill of Rights to invoke, no First Amendment to stand behind. They had only their convictions and a court that had already decided what conviction was permitted.
What they left behind — in trial transcripts, in exile, in pardons granted three centuries late — is the raw material from which American liberty was later assembled. The rights were not yet written. The arguments that would one day require them were already being made.
We begin with Anne Hutchinson.
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The Setup: 1637. A Woman Held Bible Study Meetings. The Government Put Her on Trial for It.
Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston in 1634, a forty-three-year-old midwife and mother of twelve children, following her beloved Puritan minister John Cotton from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 
She was unusually educated for a woman of her era because her father, the dissident Anglican clergyman Francis Marbury, had insisted his daughters learn to read and study Scripture. She brought that training with her to the New World, and she put it to immediate use.
Within a year of her arrival, Hutchinson was hosting weekly meetings in her home to discuss Cotton’s sermons. The gatherings began modestly — five or six women examining the week’s preaching together — but they grew rapidly. Men began attending. The new governor of Massachusetts, Sir Henry Vane, was among the participants. At her peak, Hutchinson was hosting two separate weekly sessions, so great was the demand.
She had become, by any honest measure, the most influential religious voice in the colony who did not hold ordained office.
The meetings were not merely devotional. Hutchinson was arguing a specific theological position: that most of the colony’s ministers were preaching what she called a covenant of works — the idea that moral conduct and public behavior were evidence of God’s grace and a reliable sign of salvation. She held this to be a distortion of true Puritan doctrine. Genuine faith, she insisted, rested solely on God’s free gift of grace — a covenant of grace — which no amount of good works could earn or demonstrate. She praised Cotton and her brother-in-law John Wheelwright as the only truly sanctified ministers in the colony; the rest, she said, preached the wrong gospel.
This was not idle chatter. It was a direct challenge to the authority of the men who ran the colony.
The Political Stakes
Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s was not a democracy. It was a Puritan theocracy built on a covenant — a binding agreement, in the colonists’ understanding, between themselves and God. Governor John Winthrop had articulated the vision in his sermon A Model of Christian Charity before the settlers even landed: “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The success of the colony depended on unity. Dissent threatened the covenant. Dissent was, therefore, not merely a theological problem; it was a civic emergency.
By 1636, the Antinomian Controversy — named from the Greek “against the law” — had divided the colony. Wheelwright was expelled in early 1637 for preaching the primacy of grace over works. Roger Williams had already been banished in 1636. When Vane, the pro-Hutchinson governor, returned to England and Winthrop retook the governorship in 1637, the political balance tipped decisively. Hutchinson’s supporters were outnumbered, her allies gone. The trial convened in November 1637 at Newtown (now Cambridge) with a verdict almost certainly predetermined.
Three formal charges were brought against her:
- She was a woman exerting religious authority over men.
- She preached free grace and denied the significance of works.
- She claimed the ability to identify who was “saved” and who was not.
The first charge said everything. The second and third gave it doctrinal cover.
The Trial: A Gendered Contest Over Authority
The trial transcript — preserved in Thomas Hutchinson’s 1767 History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts and digitized at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law — is a remarkable document. It is a verbatim exchange, and in it Hutchinson performs something remarkable: she out-argues the court, repeatedly, before the court simply stops pretending the argument matters.
Winthrop opened with the charge that her meetings were “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”
The phrase is diagnostic. He had not yet accused her of heresy. He began with gender. She was disruptive not primarily because of what she believed, but because she — a woman — was teaching it to men.
Her response was immediate and precise: “What have I said or done?”
Winthrop cited harboring faction members. She demanded the specific law she had broken. He pointed to the Fifth Commandment — honor thy father and thy mother — arguing that the colony’s magistrates were the spiritual parents of the community. She dissected the argument: “In what particular?” He named the commandment. She countered: “Ey Sir, in the Lord” — meaning honor is owed to parents in the Lord, not unconditionally.
When pressed on the meetings themselves, she cited Scripture — Titus 2:3–5, which instructs elder women to teach the younger — and argued she had biblical warrant. The court responded by citing 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I permit not a woman to teach”) and arguing that her authority was limited to private, occasional instruction, not public, recurring assemblies. She pushed back: “It is said, ‘I will pour my Spirit upon your daughters and they shall prophecy.’ If God give me a gift of prophecy, I may use it.”
The exchanges went on for hours. The transcript shows Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley pressing her on whether she had accused the colony’s ministers of preaching a covenant of works. She denied the exact formulation. He cited six ministers who testified otherwise. She challenged them to swear an oath to the precision of their testimony — a sharp legal instinct that placed the ministers in an uncomfortable position, since an oath committed them to the absolute accuracy of every word.
“We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex, but only this; you do adhere unto them and do endeavour to set forward this faction.” — John Winthrop
There it was. The argument was not ultimately about theology. It was about the propriety of a woman holding authority in a theocratic community — and the danger she posed to that community by demonstrating, in front of hundreds of followers, that she could engage Scripture at the level of any ordained minister in the colony.
The Turning Point: “An Immediate Revelation”
Hutchinson had held her own through two days of examination. Then, near the end, she made a statement that gave the court what it needed.
Asked how she distinguished true ministry from false, she declared that she had received direct revelation from God — knowledge communicated to her soul by the Holy Spirit, as immediate and personal as the voice of God to Abraham:
“By the voice of his own spirit to my soul. You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus has power over my body and soul. If you continue to persecute me you will bring a curse upon you and your children. The mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”
The court erupted. Winthrop called her revelation “a delusion.” The assembled judges shouted their agreement. Historian David Hall observed that her outburst made it easy for the judges to do what they intended to do regardless. In his private notes, Winthrop described her performance as “the impudent boldness of a proud dame.”
Winthrop pointed at her and declared: “This had been the ground of all these tumults and troubles. This had been the thing that has been the root of all the mischief.”
The claim of direct revelation was, theologically, a gift to the prosecution. It made her claim to authority not merely extrabiblical but unaccountable — if God spoke to her directly, no minister, no magistrate, no governor could contradict her. The court could not tolerate a woman with an authority line that bypassed every human institution they represented.
The Sentence
Winthrop pronounced the sentence without elaboration:
“Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.”
Hutchinson demanded to know the grounds of her banishment: “I desire to know wherefore I am banished?”
Winthrop’s reply: “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”
She was placed under house arrest through the winter. In March 1638, she faced a second, ecclesiastical trial before the Boston church, at which John Cotton — her mentor, the man whose theology she had championed — abandoned her and sided with the magistrates.
She was excommunicated.
After the Verdict: Exile and Death
Hutchinson departed Massachusetts with roughly sixty followers. With encouragement from Roger Williams, she helped establish the settlement of Portsmouth in what would become Rhode Island. Her husband William died in 1642. Fearing the absorption of Rhode Island settlements back into Massachusetts jurisdiction, she moved her household to New Netherland — present-day New York — in 1642.
In the summer of 1643, Hutchinson, her children, and household members were killed in an attack by warriors of the Siwanoy tribe during Kieft’s War, a Dutch-colonial conflict she had no part in provoking. All but one of the sixteen members of her household died. She was fifty-one years old. Her nine-year-old daughter Susanna survived, taken captive and later returned.
When Winthrop received the news in Massachusetts, he reportedly rejoiced, calling it God’s judgment on “this American Jezebel.”
What the Record Shows
The trial transcript reveals several things invisible to a summary retelling.
She was procedurally competent.
Hutchinson’s demand for specific charges, her insistence on named laws, her challenge to the ministers to swear oaths — these are legal instincts, not the behavior of a woman stumbling through an unfamiliar proceeding. She understood what was happening and fought it on the court’s own terms.
The gender issue was primary, not secondary.
Winthrop’s opening statement named her meetings as problematic before any theological charge — and specifically named her sex as the grounds of the objection. The theological charges were the mechanism; the gender charge was the motive. The court could not say openly: we are banishing you because you, a woman, humiliated our ministers in public by demonstrating superior knowledge of Scripture. But that is what the transcript documents.
She held the room for two days.
Even the court minutes record her cogently rebutting charge after charge. Dudley accused her of saying the ministers preached a covenant of works. She drew a distinction — they might preach as if under a covenant of works without being fully under one — that was theologically precise and difficult to refute. She lost because the court had decided the outcome before she spoke, not because she failed to argue.
The verdict language was unusual.
Winthrop’s sentence did not banish her for heresy — it banished her for being “a woman not fit for our society.” That formulation is striking. It did not charge her with a crime against God. It charged her with being a particular kind of person — a woman who would not accept her assigned station — in a community that could not afford to accommodate her.
The Legacy: 350 Years Later
Hutchinson’s influence spread through her followers, who carried the theological commitments of the Antinomian Controversy into Rhode Island and beyond, establishing communities that contributed to the eventual framework of American religious pluralism. The First Amendment Encyclopedia explicitly traces the lineage from figures like Hutchinson to the religious freedom protections of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
A bronze statue of Anne Hutchinson by sculptor Cyrus Edwin Dallin was cast in 1915 and installed on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House in 1922 — funded by the Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, who honored her as “a courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” The statue depicts her with a young girl at her side, and it stands today outside the west wing of the building that houses the government that banished her.
In 1987 — 350 years after the trial — Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis formally pardoned Anne Hutchinson, revoking the order of banishment. Historian Howard Zinn called her a true American hero.
John Winthrop never recanted. His city upon a hill required silence from women who knew too much. Anne Hutchinson refused to give it.
The Line That Carries Forward
The trial of Anne Hutchinson is often framed as a story about religious tolerance, and it is.
But looked at through the lens of courage and consequence, it is specifically about what happens when authority cannot answer a challenge and reaches instead for exclusion.
She stood before the governor of Massachusetts, without legal counsel, and argued theology on the record with the most powerful men in the colony — and held her ground for two days. She was not defeated by argument. She was defeated by verdict.
The court knew this distinction, which is why Winthrop refused to explain the grounds of the sentence. “The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.” Explanation would have required engaging her on the merits. Engagement on the merits was precisely what they could not afford.
She gave them one genuine opening — the claim to direct revelation — and they took it. But the transcript makes clear that this was an exit ramp the court was searching for, not a logical conclusion they were forced to reach.
The courage here is specific: she argued doctrine to the governor, in public, on the record, knowing the likely outcome, and she did not soften the argument to save herself.
The consequence was equally specific: banishment, excommunication, death on a frontier far from home.
What she left behind was the transcript itself — a document in which a seventeenth-century woman out-argued the government of a Puritan theocracy for two days before the government simply declared the argument over. That transcript has been read, taught, and cited for nearly four hundred years.
The verdict was reversed.
Her name is on a statue outside the building of her accusers.
Winthrop is remembered for a phrase about a city on a hill.
Hutchinson is remembered for refusing to leave it quietly.
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Next in Colonial Conscience: William Penn — The Trial That Taught Juries They Can Say No