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The settlement had full religious liberty, and Hutchinson herself developed an increasingly radical theology. She convinced three or four families to become Seekers, meaning that they rejected the legitimacy of all churches that ever existed since the time of the Apostles.<ref>Winship, ''The Times & Trials'', 144-145.</ref> After Hutchinson’s husband died in 1642, she desired to leave Pocasset, in part to get further away from Massachusetts officials who now (according to Rothbard) considered her a witch deserving to die.<ref>Rothbard, ''Conceived in Liberty'', 186.</ref> So, that year she and three families purchased land from the Wecqueasgeek Indians, in the present-day Bronx which was then colonized by the Dutch. Emphasizing their shared humanity, Hutchinson told the Wecqueasgeek that she and they were “all one Indian.” Unfortunately, a corrupt Dutch official may have pocketed her followers’ money instead of properly delivering it to the Wecqueasgeek for their land. In August or September of 1643, an Indian raid killed Hutchinson and most members of the families living with her. Sixteen people died in total.<ref>Winship, ''The Times & Trials'', 145-146.</ref>
The settlement had full religious liberty, and Hutchinson herself developed an increasingly radical theology. She convinced three or four families to become Seekers, meaning that they rejected the legitimacy of all churches that ever existed since the time of the Apostles.<ref>Winship, ''The Times & Trials'', 144-145.</ref> After Hutchinson’s husband died in 1642, she desired to leave Pocasset, in part to get further away from Massachusetts officials who now (according to Rothbard) considered her a witch deserving to die.<ref>Rothbard, ''Conceived in Liberty'', 186.</ref> So, that year she and three families purchased land from the Wecqueasgeek Indians, in the present-day Bronx which was then colonized by the Dutch. Emphasizing their shared humanity, Hutchinson told the Wecqueasgeek that she and they were “all one Indian.” Unfortunately, a corrupt Dutch official may have pocketed her followers’ money instead of properly delivering it to the Wecqueasgeek for their land. In August or September of 1643, an Indian raid killed Hutchinson and most members of the families living with her. Sixteen people died in total.<ref>Winship, ''The Times & Trials'', 145-146.</ref>
=From Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works <ref>[[Anarchy Works]]</ref>=
<blockquote>In the 1600s, Europeans were streaming to North America for a variety of reasons, building new colonies that exhibited a wide range of characteristics. They included plantation economies based on slave labor, penal colonies, trading networks that sought to compel the indigenous inhabitants to produce large quantities of animal skins, and fundamentalist religious utopias based on the total genocide of the native population. But just as the plantation colonies had their slave rebellions, the religious colonies had their heretics. One noteworthy heretic was Anne Hutchinson. An anabaptist who came to New England to escape religious persecution in the old world, she began to hold women’s meetings in her house, discussion groups based on free interpretation of the Bible. As the popularity of these meetings spread, men began to participate as well. Anne won popular support for her well argued ideas, which opposed the slavery of Africans and Native Americans, criticized the church, and insisted that being born a woman was a blessing and not a curse.
The religious leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony put her on trial for blasphemy, but at trial she stood by her ideas. She was heckled and called an instrument of the devil, and one minister said, “You have stepped out of your place, you have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject.” Upon her expulsion Anne Hutchinson organized a group, in 1637, to form a settlement named Pocasset. They intentionally settled near to where Roger Williams, a progressive theologian, had founded Providence Plantations, a settlement based on the idea of total equality and freedom of conscience for all inhabitants, and friendly relations with the indigenous neighbors. These settlements were to become, respectively, Portsmouth and Providence, Rhode Island. Early on they joined to form the Rhode Island Colony. Both settlements allegedly maintained friendly relations with the neighboring indigenous nation, the Narragansett; Roger Williams’ settlement was gifted the land they built on, whereas Hutchinson’s group negotiated an exchange to buy land.
Initially, Pocasset was organized through elected councils and the people refused to have a governor. The settlement recognized equality between the sexes and trial by jury; abolished capital punishment, witchtrials, imprisonment for debt, and slavery; and granted total religious freedom. The second synagogue in North America was built in the Rhode Island colony. In 1651 one member of Hutchinson’s group seized power and got the government of England to bestow him governorship over the colony, but after two years the other people in the settlement kicked him out in a mini-revolution. After this incident, Anne Hutchinson realized that her religious beliefs opposed “magistracy,” or governmental authority, and in her later years she was said to have developed a political-religious philosophy very similar to individualist anarchism. One might say that Hutchinson and her colleagues were ahead of their times, but in every period of history there have been stories of people creating utopias, women asserting their equality, laypeople negating the religious leaders’ monopoly on truth. </blockquote>




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Revision as of 06:26, 10 June 2018

Anne Hutchinson on Trial by Edwin Austin Abbey. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson

Instructed in religion by the seventeenth-century midwife Anne Hutchinson, a devoted group of unorthodox Puritans formed a network in Massachusetts and, eventually, established a residential community of Pocasset (in present-day Rhode Island) with utopian leanings. There, Hutchinson’s followers practiced religious freedom and, influenced by an Anabaptist offshoot called Familism, came to reject governmental and church authority.

Born in England in 1591 and married in 1612, Hutchinson discovered she was a prophet and came to experience revelations from God. She found hidden meaning in the Biblical passage Jeremiah 46:27-28, which revealed to her that God would protect her but destroy England. She and her husband set sail to Massachusetts in 1634.[1]

Upon arrival in Boston, Hutchinson delivered twice-weekly lectures to other women about religion. Men also sought her advice, and Hutchinson claimed that after a half-hour conversation with any man she could determine whether he was predestined for heaven. Inspired by Familist ideas, Hutchinson’s students believed that entering a “covenant of grace” with God would deliver them to control by the Holy Spirit and ideally enable them to live a life of never-ending joy.[2] Since this divine covenant did not involve mediation from a priest, Hutchinson has been called an “antinomian” and a “religious individualist.”[3] According to biographer Michael Winship, Massachusetts’s often-elected governor John Wintrhop “portrayed her as a hell-spawned agent of destructive anarchy.”[4]

Egalitarian views have been attributed to Hutchinson. Peter Gelderloos claims that “Anne won popular support for her well argued ideas, which opposed the slavery of Africans and Native Americans, criticized the church, and insisted that being born a woman was a blessing and not a curse.”[5] Hutchinson’s male followers refused to fight in the genocidal war against the Pequots, since they determined that the military chaplain was not in a covenant of grace.[6] Hutchinson’s followers were in touch with the progressive theologian Roger Williams who believed the land belonged to the Indians and thus could not simply be parceled out by the King of England.[7]

Hutchinson and her followers found support from Boston’s open-minded minister John Cotton, who shared some of her radical ideas. Hutchinson apparently told followers that Cotton was the only decent minister in the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony.[8]

In November 1637, the colony’s General Court put Hutchinson on trial for sedition and slander. Citing divine revelations, Hutchinson dramatically warned the prosecutors, “[I]f you go in this course you begin you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity.”[9] The Court sentenced her to banishment from Massachusetts and imprisonment in the meantime.[10]

Meanwhile, Roger Williams persuaded Hutchinson’s followers, including her husband William, to move to Aquidneck (present-day Rhode Island). Williams convinced the wealthy merchant William Coddington to purchase the island from Naragansett sachems. There, allies of Hutchinson founded the settlement of Pocasset and waited for Anne to arrive after her imprisonment ended.[11]

Under house arrest in Roxbury, Hutchinson kept teaching and sharing her ideas. The heretic-hunting minister Thomas Shepard visited Hutchinson and dishonestly told her he was not trying to entrap her. So, she freely shared her thoughts with him, and he reported those thoughts to her Boston church. The minister Cotton turned on Hutchinson, and the church excommunicated her for allegedly lying (about her beliefs) and doctrinal errors.[12] Hutchinson remained steadfast and declared, “Better to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ.”[13]

Ordered to leave Massachusetts, Hutchinson went to Pocasset, where she taught all genders together at Sunday meetings at her house.[14] In 1639, Hutchinson led a successful effort to democratize Pocasset, eliminating oligarchical distinction, instituting jury trial, and separating church from state. Pocasset was renamed Portsmouth. Anne’s husband was elected the chief judge, but she soon persuaded him to give up that post, as Roger Williams wrote, “because of the opinion which she had newly taken up, of the unlawfulness of magistry.” Murray Rothbard claims that Hutchinson arrived at “the ultimate bounds of libertarian thought: to individualist anarchism. No magistry whatever was lawful.”[15]

The settlement had full religious liberty, and Hutchinson herself developed an increasingly radical theology. She convinced three or four families to become Seekers, meaning that they rejected the legitimacy of all churches that ever existed since the time of the Apostles.[16] After Hutchinson’s husband died in 1642, she desired to leave Pocasset, in part to get further away from Massachusetts officials who now (according to Rothbard) considered her a witch deserving to die.[17] So, that year she and three families purchased land from the Wecqueasgeek Indians, in the present-day Bronx which was then colonized by the Dutch. Emphasizing their shared humanity, Hutchinson told the Wecqueasgeek that she and they were “all one Indian.” Unfortunately, a corrupt Dutch official may have pocketed her followers’ money instead of properly delivering it to the Wecqueasgeek for their land. In August or September of 1643, an Indian raid killed Hutchinson and most members of the families living with her. Sixteen people died in total.[18]


  1. ↑ Michael Winship, The Times & Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 17-20.
  2. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 34, 37, 85.
  3. ↑ Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 180.
  4. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 4.
  5. ↑ Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works.
  6. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 181. Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 36.
  7. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 173, 183. Winship, The Times & Trials, 28.
  8. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 107.
  9. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 107.
  10. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 114.
  11. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 183.
  12. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 120, 123, 134.
  13. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 183.
  14. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 144.
  15. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 184-185.
  16. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 144-145.
  17. ↑ Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 186.
  18. ↑ Winship, The Times & Trials, 145-146.
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