HUTCHINSON, Anne, American reli gious leader, the founder of the Antinomian party in the New England colonies: b. Lin colnshire, England, about 1590; d. Westchester County, N. Y., August 1643. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire clergyman. In England she was interested in the preaching of John Cotton and her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, and it was her desire to enjoy the ministry of the former which induced her to follow him to New England. She arrived in Boston with her husband 18 Sept. 1634, was admitted a member of the Boston church 2 November and rapidly acquired esteem and in fluence. She instituted meetings of the women of the church to discuss sermons and doctrines, in which, with a ready wit, bold spirit and im posing familiarity with the Scripture, she gave prominence to peculiar speculations which even on her voyage had attracted the attention and caused the displeasure of her fellow passengers. Such were the tenets that the person of the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer and that the inward revelations of the Spirit, the con scious judgments of the mind, are of paramount authority. She had been two years in the country before the strife between her sup porters and her opponents broke out into public action. Among her partisans were the young governor, Vane, Cotton, Wheelwright and the whole Boston church with the exception of five members, one of whom was the associate pastor, Wilson, while the country clergy and churches were generally united against her. °The dispute," says Bancroft, "infused its spirit into everything; it interfered with the levy of troops for the Pequot War; it influenced the respect shown to the magistrates, the distribu tion of town lots, the assessment of rates; and at last the continued existence of the two opposing parties was considered inconsistent with the public peace?' The peculiar tenets of Mrs. Hutchinson were among the 82 opinions
condemned as erroneous by the ecclesiastical synod at Newtown 30 Aug. 1637; and in No vember she was summoned before the general court and after a trial of two days sentenced, with some of her associates, to banishment from the territory of Massachusetts, but was allowed to remain during the winter at a private house in Roxbury. She joined the larger number of her friends, who, led by John Clarke and Wil liam
had been welcomed by Roger Williams to his vicinity, and had obtained through his influence from the chief of the Narragansetts the island of Aquidneck, subse quently called Rhode Island. There a body politic was formed on democratic principles, in which no one was to be "accounted a delinquent for doctrine?' The church in Boston, from which she had been excommunicated, vainly sent a deputation of "four men of a lovely and winning
to the island with the hope of reclaiming her. After the death of her hus band in 1642 she removed with her surviving family into the territory of the Dutch, probably from apprehensions that Rhode Island might not be a safe place of refuge from the en croachments of Massachusetts. The precise lo cality where she settled has been a matter of dispute, but according to the latest authorities it was near Hell Gate, Westchester County, N. Y. The Indians and the Dutch were then at war and in an invasion of the settlement by the former her house was attacked and set on fire and herself and all her family, excepting one child who was carried captive, perished either by the flames or by the weapons of the savages. Consult the biography by Jared Sparks in the