Anne Hutchinson and the Portsmouth Compact

Two years after Roger Williams walked south into the winter, a woman named Anne Hutchinson was put on trial in a Massachusetts meetinghouse for the crime of holding Bible study classes in her home. She was forty-six years old, the mother of fifteen children, and the most intellectually formidable person in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's leaders found that intolerable.

Hutchinson had attracted a large following, merchants, tradespeople, the governor Henry Vane, and many of the colony's most prominent women. She taught that salvation came through direct experience of divine grace rather than through the outward performance of good works. The ministers called this antinomianism, a theology that threatened their authority, because if grace came directly from God, what did anyone need ministers for?

Governor John Winthrop himself presided at her trial in November of sixteen thirty-seven. The court banished her from Massachusetts Bay Colony that November, and her church excommunicated her in March of sixteen thirty-eight. Soon after she suffered a miscarriage, which her accusers pointed to as a divine judgment.

Her husband and supporters traveled south and founded Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in sixteen thirty-eight, twenty-three men signing what they called the Portsmouth Compact. It was a remarkable document. The signatories pledged to govern themselves through majority consent, subject only to the laws of God, and explicitly rejected any requirement of religious conformity.

It was government built on conscience rather than coercion, a second experiment in the same radical idea that Williams had planted two years before at Providence. Anne Hutchinson eventually moved further south, to what is now New York, where she was killed during the Kieft's War in sixteen forty-three. She did not live to see how far the idea she helped plant would travel.

But Portsmouth remained, and the impulse it carried never left this small and stubborn state.