Anne Hutchinson was an Englishwoman who was born in 1591. With her husband and their 11 children, they sailed to the New World because they wanted religious freedom, and they arrived on September 18, 1634. She became an outspoken religious thinker in the New World after her family settled down and made their home in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne set up meetings for Boston women in her home, where she led them in talks about the sermons and religious issues that everyone was hearing about. After a short time, ministers and magistrates began going to her house meetings too. Anne preached that faith alone was enough to be saved, and for this reason, people did not need the church or church law.
By 1637, she and her beliefs had become so popular that she was brought to trial and found guilty of heresy against Puritan orthodoxy. She was banished from(kicked out of) Massachusetts, so she led a group of 70 followers to Rhode Island because she wanted religious freedom. Anne and her family moved to Roger Williams’ colony because they supported religious freedom, then awhile later she started a settlement on the island of Aquidneck. Her husband died in 1642, so she moved her family to a place near Pelham Bay, New York, on the Long Island Sound. A year later, in 1643, she and all but one of her children were killed in an Indian attack. She is celebrated as the first great woman religious leader in the American colonies.
