Hutchinson suggested that those possessed of
God’s grace were exempt from the rules of good
behavior and even from the laws of the common-
wealth. As her detractors pointed out, this was the
conclusion some of the earliest German Protestants
had reached, for which they were judged guilty of the
heresy of antinomianism(“against the law”) and
burned at the stake.
In 1636 the General Court charged Hutchinson
with defaming the clergy and brought her to trial.
When her accusers quoted the Bible (“Honor thy
father and thy mother”) to make their case, she coolly
announced that even the Ten Commandments must
yield to one’s own insights if these were directly
inspired by God. When pressed for details, she
acknowledged that she was a regular recipient of divine
insights, communicated, as they were to Abraham, “by
the voice of His own spirit in my soul.” The General
Court, on hearing this claim, banished her.
Hutchinson, together with her large family and a
group of supporters, left Massachusetts in the spring
of 1637 for Rhode Island, thereby adding to the rep-
utation of that colony as the “sink” of New England.
After her husband died in 1642, she and six of her
children moved to the Dutch colony of New
Netherland, where, the following year, she and all but
her youngest daughter were killed by Indians.
The banishment of dissenters like Roger
Williams and Anne Hutchinson did not endear the
Massachusetts puritans to posterity. In both cases
outspoken individualists seem to have been done in
by frightened politicians and self-serving ministers.
Yet Williams and Hutchinson posed genuine threats
to the puritan community. Massachusetts was truly a
social experiment. Could it accommodate such unco-
operative spirits and remain intact? When forced to
choose between the peace of the commonwealth and
sending dissenters packing, Winthrop, the magis-
trates, and the ministers did not hesitate.
Other New England Colonies
From the successful Massachusetts Bay Colony, settle-
ment radiated outward to other areas of New
England, propelled by an expanding population and
puritan intolerance. In 1629 Sir Ferdinando Gorges
and John Mason divided their holdings: Gorges tak-
ing the Maine section (enlarged in 1639) and Mason,
New Hampshire, but neither succeeded in making
much of his claim. Massachusetts gradually took over
these areas. The heirs of Gorges and Mason managed
to regain legal possession briefly in the 1670s, but
Massachusetts bought title to Maine for a pittance
(£1250) in 1677. New Hampshire became a royal
colony in 1680.
Meanwhile, beginning in 1635, a number of
Massachusetts congregations had pushed southwest-
ward into the fertile valley of the Connecticut River.
A group headed by the Reverend Thomas Hooker
founded Hartford in 1636. Hooker was influential in
the drafting of the Fundamental Orders, a sort of
constitution creating a government for the valley
towns, in 1639. The Fundamental Orders resembled
the Massachusetts system, except that they did not
limit voting to church members. Other groups of
puritans came directly from England to settle towns
in and around New Haven in the 1630s. These were
incorporated into Connecticut shortly after the
Hooker colony obtained a royal charter in 1662.Pequot War and King Philip’s War
New England colonists repeatedly exploited disunity
among Indians, who identified more with their hunt-
ing group, headed by a sachem, than with a particular
tribe. Savvy English settlers could often turn one
group against another. In both of the major Indian
uprisings in New England during the seventeenth
century, the colonists prevailed in part because they
were assisted by Indian allies.
In the 1630s the Pequot Indians grew alarmed
at the steady stream of English settlers to southeast-
ern Connecticut. After several clashes in 1636, the
colonists demanded that the Pequots surrender tribe
members responsible for the attacks and pay tribute
in wampum. When the Pequots refused, the govern-
ments of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth
declared war. In 1637 the New England armies, bol-
stered by warriors of the Narragansett and Mohegan
tribes, traditional foes of the Pequots, attacked a
Pequot village enclosed by a wooden palisade. When
Pequots attempted to flee, the English set fire to the
village, trapping the Indians and killing nearly all
400 inhabitants.
The Narragansett and Mohegan Indians were
aghast. They had intended to replace their own
deceased relatives by adopting captured foes, espe-
cially women and children. The English way of fight-
ing, they complained, was “too furious and slays too
many people.” Bradford, too, commented on the
“fearful sight” of the trapped Pequots “thus frying in
the fire,” but he remembered to praise God for “so
speedy a victory.” The Pequots were crushed.
In the 1670s Metacom, a Wampanoag sachem,
concluded that the only way to resist the English
incursion was to drive them out by force of arms. By
then, many Wampanoags had acquired flintlock mus-
kets and learned to use them; warfare had become far
more lethal. In 1675, after Plymouth colony had con-
victed and executed three Wampanoags, MetacomPequot War and King Philip’s War 39