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88 PERIOD 2 Colonial America amid Global Change: 1607–1754

Indian lands. By 1635, he was forced out of Salem and moved south with his followers
to found Providence in the area that became Rhode Island.
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Believing that there were very few Saints in the world, Williams and his fol-
lowers accepted that one must live among those who were not saved. Thus, unlike
Massachusetts Bay, Providence welcomed Quakers, Baptists, and Jews to the com-
munity, and Williams’s followers insisted on a strict separation of church and state.
Copyright (c) 2024 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Williams also forged alliances with the Narragansett tribe, the most powerful Amer-
ican Indian nation in the region.
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Remarkably, Anne Hutchinson, a wife and mother, led another such dissenting
group. Born in Lincolnshire in 1591, she was well educated when she married William
Hutchinson, a merchant, in 1612. The Hutchinsons and their children began attending
Puritan sermons and by 1630 embraced the new faith. Four years later, they followed
the Reverend John Cotton to Massachusetts Bay.
The Reverend Cotton soon urged Anne Hutchinson to use her exceptional knowl-
edge of the Bible to hold prayer meetings in her home on Sundays for pregnant and
nursing women who could not attend regular services. Hutchinson, like Cotton,
preached that individuals must rely solely on God’s grace rather than a saintly life or
good works to ensure salvation.
Hutchinson began challenging Puritan ministers who opposed this position,
charging that they posed a threat to their congregations. She soon attracted a loyal and
growing following that included men as well as women. A year after Roger Williams’s
departure in 1637, Puritan leaders denounced Hutchinson’s views and condemned her
meetings. After she refused to recant, she was accused of sedition, or trying to over-
throw the government by challenging colonial leaders, and put on trial. Hutchinson
mounted a vigorous defense. An eloquent speaker, Hutchinson claimed that her author-
ity to challenge the Puritan leadership came from “an immediate revelation” from God,
“the voice of his own spirit to my soul.” Unmoved, the Puritan judges convicted her of
heresy and banished her from Massachusetts Bay.
Hutchinson was seen as a threat not only because of her religious beliefs but also
because she was a woman. The Reverend Hugh Peter, for example, reprimanded her at
trial: “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and
a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.” Many considered her chal-
lenge to Puritan authority especially serious because she also challenged traditional
gender and social hierarchies. After being banished from Massachusetts Bay, Hutchin-
son, her family, and dozens of her followers joined Williams’s Rhode Island colony. The
likelihood of later radical women experiencing the success of Hutchinson diminished
as the colonies developed larger populations and more elaborate formal institutions of
politics, law, and culture.
As Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams confronted religious leaders, Puritans
and Pilgrims faced serious threats from their American Indian neighbors as well.
The Pequot nation, which was among the most powerful tribes in New England,
had been allies of the English for several years. Yet some Puritans feared that the
Pequot people, who opposed the colonists’ continued expansion, “would cause all
the Indians in the country to join to root out all the English.” Also, unlike the Span-
Pequot War ish, who believed native peoples could be converted to Christianity, many Puritans
A conflict between New believed that Native Americans were irredeemable in the eyes of God and destined
England settlers and their to damnation.
Narragansett allies against the Using the death of two Englishmen in 1636 to justify a military expedition against
Pequot Indians in 1636–1637. the Pequot nation, the colonists went on the attack. The Narragansett tribe, whom Roger
The English perceived the
Pequot tribe as both a threat Williams had befriended, allied with the English in the Pequot War (1636–1638).
and an obstacle to further After months of bloody conflict, the English and their American Indian allies launched
English expansion. a brutal attack on a Pequot fort in May 1637 that killed more than four hundred men,

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