The Antinomian crisis in the Massachusetts Bay Colony is escalating, threatening to tear it apart just as its leaders perceive a military threat from the Pequots. Anne Hutchinson has been teaching an extreme version of the “covenant of grace” in her after-church discussion group, which has swelled to eighty people or more, including some of the leading men of Boston. Her ideas attack the authority of the conventional Puritan clergy of the Bay. She accuses all but two of them, John Cotton and her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, of preaching a “covenant of works,” fighting words in those days. Needing to end the division, John Winthrop tries diplomacy and reconciliation, but neither Hutchinson nor her opponents show any inclination to compromise. After more than a year of theological debate, the General Court of Massachusetts banishes Wheelwright and brings Hutchinson to trial.

She runs rings around them.

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Selected references for this episode

Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father

Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

Edmund S. Morgan, “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson,” The New England Quarterly, December 1937.