Antinomians, as Mrs. Hutchinson's
followers were called. But an appeal from America to England was
something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of
Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams. Soon after Vane's
departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the
colony. It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all
such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth
century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity
may really be to some extent accepted.

We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization,
and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these
differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions
concerning the relations between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's
friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of
Exeter and Hampton. Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been
settled by followers of Mason and Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added
to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when
we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under
a royal government. Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs.
Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought
the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at
Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a century of turbulence,
these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony at Providence, and
thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her husband's death in
1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the
west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New
Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by
Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen
victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas
Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor
of Massachusetts.

To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these
theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by
the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at
Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the
natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed
on both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The
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