Anne Hutchinson, a midwife and religious dissenter exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her unorthodox preaching, was killed on October 10, 1643, when Siwanoy warriors attacked her settlement near present-day Pelham Bay in New York, part of retaliatory violence during Kieft's War. Only one of her children survived. Her earlier trial had made her an early symbol of religious liberty and resistance to Puritan patriarchal authority.
Anne Hutchinson had scandalized Boston's Puritan establishment by hosting religious meetings in her home where she interpreted scripture and criticized ministers for preaching a covenant of works rather than grace, a position colonial authorities deemed dangerously heretical. Governor John Winthrop personally led her 1637 trial, and she was banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1638, an extraordinary punishment for a woman in a society that expected female silence on theological matters.
She settled first in Rhode Island, then, after her husband's death, moved with her younger children to a remote area near what is now the Bronx and Pelham Bay, land then contested between Dutch settlers and the Siwanoy people. She had chosen the location partly because it lay outside both Massachusetts and Dutch jurisdiction, seeking freedom from any authority that might again silence her.
The timing proved catastrophic. Dutch governor Willem Kieft's brutal war against local Native Americans had inflamed the region, and on October 10, 1643, Siwanoy warriors attacked the isolated Hutchinson homestead, killing Anne and five of her six children with her. Only nine-year-old Susanna survived, taken captive and later ransomed. Hutchinson is remembered today as an early American champion of religious freedom and women's right to speak.