In Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson was tried before a Puritan court for antinomianism—teaching that believers were directly guided by the Holy Spirit and not bound by religious law. The trial featured an extraordinary direct theological debate between Hutchinson and Governor John Winthrop, during which she claimed direct revelation from God. She was banished from the colony, and her followers were disarmed.

Hutchinson's trial established a foundational American narrative of the individual conscience confronting authoritarian power, which became a central theme in American poetry. The trial influenced the transcendentalist poets, especially Emily Dickinson, whose ancestral connections to the trial colored her poetry of spiritual independence, and later poets like Robert Frost and Adrienne Rich who revisited Hutchinson's defiance as a proto-feminist act of dissent.