Anne Hutchinson and her family departed Boston in early April 1638, journeying toward Roger Williams's settlement at Providence after her banishment.
Following the General Court's formal sentence of banishment in March 1638, Anne Hutchinson and her family departed Boston, with some secondary accounts placing the departure around April 7, 1638. The journey was arduous, undertaken partly on foot and by boat through wilderness terrain, at a time when Hutchinson was recovering from childbirth and family upheaval.
The family's route took them toward Providence, the settlement founded a few years earlier by Roger Williams, another prominent exile from Massachusetts Bay who had likewise been banished for his views on religious liberty and separation of church and state. Williams's friendship and support proved instrumental in helping Hutchinson and her followers identify a place of refuge beyond the reach of the Massachusetts authorities.
This departure represents the pivotal transition between Hutchinson's persecution in Massachusetts and her subsequent role as a founding figure in Rhode Island. It underscores the human cost of religious intolerance in Puritan New England while also highlighting the emerging alternative of Rhode Island as a haven for dissenters, a reputation the colony would maintain and cultivate for decades afterward.