Part 87

On the 5th of February, 1631, "the ship Lyon arrived at Nantasket, with twenty passengers and a large store of provisions. Her arrival was most timely, for the [Massachusetts] colonists were reduced to the last exigencies of famine. Many had already died of want, and many more were rescued from imminent peril by this providential occurrence. A public fast had been appointed for the day succeeding that on which the ship reached Boston. It was changed to a general thanksgiving. There was another incident connected with the arrival of this ship, which made it an era, not only in the affairs of Massachusetts, but in the history of America. She brought to the shores of New England the founder of a new State, the exponent of a new philosophy, the intellect that was to harmonize religious differences, and soothe the asperities of the New World; a man whose clearness of mind enabled him to deduce, from the mass of crude speculations which abounded in the 17th century, a proposition so comprehensive, that it is difficult to say whether its application has produced the most beneficial result upon religion, or morals, or politics. This man was Roger Williams, then about thirty-two years of age. He was a scholar, well versed in the ancient and some of the modern tongues, an earnest inquirer after truth, and an ardent friend of popular liberty as well for the mind as for the body. As a 'godly minister,' he was welcomed to the society of the Puritans, and soon invited by the church in Salem to supply the place of the lamented Higginson, as an assistant to their pastor Samuel Skelton. The invitation was accepted, but the term of his ministry was destined to be brief. The authorities at Boston remonstrated with those at Salem against the reception of Williams. The Court at its next session addressed a letter to Mr. Endicott to this effect: 'That whereas Mr. Williams had refused to join with the congregation at Boston, because they would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there; and, besides, had declared his opinion that the magistrate might not punish the breach of the Sabbath, nor any other offence, as it was a breach of the first table; therefore they marvelled that they would choose him without advising with the council, and withal desiring him, that they would forbear to proceed till they had conferred about it.' This attempt of the magistrates of Boston to control the election of a church officer at Salem, met with the rebuke it so richly merited. The people were not ignorant of the hostility their invitation had excited; yet on the very day the remonstrance was written, they settled Williams as their minister. The ostensible reasons for this hostility are set forth in the letter above cited. That they were to a great extent the real ones cannot be questioned. The ecclesiastical polity of the Puritans sanctioned this interference. Their church platform approved it. Positive statute would seem to require it. Nevertheless, we cannot but think that, underlying all this, there was a secret stimulus of ambition on the part of the Boston Court to strengthen its authority over the prosperous and, in some respects, rival colony of Salem. … As a political measure this interference failed of its object. The people resented so great a stretch of authority, and the church disregarded the remonstrance. … What could not as yet be accomplished by direct intervention of the Court was effected in a surer manner. The fearlessness of Williams in denouncing the errors of the times, and especially the doctrine of the magistrate's power in religion, gave rise to a system of persecution which, before the close of the summer, obliged him to seek refuge beyond the jurisdiction of Massachusetts in the more liberal colony of the Pilgrims. At Plymouth 'he was well accepted as an assistant in the ministry to Mr. Ralph Smith, then pastor of the church there.' The principal men of the colony treated him with marked attention. … The opportunities there presented for cultivating an intimate acquaintance with the chief Sachems of the neighboring tribes were well improved, and exerted an important influence, not only in creating the State of which he was to be the founder, but also in protecting all New England amid the horrors of savage warfare. Ousamequin, or Massasoit, as he is usually called, was the Sachem of the Wampanoags, called also the Pokanoket tribe, inhabiting the Plymouth territory. His seat was at Mount Hope, in what is now the town of Bristol, R. I. With this chief, the early and steadfast friend of the English, Williams established a friendship which proved of the greatest service at the time of his exile."

_S. G. Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, volume 1, chapter 1._

Williams "remained at Plymouth, teaching in the church, but supporting himself by manual labor, nearly two years. His ministry was popular in the main and his person universally liked. Finally, however, he advanced some opinions which did not suit the steady-going Plymouth elders, and therefore, departing 'something abruptly,' he returned to Salem. There he acted as assistant to Mr. Skelton, the aged pastor of the church, and when Mr. Skelton died, less than a year later, became his successor. At Salem he was again under the surveillance of the rulers and elders of the Bay, and they were swift to make him sensible of it. He had written in Plymouth, for the Plymouth Governor and Council a treatise on the Massachusetts Patent, in which he had maintained his doctrine that the King could not give the settlers a right to take away from the natives their land without paying them for it. He was not a lawyer but an ethical teacher, and it was doubtless as such that he maintained this opinion. In our day its ethical correctness is not disputed. It has always been good Rhode Island doctrine. He also criticised the patent because in it King James claimed to be the first Christian prince who discovered New England, and because he called Europe Christendom or the Christian World. Williams did not scruple to denounce these formal fictions in downright Saxon as lies. He does not appear to have been, at any period of his life, a paragon of conventional propriety. A rumor of the treatise got abroad, though it remained unpublished. The patent happened to be a sensitive point with the magistrates. {2635} It had been granted in England to an English trading company, and its transfer to Massachusetts was an act of questionable legality. Moreover it was exceedingly doubtful whether the rulers, in exercising the extensive civil jurisdiction which they claimed under it, did not exceed their authority. They were apprehensive of proceedings to forfeit it, and therefore were easily alarmed at any turning of attention to it. When they heard of the treatise they sent for it, and, having got it, summoned the author 'to be censured.' He appeared in an unexpectedly placable mood, and not only satisfied their minds in regard to some of its obscurer passages, but offered it, since it had served its purpose, to be burnt. The magistrates, propitiated by his complaisance, appeared to have accepted the offer as equivalent to a promise of silence, though it is impossible that he, the uncompromising champion of aboriginal rights, can ever have meant to give, or even appear to give, such a promise. Accordingly when they heard soon afterwards that he was discussing the patent they were deeply incensed, though it was doubtless the popular curiosity excited by their own indiscreet action which elicited the discussion. Their anger was aggravated by another doctrine then put forth by him, namely, that an oath ought not to be tendered to an unregenerate, or, as we should say, an unreligious man, because an oath is an act of worship, and cannot be taken by such a man without profanation. … He also taught that an oath being an act of worship, could not properly be exacted from anyone against his will, and that even Christians ought not to desecrate it by taking it for trivial causes. … The magistrates again instituted proceedings against him, at first subjecting him to the ordeal of clerical visitation, then formally summoning him to answer for himself before the General Court. At the same time the Salem church was arraigned for contempt in choosing him as pastor while he was under question. The court, however, did not proceed to judgment, but allowed them both further time for repentance. It so happened that the inhabitants of Salem had a petition before the court for 'some land at Marblehead Neck, which they did challenge as belonging to their town.' The court, when the petition came up, refused to grant it until the Salem church should give satisfaction for its contempt, thus virtually affirming that the petitioners had no claim to justice even, so long as they adhered to their recusant pastor. Williams was naturally indignant. He induced his church—'enchanted his church,' says Cotton Mather—to send letters to the sister churches, appealing to them to admonish the magistrates and deputies of their 'heinous sin.' He wrote the letters himself. His Massachusetts contemporaries say he was 'unlamblike.' Undoubtedly they heard no gentle bleating in those letters, but rather the reverberating roar of the lion chafing in his rage. The churches repelled the appeal; and then turning to the Salem church, besieged it only the more assiduously, laboring with it, nine with one, to alienate it from its pastor. What could the one church do,—with the magistracy against it, the clergy against it, the churches and the people against it, muttering their vague anathemas, and Salem town suffering unjustly on its account,—what could it do but yield? It yielded virtually if not yet in form; and Williams stood forth alone in his opposition to the united power of Church and State. … The fateful court day came at last. The court assembles, magistrates and deputies, with the clergy to advise them. Williams appears, not to be tried, but to be sentenced unless he will retract. He reaffirms his opinions. Mr. Hooker, a famous clerical dialectician, is chosen to dispute with him, and the solemn mockery of confutation begins. … Hour after hour, he argues unsubdued, till the sun sinks low and the weary court adjourns. On the morrow [Friday, October 9, 1635], still persisting in his glorious 'contumacy,' he is sentenced, the clergy all save one advising, to be banished, or, to adopt the apologetic but felicitous euphemism of his great adversary, John Cotton, 'enlarged' out of Massachusetts. He was allowed at first six weeks, afterwards until spring, to depart. But in January the magistrates having heard that he was drawing others to his opinion, and that his purpose was to erect a plantation about Narragansett Bay, 'from whence the infection would easily spread,' concluded to send him by ship, then ready, to England [see MASSACHUSETTS: A. D. 1636]. The story is familiar how Williams, advised of their intent, baffled it by plunging into the wilderness, where, after being 'sorely tost for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean,' he settled with the opening spring, on the east bank of the Seekonk, and there built and planted."

_T. Durfee, Historical Discourse: Two hundred and fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of Providence, 1886._

"The course pursued towards Roger Williams was not exceptional. What was done to him had been done in repeated instances before. Within the first year of its settlement the colony had passed sentence of exclusion from its territory upon no less than fourteen persons. It was the ordinary method by which a corporate body would deal with those whose presence no longer seemed desirable. Conceiving themselves to be by patent the exclusive possessors of the soil,—soil which they had purchased for the accomplishment of their personal and private ends,—the colonists never doubted their competency to fix the terms on which others should be allowed to share in their undertaking. … While there is some discrepancy in the contemporary accounts of this transaction, there is entire agreement on one point, that the assertion by Roger Williams of the doctrine of 'soul-liberty' was not the head and front of his offending. Whatever was meant by the vague charge in the final sentence that he had 'broached and divulged new and dangerous opinions, against the authority of magistrates,' it did not mean that he had made emphatic the broad doctrine of the entire separation of church and state. We have his own testimony on this point. In several allusions to the subject in his later writings,—and it can hardly be supposed that in a matter which he felt so sorely his memory would have betrayed him,—he never assigns to his opinion respecting the power of the civil magistrate more than a secondary place. He repeatedly affirms that the chief causes of his banishment were his extreme views regarding separation, and his denouncing of the patent. Had he been himself conscious of having incurred the hostility of the Massachusetts colony for asserting the great principle with which he was afterwards identified, he would surely have laid stress upon it. … {2636} It is … clear that in the long controversy it had become covered up by other issues, and that his opponents, at least, did not regard it as his most dangerous heresy. So far as it was a mere speculative opinion it was not new. … To upbraid the Puritans as unrelenting persecutors, or extol Roger Williams as a martyr to the cause of Religious liberty, is equally wide of the real fact. On the one hand, the controversy had its origin in the passionate and precipitate zeal of a young man whose relish for disputation made him never unwilling to encounter opposition, and on the other, in the exigencies of a unique community, where the instincts of a private corporation had not yet expanded into the more liberal policy of a body politic. If we cannot impute to the colony any large statesmanship, so neither can we wholly acquit Roger Williams of the charge of mixing great principles with some whimsical conceits. The years which he passed in Massachusetts were years of discipline and growth, when he doubtless already cherished in his active brain the germs of the principles which he afterwards developed; but the fruit was destined to be ripened under another sky."

_J. L. Diman, Orations and Essays, pages 114-117._

RHODE ISLAND: A. D. 1636. The wanderings of the exiled Roger Williams. His followers. The settlement at Providence.

The little that is known of the wanderings of Roger Williams after his banishment from Salem, until his settlement at Providence, is derived from a letter which he wrote more than thirty years afterwards (June 22, 1670) to Major Mason, the hero of the Pequot War. In that letter he says: "When I was unkindly and unchristianly, as I believe, driven from my house and land and wife and children, (in the midst of a New England winter, now about thirty-five years past,) at Salem, that ever honored Governor, Mr. Winthrop, privately wrote to me to steer my course to Narragansett Bay and Indians, for many high and heavenly and public ends, encouraging me, from the freeness of the place from any English claims or patents. I took his prudent motion as a hint and voice from God, and waving all other thoughts and motions, I steered my course from Salem (though in winter snow, which I feel yet) unto these parts, wherein I may say Peniel, that is, I have seen the face of God. … I first pitched, and began to build and plant at Seekonk, now Rehoboth, but I received a letter from my ancient friend, Mr. Winslow, then Governor of Plymouth, professing his own and others love and respect to me, yet lovingly advising me, since I was fallen into the edge of their bounds, and they were loath to displease the Bay, to remove but to the other side of the water, and then he said, I had the country free before me, and might be as free as themselves, and we should be loving neighbors together. These were the joint understandings of these two eminently wise and Christian Governors and others, in their day, together with their counsel and advice as to the freedom and vacancy of this place, which in this respect, and many other Providences of the Most Holy and Only Wise, I called Providence. … Some time after, the Plymouth great Sachem, (Oufamaquin,) upon occasion affirming that Providence was his land, and therefore Plymouth's land, and some resenting it, the then prudent and godly Governor, Mr. Bradford, and others of his godly council, answered, that if, after due examination, it should be found true what the barbarian said, yet having to my loss of a harvest that year, been now (though by their gentle advice) as good as banished from Plymouth as from the Massachusetts, and I had quietly and patiently departed from them, at their motion to the place where now I was, I should not be molested and tossed up and down again, while they had breath in their bodies; and surely, between those, my friends of the Bay and Plymouth, I was sorely tossed, for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean, beside the yearly loss of no small matter in my trading with English and natives, being debarred from Boston, the chief mart and port of New England."

_Letters of Roger Williams; edited by J. R. Bartlett, pages 335-336._

"According to the weight of authority, and the foregoing extract, when Williams left Salem he made his way from there by sea, coasting, probably, from place to place during the 'fourteen weeks' that 'he was sorely tossed,' and holding intercourse with the native tribes, whose language he had acquired, as we have before stated, during his residence at Plymouth. Dr. Dexter and Professer Diman interpret this and other references differently, and conclude that the journey must have been by land. See Dexter, page 62, note; Nar. Club Pub., Vol. II, page 87. Perhaps the true interpretation is that the journey was partly by sea and partly by land; that is, from the coast inward—to confer with the natives—was by land, and the rest by sea."

_O. S. Straus, Roger Williams, chapter 5, and foot-note._

Mr. Hider, the well-known critical student of Rhode Island history, has commented on the above passage in Mr. Straus's work as follows: "The distance from Salem by sea to Seekonk was across Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, Vineyard Sound, Buzzard's Bay, the Atlantic Ocean again, and Narragansett Bay,—a distance scarcely less than 500 miles, in and out, by the line of the coast; all of which had to be covered either in a birch bark canoe or in a shallop; if in a canoe, then to be paddled, but if in a shallop, where did Williams get it, and what became of it? history does not answer. If Williams was in a boat sailing into Narragansett Bay, 'the pleasure of the Most High to direct my steps into the Bay' would become a positive absurdity unless the Most High meant that Williams should jump overboard! He certainly could have taken no steps in a boat. But if Williams was in a boat, what sense could there be in his saying 'I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter (hyperbole again) winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.' Did they not have beds in boats, nor bread? As to the expression in the Cotton Letter, it was his soul and not his body, which was exposed to poverties, &c.; observe the quotation. … When Mr. Straus in his foot-note, speaks of Williams's journey, 'partly by sea and partly by land, that is from the coast inward, to confer with the natives,' he is dealing solely with the imagination. No such conference ever took place."

_S. S. Rider, Roger Williams (Book Notes, volume 11, page 148)._

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