Part 11

“ROGER WILLIAMS was born of reputable parents in Wales, A. D. 1598. He was educated at the University of Oxford; was regularly admitted to Orders in the Church of England, and preached for some time as a minister of that Church; but on embracing the doctrines of the Puritans, he rendered himself obnoxious to the laws against the non-conformists, and embarked for America, where he arrived with his wife, whose name was Mary, on the 5th of February, A. D. 1631.” He had scarcely landed ere he began to assert the principle of religious freedom, and insist on a rigid separation from the Church of England. A declaration that the magistrate ought not to interfere in matters of conscience could not fail to excite the jealousy of a government constituted as that of Massachusetts then was; and this jealousy was roused into active hostility when, in the April following his arrival, he was called by the Church of Salem as teaching Elder under their then Pastor, Mr. Skelton.

“Of this appointment,” says Winthrop, “the Governor of Massachusetts was informed, who immediately convened a Court in Boston to take the subject into consideration.” Their deliberations resulted in a letter addressed to Mr. Endicot, of Salem, to this effect:--“That whereas Mr. Williams had refused to join the churches at Boston, because they would not make a public declaration of their repentance, for having communion with the Churches of England while they tarried there, and besides had declared his opinion that the magistrate might not punish the breach of the Sabbath, nor any other offence that was a breach of the first table; and therefore they marveled they would choose him without advising with the council, and withal desired him that they would forbear to proceed until they had considered about it.”

This interference of the government forced him to leave Salem. “He removed to Plymouth, and was engaged assistant to Mr. Ralph Smith, the pastor of the church at that place. Here he remained until he found his views of Religious Toleration and strict non-conformity gave offence to some of his hearers, when he returned again to Salem, and was settled there after Mr. Skelton’s death, which took place on the 2d of August, 1634.” In this situation Williams preached against the cross in the ensign, as a relic of papal superstition. His preaching however, on this topic, does not seem to have been a subject of complaint, only as it led some of his friends to the indiscretion of defacing the colors. His persecutors, in excusing this act to the government of England, say that they did so, “with as much wariness as they might, being doubtful themselves of the lawfulness of a cross in an ensign.” But though he may have given no offence by declaring an opinion on this subject so little at variance with their own, yet when he ventured to speak against the king’s patent, by which he had granted to his subjects the lands which belonged to the Indians; and, above all, to maintain that the civil magistrate ought not to interfere in matters of conscience, except for the preservation of peace, his presence within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts could no longer be tolerated. A summons was granted for his appearance at the next court.

He appeared accordingly. “It was laid to his charge,” says Winthrop, “that, being under question before the magistracy and churches for divers dangerous opinions, viz: That the magistrate ought not to punish for the breaches of the first table, otherwise than in such cases as do disturb the public peace. 2d. That he ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 3d. That a man ought not to pray with such, though wife, children, &c. 4th. That a man ought not to give thanks after sacrament nor after meat, &c., and that other churches were about to write the church of Salem to admonish him of these errors, notwithstanding the church had since called him to the office of Teacher.”

These charges having been read, all the magistrates and ministers concurred in denouncing the opinions of Williams as erroneous and dangerous, and agreed that the calling him to office at that time was a great contempt of authority. He and the church of Salem were allowed until the next General Court to consider of these charges, and then either to give satisfaction to the Court, or else to expect sentence.

Much warmth of feeling was exhibited in the discussion of these charges; and in the course of the debate it seems the ministers were required to give their opinions severally. All agreed that he who asserted that the civil magistrate ought not to interfere in case of heresy, apostacy, etc., ought to be removed, and that other churches ought to request the magistrates to remove him. Nothing will give a better idea of the state of feeling on this occasion than the fact that when the town of Salem at this time petitioned, claiming some land at Marblehead as belonging to the town, the petition was refused a hearing, on the ground that the church of Salem had chosen Mr. Williams her teacher, and by such choice had offered contempt to the magistrates.

The attendance of all the Ministers of the Bay at the next General Court was requested. This was held in the month of November, 1635. Before this venerable congregation of all the dignitaries of the church, Williams appeared, and defended his opinions. His defence, it seems, was not satisfactory. They offered him further time for conference or disputation. This he declined, and chose to dispute presently. Mr. Hooker was appointed to dispute with him. But Mr. Hooker’s logic, seconded as it was by the whole civil and ecclesiastical power of Massachusetts, could not force him to recognise the right of the civil magistrate to punish heresy, or to admit that the king’s patent could of itself give a just title to the lands of the Indians. The consequence was, that on the following morning he was sentenced to depart, within six weeks, out of the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

Such were the causes of Williams’ banishment, and such the circumstances under which the decree was passed. He was a man who fearlessly asserted his principles, and practiced upon them to their fullest extent. Persecution could not drive him to a renunciation of his opinions. His observance of any principle which he adopted was conscientiously strict; but this very strictness of observance had its advantages, in enabling him with more certainty to detect any latent error which his opinions involved. He was as free to declare his errors as he was to assert whatever appeared to him to be right. His very honesty in this respect has given occasion to his enemies to brand his character with inconsistency and apostacy; but he remained true to every principle espoused by him, which posterity has since sanctioned, and inconstant in those things only which are unimportant in themselves, and which are unsettled even in the present day. A tacit confession of his own fallibility was implied in the great principle of which he was the earliest asserter, that government ought not to interfere in matters of conscience; and therein consisted a wide difference between his errors, whatever they were, and those of his persecutors. This fact, in estimating the character of Williams, cannot be too well considered.

“Subsequently to his banishment, he was permitted to remain until spring, on condition that he did not attempt to draw others to his opinions.” But the friends of Williams could not consent to see their favorite pastor leave them, without frequently visiting him whilst they yet had an opportunity. In these interviews, the plan of establishing a colony in the Narraganset country, where the principle of Religious Freedom (the assertion of which had been the chief cause of his banishment) should be carried into effect, was discussed and matured. It is also highly probable that he did not fail to do what he conceived to be the duty of a faithful pastor in other respects. At length the rumor of these meetings reached the ears of the civil authorities; and in January, 1635, (O. S.,) “The governor and assistants,” says Winthrop, “met in Boston to consider about Mr. Williams; for they were credibly informed, that he, notwithstanding the injunction laid upon him, (upon liberty granted him to stay until spring,) not to go about to draw others to his opinions, did use to entertain company in his house, and to preach to them even of such points as he had been sentenced for; and it was agreed to send him into England by a ship then ready to depart. The reason was because he had drawn about twenty persons to his opinions, and they were intending to erect a plantation about the Narraganset bay, from whence the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people being many of them much taken with an apprehension of his godliness. Whereupon a warrant was sent to him to come presently to Boston, to be shipped, &c. He returned for answer, (and divers of Salem came with it,) that he could not without hazard of his life, &c. Whereupon a pinnace was sent with commission to Captain Underhill, &c., to apprehend him, and carry him on board the ship, which then rode at Nantascutt. But when they came to his house they found he had been gone three days, but whither they could not learn.”

It thus appears that the object of his government, in directing his immediate apprehension at this time, was to prevent the establishment of a colony in which the civil authority should not be permitted to interfere with the religious opinions of the citizens.

Williams was in the thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth year of his age at the time of his banishment. He fled to a wilderness inhabited only by savages. The two principal tribes--the Narragansets and Wampanoags--had, but a short time before he entered their country, been engaged in open hostilities. The government of Plymouth had on one occasion extended its aid to its early friend and ally, Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags. This interference had smothered, but not extinguished the flame. With these warring tribes, one of which (the Narragansets) was a very martial and numerous people, and exceedingly jealous of the whites, Williams was under the necessity of establishing relations of amity. He himself says that he was forced to travel between their sachems to satisfy them and all their dependent spirits of his honest intentions to live peaceably by them. He acted the part of a peace-maker amongst them, and eventually won, even for the benefit of his persecutors, the confidence of the Narragansets. It was through his influence that all the Indians in the vicinity of Narraganset bay were, shortly after his settlement at Mooshausick, united, and their whole force, under the directions of the very men who had driven him into the wilderness, brought to co-operate with the Massachusetts forces against the Pequots.

[See Winthrop’s Journal, and a Sketch of the Life of Roger Williams, appended to the first volume of the Rhode Island Historical Collections, for the above extracts.]

STANZA XII.

_Much less my consort and these pledges dear._

Williams was the father of six children, viz: Mary, Freeborn, Providence, Mercy, Daniel, and Joseph. I am not able to determine their number at the time of his banishment.

STANZA XLIII.

_Thrice did our northern tiger seem to come._

Frequently called the Panther, the Cat of the Mountain, or Catamount. There is indeed no animal of America entitled to the appellation of the Panther; but this name is frequently applied to the animal mentioned, and is adopted in this production for that reason.

STANZA LVIII.

_’Twas Waban’s cry at which the monsters ran._

The Indians imitate very perfectly the cry of wild beasts, and use that art in conveying signals and for other purposes, during their hunts and other expeditions. The known antipathy between the wolf and the catamount or panther, and the superiority of the latter over the former, may justify the text.

STANZA LXVI.

_Where burning fagot nevermore shall glow, Fired by the wrath of persecuting men._

I know not that the fagot has been generally used in any protestant country for the extirpation of heresy, yet its very general application to that purpose by Roman Catholics has, by common consent, made it the appropriate emblem of persecution in all countries.

STANZA LXIX.

_Until Sowaniu’s breezes scatter flowers again._

Sowaniu, or the Paradise of the Indians, was supposed to be an island in the far southwest. It was the favorite residence of their great god, Cawtantowit, and the land of departed spirits. The balmy southwest was a gale breathed from the heaven of the Indians.

STANZA LXXX.

_“And may the Manittoo of dreams,” he said, &c._

Manittoo--a God. It is a word which seems to have been applied to an extraordinary power, or mysterious influence. Any astonishing effect, produced by a cause which the Indians could not comprehend, they appear to have ascribed to the agency of a Manittoo. It is natural for man to draw his ideas of power or causation, from what he feels in himself; and when he does so, he will ascribe the effects which he observes to the influence of mind. As he advances in knowledge the number of these mysterious agents diminishes, until at last he is forced upon the idea of one great, designing, first cause or agent. Man, from his very constitution, therefore, must be a believer in the existence of God. He approaches a knowledge of his unity by degrees, and improves in his religious opinions in the same manner as he advances to the science of astronomy. How essential then is that freedom of opinion which our Founder sought to establish!

CANTO SECOND.

STANZA XIII.

_In a vast eagle’s form embodied, He Did o’er the deep on outstretched pinions spring._

It was the belief of the Chippewas, a tribe supposed to have descended from the same original stock (Lenni Lenape) with the Narragansets, that, before the earth appeared, all was one vast body of waters; that the Great Spirit, assuming the shape of a mighty eagle, whose eyes were as fire, and the sound of whose wings was as thunder, passed over the abyss, and that, upon his touching the water, the earth rose from the deep. It was a prevailing tradition among the Delawares and other tribes, according to Heckewelder, that the earth was an island, supported on the back of a huge tortoise, called in the text Unamis. It is the object of the author to embrace in the text a selection of their scattered traditions on the subject of creation, and to give them something like the consistency of a system. Waban, therefore, adopting their leading ideas, has drawn out his description into the appropriate sequency of events. Their Creator was a Manittoo, a mysteriously operating power, and of the same nature as that principle of causation which they felt in themselves, as constituting their own being. The term _Cowwewonck_, in the Narraganset dialect, signified the soul, and was derived from _Cowwene_, to sleep; because, said they, it operates when the body sleeps. Hence in the text, whilst the Great Spirit slept, he is represented as commencing the work of creation--operating on the immense of waters as a part of his own being, and imparting to it organic existences, (as the soul from itself creates its own conceptions,) thus giving a sort of dreamy existence to the earth and all living things, ere He assumed the shape of the eagle, and at his fiat imparted to them substantial form and vital energy. The idea, that the earth was raised out of the Ocean, seems to have been pretty general amongst the Aborigines.

STANZA XIX.

_Yet man was not; then great Cawtantowit spoke To the hard mountain crags, and called for man._

According to the traditions of the Narragansets, the Great Spirit formed the first man from a stone, which, disliking, he broke, and then formed another man and woman from a tree; and from this pair sprang the Indians.

STANZA XXII.

_Then did he send Yotaanit on high--_

Yotaanit was the God of Fire; Keesuckquand, God of the Sun; Nanapaushat, of the Moon; and Wamponand was the ruling Deity of the East.

STANZA XXIII.

_All things thus were formed from what was good, And the foul refuse every evil had; But it had felt the influence of the God, (How should it not?)--_

Heckewelder ascribes to the Indians the opinion that nothing bad could proceed from the Great and Good Spirit. Waban is here speaking in conformity to that opinion. Hence he represents the creation of Chepian, or the evil principle, as an incidental but necessary effect, yet forming no part of the original design.

STANZA XXVII.

_And manittoos, that never death shall fear, Do too within this moral form abide._

“They conceive,” says Williams, “that there are many gods, or divine powers, within the body of man--in his pulse, heart, lungs, &c.”

STANZA XXVIII.

_But if a sluggard and a coward, then To rove all wretched in the gloom of night._

“They believe that the soules of men and women go to the southwest--their great and good men to Cawtantowit his house, where they have hopes, as the Turks have, of carnal joys. Murtherers, liars, &c., their soules (say they) wander restless abroad.”--_Williams’ Key._

STANZA XXXVIII.

_This yet unproved and doubted by the best._

The Charter of Pennsylvania was granted in 1681. The philanthropic Penn was preceded by Williams in the adoption of a mild and pacific policy toward the natives. Both seem to have been equally successful.

STANZA XLV.

_Ere dark pestilence Devoured his warriors--laid its hundreds low, That sachem’s war-whoop roused to his defence Three thousand bow-men, and he still can show A mighty force._

The pestilence, to which Waban has reference, is that which shortly preceded the arrival of the Plymouth planters. The Wampanoags, before this calamity, were relatively a powerful people. Patuxet, afterwards Plymouth, was then under the government of their sachem, who, at times, made it his place of residence. Indeed the whole country between Seekonk and the ocean, eastward, seems to have been occupied by tribes more or less subject to him. Those toward the Cape and about Buzzard’s Bay were, however, rather his tributaries than his subjects. The different clans or communities, in this extensive territory, were under the government of many petty sachems, who regarded Ousamequin (afterwards Massasoit) as their chief. Availing themselves of the misfortune of their neighbors, the Narragansets extended their conquests eastward over some of these under-sachems; and when Ousamequin fled from Pawtuxet to Pokanoket, to avoid the devouring sickness, he found not only Aquidnay, but a part of Pokanoket, subject to his enemies. (See note to stanza xxxiii canto iv.) Pokanoket was the Indian name of the neck of land between Taunton river on the east, and Seekonk and Providence rivers on the west. Mount Hope, or Haup as it is called in the text, forms its southeastern extreme. The number of warriors stated in the text as subject to Ousamequin, is hypothetical. Some of the Nipnets were tributary to the Narragansets, but the greater part of them were the allies or subjects of the Wampanoag Chief.

STANZA XLVI.

_His highest chief is Corbitant the stern-- He bears a fox’s head and panther’s heart._

Mr. Winslow, who had frequent conferences with this chief, represents him as “a hollow-hearted friend to the Plymouth planters, a notable politician, &c.” He, with others, was suspected of conspiring against the whites, and Captain Standish was sent, on one occasion, to execute summary justice upon him and his confederates. He, however, escaped, and afterwards made his peace with them through the mediation of Massasoit. His residence was at Mattapoiset, now Swanzey.

STANZA XLVII.

_Yet oft their children bleed When the far west sends down her Maquas fell-- Warriors who hungry on their victims steal, And make of human flesh a dreadful meal._

In compliance with the common orthography, the name of this tribe is written _Maqua_. Williams says, that in the Narraganset dialect they were called Mohawaugsuck, or Mauquauog, from mobo, to eat; and were considered Cannibals. It is probable, from its location, that he speaks of the same tribe under the name of Mitucknechakick, or tree eaters, “a people,” says he, “so called, living between three and four hundred miles west into the land, from their eating Mituckquash--that is, trees. They are men-eaters--they set no corn, but live on the bark of the chestnut and other fine trees,” &c. Again, he says, “The Maquaogs, or men-eaters, that live two or three hundred miles west,” &c. Thus it is plain that the Maquas were considered, by the Narragansets and their neighboring tribes, Cannibals.

STANZA XLVIII.

_Here lies Namasket tow’rd the rising sun._

Namasket was within the limits of the territory which now constitutes the township of Middleborough, and was about fifteen miles from Plymouth.

_Here farther down, Cohannet’s banks upon Spreads broad Pocasset, strong Appanow’s hold._

The territory under that name, now forms a part of Fall River, Mass., and all, or nearly all, Tiverton, R. I. The territory south to the sea, was called Sagkonate, now written Sekonnet, or Seconnet, forming at this time the township of Little Compton. The northeasterly part of the island of Aquidnay was also called Pocasset. This word may be a derivative from the Indian name of the strait separating the island from the mainland. The name of the chieftain in the text must be received exclusively on Waban’s authority.

STANZA L.

_Two mighty chiefs, one cautious, wise, and old, One young and strong, and terrible in fight, All Narraganset and Coweset hold; One lodge they build--one council fire they light._

In a deposition of Williams, dated the 18th June, 1682, he says, that it was the general and constant declaration that the father of Canonicus had three sons--that Canonicus was his heir--that his youngest brother’s son, whose name was Miantonomi, was his marshal, or executioner, and did nothing without his consent.

_Five thousand warriors give their arrows flight._

This is the number at which Williams estimates them. Calendar says they were a numerous, rich, and powerful people, and though they were, by some, said to have been less fierce and warlike than the Pequots, yet it appears that they had, before the English came, not only increased their numbers by receiving many who fled to them from the devouring sickness or plague in other parts of the land, but they had enlarged their territories, both on the eastern and western boundaries. Their numbers must have diminished rapidly, as Hutchinson estimates their warriors in 1675 at two thousand; this estimate, however, might not embrace those tribes which were subject to, or dependant on them, when Williams entered the country. They seem to have been a people greatly in advance of their neighbors. They excelled in the manufacture of Wampumpeag, and supplied other nations with it--also with pendants, bracelets, tobacco pipes of stone, and pots for cookery. After the arrival of the whites, they traded with them for their goods, and supplied other tribes with them at an advance.

STANZA LI.

_Dark rolling Seekonk does their realm divide From Pokanoket, Massasoit’s reign--_