Roger Williams
An Advocate of Religious Liberty
You have learned that the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists came to America to found colonies governed according to their own views. This was because they were convinced these views were right, not because they believed that every man should be free to worship as he pleased. Liberty of faith and worship, they thought, would destroy all law and order.
Roger Williams, however, believed in civil freedom and religious liberty. He was a clever young Welshman who had been educated as a clergyman and had adopted Baptist views. He and his wife came from England to America in 1631. For a while he was pastor of a church in Boston, but his views were so different from those of his congregation that he did not stay there long. He went to Salem, then to Plymouth, and then back to Salem. He had much influence and won many people to his views. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans began to dislike him and to fear his influence; there were long debates and discussions as to what should be done about him. They objected to both his political and his religious beliefs.
Roger Williams thought that the laws of a country should prevent and punish crime and should not direct religious matters; these, he urged, should be left to men’s own consciences. He said that every man should be free to believe what he chose, and that it was wrong to tax people to support a certain church or to compel them to attend it. He said that every man ought to be allowed to vote, and that for magistrates sensible, upright men ought to be chosen without regard to their church membership. These things were contrary to the belief of the Massachusetts Bay colony and to its practices.
Williams said, moreover, that the king of England had no right to grant lands in America to any one; these belonged to the Indians and should be secured from them. This assertion was regarded as a defiance of the king’s authority. Finally it was resolved to send Williams away from the colony, and in January, 1636, the General Court ordered him to come to Boston to get on a ship that was about to sail to England. Williams knew well that return to England meant imprisonment or punishment for his views. Instead of going to Boston, he left his home in Salem one bleak, snowy day and took refuge in the forest. From his first coming to the colony he had made friends with the Indians. Now he made his way to the wigwam of Massasoit, where he spent the winter, trying to teach the savages the truths of the Christian religion. For weeks he was “sorely tost in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”
He then settled on Seekonk River and planted corn, thinking that he was beyond the bounds of the Plymouth colony. But he was still within its limits; in the spring Governor Winthrop informed him that he would be let alone if he would “steer his course” to Narragansett Bay.
With a few companions who had adopted his views, Williams crossed the bay in an Indian canoe, made a covenant of peace with the natives, and established a settlement which he called Providence. This colony became a place of refuge for people oppressed on account of their religious views. “I desired it might be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience,” said Williams. It was to be free to “Baptists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks,” he said, “to all men of all nations and countries.”
Among the people who took refuge there was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. She was a woman preacher, claiming to have the spirit of prophecy, who had been driven out from the Massachusetts colony. After some peaceful years in Rhode Island, she moved westward to a settlement of her own. Here she, her children, and servants were murdered by Indians.
Roger Williams refused to persecute Quakers who were very unpopular in all the other colonies. The religious liberty enjoyed in this colony seems to us to-day, when it is the general custom, entirely right and reasonable, but it seemed very strange and unreasonable to people at that time. Among the people of different religious views who took refuge in Rhode Island, there was a great deal of arguing and quarreling. It was said “any man who had lost his religion would be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island.”
In 1643, Williams went to England and secured a charter for his colony. It was called “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” and it is to be remembered as the first colony which by its laws secured entire religious toleration. The Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies so disapproved of the principles on which it was founded that they would not unite with it in joint action. But the Rhode Island colony was a great safeguard and protection to them. It was the influence and friendship of Roger Williams which kept the fierce Narragansetts from taking up arms against the white men at a time when it would have been dangerous and perhaps fatal to the struggling young colonies.
The exact date of Roger Williams’ death is uncertain. He is said to have lived to the age of eighty-four, devoting himself to the interests of his colony, which he lived to see prosperous and flourishing.