The Rise and Fall of Religious Liberty in America
By C. M. S.
The Making and Meaning of Rhode Island—No. 2
THE sentence of Roger Williams to banishment from the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony bore date of Oct. 9, 1635, and was to take effect within “six weeks next ensuing.” Because of the inclemency of the weather at the time of year when his departure must take place, the time was extended. Mr. Williams did not attempt to preach or teach in public, but a considerable number who sympathized with him would gather at his house from Sunday to Sunday, and listen to his discourses in private, thus absenting themselves from their accustomed places of worship on that day. This was very displeasing to the officials of the established church; it was also against the law, and increased the feeling of annoyance and irritation against him whom they had condemned to exile. Roger Williams had for some time contemplated the founding of a state whose inhabitants should enjoy the fullest liberty in matters of conscience,—a state which should be founded upon the principles of equity toward the original inhabitants of the land. In fact, one of the expressed reasons for the banishment of Williams was the fact that he had declared against the justice of taking possession of the Indians’ lands without their permission. This purpose of Williams to establish a new state based upon the principles of freedom of conscience and the rights of the Indians, determined the Puritan officials to get him out of their midst without further delay. A vessel was then riding at anchor in Boston harbor, and it was determined to send Williams to England on board of her. A warrant was despatched by the court at Boston summoning Williams thither. He replied that he believed his life to be in danger, and did not obey the summons. An officer was despatched to bring him; “but when they came at his house, they found he had been gone three days before; but whither they could not learn.” Leaving his wife and three children, the youngest less than three months old, and having mortgaged his property at Salem for means to supply his wants, Roger Williams plunged into the wilderness to find among the savages that freedom which a union of religion and the state denied him among civilized men. He speaks of himself as being “denied the common air to breathe in, and a civil cohabitation upon the same common earth; yea, and almost without mercy and human compassion, exposed to winter miseries in a howling wilderness.” These miseries of the wilderness he endured for fourteen weeks, “not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” During this time whatever shelter he had was in the smoky, dingy lodges of the Indians. But their hospitality to him in his extremity he sought during all the remainder of his life to requite by deeds of kindness. During these days and nights of distress, Williams was teaching the Indians the principles of the gospel, which he ever sought to illustrate to them in his treatment of them and the rest of his fellow men. He had learned the language of the Narragansetts, and through this exile, he became the first of the Pilgrims to carry the message of salvation to the Indians. Circumstances so brought it about that the exile of Williams became for the New England settlements what the selling of Joseph by his brethren became to the children of Israel during the time of the seven lean years. But more of this later. In the following stanza Williams refers to the kindly hospitality of the Indians while plodding through the snow from one Indian settlement to another in search of a place of abode:— “God’s providence is rich to his,
Let none distrustful be:
In wilderness, in great distress,
These ravens have fed me.”
At Seekonk, on the east bank of the Pawtucket River, Williams broke ground for a habitation, and began to build and plant; but before his crop had had time to mature, the Plymouth officials learned of his whereabouts, and, despite his former ministrations among them, warned him that he was a trespasser upon their domain, and must move on. With five companions he obeyed the ouster of his Plymouth brethren, embarked in a frail canoe, and began to descend the river. At the mouth of the Moshassuck River they landed, near a spring, and there founded a settlement which they called Providence, and which has grown to be the present city of Providence. “It was, and has ever been,” as E. B. Underhill says, in his introduction to the reprint of Williams’ “Bloody Tenent of Persecution,” “the refuge of distressed consciences. Persecution has never sullied its annals. Freedom to worship God was the desire of its founder—for himself and for all, and he nobly endured until it was accomplished.” At several different times Roger Williams had it within his power to “avenge himself of his adversaries,” but no such thought seems ever to have entered his mind, and more than once he went far out of his way to do invaluable favors for those who had banished him, or were supporters of those who did. Samuel G. Arnold, in his “History of Rhode Island,” dwelling upon the fact that some of the laymen opposed the decree for the6banishment of Williams, while every minister save one approved it, makes the following striking and truthful statement: “A practical commentary is thus afforded on the danger of uniting the civil and ecclesiastical administrations. It suggests the reflection that, of all characters, the most dangerous and the most despicable is the political priest.” There is no sadder demonstration in history than the demonstration of the truthfulness of that quotation. It is outside the purpose of these articles to give anything like a detailed history of Rhode Island, interesting as that history is. We shall have to content ourselves with the briefest possible statements in reference to its establishment and its organic law. As soon as it was known that a settlement had been started by Roger Williams among the Indians most friendly to him and most tractable, men of various beliefs and of no particular beliefs, who had been oppressed by the religious hierarchy of New England, began to gather around him. Land was purchased from the Indians by Williams which he designed should be used as a mission station, but which was later divided among the thirteen original settlers. Other settlements were founded by his followers, and these were finally brought into one colony under the title of The Providence Plantations. But before these settlements had become one political unit, the Indians of New England had grown restive under the oppressions of the whites, and began to form a confederacy among themselves, with the avowed purpose of exterminating all the English in New England. The powerful Pequots proposed to unite with the Mohegans and the Narragansetts to accomplish this purpose, in the hope of thus averting the calamity which they foresaw must soon annihilate the Indian race. It was indeed a perilous hour for Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut. Rhode Island was in no such imminent peril. The Rhode Islanders had paid for their lands, and were on most intimate terms with the sachems of the Narragansetts, their immediate neighbors. The Pequot emissaries were among the Narragansetts to bring about the confederacy against the whites when the governor and council of Massachusetts wrote a most urgent letter to Roger Williams, desiring him to use his good offices to prevent the consummation of the Indian confederacy. He was recognized as the only man in New England who could avert the impending evil. With the memory of his persecution by Massachusetts still fresh in his mind, he did not hesitate to throw himself between his own persecutors and their relentless foes. He knew that he was risking his own life at the hands of the Pequot emissaries. Concerning this dangerous expedition Williams himself says:— The Lord helped me immediately to put my life into my hand, and scarce acquainting my wife, to ship myself alone, in a poor canoe, and to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem’s house. Three days and nights my business forced me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequot ambassadors, whose hands and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on the Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but look for their bloody knives at my own throat also. God wondrously preserved me, and helped me to break to pieces the Pequot’s negotiation and design; and to make and finish, by many travels and charges, the English league with the Narragansetts and Mohegans against the Pequots. Thus was New England saved from probable extinction by one whom she would not permit to come into her borders, not even after such signal service as Williams had rendered. The Pequots, foiled in their efforts to combine the New England Indians, determined to carry on the war alone. The result was the total extermination of the Pequots, which was brought about largely by the help of the very Indians whom Williams had prevented from joining the confederacy. “It is a singular fact,” says Arnold, “that Winthrop alone, of all the old writers upon this war, makes any mention of the part performed by Roger Williams in averting a fatal catastrophe.” Governor Winthrop and some of his council, in view of what Roger Williams had accomplished for the common good, moved in the general court that he be recalled from banishment, and honored by some high mark of favor; but the records of the court fail to show that any action was taken upon the matter. History does record, however, that only six years later Massachusetts was making most earnest endeavors to gain control of the Providence, or Narragansett, settlements. Certain disaffected ones in Rhode Island had placed themselves under the protection of Massachusetts, and when Massachusetts began to threaten trouble, Roger Williams was despatched to England to obtain a patent from the British government for the territory now known as Rhode Island. He was there none too soon; for he found the emissaries of Massachusetts on the ground endeavoring to obtain a patent covering the very same territory—strange return for Rhode Island’s assistance to them in their hour of dire need! A document known as the Narragansett Patent was actually drawn up, and was signed by nine of the Parliamentary commissioners; but the influence of Roger Williams and Sir Henry Vane (one time governor of Massachusetts) prevented the consummation of the iniquitous proceeding. Nevertheless the Narragansett Patent was made, by Massachusetts, the basis of a notification to the Providence Plantations to cease the exercise of all jurisdiction in the Narragansett country. No notice seems to have been taken of this notification, and Massachusetts, evidently realizing the groundlessness of her case and the worthlessness of the Narragansett Patent, made no further move in the matter. Williams’ petition for a patent covering the Narragansett Bay country was granted in 1643; but about this time a confederation was formed of the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut, which had for one of its objects common protection against the Indians, and for another “preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the gospel.” It was provided in this agreement “that no other jurisdiction shall hereafter be taken in as a distinct head or member of this confederation, nor shall any other, either plantation or jurisdiction, in present being, and not already in combination, or under the jurisdiction of any of these confederates, be received by any of them.” This was, of course, directly aimed at Rhode Island, and was in perfect harmony with another act of those colonies in boycotting Rhode Island commercially, politically, and socially. As a result of the commercial boycott, the Rhode Islanders were not permitted to receive goods from abroad either through the ports of Massachusetts or of Connecticut. This was indeed a great hardship, and yet they felt it a much smaller evil than to be compelled to live under the jurisdiction of either Massachusetts or Connecticut with their consciences outlawed. One of the earliest laws of Rhode Island shows one of the results of this commercial boycott. The Rhode Islanders, being quite largely cut off from communication with the outside world, began to be in need of many things, one of which was gunpowder, which they desired both for hunting and for protecting themselves from the Indians. Because of this lack, a law was passed making it obligatory upon every male between the ages of seventeen and seventy years to have in his house a bow and four arrows, with which he must exercise from time to time. It was also made obligatory upon each head of a household to teach his sons to shoot with the bow. Another illustration of the boycott is seen in the following: A man by the name of John Green, who had come to America soon after the arrival of Roger Williams, and who settled in Salem, disliking the rigorous laws of Massachusetts in reference to matters of conscience, moved to the Providence Plantation.7Later, on his return to Salem to dispose of his property, he was heard to make the remark that “the power of the Lord Jesus in Massachusetts was in the hand of civil authority.” For this he was arrested by Governor Endicott, and put under bonds to answer for contempt. Two years later (1638) an act was passed by Massachusetts that “John Green shall not come into this jurisdiction upon paine of imprisonment, etc., and because it appears . . . that some other of the same place [Providence] are confident in the same corrupt judgment and practise, it is ordered that if they shall come within this jurisdiction, they shall be apprehended, . . . and if they will not disclaim the said corrupt opinion, . . . they shall be commanded presently to depart.”—Massachusetts Colonial Records, Vol. I, page 224. This unchristian procedure—the boycott—together with the Salem church’s excommunication of Roger Williams, was as near what the Catholic Church denominates “major excommunication” as anything could well be that was not so named; and it illustrates also that a union of church and state, being a pago-papal invention, always partakes of the characteristics of the papacy. The characteristics of the Rhode Island patent and charter, and the success of the Rhode Islanders in opposing Connecticut’s attempt to absorb the Providence Plantations, and put an end to the experiment of freedom of conscience, will be considered next week.