Roger Williams founds Rhode Island

A founding principle rarely arrives by charter or by parliament. More often it arrives on foot, carried out of a back door at night by one man with a compass and a pocket Bible, in weather that should kill him, into woods that belong to people the colony he is fleeing has not yet learned to name correctly. The republics that follow read the principle off a stone tablet and assume it was given. It was not given. It was walked in.

THE TEACHER AT SALEM

Roger Williams was thirty-three years old in the winter of 1635 to 1636, born in London in 1603 to a merchant tailor of Welsh paternal stock, schooled at Charterhouse on Sir Edward Coke's notice, bursarial scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, ordained in the Church of England, chaplain at Otes Hall in Essex to Sir William Masham. He had crossed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 with his wife Mary, refused the teacher's place at the Boston church on the ground that it had not separated cleanly from the Church of England, gone first to Plymouth and then to Salem, and within four years stood twice before the General Court at Boston on two doctrines the magistrates could not let stand. The first was that the civil magistrate had no jurisdiction over the conscience of any man. The second was that the King of England held no title to lands inhabited by the native peoples and could not lawfully grant what was not his. The Court deliberated ten weeks. In October 1635 it sentenced him to be put aboard the next ship for England in the spring, and ordered him kept at Salem under guard until the Lyon should sail in April.

THE PARSONAGE, FIFTEENTH OF JANUARY

It is a quarter past nine at night in the parsonage at Salem. The candle on the table beside the cradle has burned down by half. The wind is taking the loose shingles on the south side of the house. Outside, in fourteen weeks of an unusually severe winter, the snow stands three feet on the level ground and deeper in the drifts under the trees. Mary, eight months gone with their second child, sits by the fire. The first child, also Mary, sleeps in the cradle. On the table lies a bundle of bread and salt-meat, a pocket Bible, and the brass compass his father gave him at Cambridge. A private letter from John Winthrop, governor at Boston and personal friend, has reached him at his Charlestown house some days before, advising in plain terms that he steer his course to Narragansett Bay before the marshal arrives in the morning to take him to Captain Underhill's house and thence aboard ship.

A QUARTER PAST NINE

The argument with himself is short because it has been going on for ten weeks already and the conclusions are reached. Mary cannot come tonight. She will follow in the spring with the children, when there is some kind of roof. The country south of the Charles River is the country of the Narragansett, who are at peace with the colony, and the marshal of the Bay will not be sent past the colony's southern boundary in this snow. Massasoit will take him in; he has known Massasoit since the first summer at Plymouth, and he has known Canonicus, sachem of the Narragansett, four years now, having traded with him out of his own house and learned enough of the Algonquian tongue to sit by his fire without an interpreter. The path from Salem to the head of the bay is fourteen miles to the Charles, then forty more to the country of the Pokanoket, then south again. He has done it in summer. He is about to do it in three feet of snow at thirty-three years of age in a preacher's coat. The doctrine the Court has condemned him for is that forced worship stinks in God's nostrils, by his own phrase to Cotton later, and the doctrine is now to be tested not in the meeting-house but against the cold. He kisses Mary. He kisses the child. He puts on his second pair of boots, having thrown the first pair away because they were the magistracy's pair. He takes the bundle, the compass, the Bible. He goes out by the back door into the woods behind the house.

FOURTEEN WEEKS

He was, by his own letter to Major John Mason eighteen years afterwards, sorely tossed for fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean. He came on the second night to the lodge of an Indian he had met two summers before, who took him in by his fire. He came to Massasoit's village two days after that, and into the protection of the Wampanoag. He passed in March under the protection of Canonicus and the Narragansett, who would, in his own later words, never have suffered him to want bread or refuge had he stayed there in the woods his whole life. He bought, by open negotiation in the manner Canonicus required, a tract of land at the head of the bay below the Pawtucket Falls. The deed was written in his own hand, English on one side and Narragansett transliteration on the other, and lies today in the Rhode Island State Archives. He named the place Providence, in thanks for what he called God's merciful providence to me in my distress. He sent for Mary in May.

THE TOWN AGREEMENT

The settlement was bound from the first to a single principle, written down in the town agreement of August 1640 in five short paragraphs in Williams's own hand: that civil authority extended to civil things only, and that the inhabitants shall not be molested for any difference in opinion in matters of religion. No church was established. No oath was required. Jews, Quakers, Baptists, Antinomians, dissenters of every stripe driven out of the surrounding colonies came to Providence and to the towns that grew up around the bay, and were not molested. Williams obtained the colonial charter from the Long Parliament in 1644 and returned across the Atlantic in 1654 to confirm it under Cromwell. He served as President of the Providence Plantations through the later 1650s. He learned the Narragansett tongue to a level no other Englishman had reached, and set down what he had learned in A Key into the Language of America, printed at London in 1643, the first systematic English-Algonquian phrasebook and a book of quiet ethnography that treats its subjects as men. The peace he kept with Canonicus and Massasoit and their heirs held from 1636 to 1675.

THE BURNING OF PROVIDENCE

In the summer of 1675 the peace failed. King Philip's War, the rising of Massasoit's son Metacom against the encroaching colonies, broke out in the south of the bay. In March 1676 a Narragansett war party burned Providence to the ground. Williams, then seventy-three years old, was a captain of the local militia in his own town, fighting the descendants of the men who had taken him in by their fire in the fourteenth week of his exile. He is recorded standing at the edge of the burning settlement and speaking with the war leaders by name in their own tongue. The town was rebuilt. He died at Providence in 1683, eighty years old, and was buried in his own yard.

THE PATH

The principle he carried out of the parsonage door at Salem on the night of the fifteenth of January 1636 went, by the Rhode Island Code of 1647, into the foundational law of the colony, and from there, by a long inheritance through the dissenting churches and the colonial charters, into the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The republics read it off the page and assume it was given. It was walked in, a hundred and forty-four miles in deep snow, fourteen weeks long, by a man in a preacher's coat with a brass compass and a pocket Bible. The plaque on the riverfront below the Roger Williams National Memorial at Providence today carries six words from the Code of 1647 in his own hand: We agree to hold forth liberty of conscience.