Williams · 1636
Roger Williams founds Rhode Island
Roger Williams was born in London in 1603, the son of a merchant tailor of Welsh paternal extraction. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, took orders, and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 with his wife Mary. Within four years he had been twice charged before the Boston General Court for the radical doctrines that the magistrate had no power over conscience and that the King of England had no title to give away land that belonged to the native peoples. He was sentenced to deportation in October 1635 and ordered held in custody at Salem until the next ship in the spring. On the night of the fifteenth of January 1636, in deep snow, in fourteen weeks of an unusually severe winter, he walked out of his house ahead of the marshal who was coming to take him into custody, and into the woods south of Salem. He spent fourteen weeks of that winter under the hospitality of Massasoit and the Wampanoag and of Canonicus and the Narragansett. In June he founded a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay, named it Providence in thanks for the deliverance, and bound it to the principle that civil authority extended to civil things only and that no person should be coerced in religion. Rhode Island was the first political community in the English-speaking world built on that principle.
It is a quarter past nine on the night of the fifteenth of January 1636, in the parsonage at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in heavy snow, with the candle burning down on the table beside the cradle and the wind taking the loose shingles on the south side of the house. He is thirty-three years old. He is Roger Williams, formerly the teacher (the assistant minister) at Salem, formerly the chaplain of Sir William Masham at Otes Hall in Essex, formerly the protégé of Sir Edward Coke at the Inns of Court, formerly the bursarial scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, born in London to a Welsh merchant family. His wife Mary is by the fire, eight months gone with their second child. The first, Mary, is asleep in the cradle. He has, on the table, a bundle of bread and salt-meat and the brass compass his father gave him at Cambridge.
The marshal of the colony is to come for him in the morning. The General Court has been in deliberation for ten weeks. It has, after eight increasingly tense exchanges with him on the points of conscience and on the title to native land, sentenced him to be put aboard the next ship for England in the spring. The plan of the colony is to lock him up at the home of Captain Underhill at Salem until April when the Lyon sails. The plan of his friend John Winthrop, governor, who has personally sent him a private letter at his Charlestown house, is that he go south to the country of the Narragansett before the marshal arrives.
He thinks: Mary cannot come tonight. She will follow in the spring with the children when I have a roof of some kind for them.
He thinks: Massasoit will take me. I have known Massasoit since the first summer at Plymouth. I have known Canonicus four years.
He thinks: the country south of the Charles River is the country of the Narragansett. The Narragansett are at peace with the colony. I will not be pursued past the colony's southern boundary.
He thinks: the path from Salem to the Bay is fourteen miles. From the Bay to the country of the Pokanoket is forty. I have done this in summer. I am about to do it in three feet of snow.
He kisses Mary. He kisses the child. He goes out by the back door, into the woods behind the house. He carries the bundle, the compass, a pocket Bible. He is in his preacher's coat and his second pair of boots. He has thrown the first pair away because they were the magistracy's pair.
He walked, by his own letter to John Winthrop in the spring, fourteen weeks of that winter, in conditions he described as the howling wilderness. 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. He stayed under Wampanoag and then Narragansett protection for the next three months. He bought, in March, on the open negotiation that was the practice with Canonicus, a tract of land at the head of the bay below the Pawtucket Falls; the deed for it, in his hand, in English on one side and in his own transliteration of Narragansett on the other, is in the Rhode Island State Archives. He named the settlement Providence. He sent for Mary in May.
Five families joined him by the end of 1636. Twelve by 1638. The town agreement of August 1640 written by Williams runs five paragraphs and contains the phrase that became the founding principle of the colony, that civil authority extended to civil things only and that we shall not be molested for any difference in opinion in matters of religion. Williams obtained the colonial charter from the Long Parliament in 1644, returned to confirm it under Cromwell in 1654, and was governor of Providence Plantations through the 1650s. He kept the peace with the Narragansett from 1636 to 1675, traded with them, learned the language to a level that allowed him to write A Key into the Language of America (1643), the first systematic English-Algonquian phrasebook. The peace failed in 1675 when King Philip's War broke out in the south of the colony; Providence was burned in March 1676; Williams, then seventy-three, was a captain of the local militia in his own town, fighting the descendants of his protectors. He died at Providence in 1683, eighty years old. The plaque on the riverfront below the Roger Williams National Memorial today reads, in his own words from the Rhode Island Code of 1647: We agree to hold forth liberty of conscience. The principle is in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The path from his back door at Salem on the night of the fifteenth of January 1636 ran a hundred and forty-four miles in deep snow, was fourteen weeks long, and is the path the principle came in by.