Rhode Island: Haven for the Heterodox

One of the most brilliant masters of religious disputation was the Reverend Roger Williams (ca. 1603-1683), who immigrated from England to Boston in 1631. He declined an offer to become minister of the first Boston congregation because it had not formally separated from the Anglican Church. Instead, Williams moved first to Salem, then to Plymouth, and back to Salem. In each place, he was criticized for his “strange opinions,” which included a conviction that the lands chartered to Massachusetts and Plymouth belonged by right to the Indians, that a civil government could not enforce religious laws, and that religion itself ultimately rested on profoundly individual conscience and perception. Ordered by the Puritan hierarchy to change his views, Williams refused and was finally expelled from the colony by the Massachusetts General Court in October 1635. He and a handful of followers found refuge in January 1636 among the Indians on Narragansett Bay. At the head of that bay, Williams purchased from his protectors a small tract and founded a town he called Providence-the first settlement in Rhode Island.

During the next four decades, Williams welcomed to Rhode Island those of all persuasions. In 1644, during the English Civil War, he secured a patent for the colony from the Puritan-controlled Parliament, and he established a genuinely representative government founded on the principle of religious freedom. Williams returned to England again, where he successfully defended his colony’s grant against the onslaught of Puritan objections, and after the restoration of Charles II to the British throne, he secured a royal charter in 1663, sanctioning the liberal institutions he had created.