Rhode Island; its making and its meaning; a survey of the annals of the commonwealth from its settlement to the death of Roger Williams, 1636-1683

Front matter

Glass.

Book.

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Introduction

RHODE ISLAND is the smallest by far of all the States of the American Union; it has an area of only 1085 square miles, less than that of the County of Ayr in Scotland. But within this narrow space, and with a population which was until in recent years but slender, Providence grew into a great manufacturing city and Newport became the favorite home of wealth and luxury. Rhode Island has had a singularly interesting and eventful history, all the more interesting because in a tiny community the play of personal forces is best seen and the characters of individual men give color to the strife of principles and parties.- Thus some touch of that dramatic quality which belongs to the cities of Greece and Italy recurs in this little republic on Narragansett Bay. Unlike in many ways as were the settlers who went forth from England under the Stuarts to the Greeks of two thousand years earlier, some of the questions which troubled both were the same, and bore fruits not wholly dissimilar. Nor are points of likeness wanting to the history of some of the older cantons of Switzerland.

Mr. Richman, who is favorably known to stuvi Introduction

dents of history by his book on Appenzell, has essayed in the present volumes to chronicle the fortunes of Rhode Island in its earlier days. The peculiar interest of those days lies in the fact that this colony was in a special sense the offspring and the embodiment of certain distinctive and novel ideas in the sphere of religion and politics. This character it owes to one man. Roger Williams, born just three centuries ago (probably in a.d. 1603), was the founder of Rhode Island in a clearer and ampler sense than any other single man — scarcely excepting William Penn — was the founder of any other American colony ; for he gave it a set of principles which, so far as the New World was concerned, were peculiarly his own, and these principles long continued to affect its collective life. The men of Virginia were ordinary Englishmen of the class then dominant in England. The men of Massachusetts and Connecticut were Puritans of the normal seventeenth-century type, earnest and God-fearing, but almost as ready to persecute heretical opinions as they had found the church of Archbishop Laud ready to persecute them. Roger Williams had a new doctrine. In point of doctrine he seems to have been an orthodox Puritan, grifted with a double portion of the dissidence of dissent, although so " lovely in his carriage" that the hostility he roused did not take the form of hatred to himself personally. ^But he was the first apostle in New England of the theory of absolute freedom for the individual in matters of religion, with the consequent denial of the right of the civil magis-

Introduction vii

trate to intermeddle in any wise with such matters. He was not the first discoverer of this great and wholesome principle, for isolated voices had for a century before his time uttered it in more or less explicit terms. But he was so much the most zealous and active exponent of it in America, and Rhode Island was so conspicuously the first colony to apply it in practice, that he and his community deserve to be honored by those who hold that one of the chief services which the United States has rendered to the world consists in the example set there of a complete disjunction of religious worship and belief from the machinery of civil government.

Upon this foundation, and upon the cognate principle of the fullest recognition of the rights of the individual in the civil sphere also, the commonwealth of Rhode Island was built, and thus it became the refuge of those who sought to escape from the grim stringency of the Massachusetts Theocracy. Roger Williams was in a sense before his time; and he may not in some respects have fully appreciated the results of his own principles. But the principles spread and the work told, though in Europe, with its solid mass of institutions inherited from the middle ages, no great progress was made till the spirit of political revolt and the spirit of critical inquiry came in to quicken the march of ideas.

A no less honorable and scarcely less important part of Williams's doctrines was his recognition of the right of the native Indians to their lands. His respect for their rights, his wish to deal fairly and live peaceably with the aborigines are among the viii Introduction

most attractive features of his character and entitle him to be numbered in the noble band to which Las Casas and Penn and Wilberforce belongr.

The story of the beginnings of Rhode Island is full of varied interest and Mr. Richman tells it well. He delineates Roger Williams with insight and with sympathy. He sets clearly before us the conditions under which the little community started on its long and chequered course. The enormous changes which have passed in America during the last sixty years do not diminish — indeed, they rather increase — the value of a study of the days wherein the foundations of this mighty edifice were raised.

We live in a time of great States, when the right of small nations to exist is arrogantly denied by those who do not comprehend the worth of variety and of free individual development. But it ought to be remembered that down till the sixteenth century almost all the work we still prize in literature, in art, in philosophy and in religion, as well as in the creation of institutions, had been done by the citizens of small cities or by the members of small tribes. The gigantic nations of to-day, highly vitalized as they are by facilities of communication and transport, do not produce what Athens and Florence produced in the centuries of their prime.

James Bryce.

London, August i, 1902.

Preface

THE title selected for the following pages, — Rhode Island, its Making and its Meaning, — is not a mere matter of words. The meaning of Rhode Island (to speak of that first) is, I take it, clear and precise. It is primarily that Roger Williams, and the commonwealth which he founded, established earlier and more fully than any other man or community the principle of Freedom of Conscience in religion ; and in the next place it is that Rhode Island itself established earlier and more fully than any other community the political principle of Individualism, — a principle since better known as that of the Rights of Man.

It will be observed that a distinction is here drawn between the work performed chiefly by Roger Williams and that performed chiefly by Rhode Island. Williams understood the whole subject of Freedom of Conscience in religion. It has not been found possible to add anything to his exposition of this subject. But while this is true, Williams did not understand some things which were involved in and corollary to his doctrine of Soul Liberty, and which were worked out through much storm and stress by the commonwealth which

X Preface

he founded. That is to say, he did not (as is shown at Chapter XL) understand the bearings of Soul Liberty in the poHtical domain. Rhode Island, however, did understand these bearings, and the consequence is that to the principle of religious freedom (which by nearly universal consent is placed to the credit of Rhode Island) there must be added the derived though no less weighty principle of political freedom expressed in the doctrine of the Rights of Man and of the Individual : that doctrine which came to underlie both the American War for Independence and the great Revolution in France.^

So much for the meaning of Rhode Island. A word now as to its making. This, — as will be seen, — was a process both slow and tortuous. Freedom of Conscience, even in religion, was not at first formally recognized on Aquidneck ; and as for the Rights of Man and of the Individual, that principle was only established amid a series of jarring scenes

' Dr. Georg Jellinek of the University of Heidelberg says in his essay, "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens" (translated into English last year): " The right of the liberty of conscience was proclaimed by Roger Williams and with it came the conception of a universal right of man." Again he says : " With the conviction that there existed a right of conscience independent of the State was found the starting point for the determination of the inalienable rights of the individual."

It is the thesis of Dr. Jellinek that the authors of the French Revolution derived their idea of the Rights of Man not from European philosophers or from the American Declaration of Independence, but from the charters of the English colonies in America. These charters contained assertions of inalienable rights all growing out of the basic right of Soul Liberty or Freedom of Conscience. The Doctor emphatically avers: "What has been held to be a work of the [French] Revolution [the establishing of inherent and sacred rights of the individual] was in reality a fruit of the Reformation and its struggles. Its first apostle was not Lafayette but Roger Williams."

Preface xi

in which the propelling forces were Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton, and the restraining ones, William Coddington, John Clarke, and Roger Williams.

In the preparation of the book herewith submitted to the public, I have been aided with great kindness and patience by Mr. William E. Foster, librarian of the Providence Public Library ; Mr. Clarence S. Brigham, librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society ; Mr. George Parker Winship, librarian of the John Carter Brown Library ; Mr. H. L. Koopman, librarian of Brown University; Mr. Edward Field, clerk of the Providence Municipal Court ; Mr. George T. Paine of Providence, Mr. William P. Sheffield, Jr., of Newport, and Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites and Miss Florence E. Baker of the Historical Society at Madison, Wis.

I. B. R.

Muscatine, Iowa,

September, 1902.

Contents

CHAPTER PACE

Introduction by James Bryce . . . v

rhode island founded and perpetuated

Chapter I

RHODE ISLAND may be described as the reactionary offspring of Massachusetts. In order, therefore, to understand Rhode Island history in its early period, it will be necessary to take into consideration certain facts connected with the founding of the parent commonwealth. These facts are two : first, that Massachusetts in its inception was that distinctively secular institution, a company of English capitalists, corporately organized for trade under a charter which set forth with more or less completeness the powers, privileges, and capacities of the company ; and second, that notwithstanding this, Massachusetts, almost immediately upon its erection upon the shores whence its name was derived, became a Theocracy, — a Church-State ^ fairly dividing honors with Judea of old in the rigorous assiduity with which it strove to serve the Lord day and night.

' " It was a Church of Christ which settled on these shores in 1628 and the following years. . . . The State was an outgrowth from the Church, was its offspring and its handmaid. ... It was literally true that the State was only the Church acting in secular and civil affairs." — John A. Vinton, Cong. Quarterly, 1873, p. 407.

The second fact suggests irresistibly the conclusion, that whatever the artificial form vouchsafed by Charles I. to the Massachusetts Company, the real object of the members — an object none the less real that it may have been but vaguely comprehended by the greater part — was to escape royal and priestly domination, and, as noted by the Governor, John Winthrop, on the voyage over, " to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical." ^ It does not follow, however, that, because the real object of the Puritans was as stated, the fact of their organization as a trading company was without effect upon their subsequent course and polity. The charter provided for a Governor, a Deputy Governor, and eighteen Assistants to be elected annually from the " freemen " of the company ; for four annual company meetings called "great, general, and solemn assemblies " (familiar later on as assemblies of the General Court) ; and for monthly meetings of the Governor (or Deputy Governor) with at least seven Assistants, as a Court of Magistracy. Moreover, among the very considerable powers conferred upon the company by the charter was the power to make laws and ordinances not repugnant to the laws of England ; the power to admit new associates upon terms to be prescribed by the company itself ; and the power " to expulse all such person and persons

' This was clearly the object, after the reorganization of the company in 1629 and the election of Winthrop to the governorship. — Dr. Geo. E. Ellis, Puritan Age, p. 50.

as should at anytime attempt or enterprise detriment or annoyance to their plantation or its inhabitants." ^ And, while it evidently was not intended by the English Government in conferring the above powers to place a sword in the hands of the Puritans to be used in protecting their corporation, as a Theocracy, against spiritual assaults ; and while, therefore, the argument of their apologists, that they as a Theocracy possessed the same legal rights in the way of " expulsion " as they would have possessed had they chosen to remain a business corporation, falls to the ground^; still the Puritans themselves — with just what admixture of sincerity and guile it is difficult to say — certainly

' Preston, Documents Illustrative of American History, p. 59.

^ At the period treated of, colonies were looked upon, in government circles at least, as institutions essentially for pecuniary profit (Davis, New England States, iv., 2461). The statement therefore becomes almost a truism, that, as originally constituted, the company of Massachusetts Bay was a trading concern like the Hudson's Bay or the East India Company. The privileges granted under its charter were, as Mr. Charles Deane has well said, those "usually allowed to corporations in England" {Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, Dec, 1869, p. 174 ei seq.). The charter, however, while framed to secure exclusive trade privileges, was not so framed as to authorize the exclusion from the company's territory of British subjects willing to respect these privileges. "All . . . the subjects of Us," the instrument recites, . . , "which shall goe to and inhabite within the saide Landes, shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall subjects within any of the Dominyons of Us," etc. No wonder Mr. Brooks Adams is moved to say in The Emancipation of Massachusetts (p. 59): " Her [Mass.'] commercial privileges alone were exclusive, and, provided he respected them, a British subject had the same right to dwell in Massachusetts as in any of the other dominions of the Crown." It is worthy of remark that the views above set forth meet with the sanction of the English historian of New England, Mr. J. A. Doyle. He writes {The Ena. Cols, in Am., vol. ii., p. gi) : "It would seem as though the functions of the Company were to be confined to managing the trade and the material welfare of the settlement."

did avail themselves of the strict letter of their civil constitution as sanctioning both their exclusiveness and the infliction of their favorite penalty of banishment. ^

The formal organization of Massachusetts as a Theocracy or Church-State may be said to have taken place in the month of October, 165 1, when the General Court voted " to give their testimony to the book of discipline " which had been adopted by the Synod, held in Cambridge three years before. But as the Synod only put the seal of authority upon what, in the language of the General Court, " we have practiced and doe believe," it is evident that the real compacting of the Theocracy was of an earlier time. The first step (which was taken at the first session of the Massachusetts General Court, held August 23, 1630) w^as the following-, as set forth in the court records :

" Impr., it was propounded, howe the ministers should be mayntayned. ... It was ordered that houses be built for them at the publique charge. ... It was propounded, what should be their maynetenance. [After specifying the quantity of meat, money, etc., it is added], all this to be att the common charge, those of Mattapan and Salem only exempted."*

' " They [the Puritans] had as much right and the same right [under their charter] to do what they did, as a Lodge of Free Masons, going on an excursion into the Adirondack woods, would have to say distinctly that tickets will be issued to none but members of the order, their families and invited guests." — Dr. H. M. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years as Seen in its Literature, p. 420. See also Dr. Dexter, As to Roger Williams, p. iS ; Palfrey, JVew England, vol. i., pp. 299- 300, 3S7 ; Dr. Joel Parker, Massachusetts as Seen in its Early History (Lowell Institute Lectures, 1869) pp. 393-394 ; H. C. Lodge, Short History of the English Colonies in America, p. 348.

^ Mass. Col. Rec, vol. i., p. 73.

The second step (taken May 18, 1631) was in the language of the court : " It is ordered that henceforth noe man shall be admitted to the freedome of this Commonwealth but such as are members of the churches within the limits of this jurisdiction." ^ A third step was the order of court, made March 4, 1634-35, that every inhabitant must attend church services on the Lord's Day under penalty of a fine of ^s. (equivalent to about $5.00 now) or of imprisonment.^ A fourth step was the request by the General Court in March, 1634-35, that the elders and brethren of every church within the court's jurisdiction consult together concerning ** one uniform order of discipline," and " howe farr the magistrates are bound to interpose for the preservation of that uniformity and peace of the churches."^ A fifth step was the enactment in March, 1635-36, that no church should be formed without the " approbacion " of the " magistrates and of the greater parte of the churches in this jurisdiction," and further, that " noe person being , a member of any church gathered without the approbacion of the magistrates and of the greater parte of the churches in this jurisdiction, shall be admitted to the ffreedome of this Commonwealthe."^ A sixth step — and one amounting to a direct reply to the query propounded by the General Court in March, 1634-35 — was the advice of the ministers, given in March, 1637-38, apropos of the Antinomian agitation, " that in all such heresies or errors of any church members as are manifest and dangerous to the State, the Court may proceed without tarrying for the Church."^

The leading mind concerned in developing the Theocracy on the lines thus indicated was the Rev. John Cotton, lately rector of St. Botolph's, Boston, England, who came to Massachusetts in 1633, and whose personality and history will engage our attention as we proceed. In Cotton's opinion, " very much of an Athenian Democracy was in the mould of the government by the royal charter," and disapproving of this he suggested, in the words of Cotton Mather, " an endeavor after a Theocracy as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel, 'the peculiar people.'" His labors to this end were highly effectual, for by his influence — and against some questioning in the matter from time to time on the part of the "deputies," or "third estate," in the General Court — it was promptly brought about that the constitution and statutes of Massachusetts consisted in the Bible, and not in the royal charter and Orders in Council" ; a consummation which made the clergy, acting together, — in other words, the Puritan Church, — ■ necessarily the dominant element in the State ; for the Bible, like other legal codes (and more than most) required interpretation ; and for this who so fit as the clergy ? ^

' Winthrop's yournal, i., 214.

' In May, 1636, Cotton prepared a Biblical Code at the request of a committee appointed by the General Court. This code, entitled ' ' Moses his Judicials," although never formally adopted, was accepted in spirit by the court.

* " By law the civic government [in Massachusetts] was distinct from the

But to return to the Cambridge Synod. This body was assembled in September, 1646, in response to the "desire" of the General Court. A committee on " platform " was appointed, consisting of John Cotton, Richard Mather, and Ralph Partridge, — the latter of Plymouth, — and an adjournment taken. It was not until August, 1648, that the Synod was able to reassemble for business. When it did so, a draught of a "platform" which had been prepared by Mather, and to which Cotton, but not the Plymouth delegate, subscribed, was submitted and in substance adopted. The leading theocratic pronouncement of this "platform " as adopted by the Synod is contained in the seventeenth chapter, and stands thus : The civil magistrate " ought to improve his civil authority for the observing of the duties commanded in the first, as well as for observing of the duties commanded in the second, table [of the Decalogue] " ^ ; he ought to exercise himself to command the performance, and chastise the neglect, of " such acts as are commanded & forbidden in the word " ; he ought " to restrain and punish " idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, and the venting of opinions that destroy

ecclesiastical, but in fact it was strictly subordinate to it. Owing to their moral influence, the pastors and elders formed a sort of Council of Ephors : no important decision was arrived at without their consent. They spoke in the name of the Divine Will revealed in the Bible, and their sentence could only be appealed against by calling in question their interpretation." — Charles Borgeaud, The Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England, p. 148.

'The "first table" comprised the first four Commandments — those specifically referring to man's duties toward God as distinguished from man's duties toward man.

lO Early Rhode Island

the foundations, open contempt of the Word preached, the profanation of the Sabbath, disturbance of pubHc worship, etc.; and he should "put forth his coercive .power, as the matter shall require, in case a church become schismatical, or walke incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own, contrary to the rule of the word." ^ Here, then, we have an absolutely authoritative statement of what the Puritan Commonwealth was from the first, — from the period 1630- 163 7, — by which time the Massachusetts Company had pretty effectually got rid of whatever traces of a trading organization it retained after the transfer of its charter to this side of the Atlantic ; and, according to this statement, the commonwealth was a Theocracy wherein the civil magistrate (as a matter of course) was to punish "heresy" and "the venting of opinions." Unless, therefore, we are prepared to indulge the amiable but altogether idle supposition that the Puritan magistrate was inclined to shirk the performance of his duty, we may assert with great positiveness what the Massachusetts historians have as a rule been exceedingly loath to admit, namely, that not only were persons punished in early Massachusetts for offences against the civil power, but also for heresy and opinions qud opinions!^

' Mather, ATagnalia, Book V., Part ii., par. 3; Dexter, Congregationalism as St't'n in its Literature, p. 444.

^ The following instance (December l, 1640) is striking {Mass, Col. Rec, vol. i., p. 312) : " The jury found Hugh Buet [subsequently a resident of R. I.] to bee gilty of heresy & that his person and errors are dangeros for infection of others. It was ordered that the said Hugh Buet should bee

Indeed, upon slight reflection it will be seen that in a Theocracy or Church-State it is impossible for it to be otherwise than that opinions, as such, should form a ground of punishment. The Theocracy itself consists in opinions, — opinions about God and a future life ; opinions whereon is thought to depend the only hope of human salvation from the wrath to come, but which at the same time are utterly incapable of verification, and which, if they are to stand, must be sedulously protected against the destructive force of other and contrary opinions. A secular State may be menaced by war, rebellion, and intrigue, but a Theocracy is put in deadly peril by every wind of doctrine. It consequently is the most difficult of all forms of polity to keep from falling away from the mark. Where a secular State encounters only foes of flesh and blood, a Theocracy contends against the very powers of the air. It is no wonder that a Theocracy persecutes ; it is put in fear by the unseen character of that with which it fights, and, being in fear, it is at once blind and pitiless.^

So much regrardine the rise of the Massachusetts Theocracy. This Theocracy, having got itself fairly in working order, was now about to be challenged.

As early as the fifteenth century Peter Chilcicky,

gone out of o' jurisdiction by the 24th present upon paine of death, & not to returne upon paine of being hanged."

' The ecclesiastical state of Geneva under John Calvin may be taken as illustrative of the general proposition. "Calvin's object," says Robert Barclay {Inner Life of the Religious Sects, p. 17), "was to found a State resembling that of the Israelites under Moses, and the result was one of the most fearful ecclesiastical tyrannies to which mankind has been subjected."

spiritual father of the Bohemian Brethren, denied the rightfulness of any union of Church and State. Just before the outbreak of the Lutheran Reformation, in the following century, the Anabaptists^ of Germany appeared, making the same denial. Among those calling themselves Anabaptists at this time, however, were various bands of fanatics claiming the merit of direct inspiration, and maintaining that, provided the individual were assured of the indwelling of God's Spirit, it made little or no difference about conduct. As a result, there broke forth in 1535, in the city of Miinster, which had been taken possession of by the fanatics under Jan Matthys and John of Leyden, a wild reign of superstition and debauchery ; an occurrence which made the name "Anabaptist" thenceforth a synonym throughout Christendom for all that was criminal and anarchistic. In 1 536 the apostate monk, Menno Simons, allied himself with the Anabaptists properly so called, and took up the advocacy of their idea of religious lilrerty as involved in the tenet of the separation of Church and State. Menno was a Hollander, and during the years of persecution in Europe which followed upon the Miinster episode many of his disciples, called Mennonites, fled to England, where they found a considerable number of other Dutch Anabaptists settled about Norwich. This Norwich settlement continued to grow until, in 1 57 1, it contained nearly four thousand persons.^

' Anabaptist, from the verb avafiaitri'^fiv , to rebaptize. ' By actual count 3925. Bloomfield's Hist. County Norfolk, vol. iii., pp. 282, 291.

Now in 1580, Robert Browne, a kinsman of Lord Burghley, and graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, went to Norwich and formed what is regarded by modern Congregationalists as the original church of their distinctive order. Browne entertained views upon the question of the separation of Church and State which, whether derived from the Norwich Anabaptists or not, were decidedly advanced, and these ere long he proceeded to set forth in a Treatise. He says : "The magistrates have no ecclesiastical authoritie at all, but onelie as anie other Christians, if so be they be Christians." "They may doe nothing concerning the church, but onelie civilie." They are to "rule the Commoan Wealth in all outwarde lustice"; but " to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by Lawes & Penalties belongeth not to them."

Following upon these utterances by Browne are others of an identical tenor in 161 1, attributed to John Smyth, the organizer of the first church of English Baptists. Then again in 1614 we find Leonard Busher, a citizen of London and a Baptist, issuing his Religious Peace ; or, Plea for Liberty of Conscience ; and in 16 15 John Murton appears (also a Baptist) with his proof, That no Man Oiight to be Persecuted for his Religion. Finally the significant fact comes to light, that in 1626 there were eleven Baptist churches in England, in each of which there was taught the doctrine of religious liberty.^

It is — in a peculiar sense — as the child of this

' Henry C. Vedder, A Short History of the Baptists, p. 139, culminating period in the growth of the spirit of Toleration in England that Roger Williams comes upon the scene. Born in London of English parents, about the year 1603/ he is first heard of taking sermons and speeches in shorthand^ in the Star Chamber. This manifestation of parts commended him to Sir Edward Coke, — "that man of honor, wisdom, and piety," as Williams affectionately calls him, — by whom he was placed in the then newly founded Charterhouse School. From this institution, so closely identified in the minds of persons of the present day with the names of Addison, Grote, and Thackeray, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1626. Tradition has it that upon leaving college he studied law with his patron Coke, but, however that may have been, the genius of the times had entered into him, and he espoused theology. In 1629, we find him installed as chaplain to Sir William Masham of Otes, High Laver, County of Essex, and not only so, but in love with the niece of Lady Barrington, the latter an aunt to Oliver Cromwell.^ On two occasions, a "living" was