Radical Rhode Island: Religious Freedom, Civic Liberty, and Social Change in the Colonial World by Owen Marshall
Isolation
From the first moment of English settlement in the area, Rhode Island was an unusual colony compared to its neighbors in New England. Its name alone inspires a level of confusion, as Rhode Island is famously not an island at all. What is today known as “Aquidneck Island,” the largest land mass in Narragansett Bay, was “Rhode Island” to the English settlers. The land around Narragansett Bay was known as “the Providence Plantations,” creating the full name of the colony, and later the state: Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. The state did not officially shorten its name to simply “Rhode Island” until 2020. It was a place of outcasts, exiles, dissenters, and religious minorities. Its small and overall weak colonial government only loosely held its towns together, its actual borders were disputed for decades by Massachusetts and Plymouth, and its people and government became notorious for skirting around the Crown’s authority. And yet, as a radical social and political experiment, the colony worked. Beginning with its founding in the town of Providence in 1636 by the exiled minister Roger Williams, Rhode Island followed a pattern of unorthodox behavior that largely excluded it from the social fabric of colonial New England and the control of the English Crown. Not long after Williams settled in Providence in 1636, the community in Rhode Island experienced exclusion from the other colonial governments in New England. By the 1640s, Boston was quickly becoming the de facto leader of the whole region. As the capital of Massachusetts Bay, the city had significant influences on the economy, Puritan religious orthodoxy, government practices, and Native American relations of the larger area. One sphere of influence it did not have, however, was in the colonial militias. Up until the 1640s, the colonial militias were responsible for the defenses of their own colonies, not for each other. While they often formed alliances—such as during the Pequot War of the 1630s—militias only had the responsibility to defend their own colony. The government in Boston wanted to change that, to improve the defense of the region and to give Massachusetts even greater authority in New England. In 1643, the government in Boston organized a summit of New England leaders to discuss a permanent, defensive military agreement in which all of the colonies’ militias would support each other in the instance of foreign attack. At the time, England’s hold on the Northeast was not a guarantee, with French and Dutch colonists occupying significant territory nearby. In addition to potential threats from European powers, the English were still learning how to navigate the complex alliances of various indigenous nations and kinship networks, which could pose significant risk to colonial success. Massachusetts leaders held this meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, to demonstrate that their goal was a regionwide effort, not one limited to their own colony. The conference consisted of representatives from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. The conference was a success and created the New England Confederation as a defensive military alliance with Massachusetts Bay as its head. Missing from the conference, and therefore the Confederation, was Rhode Island. By 1643, the small colony already had such a reputation for harboring exiles, minorities, and dissenters that its neighboring colonies of fellow Englishmen did not include it in their agreement to defend each other from foreign threats. Rhode Island’s defense was therefore left to its own small militia and, more significantly, its alliance with the Narragansett Tribe, which at the time was the largest military force in the area. After its isolating experience with the New England Confederation decision, the colony then faced trouble from across the Atlantic. In 1651, the English passed the first of the Navigation Acts, a series of trade regulations that controlled the activity of colonial merchants. While the laws increased control and oversight within the English mercantile system, it was at the expense of merchants in the colonies by putting regulations on what they could trade, what they could charge for it, and where they could ship to. Importantly for Rhode Islanders, the Navigation Acts stopped merchants from doing business with non-English ships. This way, all of the resources coming out of Rhode Island went through English ports and paid English customs fees. Rhode Islanders at the time were completely dependent on maritime trade, and these laws would have crippled the fledgling economy. Therefore, Rhode Islanders simply did not follow the Acts. From the colonial governor all the way to sailors and dock workers, the colonial government and its people rejected the Navigation Acts and turned Rhode Island into a rather notorious stronghold for smugglers and pirates. Some of the colony’s longest-serving and most successful governors built their careers by collaborating with pirates. Without government officials enforcing maritime law, Rhode Islanders became wealthy off a black market fueled by illegal trade and successful local pirates who plundered as far away as the Indian Ocean. In this unusual economy, the colony continued its trend of unorthodox management and demonstrated a sharp, radical break from the moral and social standards of neighboring Puritan communities like Connecticut and Massachusetts. Rhode Island’s irregularities and oddities eventually earned closer attention from English authority. In 1698, the Board of Trade in England asked King William III for permission to investigate the unusual commerce and government in Rhode Island. With the Crown’s approval, the Lords of Trade sent Lord Bellomont, who was then the governor of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, to investigate the suspicious activity in Rhode Island. After a lengthy investigation during which Bellomont questioned the Rhode Island governor, previous governors, tax officials, customs agents, and other government officials—all while those officials actively sabotaged Bellomont’s reports back to England—the lord compiled a list of twenty-five “irregularities” in the colony. His findings included Quakers in public office, illegal Admiralty Courts, a populace that was complicit in piracy, and a lack of religious education. Bellomont and his agents ultimately believed that Rhode Island should have its charter revoked. From being excluded from the New England Confederation to the threat of losing their charter completely, Rhode Islanders obviously established a way of life antithetical to the status quo in colonial New England and while defying the Crown’s expectations. And it all started with the colony’s first in a long line of outcasts: Roger Williams.
The Providence Plantations (National Park Service)
Roger Williams and Rhode Island
Born in 1603, Roger Williams was a theologian, minister, philosopher, trader, diplomat, polyglot, colonizer, and the founder of the city of Providence and the colony of Rhode Island. Though he was an ordained Anglican minister and trained lawyer, Williams and his wife Mary fled England to escape persecution for their Puritan leanings. They arrived in Boston in 1631, and Williams spent five years in various preaching positions between the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies. In that time, he gained a reputation as a charismatic and intelligent minister with radical ideas. He refused to accept pay for his ministry, he preached about the principle of what is today known as the separation of Church and State, and he taught that all people have the right to “Soul Liberty,” or the freedom of religion. Though he was a devout Christian, he did not believe that the government—or anyone—could force people to worship in a particular way, and that forced worship and forced conversions were terrible sins. These ideas were deeply unsettling to the Puritan leadership in Massachusetts and Plymouth, who enforced Puritan orthodoxy via colonial law and did not yet practice religious tolerance. In 1636, Williams faced charges of undermining the magistrates and the authorities decided to send him back to England for sentencing, likely death. Rightly fearing for his life, Williams went into exile and fled the colonial limits. After surviving his journey in the wilderness thanks to rescue and resupply from members of the Wampanoag Tribe, Williams founded Providence through a deed with the powerful Narragansett Tribe. He signed a deed with two Narragansett sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomi, which did not exchange ownership of the land but rather extended hospitality and settling rights to Williams and his followers. In exchange, the Narragansett retained transportation rights through the major roads of the settlement and received premier trading rights to European goods that the settlers could provide. The Narragansett, like most North American indigenous nations, did not believe in land ownership or use currency, so referring to the deed as a “sale” is inaccurate. In the early years of establishing Providence, the town quickly became a radical social and political experiment that tested ideas like religious equality, democracy, and secular government. The first way in which Providence was an unusual place was the implementation of the separation of Church and State. When the early settlers signed the Providence Compact in 1638, they agreed to the first clearly documented explicitly secular government in human history. The government in Providence was only responsible for civic affairs, such as tax collection, property disputes, resource management, and the town militia. There was no central Church recognized or sponsored by the town, the town government enforced no matters of religion, and the government claimed its authority through the will of the people it governed, not the authority of God, the Church, or even the Crown, which itself had authority rooted in divine mandate. Nearly all the first wave of settlers in Providence were religious, but, like Williams, nearly all of them were outcasts from other colonies or England, where they learned the dangers of a government that takes responsibility for religious orthodoxy. The colonists agreed to protect their faiths from the government and to protect the government from being controlled by a single faith. Living under a secular government, settlers in Providence benefitted from religious freedom and equality for the first time in their lives. Unlike in England or neighboring colonies, Providence allowed all people to worship, or not worship, the way they wanted. Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, atheists, and others lived as neighbors with equal rights. While the settlers did not necessarily always respect each other’s practices and beliefs (Williams famously resented Catholics and, even more so, Quakers,) they respected that they all had the legal right to believe whatever their soul called them to. Other communities of religious minorities sought shelter in Rhode Island soon after Providence’s founding. In 1638, the antinomian Anne Hutchinson and her follows fled Massachusetts and established the town of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island. By the 1650s, Jewish communities lived peacefully in Rhode Island, largely on the southern tip of Aquidneck Island in Newport (founded 1639) but in other towns as well. The Narragansett and other indigenous people in Rhode Island were not subject to forced conversions and often were not proselytized to at all, though there are records of indigenous converts. Most radically, Quakers settled and thrived in Rhode Island, one of the only places in the English world at the time where their faith was tolerated. Rhode Island Quakers often became successful ship captains, business owners, and even held public office. A secular government meant that all residents could practice the “liberty of conscience,” which is how Williams referred to the freedom of religion. With religious liberty came civic liberty and the expansion of political participation. The only requirement for voting in town affairs in Providence was that the voter had to be an adult landowner. Residents could purchase land after signing the Providence Compact. There were no gender or racial barriers to land ownership, and therefore to voting. For the 17th century, this was an extraordinary development. In Providence, widowed women could inherit their husband’s property as the sole owner without having to remarry, and, more radically, women could purchase land independently. The best example of this in the early years of the settlement is Alice Daniels, an apothecary who moved to Providence after a tumultuous marriage in Plymouth. Among the fifty-two plots that made up the first Providence settlement, none were owned by people of color, but there were no laws against it. Free people of indigenous or African descent would have been able to live in early Providence as voting landowners with their religious liberty protected. With all these factors at play, it is entirely possible that the small town of Providence in the first half of the 1600s was the most democratic place in the Euro-colonial world. The actual layout of Providence was itself radical, and even blasphemous to devout Puritans and Anglicans. In a typical English town, in the center of the community was a church, with homes and other structures spread out around it. The church, and the church green, was practical and symbolic. It ensured that everyone had access to the state-sponsored place of worship and it also served as a reminder that the town’s authority came from the Church, and directly or indirectly from God. The physical placement of the church was a stamp of the unification of Church and State. Colonial towns like Boston and Salem followed this model. In Providence, though, there was no central church. Instead, the plot layout was linear, with all the houses along Towne Street facing the cove to the West and their land plots extending Eastward in long narrow tracts uphill. This ensured that everyone had equal access to vital resources, like the freshwater spring and the saltwater cove, as well as being a reflection of the spiritual equality of the townspeople. The organization of the land plots demonstrated the secular nature of the government as well as Roger Williams’s commitment to the idea of spiritual equality.
A Map of the Colony of Rhode Island (Boston Public Library)
Complexities and Legacy
One of Providence’s, and all of Rhode Island’s, most unique qualities had to do with its relationship with Native Americans. Roger Williams and the other settlers of Rhode Island were ultimately colonists who contributed to the lasting displacement and destruction of indigenous people and culture. However, their relationship with indigenous communities was complicated and often different from that of other colonists. Firstly, Williams was a close friend and ally of the Narragansett sachems with whom he wrote the deed to settle Providence. His writings indicate great respect for and friendship with Canonicus and Miantonomi, though he did not always truly understand their culture. Williams was furious and grief-stricken upon learning of the murder of Miantonomi at the hands of the Mohegan Tribe, and famously criticized English policy towards Native Americans. He passionately believed in indigenous land rights, which he saw as protected under English common law. Additionally, he preached that Soul Liberty extended to all people, not just denominations of Christianity. Though he certainly thought that indigenous religions were inferior faiths to Christianity, he also believed that everyone had the right to worship any way they saw fit. His fluency in Narragansett and Wôpanâak, both Algonquian languages, helped him build inroads into Native communities and write the first English language guide to American languages. Rhode Island experienced four decades of peace with the Narragansett until the outbreak of King Philip’s War, in which Rhode Island sided with the United Colonies and their Pequot and Mohegan allies against a coalition of tribes including the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, the Abenaki, and eventually the Narragansett. For all its oddities and tense history with Massachusetts, Rhode Island was still an English colony and could not remain neutral. During the conflict, the elderly Williams was often critical of the true aims of Massachusetts, believing that the war was largely a sham for a land grab attempt by speculators. Regardless of his concerns, Williams did not hold political power; despite founding the colony, he was never a colonial governor or similar position. Williams survived the war, but a Narragansett army burned down an evacuated Providence, which the colonists had to rebuild after the war. At the conflict’s end in mid-1676, Williams was the chair of a committee that sold indigenous war captives into slavery, for which he received a share. For an unknown period of time starting in the 1630s, Williams also kept a Pequot boy in his household in either an indentured or enslaved status, though details are difficult to come by. Clearly, he and the colony had a complicated and often contradictory relationship with Native Americans, but this relationship certainly contributed to the colony’s unusual practices, at least before King Philip’s War. Even after the death of its irregular founder, Rhode Island continued to be a place of radical social and political change, for good or for ill. Rhode Islanders kept their reputation as notorious pirates and smugglers through the 1720s, and Rhode Islanders were the first merchants to participate in the Atlantic slave trade after the Royal African Company lost its monopoly on the industry. Rhode Island was the first American colony to declare independence from Britian, and was the first American state to industrialize, with the American Industrial Revolution originating in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The small state was also the among the first to volunteer troops to the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War, during which its governor volunteered personally and fought in the First Battle of Bull Run. Rhode Island was also the first state to organize Black troops to fight in the Civil War, though the men were rejected by the Army until 1863. Rhode Island has a long history of unusual government, social change, and unorthodox practices, which modern-day residents would likely argue still continues today. It may be America’s smallest state, but there is nothing small about Rhode Island’s history or its impact on the development of the United States.
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