#127 Roger Williams Saves Rhode Island
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
The year is 1642. The Puritan colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut are conspiring against settlements at Providence and on Aquidneck Island, then small clusters of religious dissidents living under the protection of Roger Williams and his Narragansett allies. As the pressure mounted, the Rhode Islanders asked Williams to go to England and secure legal protection for their land and self-government. Williams would sail to England in 1643, and outmaneuver all of New England’s enemies of religious freedom. He would do this by writing an astonishing book about Indians. Among other things.
Against daunting odds, Williams would persuade Parliament, then dominated by Puritans and engaged in a great civil war with the royalists loyal to Charles I, to grant him a patent for Narragansett Bay that explicitly authorized rule by the majority of citizens. Williams had secured English protection for the freest place in the world for non-conformists, independent thinkers, and, TBH, cranks.
Oh. And he may well have persuaded John Milton to come out for freedom of the press.
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Selected references for this episode
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
Roger Williams, A Key Into the Language of America
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 127. I'm your host, Jack Henneman, |
| 0:12.6 | and I'm recording this episode on September 12, 2023, in a hotel room with a noisy air conditioner somewhere on the west coast. |
| 0:24.0 | As we do, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States |
| 0:28.6 | from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:31.6 | We believe there's dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, |
| 0:40.5 | depravity, corruption, finality, inspiration, oppression, genius, defeat, and glory. |
| 0:48.4 | It's been a while since we did that whole thing. |
| 0:52.1 | By popular demand, on October 6, 2023, we will do another meetup for |
| 0:57.0 | fans of the podcast, this time somewhere between Philadelphia and Princeton. |
| 1:02.5 | I'll be aiming for a craft brewery in the region, probably in Bucks County, PA, just at the |
| 1:07.9 | edge of the northern border of New Sweden, at least according to the most expansive |
| 1:13.2 | claims. When I have the details nailed down, I'll announce it on the podcast, the website |
| 1:18.8 | formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. I imagine I'll aim to get to the venue, |
| 1:25.2 | wherever it is, by 4.30 or so, just as we did in Washington and Austin. |
| 1:30.2 | And we'll go until the conversation gets stale or I get tired. |
| 1:33.9 | If you are interested, please send me an email at the History of the Americans at gmail.com. |
| 1:39.6 | Or direct message me on X, Twitter, etc., or Facebook so I can get a sense of the numbers who might be |
| 1:45.2 | showing up. |
| 1:46.5 | It should be fun. |
| 1:48.3 | For those of you listening along in sequence, it might be a bit surprising that we are back to |
| 1:53.7 | Roger Williams in Rhode Island. |
| 1:56.0 | At the end of the last episode, I'd raised the possibility of continuing with new Sweden, |
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