Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 152.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on May 27, 2024 in New Orleans.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without intentional presentism. This is one of those moments when my muse has

upset the apple cart. I'd planned to get back to Roger Williams, who will save Rhode Island yet again. Then I realized

that I really couldn't do that without talking about a difficult fellow named Samuel Gorton.

So I read up and decided he warranted his own episode, not just a few minutes in Williams' long shadow. So here we are. Gorton, it turns out,

was such a troublesome fellow he was all by himself, one of the reasons the Massachusetts Bay

and Plymouth colonies would try so hard to contain and even extinguish Providence in Rhode Island.

Finally, this episode assumes at least passing familiarity with our many episodes on New

England in the last couple of years. So if you are new to the podcast, you probably don't want to

start here. If you only want to listen to one prerequisite, I'd go with Roger William saves Rhode Island

from September 2023.

I'll put a link in the show notes.

Kenneth W. Porter, writing in the New England Quarterly in 1934, said that Samuel Gorton could probably have boasted that he caused the ruling

element of the Massachusetts Bay colony more trouble over a greater period of time than any

other single colonists, not excluding those more famous heresiarks, Anne Hutchinson and

Roger Williams. As we shall see, he was charismatic, eloquent in speech, and often very funny in the

doing of it, although nobody much considered him a laugh riot at the time. Oh, and a heresiarc is the founder of a

heretical sect. I only learned that word in the last week, and already I hope to be one myself

someday. In that regard, you'll probably be relieved to hear that we're not actually going to go deep on

Gorton's theology or the several books he wrote.

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