#153 Roger Williams Saves Rhode Island Again!

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For more than twenty years, the Puritan colonies of New England – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven – would do their utmost to gain control of Rhode Island, Roger Williams’s refuge committed to “soul liberty.” They hated his nest of heretics on their border, and they coveted Rhode Island’s arable land. The Puritan New Englanders would try everything short of military conquest, from subversion, to legal and military attacks on the Narragansetts, Rhode Island’s closest indigenous allies, to political maneuvering in London. At every turn, Williams would outfox them, finally obtaining a charter from Charles II that definitively established absolute religious liberty in Rhode Island, and mandated a “democratical” form of government. Rhode Island under Williams would become the freest place in the English world, and Rhode Islanders would defend their freedoms even after Williams was no longer in their government.

This is that story.

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Selected references for this episode

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (Commission earned)

James A. Warren, God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England (Commission earned)

Joshua J. Monk, “Roger Williams’ A Letter to the Town of Providence”

Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “‘Naked as a sign’. How the Quakers invented nudity as a protest,” Clio. Women, Gender, History, June 2021.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 153.
0:11.4	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I am recording this episode on June 5th, 2024 in Austin, Texas.
0:20.6	We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States
0:24.6	from the beginning without intentional presentism. Last time we talked about Samuel Gorton,
0:32.0	perhaps in his own way, the most important figure in early Rhode Island after Roger Williams.
0:38.0	This episode will cover many of the same moments, but from the perspective of both Williams
0:43.2	and to some degree the tribes and the region, especially the Narragansets.
0:48.5	Once again, we'll drag you back to the big year of 1643, and we'll cover events critical to the region through the
0:56.6	Stewart Restoration into the 1660s. We're getting closer to the big conflicts of the 1670s,
1:03.2	including King Phillips War, but to understand those, I at least, need to get my arms around
1:09.7	Providence and Rhode Island during the crucial decades of the mid-17th century.
1:15.1	I'm not going to suggest a lot of prerequisites. This episode will go best if you've been following along in sequence.
1:22.5	But if you don't know the map of Rhode Island, reasonably well, you might pop open an app and take a look at it. Locate
1:29.1	Portsmouth, Newport, and Aquednic, Providence, Warwick, and the territory west of the Bay,
1:36.5	since they will all come up. The essential background is this. The United Colonies of New England,
1:47.1	consisting of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth,
1:53.9	Connecticut, and New Haven, really couldn't abide the continuing existence of Providence and Rhode Island in their midst. As I trust most of you know by now, there were two big reasons
2:00.6	for their fear and loathing of
2:02.8	Roger Williams' refuge for sole liberty.
2:06.7	The first was that it was precisely that, a haven for heretics right on their border, which
2:14.0	affronted the Puritans of the United Colonies who were deeply committed to theological conformity in New England.
2:20.9	And annoyed them no end that whenever they expelled a heretic, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, or Samuel Gorton, and so forth,
	...

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