Volume 1, Chapter 21, Suppressing Heresy, The Flight of Roger Williams
The Puritans in leaving England, the historian Thomas Jefferson Wharton Baker wrote, fled
not so much from persecution as from error. It was to build a rigorous theocracy free
from dissent that the Puritans built a colony in America, and yet a Protestant theocracy
must always suffer from a grave inner contradiction, for one significant tenet of Protestantism
is the individual's ability to interpret the Bible free of ecclesiastical dictates.
Although particular Protestant creeds may have no intention of countenancing or permitting
dissent, the Protestant stimulus to individual interpretation must inevitably provoke that
If the Puritans were so rigorous in suppressing idleness and frivolity on the Sabbath, we
can imagine their zeal in rooting out heresy. As the Reverend Uriah Oakes put it, the loud
outcry of some is for liberty of conscience. I look upon an unbounded toleration as the
and the firstborn of all abominations.
And the Reverend Thomas Shepard echoed that,
"'Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration.
The eminent Puritan Divine, John Norton, in the heart of New England rent,
thundered against liberty.
We both dread and bear witness against liberty of heresy.
It is a liberty to answer to the dictated error of conscience in walking contrary to rule.
It is a liberty to blaspheme, a liberty to seduce others from the true God, a liberty
to tell lies in the name of the Lord.
As for liberty of conscience, Norton speciously claimed to be upholding it, but not the liberty
of the error of conscience.
In short, people were to be free to believe what Norton wanted them to, but were not to
be free to differ.
As early as 1631, the Puritan authorities revealed their position on heresy.
In that year, Philip Ratcliffe was whipped, fined 40 shillings, had his ears cut off and
was banished for the high crime of uttering malicious and scandalous speeches against the
government and the church.
The first important case of heresy also came soon after the founding of the colony.
To Massachusetts in early 1631 came the young Reverend Roger Williams, who quickly refused
and the coveted appointment of teacher of the Boston Church.
An individualist and a fearless logician, Williams had concluded that the Puritan Church in Massachusetts,
being separatist de facto, should also be separatist de jure,
that is, should break openly from communion with the Church of England.
In short, he pursued the Puritan's logic further than they were willing to go
and thus embarrassed the Puritans a great deal.
Beginning with this dissent, Williams quickly went on to strike hammer blows
against the entire political structure of the colony.
First he proceeded to deny the right of the civil authority
to punish the infraction of religious rule or doctrine.
This struck at the entire theocratic principle
and the General Court of Massachusetts declared in reply
that it was clearly absurd to maintain that a church might run into heresy and yet the
civil magistrate could not intermeddle. To the Puritans this was clearly a puzzling and
astonishing doctrine. Williams now accepted appointment as teacher of the Salem Church,
but his appointment was overruled by the general court on account of Williams's separatist
views and his dedication to religious liberty. Williams thereupon moved to the fully separatist
Plymouth, where he became assistant to the Reverend Ralph Smith, who had also been ejected
from Salem for his pure separatist views. But Plymouth itself was becoming less separatist
and could not tolerate Williams' libertarianism. As a result, Williams accepted in late 1633
a second call from Salem to be a teacher of the church. There he joined the senior pastor,
Samuel Skelton in attacking the growing practice of ministers in holding
periodical joint discussions, a practice which they perceptively feared would grow
into a form of synodal quasi-presbyterian control over the individual
congregations. Only four years later Skelton and Williams were proved right by
the erection of a system of synods which also resulted in joint ministerial
and National Advice to the Civil Power.
Williams proceeded to strike another fundamental blow
at the social structure of Massachusetts Bay.
He denied the right of the king to make arbitrary grants
of the land of Massachusetts to the colonists.
The Indians, he maintained, properly owned the land
and therefore the settlers should purchase the land from them.
This doctrine attacked the entire quasi-feudal origin of American colonization in arbitrary land grants in the royal charters, and it also hit at the policy of ruthlessly expelling the Indians from their land.
William's, indeed, was the rare white colonist courageous enough to say that full title to the soil rested in the Indian natives, and that white title could only be validly obtained by purchase from its true owners.
The whites, charged Williams, lived under a sin of usurpation of others' possessions.
The denial of the king's right to grant title to land he did not justly own, of course,
hit directly at the basis of the Massachusetts Charter itself, which Williams argued the
colonists had a moral duty to turn from and renounce.
The infuriated authorities now moved in on Williams, charging him with subversive doctrine.
Bowing to force majeure, Williams recanted and offered to burn the tract expressing his
dissenting views. But Williams was too much a man of principle to be suppressed for long,
and by late 1634, news reached Boston that Williams was repeating his old subversive
doctrines as well as adding the purest religious deviation from Puritan orthodoxy that oaths
should not be administered by magistrates to unregenerate sinners. Williams also denounced
the loyalty oaths coerced upon the mass of non-freeman residents of the colony in April
1634 as blasphemous. He refused to subscribe to the oath and urged his congregation to
do the same. Williams did this despite the punishment for refusal having been announced
A crackdown by the Massachusetts authorities was precipitated by Salem Church's appointing
Williams as its chief minister in place of the deceased skeleton.
The Massachusetts authorities now unanimously condemned Williams's views as erroneous and
very dangerous, and denounced Salem's action as a great contempt of authority.
The Massachusetts clergy recommended to the General Court that this dangerous advocate
of religious liberty be removed.
Hauled into General Court in July 1635, Williams now remained adamant, even after several confrontations
with Church authorities.
The General Court now openly moved to undermine Williams with his home base at Salem, punishing
Salem Church struck back with an indignation meeting which sent letters to the congregations
of the other churches of the colony urging them to admonish the magistrates and deputies
for their highness' sin.
The elders of the other churches made certain to suppress any potential upsurge of popular
Roger Williams' fearless spirit, the logic of Protestantism, and the dynamics of the conflict itself drove Roger Williams to the ultimate conclusion of separatism, calling upon Salem to
The fearless spirit, the logic of Protestantism and the dynamics of the conflict itself drove Roger Williams to the ultimate conclusion of separatism, calling upon Salem Church to separate clearly from the other churches of the colony as well as from the Church of England.
This was the straw that broke the Massachusetts camel's back.
The spirit and oligarchy now brandished its temporal sword, sending to Salem its model of church and civil power.
The model gave grave warning that the civil magistrates would strike down any corrupt or schismatic church.
Independent churches would be suppressed. Religious toleration could only end by dissolving the state as well as the church.
In September, the civil power followed this by subduing Salem.
The General Court expelled the Salem deputies and reiterated its refusal to grant the town's
land claims.
The assistant ruling Salem, John Endicott, defended the Salem Church but was promptly
imprisoned until he recanted and was discharged.
Under the severest pressure by the Puritan oligarchy, the majority of Salem Church, as
As Williams was later to write, was swayed and bowed, whether for fear of persecution
or otherwise, to say and practice what, to my knowledge, many of them mourned under.
With Salem brought to heel, it now remained only to suppress the isolated Roger Williams
himself.
Yet, when brought again into general court in October 1635, Williams stoutly maintained
all of his heretical and libertarian opinions. He refused to recant, even when forced to
debate with the Reverend Thomas Hooker, a leading Puritan divine. Thereupon the general
court ordered Williams expelled from the colony within six weeks. The sentence of banishment
declared, whereas Mr. Roger Williams hath broached and divulged diverse, new and dangerous
The court agreed to extend the deadline for Williams' banishment, provided that he would not go about to draw others to his opinions, but the authorities were chagrined to find a solution.
and that even Williams in private was having a subversive effect, while Salem bowed reluctantly
to the decision of the authorities and received the marble headland in return. Williams himself
separated from the Salem Church and others were moved to do the same. Over twenty Salem
families now prepared to follow Williams southward into exile and there build a haven of religious
and Liberty. With the disappearance of the Council for New England in 1635, Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were both virtually self-governing. And what is more, the land south of the Massachusetts Grand and west of Plymouth became a tempting vacuum, not having been parceled out to any person or group. It was in this free area that Williams now prepared to found a new colony. The Massachusetts authorities were
greatly dismayed because they had expected that Williams would be forced back to England.
It was not enough to oust Williams forcibly from the land area assigned to Massachusetts.
Should he merely move southward, there would still be a danger that, in the words of Governor
John Winthrop, the infection would easily spread to Massachusetts Bay.
The general court hastily sent a ship to Salem to arrest Williams and send him speedily back
to England. But Williams bested his persecutors and fled alone into the wilderness. He trudged
south through the snow and spent the winter among the Friendly Narragansett Indians.
In the spring Williams was joined by four friends and they proceeded to the northern
tip of Narragansett Bay where they founded the settlement of Seekonk. There they were
William's travel had scarcely ended, however. Soon, the governor of Plymouth Colony wrote to Williams regretfully advising him that Seekonk was still inside the Plymouth boundaries and that Plymouth could not dare displease Massachusetts by allowing the little band to remain. So Williams was now banished from Plymouth as well, and the purchase of Plymouth was not enough.
Providence of the Seekonk land from the Indians, the clearing of land and the planting of crops
had all been in vain.
Moving west across the Seekonk River, Williams left the jurisdiction of Plymouth and founded
the settlement of Providence.
In Providence plantations, Williams and the others scrupulously purchased the land from
the Indians and determined to allow religious liberty in their new and spontaneously formed
How Roger Williams was regarded by the frightened Puritan oligarchs of Massachusetts Bay may be seen from the historical account of the Reverend Cotton Mather, one of the main leaders of the later generation of Puritan divines.
There was a whole country in America liked to be set on fire by the rapid motion of a windmill in the head of one particular man, Roger Williams.
And Mathur realized that Williams's doctrines were aimed at the whole political as well as the ecclesiastical constitution of the country.
The reaction of the Massachusetts authorities to Williams's flight was to step up their persecution of Salem separatism.
All meetings of separatists were now outlawed.
Williams' views, at least in these early days of his career, were notably libertarian, especially in contrast to those of other Americans of his time.
But it must be recognized that Williams emerged as an embattled leader within the context of a Puritan and dissenter movement in England,
which in the 1630s and 1640s was rapidly becoming radicalized and increasingly libertarian.
The libertarian movement reached its culmination and was not to reach the same height again for well over a century in the leveler movement of the 1640s.
Williams himself had participated in the emerging Puritan cause.
A protege of the great liberal jurist, Sir Edward Koch,
Williams owned opinions that had brought him into conflict
with the ultra-Anglican and minion of the stewards, Archbishop Laud.
Williams thus received his early ideological training in the liberal dissenter movement.
Free and safe in a providence enjoying religious liberty
and Separation of Church and State. Roger Williams was later able to elaborate on his doctrines of religious liberty. His most famous theoretical work, The Bloody Tenant of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience Disgust, appeared in 1644. A sequel, The Bloody Tenant, yet more bloody, rebutting the reply of the leading Massachusetts divine, Reverend John Cotton, appeared eight years later.
Compulsory religion, Williams pointed out, violated the Christian tenet of love, and by ravishing and forcing souls and consciences led to hypocrisy for fear of state punishment.
Coerced religion, Williams declared, leads to sex, slaughtering each other for their several respective religions and consciences.
Again, unusual for his time, Williams insisted that not only Protestants, but all religions must be completely free, including the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships.
He added, To molest any person, Jew or Gentile, for either professing doctrines or practicing worship, is to persecute him in such a person, whatever his doctrine or practice be true or false, suffereth persecutionivid for conscience.
And this man of courage and principle nobly proclaimed the importance of cleaving to truth.
We must not let go for all the fleabidings of the present afflictions, having bought truth,
dear, we must not sell it cheap, not the least grain of it for the whole world, least of
all for the little puff of credit and reputation from the changeable breath of uncertain sons
of men. While Williams's heart was in the right place in insisting on purchasing all
While the Indians were certainly entitled to the land they cultivated, they also, one, laid claim to vast reaches of land which they hunted, but which they did not transform by cultivation, and, two, owned the land not as individual Indians, but as collective tribal landowners.
In many cases, the Indian tribes could not alienate or sell the lands, but only lease the use of their ancestral domains.
As a result, the Indians also lived under a collectivist regime that, for land allocation, was scarcely more just than the English governmental land grab against which Williams was properly rebelling.
Rebelling. Under both regimes, the actual settler, the first transformer of the land,
whether white or Indian, had to fight his way past a nest of arbitrary land claims by
others, and pay their exactions until he could formally own the land.
Williams, always a friend of the Indians, bought from the saccoms, or chiefs, a grant
of the large amount of land called the Providence Purchase.
Williams then donated the land to a town fellowship, a joint property held equally by himself and
five of his followers. The fellowship shortly enlarged to thirteen. As long as only the
original settlers lived in Providence, all was peaceful, and virtually no government arose
at all. As Williams described it, the masters of families have ordinarily met once a fortnight
and consulted about our common piece, watch and plenty, and mutual consent have finished
all matters of speed and pace. But it was inevitable that new settlers would come, and
then that the arbitrary nature of the land allocation should give rise to conflict. Indeed,
recriminations and tensions rapidly developed. Not realizing the inherent injustice of any
William's naturally believed he had acted generously in giving the land to the Fellowship, but the later settlers, forced to purchase the land from the Fellowship, properly resented this feudalistic proprietary.
The Fellowship, later enlarged to 54, assigned 11 acres to each member, plus the right to
an additional 100 acres apiece.
In this way, some of the land passed quickly to the individual members of the Fellowship.
If their acreage was not in precise proportion to the degree of settlement, at least this
land was now in the hands of its just owners, the individual settlers.
But unfortunately, the great bulk of the Providence Tract still remained in the hands of the collective Fellowship Proprietary, and in 1640 the Fellowship moved to formalize its claim and to establish a proprietary oligarchy over future settlers.
In that year, the fellowship drew up a plantation agreement at Providence and appointed a board of five disposers that would take charge of disposing of the land, managing the land held in common, and passing judgment on the qualification of new settlers.
Taught little humility by their own sufferings, the disposers tended to be rigorous in their judgments.
Before a man was permitted to settle and buy land in Providence, even the land of an individual
settler willing to sell, the fellowship had to approve, and a veto by one fellow was sufficient
to bar the newcomer.
The original fellows soon admitted more members, but the number of fellows never exceeded 101,
and the later members received only 25, rather than 100 acres of collectively owned land.
Positions in the fellowship descended to the heirs of the original members. The other settlers, who were permitted to become landowners in Providence, were excluded from the select circle of the fellowship proprietary, which thus controlled the land and government. The fellowship kept a sharp check on its five disposers, but this hardly made the government of Providence less oligarchal. The most oligarchic feature of the plantation agreement dealt
with Potuxet, a tract of land immediately south of Providence. Potuxet had been purchased
from Indian Sagams in the spring of 1638 and turned over by Williams to the Fellows, then
numbering 13. Overriding Williams's wishes, the Fellows, led by William Arnold and William
Harris, decided in October of 1638, eventually, to divide the Potuxet lands among themselves,
without even providing for any new settlers. The agreement of 1640 confirmed Patuxent as
a closed proprietorship. Roger Williams carried his principles of religious liberty into practice.
There was no state church and no one was forced to attend church. Williams himself was to
change his religious views several times, becoming a Baptist for a few months and then
in ending as a seeker who held to no fixed creed.
Liberty has its own inner logic, and so Williams's religious liberty in Providence extended also
to women. One of Williams's Salem adherents who had followed him to Providence, Joshua
Varon, tasting the heady wine of religious liberty, grew disenchanted with Williams's
sermon and stopped attending church. This was perfectly legitimate in his newfound home.
But Varin went so far as to prevent his wife from attending, even beating her to prevent
her from going.
Varin was therefore disfranchised by Providence in the spring of 1638 for restraining his
wife's conscience.
He soon returned to Salem, where he could again exercise the Puritan role of despotic
painter familias.
The logic of liberty had, as we shall see, even more drastic implications. For, as some
citizens of Providence began to reason, if the conscience of the individual was to be
supreme in religious matters, if the state was to have no power to interfere with any
actions determined by his religious conscience, why shouldn't his liberty extend to civil
All matters as well. Why shouldn't the individual's conscience reign supreme in all civil as well
as religious affairs?