Volume 1, Chapter 24, Rhode Island in the 1650s, Roger Williams's Shift from Liberty
With Williams gone to England, William Coddington discovered that it was not easy to impose absolute
feudal rule upon a free people. The citizens of Aquidneck, led by Captain Richard Morris
Thomas and Nicholas Easton launched an armed revolt against Coddington in early 1652, threatening
him and ordering his feudal court to disperse. Coddington, searching for yet another imperial
armed force that he could rule and hide behind, turned in desperation to the Dutch, asking
vainly for a troop of New Netherland soldiers to suppress the revolt. When Coddington's
When Chief Aide, Captain Partridge, seized the home of one of the citizens to enforce a Codetonian court order, the enraged populace rose up, occupied the house, and hung the captain then and there.
The voice of the people had been heard, and Coddington, speedily taking the lesson to heart, reversed New England custom by fleeing to Massachusetts.
In the meantime, Williams and Clark easily convinced the English government of the spuriousness of Coddington's claim and obtained an order vacating the Coddington Charter.
Soon William Dyer returned to Coddington from England with the good news.
The Coddington Threat was finally over.
Williams arrived in England at the moment of Puritan victory and at the peak of the revolutionary intellectual ferment.
The great libertarian Leveller movement was at the peak of its influence, and religious freedom had given rise to many diverse and enthusiastic sects.
Williams plunged again into intimate association with such liberal Puritan leaders as Sir Henry
Vane and John Milton. The upsurge of libertarian views had led to a polarization of ideas among
the Puritans, a polarization accelerated by the disruption that always follows the victory
of a revolutionary coalition. The Orthodox Puritans, or independents, headed by the Reverend
and John Owen began to move toward a new state church of their own and toward the suppression
of other religious views. The liberal wing of the Puritans including Vane and Milton
moved in to battle this essentially counter-revolutionary trend and Williams enthusiastically joined
in this struggle. Eight years before, Williams' bloody tenet had been ordered burnt by the
The Presbyterians then in control of Parliament. Now his writings in behalf of religious liberty
received great acclaim in Parliament and in the victorious New Model Army. This was especially
true of his published reply to the Reverend John Cotton's attack on the Bloody Tenant.
Williams's rebuttal was The Bloody Tenant Yet More Bloody, in which he denounced Massachusetts'
William's also proceeded to a keen attack on the Massachusetts oligarchy. A forced payment of tithes created a church leadership, rich and lordly, pompous and princely, and gave it a monopoly on public office. Wasn't the insistence on compulsory church attendance a reflection of the fear of the rulers that, given a free choice, people's attendance
Williams pointed also to Holland's commercial greatness, continuing side by side with its practice of religious toleration, and he warned prophetically that the Irish question would never be settled so long as the laws persecuting Roman Catholics remained.
and only full religious freedom, free conferrings, disputings and preachings could reduce civil
strife and bloodshed.
Williams even pressed on from his insight into religious liberty to a much wider politico-economic
libertarian view.
The kings of the earth, he declared, used power over the bodies and goods of their subjects
but for the filling of their ponches like wolves. These rulers, employing civil arms
and forces to the utmost, pressed for universal conquest to establish rule and dominion over
all the nations of the earth. But on the contrary, government's proper function is to secure
to each individual his natural and civil rights and liberties due to him as a man, a subject
Project, a Citizen. In another tract written in that exhilarating spring of 1652, hyraling
ministry none of Christ. Williams defended the idea of voluntary rather than compulsory
donations to churches. He also declared, I desire not that liberty to myself, which I
which I would not freely and impartially weigh out to all the consciences of the world beside.
Government's absolute duty was to ensure absolute freedom for each religious group.
Williams's new writings had a two-fold thrust and purpose,
to advance the cause of Rhode Island liberty against Massachusetts,
and at the same time to wage the good and general fight for liberty against tyranny
in England itself. The major complementary tract setting forth a specific case for Rhode Island, as well as a Baptist defense of religious liberty, was John Clarke's newly published Ill News from New England.
Although Williams and Clarke had no difficulty disposing of Coddington's claims, the larger problem of Rhode Island vis-à-vis Massachusetts was far more difficult.
For the crucial decision on which way the Puritan Revolution would turn rested not with Williams's friends, but with Oliver Cromwell, head of the New Model Army, and a centrist torn between the flaming principles of the liberals and a conservative yearning by orthodox independents and Presbyterians for a swing back to statism.
Cromwell, furthermore, was friendly with the oligarchs of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay,
as well as with Roger Williams. Moreover, the protector was, fatefully, balking increasingly
at the obvious next task of the revolution, the smashing of feudal landholding. The libertarian
groundswell of the revolution could not be sustained unless the feudal oligarchy was
was dispossessed of political power as well as of its restrictive hold of the land of
England created by that power and on which that power was now based.
Events moved swiftly as happens in revolutionary situations and by May 1653 Cromwell had made
his fateful decision for the landed oligarchy, for statism and for counter revolution.
Parliament was forcibly dissolved and military dictatorship assumed by Cromwell. The great
leveler leader John Lilburn was jailed for his libertarian views and the leveler movement
broken up. Only the courageous Sir Henry Vane continued to cry out in protest, charging
that Cromwell was plucking up liberty by its very roots. Williams, too, joined Vane in
and opposition, at least privately denouncing the protector as a usurper and also attacking
Cromwell's aggressive imperialism, typified by his war against the Dutch. Proceeding skillfully,
however, Williams was able to procure an at least tentative confirmation by the English
government of Rhode Island's charter claims. Short of funds and discouraged by the new
In a new turn on the English scene, and spurred by the turmoil in Rhode Island, Williams returned
home in the summer of 1654, leaving John Clark in London to continue the negotiations.
Williams arrived to find a highly troubled colony. In particular, his beloved Providence
was again in great danger. William Cottington had been successfully overthrown, but this
This by no means ended trouble from Aquidnick. Instead, the Aquidnick government, headed
by William Dyer and including Nicholas Easton, had embarked on an aggressive, imperialist
course of its own. It had launched piratical attacks on the Dutch of New Leatherland and
simultaneously, in spring 1653, combined with a minority of Providence Warwick people to
to claim that theirs was the true government of the Rhode Island colony.
The Providence Warwick government had protested and charged that a quidnick aggression against
the Dutch would set all New England on fire.
At the same time, the Patuxet oligarchy again refused to pay taxes to Providence and once
Once again, Massachusetts threatened armed intervention and prevented Providence from
pressing its claim. Any lesser man than the great founder of Rhode Island would have been
discouraged enough to give up. For almost two decades, Roger Williams had fought for
individual liberty in England, in New England, and especially for his Rhode Island. And now
England was retrogressing and Rhode Island was rent in civil strife. But the great peacemaker,
who had conciliated so many disputes and conflicts with the Indians, now used his powerful influence
to bring the various factions into conciliatory negotiations. Rational persuasion and not
Wims' main task was to bring into the negotiations a reluctant providence, disgusted by the piracy
conducted by the dire Eastern rulers of Aquidneck against the Dutch.
Finally, each of the four towns agreed to choose six commissioners for conciliation
Conference, which met at Warwick at the end of August 1654. The decision of the conference
was at once a victory for Williams and unity, and a complete defeat for the East and Dyer
faction. Reunion of the Rhode Island colony was achieved, and all the laws of Equidnick,
since the Coddington usurpation, were eliminated, thus restoring the old pre-Coddington dispensation
to the Colony. Cottington himself formally submitted to Rhode Island authority two years
later. Roger Williams was then elected president of the reunited colony. Even the Potuxet troubles
were finally fading. Benedict Arnold, son of William and leader of the Potuxet oligarchy,
finally abandoned the oligarchy's long search for outside armed intervention, renounced
First Massachusetts submitted himself to Rhode Island and moved from Patuxet to Newport.
However, the actual reunion of the rest of the colony with Patuxet did not take place
for five more years.
A year later, 1655, Oliver Cromwell greatly helped settle the outstanding issues by sending
a formal message to Rhode Island confirming its right to self-government under the Charter
On this happy event, Williams wrote to Vane on behalf of the town of Providence. Vane
had written to Rhode Island wondering why the colonists had fallen into such disorder.
Williams replied for Providence that Rhode Island has long drunk of the cup of as great
liberties as any people that we hear of under the whole heaven. Possibly this sweet cup
Hopp hath rendered many of us wanton and too active.
Rhode Island, Williams pointed out, had been spared the Civil War of England, the iron
yoke of wolfish bishops and the new chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor in this colony
have we been consumed with the overzealous fire of the so-called godly Christian magistrates.
Williams expanded this recital of Rhode Island liberties to include the political and economic.
Sir, we have not known what an excise means. We have almost forgotten what tithes are,
yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth.
It was at this very moment, the moment of triumph, that Roger Williams made a radical
and fateful shift in his thinking and actions. From a fighter for liberty, Williams suddenly
became a statist and an invader of liberty.
From a devoted advocate of freedom of conscience, Williams became himself a persecutor of that
very conscience.
What was the reason or reasons for this sudden turnabout, this betrayal of the causes for
which Roger Williams had so long devoted his very life?
No historian can ever look completely into the soul of another man, but he can make some
judicious estimates. We may note several probable reasons for the shift.
First, there is the subtle corruption wrought by power, even upon the staunchest libertarian.
In the last analysis, power and liberty are totally incompatible, and when one gains the
The heroic fighter for liberty, out of power, is often tempted, once the reins of command
are in his hands, to rationalize that now order must be imposed by him, that excessive
liberty must be checked by him. Williams had been president of Rhode Island only once before,
in the 1644-47 period, when there was hardly any government in the colony.
As soon as the colony was formally organized in 1647, Williams had been happy to retire
to the private life of a successful fur trader.
He had then only emerged from private life to go to England to save the colony.
It was only now, in effect, that he was assuming the political post of head of Rhode Island.
A second reason was the coinciding theoretical error that Williams had made in his letter
too vain, that what Rhode Island had been suffering from was an excess of liberty. The
sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton. On the contrary, the conflicts in Rhode Island
had been caused not by too much liberty, but by too little. The land monopoly and the treachery
of the Patuxent oligarchs, the Coddington attempt to impose feudal rule, the continuing
imperialist pressure of Massachusetts and the United Colonies. It had only been the
remarkable sturdiness of the libertarian tradition in Rhode Island that had kept the colony free
despite all these dangers. And it had enabled it to escape them at last. And the thought
and life of Roger Williams had been perhaps the chief ingredient in that tradition. But
that great tradition, strong enough to surmount other periods, was not strong enough to survive
its betrayal by its own leading architect.
A third reason for Williams's shift was undoubtedly his discouragement at the retrogression of
William's had been one of the great lights of that movement, and it, in turn, had inspired and nourished him in the 1630s, the 1640s, and on his last visit to England.
But then it had been an exciting, rising movement. Now, because of Cromwell's betrayal, it was rapidly losing heart and being put to route.
Was the now aging Williams strong enough to keep his convictions at the same burning pitch?
Was he strong enough to resist all the temptations to follow the Cromwellian path? Evidently,
the answer is no. We may consider also Williams's earlier lapse from the libertarian principle
in the days of the Gorton persecution, and Williams's eventual siding with the Patuxet
Faction to Expel Gorton from Providence. Purity of Principle had been cast aside even then,
and this indicates a fourth contributory reason for Williams's change of heart, a tendency
to react testily when people more radically individualist than himself appeared upon the
William's shift from liberty to tyranny was first revealed sharply and startlingly in his
imposing upon the people of Rhode Island compulsory military service.
The other colonies underwent conscription, but this was a strong blow to the libertarian
movement of Rhode Island, driving through a compulsory militia bill in the selection
and Military Officers in a Providence town meeting, Williams precipitated vehement opposition.
The leaders of this libertarian opposition were the Baptist, who denounced the bearing
of arms as unchristian and conscription as an invasion of religious liberty and of the
natural rights of the individual. This opposition was itself radicalized by the crisis precipitated
by Williams and the logic of the pacifist opposition to conscription and arms-bearing
led them straight to the ne plus ultra of libertarianism, individualist anarchism.
The opposition, led by Reverend Thomas Olney, former Baptist minister at Providence, William
Harris, John Field, John Throckmorton and Williams' own brother Robert, circulated a
The petition charging that it was blood-guiltiness and against the rule of the gospel to execute
judgment upon transgressors, against the private or public wheel.
In short, government itself was anti-Christian.
The emergence of William Harris as an anarchist was a particularly striking phenomenon.
This conscientious man, who had been one of the original few to accompany Williams to
to Providence and had then joined the Patuxet Oligarchy, had been suddenly aroused by William
Arnold. Harris had been one of the victims of Arnold's attempted land grab under the
aegis of Massachusetts. Apparently this sobering experience of how the state can be used to
oppress as well as to confer privileges, added to his disfranchisement by Providence a dozen
Roger Williams bitterly condemned the tumult and disturbance caused by the anarchist petition,
conveniently failing to place any blame for the tumult on his original imposition of conscription.
And Williams sneered at the pretense that arms-bearing violated the petitioner's conscience.
He then came up with a famous analogy to support his newfound statist philosophy.
He likened human society to a ship on which all people were passengers.
All may worship as they please, he graciously declaimed, but none is to be allowed to defy
The Common Laws and Orders of the Ship Concerning Their Common Peace or Preservation
And if any should mutiny against their officers or preacher write that there ought to be no
commanders or officers because all are equal in Christ, therefore no masters, nor officers,
nor laws, nor orders, no corrections, nor punishments, the commanders may judge, resist,
In short, not only were mutinous actions to be punished by the state, but even the very advocacy of anarchist principles.
Wims's analogy was superficially attractive, but of dubious relevance.
If society inhabits a ship and must obey its officers, who are the owners of the social ship?
What gives one set of men in a country the right to claim ownership of that country and the people in it,
and therefore the right to command and force others to obey?
These were questions that Williams never bothered to raise, let alone answer.
He might also have pondered in what way individual persons pursuing their separate ways on land were in any way comparable to a ship, and a single ship at that, which has to go in one direction at a time. Why must everyone be on one ship?
Williams' pronouncement did not convince the opposition either.
The anarchists rose in rebellion against Williams' government, but were put down by force.
Despite this failure, at the 1655 elections a few months later, at which Williams was re-elected president,
Thomas Olney was elected an assistant and was seated even though he had participated in the uprising.
Williams now began a systematic campaign of statism in the colony.
The central government was aggrandized at the expense of the home rule rights of the towns.
In May 1655, the assembly decided to bypass its financial dependence on funds raised by the towns
and to appoint officials to levy general taxes directly on the people.
The following year it was decreed that no laws of the colony may be obstructed or neglected under pretense of any authority of any of the town charters.
Williams also moved to stiffen the laws against immorality.
The assembly decreed the compulsory licensing of liquor dealers and an excise tax on liquor.
Sales of spirits to Indians were restricted severely.
Punishments were intensified.
The four towns had, until then, failed to provide prisons or stocks, so little was the need and so pervasive the spirit of freedom.
But the colonial assembly now moved to fill this gap and also to outlaw verbal incivilities, which were to be punished by the stocks or payment of a fine.
Adultery, which had not been subject to express penalty in the Code of 1647, was now to be punished by whipping and a fine.
and a fine. Corporal punishment was to be levied for loose living, and masters were
to be held responsible for the licentious careers of servants or minor sons. On the
other hand, divorce laws were liberalized to allow for divorce for reasons of incompatibility.
It is clear that a large part of the motivation for the new statist trend was a desire to
Curry Favor with Cromwell. It was shortly after receipt of Cromwell's official reconfirmation
of Rhode Island's charter in June 1655 that the assembly passed the law against loose
living on information that Cromwell was restive at the state of morality in the colony. Furthermore,
Cromwell in his message had ordered Rhode Island to provide against intestine commotions.
The colony swiftly passed a law against ringleaders of factions, providing that such ringleaders,
when found guilty by the general court, were to be sent to England for trial. Here was
the fulfillment of the ominous hints of Williams's ship analogy.
But Baptist anarchism continued to multiply in Rhode Island. One of the new adherents
This was none other than Catherine Scott, the leading Baptist minister and a sister of Anne Hutchinson.
Anne Hutchinson's lone pioneering in philosophical anarchism before her death had planted a seed that came to fruition a decade and a half later.
Also adopting anarchism were Rebecca Throckmorton, Robert West, and Anne Williams, wife of Roger's brother, Robert.
Catherine Scott and Rebecca Throckmorton were soon to espouse the Quaker faith.
Finally, in March 1657, the crackdown arrived and the four individualists were summoned into court by Williams as being common opposers of all authority.
Williams relented after this public intimidation, however, and the charges were dismissed.
Meanwhile, Williams's relations with Patuxet had undergone a subtle but significant change.
A former aggressor that many times had called on Massachusetts to crush the colony, Patuxet now became a relative island of liberty, resisting encroachment from Providence.
Apart from its oligarchy and land, Patuxet had managed to avoid paying taxes either to
Rhode Island or to Massachusetts Bay, and was content to live in liberty from immorality
laws or from laws against trading with the Indians. It was now Williams who began to
agitate aggressively for a joint Massachusetts-Providence suppression of Patuxian liberties and for
for the Forcible End to Patuxent Secession.
This entire Patuxent experience with governments served to confirm William Harris in his anarchism
and also to embitter Williams against Harris more than against his fellows.
Harris was particularly vehement in opposition to taxation, all taxation, and circulated
Harris predicted to all the towns a manuscript denouncing all civil government and urged the people to cry out no lords, no masters.
Harris predicted that the state, the House of Saul, would inevitably grow weaker and weaker, whereas the House of David, Harris and his followers, would grow stronger and stronger.
Harris also condemned all punishments and prisons, all officials and legislative assemblies.
William Harris was now hauled into court, charged with open defiance under his hand against our Charter, all our laws, Parliament, the Lord Protector and all government.
Harris, instead of quieting down under the intimidation as had Mrs. Scott and the others,
swore that he would continue to maintain his anarchism with his blood.
Persistently refusing to recant, Harris repeated his interpretation of scripture that he that
can say it is his conscience ought not to yield subjection to any human order amongst
The General Court found that Harris was guilty of being contemptuous and seditious, and he
and his son were heavily bonded for 500 pounds.
The evidence was sent to England in preparation for a trial there for treason.
The treason trial never materialized, but only because the ship carrying the evidence
to England was lost at sea.
Harris was finally sufficiently cowed, however, to abandon his anarchism and he turned instead
to a lifelong harassment of the hated Roger Williams through litigation of land claims.
Williams retired from the presidency in 1657 and a year later Patuxet was reunited with
and the rest of the colony.