WEBVTT NOTE 24. Rhode Island in the 1650s: Roger Williams' Shift from Liberty 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.320 Volume 1, Chapter 24, Rhode Island in the 1650s, Roger Williams's Shift from Liberty 2 00:00:10.320 --> 00:00:16.320 With Williams gone to England, William Coddington discovered that it was not easy to impose absolute 3 00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:22.600 feudal rule upon a free people. The citizens of Aquidneck, led by Captain Richard Morris 4 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:30.240 Thomas and Nicholas Easton launched an armed revolt against Coddington in early 1652, threatening 5 00:00:30.240 --> 00:00:37.160 him and ordering his feudal court to disperse. Coddington, searching for yet another imperial 6 00:00:37.160 --> 00:00:43.640 armed force that he could rule and hide behind, turned in desperation to the Dutch, asking 7 00:00:43.640 --> 00:00:49.840 vainly for a troop of New Netherland soldiers to suppress the revolt. When Coddington's 8 00:00:49.840 --> 00:01:04.840 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. 9 00:01:04.840 --> 00:01:15.840 The voice of the people had been heard, and Coddington, speedily taking the lesson to heart, reversed New England custom by fleeing to Massachusetts. 10 00:01:15.840 --> 00:01:39.840 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. 11 00:01:39.840 --> 00:01:44.840 Soon William Dyer returned to Coddington from England with the good news. 12 00:01:44.840 --> 00:01:48.840 The Coddington Threat was finally over. 13 00:01:48.840 --> 00:01:56.840 Williams arrived in England at the moment of Puritan victory and at the peak of the revolutionary intellectual ferment. 14 00:01:56.840 --> 00:02:08.840 The great libertarian Leveller movement was at the peak of its influence, and religious freedom had given rise to many diverse and enthusiastic sects. 15 00:02:08.840 --> 00:02:15.440 Williams plunged again into intimate association with such liberal Puritan leaders as Sir Henry 16 00:02:15.440 --> 00:02:23.480 Vane and John Milton. The upsurge of libertarian views had led to a polarization of ideas among 17 00:02:23.480 --> 00:02:29.920 the Puritans, a polarization accelerated by the disruption that always follows the victory 18 00:02:29.920 --> 00:02:37.120 of a revolutionary coalition. The Orthodox Puritans, or independents, headed by the Reverend 19 00:02:37.120 --> 00:02:44.000 and John Owen began to move toward a new state church of their own and toward the suppression 20 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:50.400 of other religious views. The liberal wing of the Puritans including Vane and Milton 21 00:02:50.400 --> 00:02:57.640 moved in to battle this essentially counter-revolutionary trend and Williams enthusiastically joined 22 00:02:57.640 --> 00:03:05.120 in this struggle. Eight years before, Williams' bloody tenet had been ordered burnt by the 23 00:03:05.120 --> 00:03:11.160 The Presbyterians then in control of Parliament. Now his writings in behalf of religious liberty 24 00:03:11.160 --> 00:03:18.300 received great acclaim in Parliament and in the victorious New Model Army. This was especially 25 00:03:18.300 --> 00:03:24.560 true of his published reply to the Reverend John Cotton's attack on the Bloody Tenant. 26 00:03:24.560 --> 00:03:31.560 Williams's rebuttal was The Bloody Tenant Yet More Bloody, in which he denounced Massachusetts' 27 00:03:31.560 --> 00:04:01.560 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 28 00:04:01.560 --> 00:04:22.560 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. 29 00:04:22.560 --> 00:04:30.200 and only full religious freedom, free conferrings, disputings and preachings could reduce civil 30 00:04:30.200 --> 00:04:32.920 strife and bloodshed. 31 00:04:32.920 --> 00:04:39.560 Williams even pressed on from his insight into religious liberty to a much wider politico-economic 32 00:04:39.560 --> 00:04:41.680 libertarian view. 33 00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:48.320 The kings of the earth, he declared, used power over the bodies and goods of their subjects 34 00:04:48.320 --> 00:04:56.280 but for the filling of their ponches like wolves. These rulers, employing civil arms 35 00:04:56.280 --> 00:05:03.760 and forces to the utmost, pressed for universal conquest to establish rule and dominion over 36 00:05:03.760 --> 00:05:10.760 all the nations of the earth. But on the contrary, government's proper function is to secure 37 00:05:10.760 --> 00:05:17.760 to each individual his natural and civil rights and liberties due to him as a man, a subject 38 00:05:18.320 --> 00:05:27.040 Project, a Citizen. In another tract written in that exhilarating spring of 1652, hyraling 39 00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:34.400 ministry none of Christ. Williams defended the idea of voluntary rather than compulsory 40 00:05:34.400 --> 00:05:42.280 donations to churches. He also declared, I desire not that liberty to myself, which I 41 00:05:42.280 --> 00:05:49.280 which I would not freely and impartially weigh out to all the consciences of the world beside. 42 00:05:49.920 --> 00:05:56.920 Government's absolute duty was to ensure absolute freedom for each religious group. 43 00:05:56.920 --> 00:06:01.160 Williams's new writings had a two-fold thrust and purpose, 44 00:06:01.160 --> 00:06:06.100 to advance the cause of Rhode Island liberty against Massachusetts, 45 00:06:06.100 --> 00:06:11.040 and at the same time to wage the good and general fight for liberty against tyranny 46 00:06:11.040 --> 00:06:27.040 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. 47 00:06:27.040 --> 00:06:39.040 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. 48 00:06:39.040 --> 00:07:04.040 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. 49 00:07:04.040 --> 00:07:09.680 Cromwell, furthermore, was friendly with the oligarchs of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, 50 00:07:09.680 --> 00:07:16.200 as well as with Roger Williams. Moreover, the protector was, fatefully, balking increasingly 51 00:07:16.200 --> 00:07:24.120 at the obvious next task of the revolution, the smashing of feudal landholding. The libertarian 52 00:07:24.120 --> 00:07:29.420 groundswell of the revolution could not be sustained unless the feudal oligarchy was 53 00:07:29.420 --> 00:07:35.620 was dispossessed of political power as well as of its restrictive hold of the land of 54 00:07:35.620 --> 00:07:42.220 England created by that power and on which that power was now based. 55 00:07:42.220 --> 00:07:49.220 Events moved swiftly as happens in revolutionary situations and by May 1653 Cromwell had made 56 00:07:50.140 --> 00:07:57.140 his fateful decision for the landed oligarchy, for statism and for counter revolution. 57 00:07:57.140 --> 00:08:04.820 Parliament was forcibly dissolved and military dictatorship assumed by Cromwell. The great 58 00:08:04.820 --> 00:08:11.460 leveler leader John Lilburn was jailed for his libertarian views and the leveler movement 59 00:08:11.460 --> 00:08:17.560 broken up. Only the courageous Sir Henry Vane continued to cry out in protest, charging 60 00:08:17.560 --> 00:08:23.360 that Cromwell was plucking up liberty by its very roots. Williams, too, joined Vane in 61 00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:29.120 and opposition, at least privately denouncing the protector as a usurper and also attacking 62 00:08:29.120 --> 00:08:36.680 Cromwell's aggressive imperialism, typified by his war against the Dutch. Proceeding skillfully, 63 00:08:36.680 --> 00:08:43.540 however, Williams was able to procure an at least tentative confirmation by the English 64 00:08:43.540 --> 00:08:49.680 government of Rhode Island's charter claims. Short of funds and discouraged by the new 65 00:08:49.680 --> 00:08:55.200 In a new turn on the English scene, and spurred by the turmoil in Rhode Island, Williams returned 66 00:08:55.200 --> 00:09:03.760 home in the summer of 1654, leaving John Clark in London to continue the negotiations. 67 00:09:03.760 --> 00:09:09.520 Williams arrived to find a highly troubled colony. In particular, his beloved Providence 68 00:09:09.520 --> 00:09:14.680 was again in great danger. William Cottington had been successfully overthrown, but this 69 00:09:14.680 --> 00:09:20.680 This by no means ended trouble from Aquidnick. Instead, the Aquidnick government, headed 70 00:09:20.680 --> 00:09:26.900 by William Dyer and including Nicholas Easton, had embarked on an aggressive, imperialist 71 00:09:26.900 --> 00:09:33.560 course of its own. It had launched piratical attacks on the Dutch of New Leatherland and 72 00:09:33.560 --> 00:09:41.120 simultaneously, in spring 1653, combined with a minority of Providence Warwick people to 73 00:09:41.120 --> 00:09:45.920 to claim that theirs was the true government of the Rhode Island colony. 74 00:09:45.920 --> 00:09:52.040 The Providence Warwick government had protested and charged that a quidnick aggression against 75 00:09:52.040 --> 00:09:56.560 the Dutch would set all New England on fire. 76 00:09:56.560 --> 00:10:03.560 At the same time, the Patuxet oligarchy again refused to pay taxes to Providence and once 77 00:10:03.560 --> 00:10:08.800 Once again, Massachusetts threatened armed intervention and prevented Providence from 78 00:10:08.800 --> 00:10:15.120 pressing its claim. Any lesser man than the great founder of Rhode Island would have been 79 00:10:15.120 --> 00:10:21.160 discouraged enough to give up. For almost two decades, Roger Williams had fought for 80 00:10:21.160 --> 00:10:29.120 individual liberty in England, in New England, and especially for his Rhode Island. And now 81 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:37.380 England was retrogressing and Rhode Island was rent in civil strife. But the great peacemaker, 82 00:10:37.380 --> 00:10:44.620 who had conciliated so many disputes and conflicts with the Indians, now used his powerful influence 83 00:10:44.620 --> 00:10:51.900 to bring the various factions into conciliatory negotiations. Rational persuasion and not 84 00:10:51.900 --> 00:11:06.620 Wims' main task was to bring into the negotiations a reluctant providence, disgusted by the piracy 85 00:11:06.620 --> 00:11:12.580 conducted by the dire Eastern rulers of Aquidneck against the Dutch. 86 00:11:12.580 --> 00:11:19.140 Finally, each of the four towns agreed to choose six commissioners for conciliation 87 00:11:19.140 --> 00:11:27.220 Conference, which met at Warwick at the end of August 1654. The decision of the conference 88 00:11:27.220 --> 00:11:33.140 was at once a victory for Williams and unity, and a complete defeat for the East and Dyer 89 00:11:33.140 --> 00:11:40.020 faction. Reunion of the Rhode Island colony was achieved, and all the laws of Equidnick, 90 00:11:40.020 --> 00:11:47.940 since the Coddington usurpation, were eliminated, thus restoring the old pre-Coddington dispensation 91 00:11:47.940 --> 00:11:53.740 to the Colony. Cottington himself formally submitted to Rhode Island authority two years 92 00:11:53.740 --> 00:12:02.200 later. Roger Williams was then elected president of the reunited colony. Even the Potuxet troubles 93 00:12:02.200 --> 00:12:08.660 were finally fading. Benedict Arnold, son of William and leader of the Potuxet oligarchy, 94 00:12:08.660 --> 00:12:14.580 finally abandoned the oligarchy's long search for outside armed intervention, renounced 95 00:12:14.580 --> 00:12:21.340 First Massachusetts submitted himself to Rhode Island and moved from Patuxet to Newport. 96 00:12:21.340 --> 00:12:26.820 However, the actual reunion of the rest of the colony with Patuxet did not take place 97 00:12:26.820 --> 00:12:29.220 for five more years. 98 00:12:29.220 --> 00:12:36.180 A year later, 1655, Oliver Cromwell greatly helped settle the outstanding issues by sending 99 00:12:36.180 --> 00:12:42.520 a formal message to Rhode Island confirming its right to self-government under the Charter 100 00:12:42.520 --> 00:12:50.640 On this happy event, Williams wrote to Vane on behalf of the town of Providence. Vane 101 00:12:50.640 --> 00:12:55.520 had written to Rhode Island wondering why the colonists had fallen into such disorder. 102 00:12:55.520 --> 00:13:01.560 Williams replied for Providence that Rhode Island has long drunk of the cup of as great 103 00:13:01.560 --> 00:13:08.520 liberties as any people that we hear of under the whole heaven. Possibly this sweet cup 104 00:13:08.520 --> 00:13:13.080 Hopp hath rendered many of us wanton and too active. 105 00:13:13.080 --> 00:13:17.960 Rhode Island, Williams pointed out, had been spared the Civil War of England, the iron 106 00:13:17.960 --> 00:13:25.480 yoke of wolfish bishops and the new chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor in this colony 107 00:13:25.480 --> 00:13:32.760 have we been consumed with the overzealous fire of the so-called godly Christian magistrates. 108 00:13:32.760 --> 00:13:37.760 Williams expanded this recital of Rhode Island liberties to include the political and economic. 109 00:13:37.760 --> 00:13:43.520 Sir, we have not known what an excise means. We have almost forgotten what tithes are, 110 00:13:43.520 --> 00:13:49.680 yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth. 111 00:13:49.680 --> 00:13:56.560 It was at this very moment, the moment of triumph, that Roger Williams made a radical 112 00:13:56.560 --> 00:14:05.320 and fateful shift in his thinking and actions. From a fighter for liberty, Williams suddenly 113 00:14:05.320 --> 00:14:09.800 became a statist and an invader of liberty. 114 00:14:09.800 --> 00:14:16.800 From a devoted advocate of freedom of conscience, Williams became himself a persecutor of that 115 00:14:16.800 --> 00:14:19.160 very conscience. 116 00:14:19.160 --> 00:14:25.000 What was the reason or reasons for this sudden turnabout, this betrayal of the causes for 117 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:30.400 which Roger Williams had so long devoted his very life? 118 00:14:30.400 --> 00:14:36.600 No historian can ever look completely into the soul of another man, but he can make some 119 00:14:36.600 --> 00:14:42.560 judicious estimates. We may note several probable reasons for the shift. 120 00:14:42.560 --> 00:14:49.560 First, there is the subtle corruption wrought by power, even upon the staunchest libertarian. 121 00:14:50.540 --> 00:14:57.260 In the last analysis, power and liberty are totally incompatible, and when one gains the 122 00:14:57.260 --> 00:15:04.260 The heroic fighter for liberty, out of power, is often tempted, once the reins of command 123 00:15:08.020 --> 00:15:15.020 are in his hands, to rationalize that now order must be imposed by him, that excessive 124 00:15:18.140 --> 00:15:25.140 liberty must be checked by him. Williams had been president of Rhode Island only once before, 125 00:15:25.140 --> 00:15:32.640 in the 1644-47 period, when there was hardly any government in the colony. 126 00:15:32.640 --> 00:15:38.700 As soon as the colony was formally organized in 1647, Williams had been happy to retire 127 00:15:38.700 --> 00:15:42.680 to the private life of a successful fur trader. 128 00:15:42.680 --> 00:15:47.720 He had then only emerged from private life to go to England to save the colony. 129 00:15:47.720 --> 00:15:53.820 It was only now, in effect, that he was assuming the political post of head of Rhode Island. 130 00:15:53.820 --> 00:16:01.140 A second reason was the coinciding theoretical error that Williams had made in his letter 131 00:16:01.140 --> 00:16:08.580 too vain, that what Rhode Island had been suffering from was an excess of liberty. The 132 00:16:08.580 --> 00:16:15.220 sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton. On the contrary, the conflicts in Rhode Island 133 00:16:15.220 --> 00:16:24.220 had been caused not by too much liberty, but by too little. The land monopoly and the treachery 134 00:16:24.220 --> 00:16:30.840 of the Patuxent oligarchs, the Coddington attempt to impose feudal rule, the continuing 135 00:16:30.840 --> 00:16:36.880 imperialist pressure of Massachusetts and the United Colonies. It had only been the 136 00:16:36.880 --> 00:16:43.140 remarkable sturdiness of the libertarian tradition in Rhode Island that had kept the colony free 137 00:16:43.140 --> 00:16:49.700 despite all these dangers. And it had enabled it to escape them at last. And the thought 138 00:16:49.700 --> 00:16:54.660 and life of Roger Williams had been perhaps the chief ingredient in that tradition. But 139 00:16:54.660 --> 00:17:00.660 that great tradition, strong enough to surmount other periods, was not strong enough to survive 140 00:17:00.660 --> 00:17:05.900 its betrayal by its own leading architect. 141 00:17:05.900 --> 00:17:11.900 A third reason for Williams's shift was undoubtedly his discouragement at the retrogression of 142 00:17:11.900 --> 00:17:26.900 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. 143 00:17:26.900 --> 00:17:37.900 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. 144 00:17:37.900 --> 00:17:45.220 Was the now aging Williams strong enough to keep his convictions at the same burning pitch? 145 00:17:45.220 --> 00:17:52.020 Was he strong enough to resist all the temptations to follow the Cromwellian path? Evidently, 146 00:17:52.020 --> 00:17:59.340 the answer is no. We may consider also Williams's earlier lapse from the libertarian principle 147 00:17:59.340 --> 00:18:05.900 in the days of the Gorton persecution, and Williams's eventual siding with the Patuxet 148 00:18:05.900 --> 00:18:13.900 Faction to Expel Gorton from Providence. Purity of Principle had been cast aside even then, 149 00:18:13.900 --> 00:18:20.940 and this indicates a fourth contributory reason for Williams's change of heart, a tendency 150 00:18:20.940 --> 00:18:29.100 to react testily when people more radically individualist than himself appeared upon the 151 00:18:29.100 --> 00:18:39.600 William's shift from liberty to tyranny was first revealed sharply and startlingly in his 152 00:18:39.600 --> 00:18:45.660 imposing upon the people of Rhode Island compulsory military service. 153 00:18:45.660 --> 00:18:50.700 The other colonies underwent conscription, but this was a strong blow to the libertarian 154 00:18:50.700 --> 00:18:56.220 movement of Rhode Island, driving through a compulsory militia bill in the selection 155 00:18:56.220 --> 00:19:04.140 and Military Officers in a Providence town meeting, Williams precipitated vehement opposition. 156 00:19:04.140 --> 00:19:09.220 The leaders of this libertarian opposition were the Baptist, who denounced the bearing 157 00:19:09.220 --> 00:19:15.740 of arms as unchristian and conscription as an invasion of religious liberty and of the 158 00:19:15.740 --> 00:19:23.580 natural rights of the individual. This opposition was itself radicalized by the crisis precipitated 159 00:19:23.580 --> 00:19:30.800 by Williams and the logic of the pacifist opposition to conscription and arms-bearing 160 00:19:30.800 --> 00:19:38.660 led them straight to the ne plus ultra of libertarianism, individualist anarchism. 161 00:19:38.660 --> 00:19:44.980 The opposition, led by Reverend Thomas Olney, former Baptist minister at Providence, William 162 00:19:44.980 --> 00:19:52.300 Harris, John Field, John Throckmorton and Williams' own brother Robert, circulated a 163 00:19:52.300 --> 00:19:59.500 The petition charging that it was blood-guiltiness and against the rule of the gospel to execute 164 00:19:59.500 --> 00:20:05.180 judgment upon transgressors, against the private or public wheel. 165 00:20:05.180 --> 00:20:10.460 In short, government itself was anti-Christian. 166 00:20:10.460 --> 00:20:16.860 The emergence of William Harris as an anarchist was a particularly striking phenomenon. 167 00:20:16.860 --> 00:20:21.620 This conscientious man, who had been one of the original few to accompany Williams to 168 00:20:21.620 --> 00:20:28.340 to Providence and had then joined the Patuxet Oligarchy, had been suddenly aroused by William 169 00:20:28.340 --> 00:20:34.460 Arnold. Harris had been one of the victims of Arnold's attempted land grab under the 170 00:20:34.460 --> 00:20:41.540 aegis of Massachusetts. Apparently this sobering experience of how the state can be used to 171 00:20:41.540 --> 00:20:48.500 oppress as well as to confer privileges, added to his disfranchisement by Providence a dozen 172 00:20:48.500 --> 00:21:07.100 Roger Williams bitterly condemned the tumult and disturbance caused by the anarchist petition, 173 00:21:07.100 --> 00:21:15.260 conveniently failing to place any blame for the tumult on his original imposition of conscription. 174 00:21:15.260 --> 00:21:21.940 And Williams sneered at the pretense that arms-bearing violated the petitioner's conscience. 175 00:21:21.940 --> 00:21:28.140 He then came up with a famous analogy to support his newfound statist philosophy. 176 00:21:28.140 --> 00:21:35.340 He likened human society to a ship on which all people were passengers. 177 00:21:35.340 --> 00:21:41.180 All may worship as they please, he graciously declaimed, but none is to be allowed to defy 178 00:21:41.180 --> 00:21:48.380 The Common Laws and Orders of the Ship Concerning Their Common Peace or Preservation 179 00:21:48.380 --> 00:21:53.700 And if any should mutiny against their officers or preacher write that there ought to be no 180 00:21:53.700 --> 00:22:01.060 commanders or officers because all are equal in Christ, therefore no masters, nor officers, 181 00:22:01.060 --> 00:22:08.460 nor laws, nor orders, no corrections, nor punishments, the commanders may judge, resist, 182 00:22:08.460 --> 00:22:21.460 In short, not only were mutinous actions to be punished by the state, but even the very advocacy of anarchist principles. 183 00:22:21.460 --> 00:22:29.460 Wims's analogy was superficially attractive, but of dubious relevance. 184 00:22:29.460 --> 00:22:37.460 If society inhabits a ship and must obey its officers, who are the owners of the social ship? 185 00:22:37.460 --> 00:22:46.460 What gives one set of men in a country the right to claim ownership of that country and the people in it, 186 00:22:46.460 --> 00:22:50.460 and therefore the right to command and force others to obey? 187 00:22:50.460 --> 00:22:56.460 These were questions that Williams never bothered to raise, let alone answer. 188 00:22:56.460 --> 00:23:15.460 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? 189 00:23:15.460 --> 00:23:19.460 Williams' pronouncement did not convince the opposition either. 190 00:23:19.460 --> 00:23:26.460 The anarchists rose in rebellion against Williams' government, but were put down by force. 191 00:23:26.460 --> 00:23:33.460 Despite this failure, at the 1655 elections a few months later, at which Williams was re-elected president, 192 00:23:33.460 --> 00:23:42.460 Thomas Olney was elected an assistant and was seated even though he had participated in the uprising. 193 00:23:42.460 --> 00:23:48.460 Williams now began a systematic campaign of statism in the colony. 194 00:23:48.460 --> 00:23:54.460 The central government was aggrandized at the expense of the home rule rights of the towns. 195 00:23:54.460 --> 00:24:02.460 In May 1655, the assembly decided to bypass its financial dependence on funds raised by the towns 196 00:24:02.460 --> 00:24:08.460 and to appoint officials to levy general taxes directly on the people. 197 00:24:08.460 --> 00:24:18.460 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. 198 00:24:18.460 --> 00:24:23.460 Williams also moved to stiffen the laws against immorality. 199 00:24:23.460 --> 00:24:30.460 The assembly decreed the compulsory licensing of liquor dealers and an excise tax on liquor. 200 00:24:30.460 --> 00:24:35.460 Sales of spirits to Indians were restricted severely. 201 00:24:35.460 --> 00:24:37.460 Punishments were intensified. 202 00:24:37.460 --> 00:24:47.460 The four towns had, until then, failed to provide prisons or stocks, so little was the need and so pervasive the spirit of freedom. 203 00:24:47.460 --> 00:24:58.460 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. 204 00:24:58.460 --> 00:25:06.460 Adultery, which had not been subject to express penalty in the Code of 1647, was now to be punished by whipping and a fine. 205 00:25:06.460 --> 00:25:12.460 and a fine. Corporal punishment was to be levied for loose living, and masters were 206 00:25:12.460 --> 00:25:18.940 to be held responsible for the licentious careers of servants or minor sons. On the 207 00:25:18.940 --> 00:25:27.140 other hand, divorce laws were liberalized to allow for divorce for reasons of incompatibility. 208 00:25:27.140 --> 00:25:33.380 It is clear that a large part of the motivation for the new statist trend was a desire to 209 00:25:33.380 --> 00:25:40.780 Curry Favor with Cromwell. It was shortly after receipt of Cromwell's official reconfirmation 210 00:25:40.780 --> 00:25:47.700 of Rhode Island's charter in June 1655 that the assembly passed the law against loose 211 00:25:47.700 --> 00:25:55.580 living on information that Cromwell was restive at the state of morality in the colony. Furthermore, 212 00:25:55.580 --> 00:26:01.500 Cromwell in his message had ordered Rhode Island to provide against intestine commotions. 213 00:26:01.500 --> 00:26:08.740 The colony swiftly passed a law against ringleaders of factions, providing that such ringleaders, 214 00:26:08.740 --> 00:26:14.220 when found guilty by the general court, were to be sent to England for trial. Here was 215 00:26:14.220 --> 00:26:20.580 the fulfillment of the ominous hints of Williams's ship analogy. 216 00:26:20.580 --> 00:26:26.220 But Baptist anarchism continued to multiply in Rhode Island. One of the new adherents 217 00:26:26.220 --> 00:26:33.220 This was none other than Catherine Scott, the leading Baptist minister and a sister of Anne Hutchinson. 218 00:26:33.220 --> 00:26:45.220 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. 219 00:26:45.220 --> 00:26:55.220 Also adopting anarchism were Rebecca Throckmorton, Robert West, and Anne Williams, wife of Roger's brother, Robert. 220 00:26:55.220 --> 00:27:01.220 Catherine Scott and Rebecca Throckmorton were soon to espouse the Quaker faith. 221 00:27:01.220 --> 00:27:14.220 Finally, in March 1657, the crackdown arrived and the four individualists were summoned into court by Williams as being common opposers of all authority. 222 00:27:14.220 --> 00:27:21.220 Williams relented after this public intimidation, however, and the charges were dismissed. 223 00:27:21.220 --> 00:27:28.220 Meanwhile, Williams's relations with Patuxet had undergone a subtle but significant change. 224 00:27:28.220 --> 00:27:41.220 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. 225 00:27:41.220 --> 00:27:47.820 Apart from its oligarchy and land, Patuxet had managed to avoid paying taxes either to 226 00:27:47.820 --> 00:27:54.320 Rhode Island or to Massachusetts Bay, and was content to live in liberty from immorality 227 00:27:54.320 --> 00:28:00.860 laws or from laws against trading with the Indians. It was now Williams who began to 228 00:28:00.860 --> 00:28:09.020 agitate aggressively for a joint Massachusetts-Providence suppression of Patuxian liberties and for 229 00:28:09.020 --> 00:28:14.020 for the Forcible End to Patuxent Secession. 230 00:28:14.020 --> 00:28:21.260 This entire Patuxent experience with governments served to confirm William Harris in his anarchism 231 00:28:21.260 --> 00:28:26.820 and also to embitter Williams against Harris more than against his fellows. 232 00:28:26.820 --> 00:28:32.860 Harris was particularly vehement in opposition to taxation, all taxation, and circulated 233 00:28:32.860 --> 00:28:42.860 Harris predicted to all the towns a manuscript denouncing all civil government and urged the people to cry out no lords, no masters. 234 00:28:42.860 --> 00:28:56.860 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. 235 00:28:56.860 --> 00:29:03.860 Harris also condemned all punishments and prisons, all officials and legislative assemblies. 236 00:29:04.860 --> 00:29:15.860 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. 237 00:29:15.860 --> 00:29:23.500 Harris, instead of quieting down under the intimidation as had Mrs. Scott and the others, 238 00:29:23.500 --> 00:29:29.140 swore that he would continue to maintain his anarchism with his blood. 239 00:29:29.140 --> 00:29:35.860 Persistently refusing to recant, Harris repeated his interpretation of scripture that he that 240 00:29:35.860 --> 00:29:44.100 can say it is his conscience ought not to yield subjection to any human order amongst 241 00:29:44.100 --> 00:29:51.100 The General Court found that Harris was guilty of being contemptuous and seditious, and he 242 00:29:51.100 --> 00:29:55.620 and his son were heavily bonded for 500 pounds. 243 00:29:55.620 --> 00:30:01.580 The evidence was sent to England in preparation for a trial there for treason. 244 00:30:01.580 --> 00:30:07.180 The treason trial never materialized, but only because the ship carrying the evidence 245 00:30:07.180 --> 00:30:10.660 to England was lost at sea. 246 00:30:10.660 --> 00:30:17.340 Harris was finally sufficiently cowed, however, to abandon his anarchism and he turned instead 247 00:30:17.340 --> 00:30:24.980 to a lifelong harassment of the hated Roger Williams through litigation of land claims. 248 00:30:24.980 --> 00:30:32.100 Williams retired from the presidency in 1657 and a year later Patuxet was reunited with 249 00:30:32.100 --> 00:30:34.100 and the rest of the colony.