23. The Further Settlement of Rhode Island: The Odyssey of Samuell Gorton

In the meanwhile, religious liberty, and hence diversity, was flourishing in nearby Providence. An Anglican minister who had been living in the vicinity before the Williams settlement continued to preach there. Baptists came also to the colony and exerted great influence. The first Baptist minister was Dr. John Clarke, a physician, who had arrived in Massachusetts from England just in time to join with Anne Hutchinson and leave for Aquidneck. William Harris also was a leading Rhode Island Baptist from the earliest days. The brilliant Baptist leader and sister of Anne Hutchinson, Mrs. Catherine Scott, even succeeded in temporarily converting Roger Williams (along with many other leaders) to the Baptist faith in early 1639. The inveterate Baptist insistence on individual conscience and the right of religious liberty was very close to Williams’ views. In addition, each Baptist church was separate and completely autonomous; the officers were democratically elected by the entire congregation. In a few months, however, Williams shifted again to become a Seeker, which he continued to be for the rest of his life. Williams had arrived at the point of questioning the claims of all churches to apostolic authority or to correctness of ritual.

In addition to religious liberty, and apart from land allocation, the powers of government in Providence were limited. Disputes were to be settled by arbitration, but the arbitration was compulsory, enforced by the ruling “disposers.” And, in contrast to Massachusetts, there was no establishment of government schools.

One of the most repeatedly and consistently persecuted Americans of the seventeenth century was Samuell Gorton, an individualist and a free spirit who had been a clothier in London. Gorton, a “Professor of the Mysteries of Christ,” challenged not only the right of theocracy, but the wisdom of all priests and formal religious organizations. Politically, this individualist argued that any transgressions of government beyond the rights guaranteed by the English common law were impermissible. Gorton also opposed theocratic laws against immorality, and questioned the existence of heaven and hell, the truth of the Scriptures, baptism, and the taking of oaths.

Chafing at the restrictions of Anglican England, Gorton left London for Boston in 1636 “to enjoy liberty of conscience, in respect to faith towards God.” It did not take Gorton long to see that he had only moved from the frying pan into the fire; he arrived just in time to see the expulsion of the Reverend Wheelwright to Exeter, and he realized that if Massachusetts would not tolerate the presence of the relatively orthodox Wheelwright, it could surely have little place for the likes of him.

Gorton therefore left quickly for Plymouth, where he began to attract considerable following for his views. Adopting Anne Hutchinson’s device of prayer meetings in his parlor, Gorton began to arouse the ire of the colony’s oligarchs by making a convert of the wife of the Rev. Ralph Smith, the respected retired minister of Plymouth. Another inconvenient convert was a sewing maid of the current minister of the colony, the Reverend Mr. Rayner. Reverend Mr. Smith began a campaign to expel Gorton from the colony, and a suitable excuse came shortly to hand. Employed as Mrs. Gorton’s serving maid was a widow newly arrived from England, Ellen Aldridge. Charges began to be whispered about Plymouth Colony that Ellen had committed the grievous offense of “smiling in church.” Complaints were duly lodged against her, and the Plymouth fathers summarily ordered Ellen to be promptly expelled from the colony as a “vagabond.” Gorton spoke up heatedly in protest over these high-handed proceedings, for which high crime Gorton himself was hauled into court in late 1638. In a pretrial hearing, Gorton accused one of the magistrates of lying, a charge which only added to his crimes. At this trial Gorton denounced the grave violation of English common law in uniting the offices of prosecutor and magistrate in the same man. Protesting against the injustice of the trial, Gorton addressed the crowd: “Ye see good people how you are abused! Stand for your liberty; and let them not be parties and judges.” The frightened church elders, on hearing this plea, urged the court to inflict summary punishment to remove this libertarian troublemaker from the colony. Gorton was duly prohibited from speaking in his own defense, and the court swiftly fined Gorton and gave him fourteen days to leave Plymouth. Gorton was thereby forced to walk through the wilderness in the snow, and was barely able to finish the journey southwestward to Portsmouth, where he settled.

In Portsmouth, Gorton found political rule centered in William Coddington, the sole magistrate. Joined there by his main Plymouth disciple, John Wickes, Gorton promptly amassed a large following, and formed an alliance with Anne Hutchinson to overthrow Coddington’s dictatorial rule and to repulse Coddington’s armed attempt to impose his rule in Portsmouth.

A year later, however, with Newport joined to Portsmouth, Coddington was back in command, even though opposed by the majority of Portsmouth residents. Again Samuell Gorton, who had steadfastly refused to enter into the agreement to join Newport, felt the lash of persecution, and again Gorton’s defense of someone in his employ was the catalyst used.

At the end of 1640 an old woman’s cow invaded Gorton’s land. Coming after the cow, the trespassing old lady got into a fight with a serving girl of Gorton’s, after which the woman hauled the servant into court. Gorton defended his servant, and strongly protested the unfair trial, attacking the justices as “just asses.” He also denied the authority of the constituted court and government. Since no royal charter covered Rhode Island, it was free territory, and therefore no authority to set up a government could exist. Coddington, the chief justice at the trial, ordered Gorton arrested forthwith, crying out, “You that are for the King, lay hold on Gorton”; to which the defiant Gorton instantly riposted: “All you that are for the King, lay hold on Coddington.” A hand-to-hand fight ensued, with Coddington’s armed guard gaining the victory. Gorton was arrested and John Wickes, who had also defended the servant, was put into the stocks, Gorton himself was soon whipped and banished from Aquidneck; Wickes and several Gortonites were banished as well.

What next? The only place left for Gorton to go was Providence, and so he and a dozen families of disciples arrived there in the winter of 1640–41. In Providence, Gorton found two major factions: the owners of Pawtuxet, headed by William Arnold and William Harris, and Providence proper, led by Roger Williams. The oligarchical Pawtuxet clique was particularly fearful that Gorton might convert a majority of townsmen and overturn its rule, and so the Pawtuxet rulers refused to allow the Gortonites to use the town commons. The Arnold faction urged that the “turbulent” Gorton and his followers be expelled immediately from the settlement. But Gorton expanded his following, and they soon became a third force in the little colony,

And what of Roger Williams? Enjoying increasing political power, Williams was beginning to lose the edge of his libertarian principles. He became alarmed that Gorton, far more individualist and libertarian than himself, was “bewitching and bemadding poor Providence... with his unclear and foul censures of all the ministers of this country....” Williams tried to violate, sub rosa, his own principles of religious liberty by simply excluding Gorton from Providence, an exclusion which was in the power of the landed oligarchy of the town. Or rather, Williams, more moderate than Arnold, wanted to grant Gorton admission only if he pledged to respect the authority of the government, and if he abandoned such “uncivil” protests as had gotten Gorton expelled from Portsmouth.

Finally, in November 1641 some of the Pawtuxet faction seized some cattle owned by a Gortonite, to satisfy a debt judgment the Gortonites believed to be arbitrarily decreed by the disposers. This led to a full-fledged riot between the two factions (the Gortonites being led by Randall Holden and John Greene) and the Gortonites managed to save their friend’s property from the “cattle stealers.”

Because of the riot, thirteen of the Pawtuxet oligarchs made a desperate and treacherous call for the Massachusetts government to intervene with force to expel the “anarchist” Gortonites. The oligarchs pulled out all the stops against their enemies, accusing the Gortonites of being anarchists, and leaning toward communism and free love, or “familism.” Their appeal to Massachusetts was a direct threat to all the precious liberties that the men of Providence had fled Massachusetts to preserve. And thus began an active threat to Rhode Island liberty from Massachusetts that was to last and be of great significance for the little settlements for years to come.

Massachusetts replied haughtily to the Pawtuxians that it would intervene only if Providence would first submit to its authority, which Providence would not do. Indeed, less than a third of the Providence citizens supported the Arnold-Harris petition.

Williams, however, now joined the Pawtuxians in obtaining the expulsion of Gorton from Providence. Gorton was now banished even from this relative haven of religious liberty. His only consolation was that this time he wasn’t whipped out of town. Gorton and his followers now moved to West Pawtuxet, an unused tract of land which Gorton had purchased the year before. But once again, the alarmed Arnold-Harris forces in September 1642, requested coercive intervention by Massachusetts and in return offered the submission of Pawtuxet to Massachusetts authority. Delighted, Massachusetts accepted with alacrity, and their declamations thoroughly alarmed the Gortonites. Governor Winthrop, for example, exulted that Samuell Gorton “was a man not fit to live upon the face of the earth,” and Massachusetts troops made ready, it appeared, to put that harsh value judgment into effect.

There was, it seemed, no place in America that would tolerate the existence of Samuell Gorton—not even the relatively free Providence and Aquidneck settlements. There was but one course left: Gorton determined to found an entirely new settlement of his own. Gorton, a friend of the Indians and of Indian rights, moved with his flock south of Providence to purchase Indian land and found the settlement of Shawomet in November 1642.

Tasting the heady wine of freedom at last, the Gortonites sent a defiant letter to the Massachusetts authorities, which the diligent Boston synod discovered to contain no less than twenty-six ‘blasphemies.” Massachusetts and its Pawtuxian underlings now formed a secret alliance with some marauding Indian chiefs to lay claim to Shawomet territory in order to charge that the Gortonite land purchase was null and void. Massachusetts, suddenly and for the first time championing Indian land rights and implicitly assuming jurisdiction in an area not covered by its charter, ordered Gorton to appear before the Massachusetts courts to defend his land claims. Gorton of course refused.

In the summer of 1643, Massachusetts shamefully arranged the murder of the high Indian chief Miantonomo, who had sold Shawomet to Gorton. Again the Massachusetts General Court wrote to the Shawomet settlers, ordering them all to appear at Boston, ostensibly to settle the land claims. Randall Holden wrote the defiant reply for the Gortonites on September 15, a reply filled, of course, with what the Bostonians called blasphemies. Addressing himself to “the great and honoured Idol General, now set up in the Massachusetts,” Holden denounced the submitting Indian sachems (headed by one Uncas) as thieves, pointing out that Shawomet was outside Massachusetts jurisdiction, and proceeding to talk to the Massachusetts oligarchy, at long last, in terms which none had yet dared to use. Calling them a generation of vipers, murderers of Anne Hutchinson, and companions of Judas Iscariot, Holden and the Gortonites heroically declared that they would henceforth treat Massachusetts precisely as Massachusetts treated them:

According as you put forth yourselves towards us, so shall you find us transformed to answer you. If you put forth your hand to us as country-men, ours are in readiness for you; if you exercise the pen, accordingly do we become a ready writer; if your sword be drawn, ours is girt upon our thigh; if you present a gun, make haste to give the first fire, for we are come to put fire upon the earth, and it is our desire to have it speedily kindled.

To this valiant defense of the rights of Shawomet, Massachusetts replied instantly in the way it knew best: by declaring the Gortonites “fitted for the slaughter” and by dispatching an armed troop. The Massachusetts troop having laid siege to Shawomet, Gorton asked Massachusetts to accept an offer of Providence ministers to arbitrate the dispute. Winthrop quickly refused, charging that this was just a ruse to delay matters while Gorton stirred up the Indians. After the soldiers plundered the houses and seized the cattle of the Gortonites, the settlers surrendered, but only on the pledge of the soldiers that they would be treated, en route to Boston, as guests rather than as captives. As soon as the surrender was completed, however, the Massachusetts soldiery reneged on the agreement and the Gortonites were marched to Boston under orders that anyone who spoke on the way would be knocked down and anyone who dared to step out of the column would be run through with a bayonet.

Arriving in Massachusetts, the Gortonites found that that colony had now conveniently forgotten about the dispute over the Indian land claims. With the Gortonites at last in its power, Massachusetts held them exultantly without bail on charges of heresy, blasphemy, and opposition to the authority of Massachusetts. According to now hallowed Massachusetts custom, it was not enough of a scourge upon the Gortonites to be charged with heresy, blasphemy, and treason; in addition, they had to be constantly pursued and harassed by the church elders and ministers trying to convert them to the Puritan faith. Once—only once—was Gorton allowed to speak in a Massachusetts church, to the great regret of the theocracy. Courageously he proclaimed: “In the church now there was nothing but Christ, as that all our Ordinances, Ministers, and Sacraments, etc. were but men’s inventions, for show and pomp.”

On hearing this, some of the ministers urged the magistrates speedily to “hew” Gorton “in pieces.” The Rev. John Cotton urged death for the heretics; indeed, the cry for death was joined by all but three ministers of the colony. Happily, the death vote lost (by two votes) in the General Court—the supreme judicial as well as legislative arm of the colony. Not that the court’s sentence was not severe. On November 3, 1643, the General Court condemned the Gortonites to indefinite terms of hard labor in chains and forbade them to speak any of their “blasphemous and abominable heresies” on pain of death.

The indomitable Gortonites, however, did not let their sentence faze them in the least. Working at hard labor rather than languishing in prison meant that they traveled throughout the colony, working in different towns. Defiantly ignoring the death threat, the Gortonites preached their view of the Gospel wherever they went, and made numerous converts all over the colony, especially among women. Before long a majority of the colony was at the least sympathetic to their plight. Many influential leaders, including former governor John Endecott, urged death for the disobedient Gortonites, and Rev. John Cotton recommended that they be starved into submission. But finally, the alarmed and perplexed authorities decided that the safest course was to get the resisting Gortonites out of the country. They freed the prisoners, giving them fourteen days to leave the colony on pain of death. The Massachusetts authorities assumed that the banishment order covered Shawomet; acting on the technicality that the town was not explicitly mentioned in the order, the Gortonites returned home to Shawomet.

They were not long allowed to remain there, however. On hearing of their return, Governor Winthrop ordered the Gortonites out, and the hapless settlers fled back to Portsmouth, where they rented houses and land, despite the opposition of Governor Coddington to their immigration. But the trials and tribulations of Samuell Gorton and his flock were far from over.

Much as Roger Williams continued self-government free from English rule, the threat of Massachusetts imperialism, brought on by the Pawtuxet oligarchs, had driven him to realize that it was now necessary to gain an English charter to protect the Rhode Island settlement, once and for all, from Massachusetts aggression. Sailing in 1643 for England, now in the midst of the exhilarating ideological ferment of the Puritan Revolution, Williams persuaded Parliament, in the spring of 1644, to grant Providence and Aquidneck a charter as the united “Providence Plantations.”

While in England, Williams happily associated with the radical liberal wing of the revolution—especially with Sir Henry Vane, the former ally of Anne Hutchinson in Massachusetts—and with its struggle against any established Presbyterian or Puritan church. It was in England, indeed, that Williams was inspired to elaborate his principle of religious liberty and to publish his famous Bloody Tenent. His writings were hailed by the British liberals, who used Williams’ arguments in their own struggle against any budding theocracy.

The new Rhode Island charter was happily loose and vague, allowing any sort of self-government generally and vaguely compatible with English laws. On Williams’ triumphal return to Providence in late 1644, the colony’s General Assembly met for the first time and formed a loose and informal organization, with Williams chosen as “chief officer.” Bitterly opposed to the charter, however, was William Coddington, whose increasingly pressed claim to sole ownership of all of Aquidneck Island was now permanently in jeopardy. Coddington treacherously followed the Pawtuxet lead by seeking to bring in the force of Massachusetts (and also the newly formed New England Confederation) against the new charter. Forgetting his former fight for liberty alongside Anne Hutchinson, Coddington actually wrote Winthrop that he believed wholeheartedly in the Massachusetts system, “both in Church and Commonwealth.”

Samuell Gorton returned to Portsmouth just in time to throw himself into the defense of the charter against Coddington’s attempted usurpation. Gorton was, in fact, made a judge by the anti-Coddingtonians of Portsmouth.

Despite the protective charter of 1644, Massachusetts continued, in the next two years, to claim authority over all of the Rhode Island settlements. Thus, in 1645 Massachusetts and its sister colonies of the United Colonies, or New England Confederation, declared war against the peaceful Narragansett Indians and dispatched a military force to Rhode Island. Upon hearing of Roger Williams’ negotiation of neutrality with the Narragansetts, Massachusetts and Plymouth thundered to the Providence Plantations that if they persisted in their neutrality they would be treated as enemies, and also forbade them to operate under their 1644 charter.

Moving specifically against the Gortonites, Massachusetts, in autumn 1645, authorized a group of families to settle at Shawomet, on the lands seized from the Gortonites. Plymouth, however, felt that it too had a claim to the territory and warned off the new settlers from Massachusetts. The United Colonies of New England promptly proceeded to assume jurisdiction and presumed to award the territory to Massachusetts.

Alarmed at the developing aggression of Massachusetts, Samuell Gorton decided to go to England to seek definite English protection for his rights to Shawomet. Holding also an impressive commission from his friends, the Narragansett Indians, who declared themselves willing to submit to an English charter, Gorton, along with Holden and Greene, left for England in late 1645.

After a decade of odyssey and persecution, it was highly gratifying for Samuell Gorton to arrive in England at the height of the great libertarian ferment spawned by the Levellers and other radical individualist groups. Gorton had the time of his life for two years, spoke throughout England, was widely hailed, and wrote and published two books—his literary output being inspired, evidently, by the radical libertarian ferment in England.

In the fall of 1646, Randall Holden and John Greene returned triumphantly to Boston, armed with an order from the Earl of Warwick, head of the Commission for Foreign Plantations, to allow the Shawomet settlers to return home in freedom and to remain there without molestation. The submission of the Narragansett Indians to England also successfully kept the potentially bountiful Narragansett country out of Massachusetts’ hands. The incensed Massachusetts authorities seriously considered jailing Holden and Greene and ignoring Warwick and Parliament. But cooler heads finally prevailed, and the two Rhode Islanders were allowed to proceed on their way.

Samuell Gorton himself exultantly returned to Boston in the spring of 1648. The infuriated General Court of Massachusetts immediately decided to lock up Gorton “to prevent the infection of his pestilent doctrine,” but Gorton triumphantly produced a letter of safe conduct from the Earl of Warwick. The disgruntled General Court had been stopped from arresting Gorton, but it gave him a week to get out of the colony. Gorton returned to Shawomet, which he gratefully renamed Warwick. William Arnold, the leading Pawtuxet oligarch, continued to complain about Gorton to Massachusetts and urge intervention, but Massachusetts was now chastened and decided, at long last, to leave the Gortonites alone. The saga of violent Gortonite persecution was finally over.

Shawomet, and later Warwick, had no government at all until it united with the other towns to form the colony of Providence Plantations in 1648. Until then, the little settlement, in the words of Gorton, “lived peaceably together, desiring and endeavoring to do wrong to no man, neither English nor Indian, ending all our differences in a neighborly and loving way of arbitration, mutually chosen amongst us.” But this anarchist idyll soon came to an end. Beginning in 1647 and completed the following year, the four Rhode Island Towns of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick were united into the colony of the Providence Plantations. From a persecuted outcast, Samuell Gorton had now become a respected leader of the colony. As the undisputed leader of Warwick, Gorton was chosen town magistrate and for numerous other posts, and he was Warwick’s main representative in the new colony.

The code of the united colony, drawn up in 1647, followed Gorton’s insistence on conforming judicial procedure to English Law. The code had been largely drafted by Roger Williams, acting as moderator of the Providence town meeting, and discussed in detail both by committees of correspondence in the various towns and by the Assembly. Numerous safeguards were included against the exercise of power by the central government of the colony. The selected officers, who constituted the supreme judicial power, did not, as in other colonies, constitute also an upper legislative house. Instead, they had no position in the legislature, which was in fact a General Assembly of all the freemen of the colony. The only representative body was a General Court—a committee of six from each town, meeting in between the meetings of the larger General Assembly. Laws passed by the General Court were subject to the approval of the towns. If a majority of the towns approved, then the law would stand, but only until confirmation by the next General Assembly. Popular elections were to be annual, for all representatives and executive officers. The duties of each official were carefully defined and every officer was warned not to go “beyond his Commission.” Wrongdoing by any official made him liable to impeachment and trial in the General Assembly. In addition, the towns were empowered to make their own apportionment of the taxes levied upon them by the central government, and to do their own collecting.

One of the crucial safeguards raised in the code against the central government was the guarantee of home rule to each town. To guard against the supremacy of any one town, the General Court and Assembly were to rotate their meeting place among the towns. Moreover, the code provided for initiative and referendum, and nullification by the towns. Initiative permitted the “agitation” and passage of new legislation by a majority of the town meetings themselves, thus completely bypassing the General Court. The referendum-and-nullification provision forced the General Court, as we have seen, to refer its enactments to the towns, a majority of which could veto any legislation. In accordance with Rhode Island’s role of providing asylum, there were (unlike Massachusetts) no “stranger” laws preventing persons or towns from receiving newcomers without the consent of the central government.

The code also provided no mitigation of legal penalties for “gentlemen” criminals, and there was no primogeniture in the law of inheritance. In contrast to the brutal edicts of Massachusetts, punishments for crime were restricted, and were far more proportional to the gravity of the crime. Only once did Rhode Island under the code whip or brand anyone, and branding was abolished by 1656. And in contrast to the scores of capital crimes in England and Massachusetts, Rhode Island listed only nine crimes as capital. More important, only two criminals were executed in Rhode Island during Roger Williams’ long lifetime—and both of these were murderers.

Religious liberty was guaranteed in the Rhode Island code, and the laws against personal immorality, though not completely absent, were relatively mild. There was neither sumptuary legislation against “unseemly” adornment nor any attempt to regulate a person’s church life, though laws restricting drinking and gambling were imposed. And while witchcraft was technically illegal, the law against supposed witches was never enforced in Rhode Island.

After several years of this system, the General Assembly in 1650 dissolved itself, thereby ending the democratic veto of the body of freemen. A newly strengthened unicameral General Court of six from each town now constituted the legislature of the colony. Provision for veto of any law by a majority of towns was, however, retained.

In the new government, it might be added, Samuell Gorton was especially selected to serve on committees of defense against Massachusetts’ encroachments, a task which Gorton was certainly happy—and well fitted—to pursue.

Let it not be thought, however, that Rhode Island was in any sense out of the woods. For one thing, it still faced the Coddington threat. Thwarted in his claim to unfettered rule in Aquidneck, Coddington spurned Williams’ offers to arbitrate their differences, and turned again to an outside colony to practice subversion—this time to Plymouth. Aquidneck would not agree to the scheme, however, and Coddington left for England in late 1648 to plead his case there.

In the meanwhile, Massachusetts Bay continued its pressure on Rhode Island, and especially on Warwick and the Gortonites. Massachusetts and Plymouth stirred up the Indians to plunder Warwick. And then Massachusetts returned to its imperialist course by meddling in behalf of William Arnold and the Pawtuxet oligarchy. Arnold embarked on an aggressive campaign of land-grabbing, and forcibly seized the land of William Field of Pawtuxet. When Field sued in the Providence courts, Arnold refused to appear, and produced obviously mutilated documents of title to try to prove that Providence had no jurisdiction. These documents would, in effect, have ejected many Pawtuxians from their homes and lands, which would then become the property of Arnold and his friends. At this point, spring 1650, Massachusetts suddenly intervened and ordered Rhode Island to end its prosecution of this case, thus throwing its cloak of protection over the land theft by William Arnold and his friends, and moving to extend its suzerainty over Rhode Island.

To add to Rhode Island’s and Gorton’s troubles, Massachusetts quickly followed this intervention by granting to Arnold and his Pawtuxet friends the right to encroach on Gortonite land in Warwick. It did this by decreeing the forced merger of Pawtuxet and Warwick into one county of Suffolk. Shortly afterward, in the fall of 1650, Massachusetts troops arrived in Rhode Island and prevented the Warwick citizens from prosecuting Arnold. Finally, to make the little colony’s cup overflow, Coddington returned from England in the spring of 1651 with an astounding new charter, granting Coddington the right to rule Aquidneck Island as its sole feudal lord and ruler for life, to be aided only by six appointed assistants.

The hammer blows against Rhode Island were now falling thick and fast. Massachusetts sent an official warning to Roger Williams that any attempt to collect taxes from William Arnold and his Pawtuxet oligarchs would lead the Bay magistrates to intervene “in such manner as God shall put into their hands.” And, what is more, the United Colonies of the New England Confederation authorized Plymouth to assume complete jurisdiction over Warwick.

Little Rhode Island was clearly in desperate straits. Its plight was reinforced by Massachusetts’ persecution of the growing sect of Rhode Island Baptists. As early as 1646, the United Colonies had ordered the vigorous suppression of Baptists for rejecting infant baptism. The Baptists proceeded to aggravate the Puritan theocracy all the more by adopting the practice of baptism by immersion. Dr. John Clarke, the Baptist leader in Rhode Island, infuriated the Massachusetts authorities by converting some citizens of Seekonk, on the Plymouth side of the border, and Massachusetts went so far as to threaten armed action against Plymouth if it did not suppress the invading Baptists. By the fall of 1651, Massachusetts was negotiating with William Coddington for forcible extradition of all those refugees from Massachusetts who had found shelter at Aquidneck, and it began to contemplate the invasion of Rhode Island for the armed suppression of the Rhode Island Baptists.

During this time, John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes, the successful Baptist missionaries to Seekonk, had fallen into the hands of the Massachusetts oligarchy. Visiting a sick old communicant at Lynn, Clarke and Holmes were arrested and sentenced to a heavy fine. The eminent Clarke protested that Massachusetts proceedings violated traditional rights under English law; the report of Governor Endecott held—characteristically—that Clarke “deserved death” and “was worthy to be hanged.” Obadiah Holmes refused to sanction the legitimacy of his sentence by not paying the fine, at which point the enraged Rev. John Wilson, minister of the Boston church, struck Holmes in a fury and called down “the curse of God” upon him. Holmes received an extremely severe whipping of thirty lashes, scarring him for life. After this additional fines were levied on the two men, with promise of another severe whipping in case of default.

Roger Williams protested fervently against this brutal treatment, but to no avail. Deeply moved, Williams asked Massachusetts how it was that “he that speaks so tenderly for his own, hath yet so little respect, mercy or pity to the like conscientious persuasions of other men.” And Williams cried out:

It is a dreadful voice from the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords: “Endicot, Endicot why huntest thou me? Why imprisonest thou me? Why finest, why so bloodily whippest, why wouldest thou... hang and burn me?”

There was rising disgust in England as well. The English Puritans had come increasingly under the influence of libertarian views, emanating from the revolutionary ferment. As Massachusetts tightened its theocratic rule, the English Puritans became more and more horrified. Sir Richard Saltonstall, himself a former Massachusetts oligarch who had long since returned to England, wrote to Massachusetts in eloquent and aggrieved reaction to the prolonged whipping of Holmes: “It doth not a little grieve my spirit to hear what sad things are reported daily of your tyranny and persecutions in New England, as that you fine, whip and imprison men for their consciences.” English Puritans, Saltonstall reminded them, had hoped that “you might have been eyes to God’s people here, and not practice those courses in a wilderness, which you went so far to prevent.”

Rhode Island was clearly hemmed in on every side, with Plymouth seizing Warwick, Coddington seceding to become sole overlord of Aquidneck and allying himself with the colony’s enemies in Plymouth and Massachusetts, and Massachusetts assuming jurisdiction to protect the Pawtuxet land-grab and threatening suppression of Rhode Island Baptists—indeed the crushing of the colony altogether. It was more than high time for a final desperate attempt to save the little colony. Obviously, the only thing to do was to send respected agents immediately to England, to try to obtain firm parliamentary protection for Rhode Island’s charter. Samuell Gorton, now president of Providence Plantations (a truncated colony including only Warwick and Providence), was the active force in raising 200 pounds to send Roger Williams to England. The majority of citizens of Aquidneck, bitterly opposed to Coddington’s usurpation, raised the money to send Dr. John Clarke of Newport along with Williams, to represent the island. The Gortonites quickly informed the United Colonies that Williams was going to England on their behalf, among other things to detail the numerous wrongs they had been suffering at the hands of Plymouth and Massachusetts.

Alarmed by this decision, the determined William Arnold pleaded with Massachusetts to send troops immediately and take over Rhode Island before the opportunity was lost. Asking Massachusetts to keep his letter secret, Arnold—not noted for his own personal piety—warned that should Rhode Island be allowed to continue in existence “under the pretense of liberty of conscience... thee comes to live all the scum the runaways of the country.” Arnold pointed to a horrible example: a man imprisoned in Connecticut (New Haven) for adultery had escaped prison and fled to Rhode Island, where he was not executed, although the guilty woman, having failed to escape, was properly put to death. Arnold also charged indignantly that some of the Gortonites “cryeth out much against them that putteth people to death for witches; for they say there be no other witches upon earth... but your own pastors and ministers.”

Massachusetts, however, growing a bit cautious, did not take Arnold’s tempting advice. Instead, it went so far as to permit Williams and Clarke free passage to Boston, where they set sail for England in November 1651.

With Williams gone, Samuell Gorton was the dominant force in the Providence-Warwick government. As president, and then as moderator of the Assembly the following year, Gorton was able to enact the outlawing of slavery in the colony, and also to limit the term of any indentured service to ten years. Unfortunately, the former law remained a dead letter, but it was the first act of abolition of slavery in American history. Gorton also secured the elimination of imprisonment for debt. Samuell Gorton had successfully completed his odyssey of persecution to become one of the foremost leaders of the colony.