Williams, Roger

Roger (1607-1684), the founder of Rhode Island. He was born in Wales and died at Providence, Rhode Island. His father is said to have been a London tailor. While a lad Roger attracted the attention of Sir Edward Coke, an eminent judge, who educated him at the Charter House School and at Cambridge. Williams was designed for the Church of England, but he became an out and out Puritan. In 1630 he migrated to New England to enjoy religious liberty. He had no sooner landed than he found himself in conflict with the Puritan authorities of Boston, asserting that they were as arbitrary as the authorities of England. He affiliated, however, with the churches of Salem and Plymouth, acting as teacher in the latter for two years. In 1635 the general court of Massachusetts arrested and tried him on charges. The most important of these was that he taught that the civil power, that is to say the government, has no authority to say what a man shall or shall not believe. Williams' contention was simply for liberty of conscience, a principle now so well understood that it is not questioned in a civilized country, but he was ahead of his time. Men who had come across the Atlantic to found a church according to their own ideas could not tolerate the presence of one who did not in all respects agree with them. Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay. He fled from Salem to the Narragansett Indians to escape arrest. They welcomed him and gave him a home which he called Providence in a spirit of thankfulness for "God's merciful Providence to him in his distress."

In 1643 Williams went to England and in the following year he returned with a charter, rendering the "Providence Plantations" independent of their uncertain neighbors, the New England Confederacy of Puritan colonies. Mindful of the persecution he had suffered, "Williams," says Oscar S. Straus, his biographer, "was the first to organize and build up a political community with absolute religious liberty as its chief cornerstone. To him, the successful pioneer of these principles, is due to a larger extent than to any other man the American system of a free church in a free state." See Rhode Island; Hutchinson; Anne; Providence; Baptists