Roger Williams

Roger Williams founded Rhode Island as the first colony with genuine separation of church and state, and was banished from Massachusetts for arguing it. Born in London around 1603, he was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, took orders in the Church of England, and emigrated in 1631 as a Puritan minister. He arrived with a reputation and immediately refused the post offered at Boston, on the grounds that the congregation had not separated cleanly enough from the Church of England. He made three claims the Massachusetts authorities could not tolerate. That the civil magistrate has no authority over religious belief, since compelling worship makes hypocrites rather than Christians. That the colonial charter was invalid because the king could not grant land that belonged to the Narragansett and Wampanoag, who should be paid for it. And that church and state must be separated by what he called a hedge or wall of separation — a phrase that reached Thomas Jefferson a century and a half later. He was convicted of sedition and heresy in 1635 and ordered deported to England. He fled in midwinter 1636, sheltered by Massasoit's Wampanoag, and bought land from the Narragansett, naming the settlement Providence. Rhode Island's charter, which he secured in 1644 and again in 1663, guaranteed liberty of conscience. Quakers, Baptists and Jews settled there when they could settle nowhere else in New England; the Touro Synagogue in Newport is the oldest in the country. He founded the first Baptist church in America and then left it, concluding no church was pure. He learned Narragansett and published A Key into the Language of America in 1643. He died in 1683.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history