Most of us, if we have studied early American history at all, have heard of Roger Williams. He is one of the people the Puritans booted out of Massachusetts, remember? He disagreed with the leaders of the Bay colony about what seems to us today to be minor points relating to their religious beliefs, and he was banished. He fled into what was then the wilderness (at least as far as Europeans were concerned), and founded what became Rhode Island. That’s what most of us remember, and it’s not wrong, but there is a lot more detail than that.
What Williams disagreed with was, in essence, the imposition of a state religion. He did not think that the government, whatever form it took, should dictate people’s beliefs. That might sound obvious to us today, but then, it was, not to put too fine a point on it, revolutionary. And the leaders of the government in Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies felt it to be an existential threat. They banished Williams, and washed their hands of him, but then a number of other people joined him. Several of these people had also been banished from Massachusetts.
The fact that Rhode Island survived at all is somewhat amazing, but from Barry’s telling, very important for our founding as a nation. While the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth colonies, and even the Dutch in New Netherland, were not happy about the existence of Rhode Island, once the King granted them a charter of their own, there was little they could do about it. While Rhode Island grew slowly in population, they did grow. And Williams’ crazy idea, that people should be free to decide their own beliefs, not just follow their monarch or government, became enshrined in our Constitution.
If this was your family, how would you research them? I did have ancestors early in Rhode Island, but I don’t think they were this early. While church records are important in other colonies, they are not in Rhode Island. The only exception might be Quakers. They were allowed in Rhode Island, while other colonies were persecuting them. If you have an ancestor that you know went to Massachusetts, but disappears from the records there, you might check to see if they went to Rhode Island. That could tell you a lot about that ancestor!