Conceived in Liberty (37 page)

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.