The Wordy Shipmates (26 page)

 

 

 

A
few weeks prior to Anne Hutchinson’s death, Winthrop notes in his journal that Roger Williams, passing through New Amsterdam to board a ship for England to secure a charter for Providence, had actually tried to negotiate a peace between the Dutch and their Indian opponents. Winthrop writes that thanks to Williams, peace was “reestablished between the Dutch and them.” Alas for Hutchinson, that peace didn’t stick.

It is during this 1643 voyage from New Amsterdam that Williams writes his Algonquian dictionary,
A Key to the Language of America,
by a “rude lamp at sea.” It is an eventful trip. In London, Williams goes on a publishing binge, printing
A Key,
along with John Cotton’s callous letter about his banishment, his response to Cotton’s letter, and his diatribe on liberty of conscience,
The Bloudy Tenent.
He also secures a charter from Parliament for Providence, Newport, and Portsmouth. The three towns, the document claims,

have adventured to make a nearer neighborhood and society with the great body of the Narragansett, which may in time by the blessing of God upon their endeavors, lay a sure foundation of happiness to all America.

Among the names of parliamentarians signing the charter is one “H. Vane,” the former governor of Massachusetts Bay.

Williams made another return visit to England in 1651, staying at Vane’s house and hobnobbing with Puritan celebrities like Cromwell and the poet John Milton, author of
Paradise Lost
(whom Williams taught Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch). But the person who would, some twelve years later, in 1663, make Williams’s dream of codifying religious liberty come true was not one of his fellow Puritans. It was the philandering, theater-attending “merry monarch” of the Restoration himself, Charles II.

The new Rhode Island charter signed by the king proclaimed:

No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concern ments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned, they behaving themselves peaceable and quietly.

While the previous charter had urged Rhode Island, like the Massachusetts Bay Charter of yore, to “conform to the laws of England,” this one extends to the inhabitants of Rhode Island more freedom than the inhabitants of England.

In the years after Massachusetts forces Roger Williams, and then Anne Hutchinson, to trudge through the snow to Narragansett Bay, Williams’s colony becomes a place of refuge for the unwanted and displaced, the outcasts and the cranks, including Baptists, Quakers, and Jews.

In
The Witches of Eastwick,
a novel set in a fictional, seemingly dull Rhode Island village, John Updike tips his hat to Rhode Island’s weirdo founders. Satan moves to town and wonders why the alluring local witches live in such a humdrum place. “Tell him Narragansett Bay has always taken oddballs in,” says one witch to another, “and what’s he doing up here himself?”

That said, Williams’s colony is hardly utopia. There is as much internecine squabbling—if not more—going on there as there is in Massachusetts.

In 1672, the sixty-nine-year-old Williams himself will wage a vicious war of words with the colony’s Quakers because he believes they have “set up a false Christ.” The Quaker belief in the “God within” each person is anathema to a Bible-based Calvinist like Williams, who writes in his screed against Quaker founder George Fox,
George Fox Digg’d Out of his Burrowes,
“they preached the Lord Jesus to be themselves.”

Williams even holds a three-day-long debate in Newport with three Quakers. “The audience, mostly Baptists and Quakers,” writes Perry Miller, “heckled him with cries of ‘old man, old man,’ and whispered, after he had on the first day shouted himself hoarse in order to get any hearing, that he was drunk.” (More than three decades after John Cotton accused Williams of missing God’s point back in Salem when he smote him with laryngitis, he was once again struck dumb during a spree of punditry.)

Here is the important difference between Massachusetts Bay and Narragansett Bay. Quakers such as Mary Dyer are hanged in Boston Common. In Rhode Island, there is bickering, but there is no banishing. There are mean-spirited spiritual debates, but no forced and freezing hikes of exile.

 

 

 

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n 1675, Metacom, aka King Philip (the son of Williams’s old Wampanoag friend Massasoit) assembled an army of allied native warriors, attacking English settlements across New England. In 1676, some of Philip’s Narragansett allies burned down Providence. One English resident of the town believed the Word of God would protect him from the native invaders, who nevertheless “ripped him open, and put his Bible in his belly,” according to one contemporary account. Williams’s house went up in smoke, along with his lifelong sympathy for his Narragansett neighbors. After Philip’s death—his head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for the next twenty years—Williams was one of the colonial officials at the end of the war who approved the sale of vanquished Indians into slavery, primarily in Bermuda, where their descendants still reside.

Though Williams complained of being “old and weak and bruised” with “lameness on both my feet,” he lived to see Providence rebuilt. He is well remembered there, having died in 1683 at the age of eighty. What was left of his remains was reburied in 1939 in a park on Prospect Terrace in which a colossal statue of Williams stares out across his city, giving him a view of the statue
Independent Man
on top of the Rhode Island State Capitol, where the Royal Charter of 1663 is, incidentally, housed.

One morning, I sat on a bench near the Williams statue eating breakfast, and from the open window of a passing car I heard rapper Eminem on the radio, asking, “May I have your attention, please?” as Williams must have asked so many times, trying to get the men and women of New England to hear what he had to say.

So Providence is an appropriate place to ponder Williams, but the best spot in Rhode Island to commune with his legacy is in the Touro Synagogue, in Newport. This fine colonial temple with its arches and columns is the oldest synagogue in the United States. The building was dedicated in 1763. But the congregation dates back to 1658, when fifteen Jewish families sailed from the West Indies because they had heard of Roger Williams and his colony’s commitment to freedom of worship.

In 1790, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson come to Newport, stumping for the Bill of Rights. (Rhode Island is the last state to ratify the Constitution precisely because its citizens hold out for a bill of rights so they can retain the freedom of religion they have enjoyed since the days of Roger Williams.) Moses Seixas, a member of the Touro Synagogue, wrote Washington a letter asking about his administration’s policy toward Jews. Washington’s response, addressed “to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island,” reassures Seixas and his brethren that the American government goes beyond mere tolerance:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

O
ne hundred and seventy years after the first president wrote those words pledging freedom of religion in the United States, the thirty-fifth president was elected. John Winthrop would have been delighted that the new president came from a Boston family. That is, until Winthrop learned that that Boston family was Catholic.

In a kind of microbial comeuppance, the Protestant bastion Winthrop was able to build in the 1630s because a plague had wiped out its original Indian inhabitants by 1620 would become the Catholic capital of America after an infectious mold destroyed the Irish potato crop in the 1840s, flinging the refugees of the resulting famine, among them the ancestors of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to Boston in droves, bringing their “popery” with them.

On January 9, 1961, eleven days before his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy gives a speech at the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill to a Joint Convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His opening remarks, including the fact that his grandparents were born there and the hope that his grandchildren will be, too, seem sentimental on the page. But in the sound recording of that event, the tone of his voice is solemn, nearly fu nereal. He claims it is not a farewell address, but that is how it sounds. He calls himself a “son of Massachusetts,” and here that does not come off as boosterism. To be a son of Massachusetts is to carry the cumbersome weight of history, though Kennedy is proud to bear that burden.

“For no man about to enter high office in this country can ever be unmindful of the contributions which this state has made to our national greatness,” he tells them. “Its leaders have shaped our destiny long before the great republic was born. For what Pericles said of the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: ‘We do not imitate—for we are a model to others.’ ”

For a man who always looks so crisp and modern on film, that last opinion could not be more antique. Nowadays, I cannot imagine that an American president from Massachusetts would ever be allowed to stand up in his home state and evoke Pericles in order to put forth the notion that the rest of the country should look up to the place nicknamed “Taxachusetts,” the place where men are allowed to marry other men. Nowadays, I cannot imagine an American from Massachusetts could get elected president period, much less a Harvard grad prone to elitist quotations from ancient Greece.

Kennedy goes on to say,

The enduring qualities of Massachusetts—the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant—will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation’s executive mansion.

“Allow me to illustrate,” he says. He talks about how he’s spent the last couple of months planning for his presidency. As he makes ready, one man has been on his mind.

“I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship
Arbella
three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier,” Kennedy says.

Then he boils down the two phrases from “A Model of Christian Charity” that mean the most to him: “We must always consider, [Winthrop] said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

I fall for those words every time I hear them, even though they’re dangerous, even though they’re arrogant, even though they’re rude.

“Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us,” Kennedy points out. He does not mention that the whole world is staring in America’s direction because we have a lot of giant scary bombs, but I am guessing that is partly what he meant. He says that he hopes that all branches of government, from the top on down, are mindful of “their great responsibilities.” Responsibilities that include trying not to use the giant scary bombs.

“For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the
Arbella
in 1630,” he continues. “We are committing ourselves to tasks of state-craft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was by terror without and disorder within.”

He then paraphrases the same verse from the Gospel of Luke that John Cotton evoked in 1630 in his farewell sermon to the passengers on the
Arbella.
“For of those to whom much is given, much is required.” He says that history will judge him and everyone else on four things—courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication, “the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State,” Kennedy adds.

He does not sound entirely steady. “I ask for your help and your prayers, as I embark on this new and solemn journey,” he pleads. At this grave moment, he is not a man merely talking about the
Arbella.
He is on the dock in Southampton, ready to board the
Arbella,
along with the people before him. The mood is ominous and the fear is real. But this is a new beginning and he is not alone.

The Complete Writings of Roger Williams,
edited by Perry Miller, seven volumes (Russell & Russell, 1964; based on the Narragansett Club edition of 1867).