Historic Events of Colonial DaysHolland, Rupert Sargent
History
Historic Events of Colonial Days
Holland, Rupert Sargent
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Yet this young man, Roger Williams by name, seemed simple and quiet
enough, as he and his wife came ashore and were welcomed by Governor
John Winthrop. He was a young preacher, filled with a desire to carry
his teaching to the new lands across the Atlantic Ocean, and he had been
asked to be the minister of the First Church in Boston. As it turned
out, however, his ideas were not the ideas of the people of Boston, and
he soon found that the First Church was not the place for him.
So after a short stay in Boston Roger Williams and his wife went to
Plymouth, which was then a colony separate from Massachusetts Bay.
William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, and his neighbors made the
young preacher welcome, and there Roger Williams stayed for two years,
teaching and exhorting and prophesying, as ministers were said to do in
those days. There his daughter Mary was born. Roger Williams, however,
was given to argument and could be very obstinate at times, and
presently he fell out with his neighbors at Plymouth, and moved again,
this time to Salem. There he was given charge of the church, and there
he, like many other free-thinking men, fell under the displeasure of the
governor of Massachusetts Bay. For some things he taught he was summoned
before the General Court of the Bay, and the Court ordered him to leave
the colony. He did not go at once, and Governor Winthrop let him stay
until the following January, when rumors came to Boston that Roger
Williams was planning to lead twenty men of his own way of thinking to
the country about Narragansett Bay, and there establish a colony of his
own. John Winthrop objected seriously to any such performance.
The governor sent Captain John Underhill in a sailboat to Salem, with
orders to seize Roger Williams and put him on board a ship that was
lying at Nantasket Roads, ready to sail for England. But when Captain
Underhill and his men marched up to the house of Williams they found
that the man they wanted had fled three days before. There was no
knowing which way he had gone, the wilderness stretched far and wide to
west and south, and so they gave up the search for him and reported to
Governor Winthrop that Roger Williams had disappeared.
Five friends of Williams, knowing that he had been commanded to leave
Massachusetts Bay, had gone into the wilderness and built a camp for him
on the banks of a river which was called by the three names of the
Blackstone, for the first settler there, the Seekonk, and the Pawtucket.
There Williams joined them, and there they stayed during the winter and
planted their crops in the spring. Then a messenger from the governor of
Plymouth came, saying that their plantation was within the borders of
the Plymouth Colony, and asking in a friendly way that Roger Williams
and his friends should move to the other side of the river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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