During the succeeding quarter of a century Samuell Gorton was active and influential in shaping the destinies of the growing State. He occupied the highest places of honor and responsibility at the gift of his fellow-citizens, and was habitually called into service when sound judgment, prompt and courageous action, and literary ability were requisite. He represented Portsmouth in the Assembly at Newport in 1645. He was chosen one of the Commissioners of the town of Warwick to the General Assembly on his return from England, and served therein a greater part of the time for the next two or three decades. He was placed on the most important committees, and his pen was frequently called into requisition to prepare State papers, and letters to the magistrates of other Colonies, and to the representatives of the new Commonwealth in England. Though absent in the Mother Country during the first year of Colonial Government under the charter of 1643-44, his political views were embodied in the remarkable Code of 1647, passed by the first General Assembly of the United Colony, one of the earliest compilations of law in American history. In the construction of this Code, care was taken to avoid the errors of which Gorton had complained, in the judicial procedure of the other Colonies, by making each section conform to existing English law,[49] reference to the corresponding English statute being placed at the end thereof.[50] The provision respecting witchcraft is especially noteworthy as indicating a prevailing scepticism in Rhode Island at a time when Massachusetts was under the spell of the delusion, soon to break forth in an appalling epidemic of persecution. The object of its introduction is evidently the set purpose of conforming to English precedents rather than a conviction of the legislators that the statute was demanded by any real public necessity. The section reads: “Witchcraft is forbidden by this present Assembly to be used in this Colonie; and the Penaltie _imposed by the authoritie that wee are subjected to, is felonie of death_.—I Jac. 12.”[51] The Code of 1647 also forbade imprisonment for debt, and is otherwise in advance of most contemporary legislation. The temper of the Colony on the subject of witchcraft is still further evidenced in the testimony of their opponents,[52] who complained in an anonymous letter addressed to the agent of Massachusetts in England a few years later, that the new government was ignoring the English law. This epistle especially stigmatized “some of them at Shawomet that cryeth out much against them that putteth people to death for witches, for they say there be no other witches upon earth, nor devils, but your own pasters and ministers, such as they are.”[53] There was apparently never a prosecution in Rhode Island under the statute against witchcraft.