Reconsiderations

Reconsiderations ROGER WILLIAMS NOT A SEEKER BUT A “WITNESS IN SACKCLOTH” j. stanley lemons OGER Williams has been called a Seeker for about 370 years, R so to say that he was not a Seeker is to fly in the face of time and repetition. The endurance of “Roger Williams, the Seeker,” stems from the fact that his critics defined him that way in the seventeenth century and no one critically questioned the label until the twentieth century.1 Not only was “Seeker” repeated down through the years, but the meaning changed from an epithet in the seventeenth century into a term of admiration by the twentieth century, especially in the hands of liberal historians and humanists. Even the Baptists, whom Williams deserted after only a few months, now praise him as a Seeker.2 Yet some scholars doubt that the Seekers ever existed, instead proposing that they were an imaginary sect created by heresy-hunters. Even if the Seekers did exist, Williams never “styled himself a ‘Seeker’”3 and never identified with them. The time has come to re-brand Williams as a “Witness” because that is how he saw himself. I: From Heretic to Humanist Hero The evolution of the label “Seeker” from opprobrium to praise fol- lowed the change in the reputation of Roger Williams from outsider 1One exception is John Hunt, Religious Thought in England from the Reformation to the End of the Last Century (London: Strahan & Co., 1870), 1:234, who said that Ranters and Seekers must be struck off the lists of sects. “Either they never existed or these were names applied to parties otherwise named.” 2See, for example, the picture of Williams on the cover of the April 1954 issue of Crusader with the title “Seeker.” The Crusader was the denominational magazine of the Northern Baptist Convention. 3Thomas Bicknell, Story of Dr. John Clarke: The Founder of the First Free Com- monwealth of the World on the Basis of Full Liberty in Religious Concernments (Prov- idence: privately printed, 1915), p. 175. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVIII, no. 4 (December 2015). C 2015 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00496. 693 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00496 by guest on 27 September 2021 694 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to hero. He went from being regarded as a heretical trouble-maker in his own time to being widely seen in the nineteenth century as the first great American prophet of religious liberty. The first histories of New England, written by Puritan defenders of the New England Way, depicted Williams as an unstable, troublesome fanatic who de- served to be punished for his dangerous ideas.4 Those early histories simply repeated the slander of the English heresiographers who first called Williams a “Seeker” in the mid–1640s in order to brand him as a heretic. While Baptists in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies sought to rehabilitate Williams’s reputation, his acceptance as an American hero came with the rising tide of democracy and liberty in the nineteenth century.5 As separation of church and state and religious liberty came to be regarded as basic to the American way of life, Williams’s reputation as the earliest American champion of 4The first history was Nathaniel Morton’s New-England’s Memorial, published in Cambridge in 1669. He was the nephew of William Bradford (1590 –c. 1657), governor of Plymouth. While Bradford’s journal, Of Plimouth Plantation, was not published until 1856, Morton and other writers knew it and quoted from it. These included William Hubbard, A General History of New England from the Discovery to 1680, and Joshua Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusets [sic] Colony Anno 1628, published in Boston in 1683 and 1694 respectively. When Cotton Mather published his Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England (London, 1702), he amplified a remark from his grandfather John Cotton who had written to Williams, saying, “you over-heated your selfe in reasoning and disputing against the light of his [Jesus Christ’s] truth. .” Mather characterized Williams with that oft- quoted comparison of Williams’s zealotry to the Dutch windmill that spun so furiously that the grindstone heated up, set fire to the mill, and then spread to burn down the whole town. See Magnalia Christi Americana, 2:430. John Cotton’s comment is found in A Letter of John Cotton (1643)inComplete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1963), 1:298 (hereafter referred to as Williams Complete Writings). 5Baptist champions of Roger Williams included John Callender, An Historical Dis- course on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island (1739), edited by Romeo Elton, Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, vol. 4 (Providence: Knowles, Vose & Co., 1838); Isaac Backus, A History of New England with particular reference to the Denomination of Christians called Baptists (1777 repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969); David Benedict, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America, and other Parts of the World (London: Lincoln and Edmands, 1811); James D. Knowles, Memoir of Roger Williams: The Founder of the State of Rhode-Island (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands, 1834); William Gammell, Life of Roger Williams: Founder of the State of Rhode Island (Boston: Gould, Kendell & Lincoln, 1846); Romeo Elton, The Life of Roger Williams: The Earliest Legislator and True Champion for a Full and Absolute Liberty of Conscience (Providence: George H. Whitney, 1853); Frances Wayland, Notes on Principles and Practices of Baptist Churches (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1857); Daniel C. Eddy, Roger Williams and the Baptists (Boston: Andrew F. Graves, 1861); Reuben Guild, Biographical Introduction to the Writings of Roger Williams (Providence: Narragansett Club Publication, 1866); Guild, Footprints of Roger Williams (Providence: Tibbetts & Preston, 1886). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00496 by guest on 27 September 2021 RECONSIDERATIONS 695 these ideas rose and the image of his Puritan detractors sank.6 In his magisterial history of the United States, George Bancroft declared, “Roger Williams asserted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty, and made it the corner stone of a political constitution. It became his glory to found a state upon that principle . .” Further, “Let, then, the name of Roger Williams be preserved in universal history as one who advanced moral and political science, and made himself a benefactor of his race.”7 The secularization of Williams was advanced by Oscar Straus in 1894 with the publication of Roger Williams: Pioneer of Re- ligious Liberty.8 He stressed Williams’s political views and put him in a tradition that fought for liberty against oppression. This admiration soared in the twentieth century, especially among the Progressive historians who saw Williams’s ideas as part of a great liberal tradition. On the other hand, they regarded the Puritans as the cause of much of what was wrong with America. Popular critics of Puritanism included the likes of the journalist H.L. Mencken who coined his savage definition of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”9 Vernon Parrington regarded Calvinism as a rotten root to American culture and saw the Puritans’ effort to create a Calvinist state as establishing an oppressive, conservative tradition in America. Parrington called Williams an open-minded inquirer, an intellectual, a “Christian free-thinker.” He put Williams at the head of the line of liberalism that ran through Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Parrington’s own time.10 He saw Williams as prefiguring Thomas Paine, William Ellery Channing and the Unitarians, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and the French Roman- tic School.11 Parrington credited his student James Ernst with his 6When secular historians in the nineteenth century, such as George Bancroft, praised Williams, the Puritans had lost the argument. See his History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols. (1885 repr Port Wash- ington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), 1:249–56. 7Bancroft, History of the United States, pp. 254–55, 256. 8Oscar S. Straus, Roger Williams: Pioneer of Religious Liberty (New York: Century Co., 1894). 9Alistair Cooke, ed., The Vintage Mencken (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1955), p. 233. 10Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Literature: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginning to 1920, 3 vols. (1927 repr New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), 1:6, 10, 64. 11Parrington, Main Currents in Amer. Literature, 1:62, 65. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00496 by guest on 27 September 2021 696 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY interpretation of Williams as a political theorist.12 Not surprisingly these conclusions were amplified in Ernst’s own writings.13 James Ernst’s 1932 biography, Roger Williams: New England Fire- brand, was a major contribution and shaped the understanding of Williams for the next three decades. He called Williams the “Father of American democracy,” “a John the Baptist of New England Tran- scendentalism and a spiritual ancestor of Theodore Parker, Channing, and Emerson,” a “transcendental mystic,” a “Renaissance humanist,” and the “apostle of the French Revolution and individual rights.”14 An impressive aspect of Ernst’s work was his research into the tracts, pamphlets, and books of the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, bringing fresh material to the American audience. While doing his research, he conclusively identified The Examiner Defended (1652) as being written by Williams.15 This research lent great cred- ibility to his conclusions, and from this investigation grew Ernst’s description of the “Seeker religion.” Unfortunately, his determination to present Williams as a Seeker caused him to misread or misconstrue his sources and to draw dubious conclusions.

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