Rhode Island

HARVARD DEPOSITORY BRITILE BOOK .. l BY f'HB SAMB AUTHOII. John Brown amon~ tbe Quakers, and Other SkeU:bes. Revised Edition, 16mo, gilt top, .x.so. Concerning one or the sketches: "A wlulll ,..,.;. IHIIiM ,. Wl.ttn'W Ai.tm:Y."-FllAMCIS PAJUI:IIAM. Appenzell: Pure Democracy and Pastoral Ufe In Inner Rhoden : A Swiss Study. nmo, $1.50. "F11ll •f itttwut ruttl i~~.rtrw~UJ~."-London TitJU.t. RHODE ISLAND ITS MAKING AND ITS MEANING A Survey of the Annale of the Commonwealth &om fu Setdement to the Death of Roger William• BY IRVING BERDINE RICHMAN WITH AN INTI.ODVCTION aT JAMES !!_RYCE, M.P., D.C.L. AVTIIOa OP ''TR& AII&&ICAJI COJIMC*W&Al.TIItt VOLUME I G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON ~be 'ltntcllerbocker l)rue 19QZ - COPYiliGHT, IC)OI BY IRVING BERDINE RICHMAN FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN INTRODUCTION HODE ISLAND is the smallest by far of all R the States of the American Union; it has an area of only 1o85 square miles, less than that of the County of Ayr in Scotland. But within this narrow space, and with a population which was until in recent years but slender, Providence grew into a great manufacturing city and Newport be came the favorite home of wealth and luxury. Rhode Island has had a singularly interesting and eventful history, all the more interesting because in a tiny community the play of personal forces is best seen and the characters of individual men give color to the strife of principles and parties. Thus some touch of that dramatic quality which belongs to the cities of Greece and Italy recurs in this little republic on Narragansett Bay. Unlike in many ways as were the settlers who went forth from England under the Stuarts to the Greeks of two thousand years earlier, some of the questions which troubled both were the same, and bore fruits not wholly dissimilar. Nor are points of likeness wanting to the history of some of the older cantons of Switzerland. Mr. Richman, who is favorably known to stu- YOL.I. v vi Introduction dents of history by his book on Appenzell, has essayed in the present volumes to chronicle the for tunes of Rhode Island in its earlier days. The peculiar interest of those days lies in the fact that this colony was in a special sense the offspring and the embodiment of certain distinctive and novel ideas in the sphere of religion and politics. This · character it owes to one man. Roger Williams, hom just three centuries ago(probably in A.D. 16o3), was the founder of Rhode Island in a clearer and ampler sense than any other single man-scarcely excepting William Penn-was the founder of any other American colony ; for he gave it a set of principles which, so far as the New World was concerned, were peculiarly his own, and these principles long continued to affect its collective life. The men of Virginia were ordinary Englishmen of the class then dominant in England. The men of Massachusetts and Connecticut were Puritans of the normal seventeenth-century type, earnest and God-fearing, but almost as ready to persecute heretical opinions as they had found the church of Archbishop Laud ready to persecute them. Roger Williams had a new doctrine. In point of doctrine he seems to have been an orthodox Puritan, gifted with a double portion of the dissidence of dissent, although so u lovely in his carriage" that the hostility he roused did not take the form of hatred to him self personally. But he was the first apostle in New England of the theory of absolute freedom for the individual in matters of religion, with the consequent denial of the right of the civil magis- Introduction Vll trate to intermeddle in any wise with such matters. He was not the first discoverer of this great· and wholesome principle, for isolated voices had for a century before his time uttered it in more or less explicit terms. But he was so much the most zealous and active exponent of it in America, and Rhode Island was so conspicuously the first colony to apply it in practice, that he and his community deserve to be honored by those who hold that one of the chief services which the United States has rendered to the world consists in the example set there of a complete disjunction of religious worship and belief from the machinery of civil government. Upon this foundation, and upon the cognate principle of the fullest recognition of the rights of the individual in the civil sphere also, the common wealth of Rhode Island was built, and thus it be came the refuge of those who sought to escape from the grim stringency of the Massachusetts Theocracy. Roger Williams was in a sense before his time; and he may not in some respects have fully appreciated the results of his own principles. But the prin ciples spread and the work told, though in Europe, with its solid mass of institutions inherited from the middle ages, no great progress was made till the spirit of political revolt and the spirit of critical inquiry came in to quicken the march of ideas. A no less honorable and scarcely less important part of Williams's doctrines was his recognition of the right of the native Indians to their lands. His respect for their rights, his wish to deal fairly and live peaceably with the aborigines are among the viii Introduction most attractive features of his character and entitle him to be numbered in the noble band to which Las Casas and Penn and Wilberforce belong. The story of the beginnings of Rhode Island is full of varied interest and Mr. Richman tells it well He delineates Roger Williams with insight and with sympathy. He sets clearly before us the con ditions under which the little community started on its long and chequered course. The enormous changes which have passed in America during the last sixty years do not diminish - indeed, they rather increase-the value of a study of the days wherein the foundations of this mighty edifice were raised. We live in a time of great States,. when the right of small nations to exist is arrogantly denied by those who do not comprehend the worth of variety and of free individual development. But it ought to be remembered that down till the sixteenth century almost all the work we still prize in literature, in art, in philosophy and in religion, as well as in the creation of institutions, had been done by the citi zens of ·small cities or by the members of small tribes. The gigantic nations of to-day, highly vitalized as they are by facilities of communication and transport, do not produce what Athens and Florence produced in the centuries of their prime. .JAMES BRYCE. , I PREFACE HE title selected for the following pages, - T Rhode Island, its Making and its Meaning, -is not a mere matter of words. The meaning of Rhode Island (to speak of that first) is, I take it, clear and precise. It is primarily that Roger Williams, and the commonwealth which he founded, established earlier and more fully than any other man or community the principle of Free dom of Conscic:;nce in religion ; and in the next place it is that Rhode Island itself established earlier and more fully than any other community the political principle of Individualism,-a principle since better known as that of the Rights of Man. It will be observed that a distinction is here drawn between the work performed chiefly by Roger Williams and that performed chiefly by Rhode Island Williams understood the whole subject of Freedom of Conscience in religion. It has not been found possible to add anything to his exposition of this subject. But while this is true, Williams did not understand some things which were involved in and corollary to his doctrine of Soul Liberty, and which were worked out through much storm and stress by the commonwealth which YO&..L fx X Preface he founded. That is to say, he did not (as is shown at Chapter XI.) understand the bearings of Soul Liberty in the political domain. Rhode Island, how ever, did understand these bearings, and the con sequence is that to the principle of religious freedom (which by nearly universal consent is placed to the credit of Rhode Island) there must be added the de rived though no less weighty principle of political freedom expressed in the doctrine of the Rights of Man and of the Individual : that doctrine which came to underlie both the American War for Inde pendence and the great Revolution in France.1 So much for the meaning of Rhode Island. A word now as to its making. This,- as will be seen, · -was a process both slow and tortuous. Freedom of Conscience, even in religion, was not at first formally recognized on Aquidneck ; and as for the Rights of Man and of the Individual, that principle was only established amid a series of jarring scenes 1 Dr. Georg Jellinek of the University of Heidelberg says in his essay, " The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens" (translated into English last year): " The right of the liberty of conscience was proclaimed by Roger Williams and with it came the conception of a universal right of man." Again he says : ' ' With the conviction that there existed a right of conscience independent of the State was found the starting point for the determination of the inalienable rights of the individual." It is the thesis of Dr.

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