Roger Williams as Palimpsest: Radical in One Lane, Conventional Elsewhere

 

A Word-Deed Analysis of Soul-Liberty and Its Limits

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1. Introduction: Roger Williams as Palimpsest

Roger Williams has become a kind of Rorschach test for American political and religious imagination. He appears, depending on who is looking, as:

• The troublesome Puritan heretic banished from Massachusetts Bay.¹
• The founding "saint" of Rhode Island, architect of American religious freedom.²
• A proto–Bill of Rights liberal whose ideas prefigure modern human rights.³
• A theorist of "mere civility," offering a minimalist ethic for pluralist politics.⁴
• A Baptist/evangelical "prophet of soul-liberty" and patron saint of religious freedom.⁵

Each of these Rogers is recognizably linked to the same historical person, but they are not mutually compatible. The historical record has become a hermeneutical palimpsest: successive generations have written over earlier understandings of Williams, layering their own anxieties and aspirations onto his texts.

Two interpretive temptations recur. One is to anoint one layer as the "real" Williams and dismiss the rest as distortions. The other is to aggregate all the layers into a single, anachronistic figure who somehow anticipates the entire modern liberal and evangelical consensus.

This essay takes a different path. It does not attempt to read Williams's mind or to reconstruct a single "essential" Williams. Instead, it employs a simple but demanding method: a Word–Deed principle. Interpretive claims about Williams must be tested against:

1. What he actually wrote—in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), its prefaces, subsequent pamphlets, and letters.⁶
2. What he actually did—in founding Providence, negotiating with Native nations, securing and defending the Rhode Island charter, tolerating Quakers and Samuel Gorton, and participating (or not) in broader political causes.⁷

Alongside this Word–Deed test, the essay uses three comparative "controls" drawn from Williams's own milieu: John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, and Samuel Gorton. They shared overlapping theological and political vocabularies with Williams, moved in some of the same circles, and faced cognate problems. Yet their paths diverged in telling ways. Precisely because they are so close to Williams in time and space, they help expose what he did—and did not—make of his premises.

The central claim that emerges is this:

Williams was radical and absolute in one domain only: the individual's quest for God must never be coerced. He insisted that "soules" and "consciences" are inviolable in matters of faith and worship, and he tried—imperfectly—to build a civil order that respected that inviolability.⁶

He did not extend this absolutism to other domains (slavery, gender, property, political rights), even when contemporaries like Gorton and the Levellers did. Modern readings that treat Williams as a general theorist of civil liberty, minimal civility, or democratic equality mistake the historical fusion of religion and politics in his century for a conceptual generality he himself never articulated.³⁴

The argument proceeds in several movements. First, it shows how Williams's eschatology made "soul-liberty" thinkable, and contrasts his use of that theology with Milton's. Second, it analyzes Williams's direct addresses to Parliament in 1644, which reveal his rigorous domain-specificity. Third, it places Williams in the company of Cromwell and Milton in the 1650s, then introduces Gorton as a limiting comparator. Fourth, it uses the Quaker case to refute the "mere civility" reading. Fifth, it reconstructs Williams's own conception of separation, his limited success in Rhode Island, and Baptist and liberal appropriations. Finally, it considers Williams's afterlife: how later traditions extended his logic beyond what he himself ever claimed.

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2. Eschatology and Its Limits: The Milton Control

Williams's radical doctrine of liberty of conscience did not arise from a generalized love of freedom. It was the consequence of a specific eschatological and ecclesiological judgment: in the present age, all visible churches are fallen, and God alone will judge their errors at the Last Day.⁶

In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), Williams repeatedly returns to Christ's parable of the wheat and tares in Matthew 13.⁶ The servants want to uproot the tares (false believers), but the householder forbids them:

"In the parable of the Tares, the Lord Jesus expresly commands, that the Tares… must be suffered to grow in the field of the World, and that but for one reason, because their roots are so twisted with the Wheet, that the plucking up of the one, endangers the plucking up of the other also."⁶

For Williams, the magistrate is precisely the over-zealous servant who cannot see into hearts. Any attempt to enforce doctrinal purity—whether by fines, imprisonment, banishment, or execution—risks uprooting true believers along with supposed heretics. Magistrates therefore must not touch "soules" and "consciences" at all:

"The Civill Magistrate may not intermeddle with Religion or matters of Conscience, nor compell men to this or that form of Religion, or doctrine, or worship."⁶

This is a radical claim about jurisdiction: the magistrate's sword is God-ordained, but strictly for "bodies and goods," not for spiritual matters.⁶⁸ Theologians had long distinguished the "two kingdoms" or "two tables" of the law; Williams's move is to strip the magistrate of any authority over the first table (idolatry, blasphemy, worship) altogether.⁶

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6. Quakers and the Collapse of "Mere Civility"

Recent political theory has sought in Williams a forerunner of a different ideal: "mere civility," understood as a minimal ethic of interaction that allows people who despise each other's views to go on coexisting and arguing. Teresa Bejan, for example, presents Williams as a theorist who wanted "not mutual respect but the ability to disagree, sometimes quite nastily, without resorting to violence or suppression."⁴

Bejan explicitly appeals to Williams's exchanges with the Quakers as proof of concept: here, she argues, is a case where deep mutual hostility is nonetheless contained within a minimal standard of civility that keeps conversation going.⁴ Yet the historical record of those same Quaker encounters suggests something quite different.

6.1. Quaker incivilities

Seventeenth-century Quakers, especially in England and Massachusetts, were notorious for spectacular acts of religious protest. Some entered churches naked or half-naked as a sign against "outward forms."²¹ Others broke bottles or pots during sermons, shouted down ministers, or disrupted sacraments, claiming prophetic inspiration.²¹ In Massachusetts, such acts elicited brutal punishments: whippings, brandings, mutilations, and executions.²²

In Rhode Island, Quakers arrived in the 1650s and rapidly gained influence, especially in Newport.¹⁸²³ Their behavior could be deeply unsettling to magistrates and other colonists. Yet, as historians repeatedly note, they were not persecuted there for their beliefs or for their disruptive modes of worship.²³²⁴

Williams himself detested Quaker doctrine. Late in life he wrote George Fox Digg'd out of his Burrowes (1676), a long, bitter attack on Quaker theology and practice.²⁴ He also, famously, rowed by his own hand across Narragansett Bay as an old man to engage in a multi-day public debate with Quaker leaders.²³²⁴

But crucially, he did not advocate that Quakers be expelled, fined, whipped, or otherwise coerced by the civil power for their beliefs or their disruptive behavior.²³²⁴ He did not demand that they meet any civility threshold as a condition of legal toleration. In practice, his tolerance extended to Quaker incivilities and disruptions—public shouting, symbolic acts that many contemporaries would have seen as breaches of peace—because he understood them as expressions of religious conviction.²³²⁴

6.2. What this shows

If one takes Williams's actual deeds seriously, two conclusions follow.

First, civility was not the operative principle. Quakers regularly violated what any reasonable observer would call minimal civility norms. Yet Williams opposed using the civil sword against them. If "mere civility" were the condition of inclusion, they would fail it. His tolerance of them was grounded instead in his absolute refusal to "rape" conscience, even when conscience produced incivility.⁶²³

Second, Williams was not trying to perpetuate agonistic debate as such. His own debates with Quakers were his personal attempt to witness to what he believed, a kind of intellectual labor of love. They were not the mechanism by which his polity managed disagreement. The polity's mechanism was simpler: it refused to grant magistrates jurisdiction over matters of doctrine and worship, full stop.⁶²³

Had Williams intended to found a theory of "mere civility," one would expect, somewhere among his hundreds of pages, an attempt to define that civility: what counts as a violation, what sanctions are appropriate, where the line lies between permissible harshness and punishable abuse. There is nothing of the kind. The terms "civil peace" and "order" remain generic and under-theorized, while the non-coercion of conscience is elaborated at enormous length. The imbalance itself is telling.

The Quaker test thus aligns with the Gorton test: both show that Williams's principle is maximalist but narrow, and not easily assimilable to modern theories of civility or content-neutral public reason.

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7. Radical in One Lane: The Inviolability of the Quest for God

At this point the conceptual core of Williams's position can be stated plainly.

7.1. Separation for the sake of conscience, not "the church"

It is common, especially in Baptist and evangelical retellings, to say that Williams's separation of church and state was meant "to protect the church from the state."⁵ While there is some truth in that (he did fear an established church's corruption by civil power), it mislocates the beneficiary of separation.

Williams's own writings make clear:

• He had no confidence in the purity of any visible church (that is, the outward, institutional church in this age).
• He left the Church of England, then Congregationalism, then the brief Baptist experiment, and died a Seeker—refusing to join any formal church.²⁵
• He saw all visible churches as provisional and mixed in this "wilderness condition," awaiting Christ's return.⁶²⁵
• He explicitly extends his protection not only to various Christian sects but to "Pagans, Jewes, Turkes" as well.⁶²⁶

In a characteristic passage, he insists:

"[A]ll men of all Nations and Countries, Jewes, Turkes, Papists, Protestants… ought freely and peaceably to enjoy their own Judgements, and Consciences in matters of Religion…"⁶

The wall he wants is therefore not built around a particular "church" as institution. It is built around the individual conscience, whatever religious or irreligious form that conscience may take. Separation is for the sake of "all individual soules" in the religious domain.

7.2. The one domain of "infinite sanctity"

Williams does treat each individual soul or conscience as having infinite value and sanctity—not as a generalized Kantian dignity attaching to all human agency in every domain, but as the soul's unique relation to God in the quest for truth. In this, his view overlaps structurally with what later Kantianism (if not necessarily Kant himself) is typically read as affirming: there is a zone of human standing into which no legitimate coercive will may intrude.

The difference lies in content and scope:

• For Williams, that inviolable domain is the sphere of faith and worship. No civil power may compel or punish belief, impose worship, or force anyone into or out of any visible church.⁶
• Outside that lane, he accepts a wide range of coercion that a full-blown Kantian framework would at least problematize:
  • Conscription for defensive wars,
  • Taxation,
  • Civil punishments for theft, violence, and other bodily offenses,
  • Hierarchical social and gender roles,
  • Limited forms of servitude and slavery he found distasteful but did not absolutely condemn.¹⁷¹⁹

His famous "Ship of State" letter makes this distinction vivid. On board a ship, Williams writes, people of many different religions and consciences may sail together. The captain may "command justice, peace and sobriety" among passengers and crew, punish mutiny, theft, violence, and refusal to perform necessary work, and use "chains and whips" if necessary to preserve safety and order.⁶

These are matters of bodies and conduct, and they are legitimately subject to coercion. What the captain may not do is force anyone to attend the ship's prayers, compel anyone to desist from their own prayers, or punish anyone for their beliefs or modes of worship.⁶

The body can be constrained; the soul cannot be conscripted. Coercion aimed at the soul, Williams says elsewhere, "stinks in God's nostrils"; coercion aimed at civil peace does not attract the same blanket condemnation.⁶⁸ Even where he disliked an institution such as slavery and sought to mitigate it (e.g. favoring time-limited servitude), he did not declare it a violation of the same inviolable principle that made religious coercion an abomination.¹⁷¹⁹

Thus:

• Kantian dignity (or at least Kantianism) is often read as constraining how we may treat embodied persons across many domains of life.
• Williams's "infinite sanctity" attaches only to the soul's relation to God in matters of faith and worship.

Outside that one lane, he is not a general theorist of rights or equality. Inside it, he may be the most uncompromising figure of his age.

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8. Rhode Island: Experiment, Fragmentation, and Partial Failure

If Williams's words sketch a society ordered around inviolable conscience, his deeds in Rhode Island show both the power and limits of that experiment.

8.1. Founding Providence and the patent

After banishment from Massachusetts in winter 1635–36, Williams founded Providence on land obtained from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi.²⁸ He explicitly grounded his title in Native consent, not royal grant, and cultivated close alliances with his Native neighbors.²⁸²⁹

In 1643–44 he traveled to England and secured from Parliament the "Providence Plantations" patent, authorizing the inhabitants of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport to "govern themselves and such others as shall hereafter inhabit within any part of the said tract of land… by such a form of civil government as by voluntary consent of all or the greater part of them shall be found most serviceable."³⁰ This vague authorization, secured through Williams's diplomacy, gave the towns wide latitude to experiment.

The 1647 code adopted under this patent famously declared that "all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God," so long as they kept the civil peace.³¹ It is tempting to read "so long as they keep the civil peace" as an embryonic version of Bejan's "mere civility." But neither the code nor Williams ever specify what "civil peace" requires in terms of speech and conduct. There is no list of minimal standards; there is, instead, a vague common-law phrase whose content is left almost entirely to case-by-case judgment.

In practice, Williams's tolerance for Quaker incivilities and disruptions—public shouting, symbolic acts that many would have deemed breaches of peace—shows that "civil peace" did not operate as a fixed behavioral threshold. Where conduct was clearly an expression of religious conscience, he stretched the notion of peace to fit his non-coercion principle, not the other way around.²³

8.2. Internal fragmentation

The actual politics of Rhode Island undercut any simple story of Williams as the architect of a unified tolerant commonwealth:

• The colony remained decentralized and contentious:
  • Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick often acted like semi-autonomous city-states.²⁹³²
  • Factions aligned with Massachusetts (Arnold–Pawtuxet), with Coddington's quasi-magisterial project on the islands, or with Gorton's Warwick radicalism.¹⁶²⁹³²
• Williams's own political roles were significant but intermittent:
  • Founder of Providence and early informal leader there.²⁸
  • Agent to England twice (1643–44, 1651–54), securing and defending patents.¹²¹³³⁰
  • President (chief officer) of the united colony only from 1654–1657.³³
  • Frequently described as mediator and negotiator, not as a durable party boss.²⁹³²
• Others, especially Coddington and Gorton, often had greater day-to-day political impact within their respective zones:
  • Coddington obtained a separate commission for the island towns and governed them semi-independently until Williams and Clarke had it revoked.¹³²⁹
  • Gorton's Warwick community enacted its own property and justice arrangements and fought long jurisdictional battles with Massachusetts and internal rivals.¹⁶³²

In this landscape, Williams's radical principle of universal tolerance for conscience was one force among many, not the settled consensus of the settlers. Rhode Island's relative freedom from religious persecution was as much a product of weak central power, overlapping claims, and economic interests as it was of Williams's theology.²⁹³²³⁴

8.3. Word–Deed tension

The Word–Deed method thus yields a nuanced verdict:

• Word: Williams proposed and defended an extraordinarily radical doctrine of soul-liberty and tried to encode it in charters and laws.⁶³⁰³¹
• Deed: He:
  • Consistently refused to persecute for belief or worship in Providence and resisted efforts to import Massachusetts's coercive model.²⁹³²
  • Tolerated Quaker and Gortonite incivilities rather than violate conscience. Gorton's "turbulent" and "seditious" behavior—denouncing magistrates in court, refusing to acknowledge their authority, using abusive language—was so described and prosecuted by Plymouth authorities; yet Williams's main concern in Rhode Island was to shield Gorton's community from Massachusetts overreach, not to expel him on civility grounds.¹⁶²³
  • Yet participated in or acquiesced to practices (e.g. enslavement of Native captives after King Philip's War) that his principle, extended, would have condemned.¹⁹
• Institutionally: Rhode Island never became the coherent "Williamsian" commonwealth imagined in some later narratives. It remained a small, fractious, and only partially principled haven for diverse and often antagonistic sects.²⁹³²³⁴

This mixed record does not diminish Williams's conceptual radicalism in his chosen domain. It does, however, caution against equating his vision with the colony's reality, or treating Rhode Island as a simple demonstration of his ideas.

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9. Baptist/Evangelical and Liberal Williams: Two Genealogies

The palimpsest structure can now be seen more clearly.

9.1. Baptist and evangelical appropriations

Baptists and evangelicals have long claimed Williams as:

• An early "Baptist" (despite his brief membership and later Seeker status),
• A hero of "soul-liberty" grounded in Christ's sole lordship over the believer's conscience,
• A champion of "separation of church and state" as a way to protect the church from worldly corruption.⁵²⁵²⁶

These readings rightly emphasize:

• His insistence that genuine conversion must be free and uncoerced.⁶²⁶
• His argument that state establishments corrupt the church and produce hypocrites.⁶²⁶
• His anticipation of later Baptist arguments for voluntarist churches and religious liberty.²⁶²⁷

But they often slide, conceptually, from:

• Protecting all consciences in matters of religion

to

• Protecting "the church" (implicitly Protestant) from the state.

Williams's own texts do not support that narrowing. As already seen, he explicitly extends liberty of conscience to "Pagans, Jewes, Turkes, Papists, Protestants," treating all visible religious communities as equally fallible and equally beyond the magistrate's jurisdiction.⁶²⁶ His wall is built around the quest for God in every soul—not around any particular ecclesiastical body.

9.2. Liberal and cosmopolitan appropriations

On the other side, liberal theorists and popular historians have presented Williams as:

• A forerunner of modern human rights and universal human dignity.³
• A proto-cosmopolitan who saw all cultures and individuals as equally worthy.³
• A central architect of American democracy and liberty.³⁵

They rightly seize on:

• The rhetorical power of Williams's language about conscience and persecution.⁶³⁵
• The fact that his arguments were cited, reworked, and generalized in the eighteenth century, especially in debates leading to the First Amendment.³⁶
• His relatively favorable treatment of Native Americans and his respect for their customs and claims.²⁸²⁰³⁷

Martha Nussbaum and others treat Williams's sympathy for Native Americans as evidence of a nascent general principle of cultural tolerance, even a proto-cosmopolitan sensibility that embraces alterity as such.³ Yet the sources suggest a more particular pattern. His reverence for the Narragansetts was bound up with gratitude (they sheltered and fed him when Massachusetts cast him out), linguistic and ethnographic fascination, theological speculation (were they remnants of the lost tribes of Israel?), and his sense that providence had arranged his survival and settlement (hence "Providence").²⁸³⁷

These are powerful, morally significant affections, but they never crystallize into a general theory that "all cultures are equally good" or that all practices deserve equal respect. They remain anchored in this specific relationship, which he reads as divinely orchestrated.

More broadly, the Word–Deed test reveals limits in the liberal reading:

• His doctrine of inviolability was explicitly about religious conscience, not about all aspects of human life.⁶
• In his own lifetime he:
  • Did not endorse Gorton's egalitarianism on gender or slavery;¹⁶¹⁷
  • Did not articulate a general rights doctrine for political participation;⁷³³
  • Accepted significant civil authority over bodies and conduct (as in his ship metaphor).⁶

The genealogical Williams that later Whigs, republicans, and liberals constructed from his writings was historically important. His phrases and precedents were repurposed in a new conceptual environment where "civil and religious liberty" had been fused into a single package.³⁶¹⁹² But that does not mean he himself held the full set of beliefs attributed to him.

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10. Conclusion: Singular Voice, Limited Domain

The picture that emerges from this exercise in Word–Deed comparison and comparative control is neither the hagiographic Williams of some Baptist and liberal narratives nor the narrowly contextualized figure of some revisionists. It is more precise, and in many ways more interesting.

• Williams was radical at the root in one domain: the sphere of religious conscience and worship. No magistrate, no church, no Parliament, no army may "rape" the soul or "ravish" conscience.⁶⁸ He was willing to live with incivility, disorder, and political risk rather than compromise that line.
• He was narrow in scope relative to others in his milieu. He did not:
  • Unite religious and civil liberty into a comprehensive republican program (Milton, Levellers).⁹¹¹⁹³
  • Extend his anti-hierarchical theology to gender, slavery, or property egalitarianism (Gorton).¹⁶¹⁷
  • Build a durable, coherent Williamsian regime even in his own colony.²⁹³²
• His historical significance rests partly on what he actually said and did, and partly on what later generations made of him. The genealogical Williams—Jefferson's Williams, Nussbaum's Williams, Barry's Williams—is a genuine historical force, shaping American self-understandings of liberty and conscience. But that genealogical figure cannot be simply read back into the seventeenth century without distorting the conceptual structure of Williams's own thought.

In the radical Protestant age of regicide, civil war, and sectarian experimentation, Williams stands out as a singular and curious voice: not the broadest theorist of liberty, but perhaps its most uncompromising guardian at one vulnerable point. He drew a hedge around the conscience and refused to let even the most promising godly state cross it. That hedge, narrower than many imagine yet stronger than most have been willing to draw, remains one of his most enduring and unsettling legacies.

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11. Afterlife: From Soul-Liberty to Inalienable Rights

Williams's story does not end with his death or with Rhode Island's early history. His arguments had an afterlife in the Atlantic world's libraries and debates about liberty.

By the eighteenth century, The Bloudy Tenent and related tracts circulated in a world where Locke's Letter on Toleration and Second Treatise, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Voltaire's and other philosophes' writings, and the Cato's Letters of Trenchard and Gordon were reshaping notions of liberty, rights, and sovereignty.¹⁹²³⁶ Williams's texts—whether directly or through intermediaries—became part of the repertoire from which Anglo-American writers drew when articulating "liberty of conscience" and "rights of man."

There is a structural family resemblance between Williams's core move and later rights language:

• Williams: the soul's relation to God is inviolable; no human power may rightfully coerce belief or worship; only God may judge conscience.⁶
• Locke and later Whigs: individuals are born with "natural" or "inalienable" rights to life, liberty, and property; no legitimate government may violate these without consent.¹⁹²³⁶

In both cases, there is a hedge drawn around some aspect of human standing, a claim that this hedge is prior to and limits political authority, and a moral rhetoric of "rape," "usurpation," or "tyranny" when that limit is crossed.⁶⁸¹⁹²

Williams's hedge is theological and domain-specific; Locke's and Jefferson's are more anthropological and expansive. Yet the underlying shape—a sphere into which no magistrate may reach—made Williams's arguments especially susceptible to transposition.

Several kinds of transposition occurred:

• Liberal Enlightenment transposition:
  • Taking Williams's insistence that "no man should be forced to worship or maintain a worship against his own consent"⁶
  • And extending the logic from "worship" to "speech," "press," "assembly," and eventually more general "liberty."³⁶¹⁹²
• Evangelical transposition:
  • Taking his defense of conscience and voluntarist faith,
  • And re-casting it as a protective hedge around "the church" (especially Protestant communities) against secular or rival religious interference.⁵²⁶

In both cases, later actors did what creative traditions often do:

• They selectively appropriated a powerful argument from one domain,
• Recognized its latent moral force,
• And extended it into new domains that the originator had not explicitly considered.

These extensions were historically transformative. The liberal–republican line from Williams to Locke to Jefferson to the First Amendment helped entrench ideas of "first freedoms" and "inalienable rights" that continue to shape constitutional orders.³⁶²³ The Baptist/evangelical line helped make "religious liberty" a central watchword in American political and ecclesiastical struggles, for good and ill.⁵²⁴⁰

The task of historical analysis is not to condemn such appropriations as "distortions," but to name them accurately. Williams never said "all men are born with inalienable civil and political rights" in the Lockean–Jeffersonian sense. He never formulated a general human-rights doctrine encompassing property, gender, or political participation. He never joined an abolitionist movement or articulated a comprehensive egalitarianism.

What he did do was:

• Argue, with relentless theological and scriptural force, that coercing the soul's quest for God is a crime against God and man.⁶⁸
• Live that argument out, unevenly but recognizably, in his dealings with Natives, Gorton, Quakers, and fellow colonists.²⁸¹⁶²³
• Provide later generations with a lexicon and structure—soul-liberty, rape of conscience, hedge between magistrate and spiritual matters—that could be lifted out of its original frame and set to new uses.

If the historical Williams drew a hedge only around conscience, the genealogical Williams helps explain why later generations came to draw hedges around bodies, property, speech, and political personhood as well. The hedges are not the same, but they are cognate. Tracing their relation clarifies both what early modern Protestant arguments about conscience made possible and what they did not themselves contain.

That, in the end, is the value of distinguishing historical from genealogical Williams. The first keeps us honest about what one seventeenth-century dissenter actually said and did. The second helps us see how those words and deeds were woven into much larger stories—of liberalism, evangelicalism, and democracy—that would have surprised, and perhaps troubled, the man whose "bloudy tenent" they conscripted for their own ends.

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Endnotes

1. On Winthrop and Williams's banishment, see John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); summarized in "Roger Williams," First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University.
2. For the founding-father emphasis, see Samuel Eliot Morison et al., The Growth of the American Republic (various eds.); and Kenneth C. Davis, "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea," Smithsonian Magazine.
3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008); John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (New York: Viking, 2012).
4. Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
5. For Baptist and evangelical appropriations, see Strickland, Roger Williams: Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty (Project Gutenberg ed.); Michael A. G. Haykin, "Roger Williams and Liberty of Conscience," Evangelical Library (2013); and "Roger Williams's Contribution to Religious Liberty and Baptists," Southwestern Journal of Theology.
6. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (London, 1644), texts via Early English Books Online and modern reprints.
7. Concise biographical overview in Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and "Roger Williams," Encyclopaedia Britannica.
8. Williams, "To the Right Honorable, both Houses of the High Court of Parliament," preface to Bloudy Tenent.
9. John Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82); online at Dartmouth Milton Reading Room.
10. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), in Complete Prose Works; see also Michael Bryson, "Milton and the Regicides," various online resources.
11. Williams, "To Every Courteous Reader," preface to Bloudy Tenent.
12. "Roger Williams: Return to England," National Park Service.
13. On Coddington's commission and its revocation, see NPS, ibid.; and "Founding of Rhode Island," EBSCO Research Starters.
14. Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1999; originally published Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991) esp. ch. 7 (discussion of Cromwell and Milton).
15. On Cromwell's limited toleration and his conception of a godly commonwealth, see "Oliver Cromwell – Toleration in an Intolerant Age," Evangelical Times, 16 May 2022; and "3. Toleration and the Protectorate," in Blair Worden et al., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
16. Adelos Gorton, The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton (Philadelphia, 1907), esp. chs. 1–7, 14–17; includes transcriptions of Plymouth charges describing Gorton as "turbulent" and "seditious" and his courtroom behavior.
17. On Gorton and the 1649 anti-slavery statute, see Gorton, ibid.; and scholarship on early Rhode Island law, e.g. "Newport, Rhode Island was founded in 1639 by religious dissidents…," Newport Historical Society handout.
18. On Gorton and Williams's interactions under the early charters, see Gorton, Life and Times; and "Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, and Secular American History," New England Quarterly.
19. On Williams and the enslavement of Native captives after King Philip's War, see standard biographies (Gaustad, Barry) and discussions in American religious history surveys.
20. On Providence's founding, Williams's deeds from Canonicus and Miantonomi, and his ethnographic work, see Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643) and NPS essays on "Founding of Providence."
21. On Quaker prophetic "signs" such as naked protest and bottle-breaking, see Heather E. Barry, "Naked Quakers Who Were Not So Naked."
22. On Puritan persecution of Quakers in Massachusetts (whippings, mutilations, executions), see the overview embedded in Douglas O. Linder, "The Life, Trials, and Execution of Mary Dyer: An Account," available online at https://famous-trials.com/dyer/2489-the-life-trials-and-execution-of-mary-dyer-an-account.
23. On Quakers in Rhode Island and Williams's debates with them, see Roger Williams National Memorial history essays, U.S. National Park Service, esp. "Religious Controversy in Colonial Rhode Island," and Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1999).
24. Roger Williams, George Fox Digg'd out of His Burrowes (Boston: John Foster, 1676); reprinted in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, vol. 5, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). For analysis, see Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1999) pp. 179-188.
25. On Williams's Seeker status and ecclesial trajectory (Anglican → Congregationalist → brief Baptist → Seeker), see Gaustad, Roger Williams; and "Roger Williams," First Amendment Encyclopedia.
26. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, on "Pagans, Jewes, Turkes, Papists, Protestants" and liberty of conscience.
27. On Cromwell's limited toleration and his conception of a godly commonwealth, see Michael A. G. Haykin, "Oliver Cromwell – Toleration in an Intolerant Age," Evangelical Times, 16 May 2022, available at https://www.evangelical-times.org/oliver-cromwell-toleration-in-an-intolerant-age/.
28. On Williams's relations with the Narragansetts and their role in his survival, see "Roger Williams: Founding of Providence," Roger Williams National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service), available at https://www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/founding-of-providence.htm; and Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643).
29. On early Rhode Island's fragmented politics and town rivalries, see Bruce C. Daniels, "Dissent and Disorder: The Radical Impulse and Early Government in the Founding of Rhode Island," Journal of Church and State 24, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 357–378; and the various articles and bibliographical resources on colonial politics and town rivalries in Rhode Island History, published by the Rhode Island Historical Society.
30. On the 1643/44 Providence Plantations patent, see the text in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, ed. John Russell Bartlett (Providence, 1856–65), 1:143–147; a helpful overview in "The Rhode Island Patent of March 1643/44 and the Acts and Orders of 1647," Small State Big History; and summaries in "Patent," Roger Williams National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service) and EBSCO "Research Starter," "Roger Williams National Memorial."
31. On the 1647 code and its "walk as their consciences persuade them" clause, see Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 1:147–152; and the discussion in "Establishment or Tolerance?," Pluralism Project at Harvard University.
32. On town autonomy, factional alignments (Arnold–Pawtuxet, Coddington, Warwick), and appeals to Massachusetts, see articles and bibliographic guides in Rhode Island History (Rhode Island Historical Society) and "Roger Williams: Founding Providence," Roger Williams National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service).
33. On Williams's presidency (1654–1657) and other offices, see standard biographical entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the First Amendment Encyclopedia, as well as the relevant volumes of Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England.
34. On Rhode Island's "Rogue's Island" reputation and toleration as stalemate, see "Establishment or Tolerance?," Pluralism Project (Harvard University), which emphasizes Rhode Island's lack of an established church, its wide liberty of conscience, and the resulting perception among neighboring colonies. Available online at https://pluralism.org/establishment-or-tolerance.
35. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012); for Barry's characterization of Williams's role in American democracy, see especially the introduction and conclusion.
36. LeRoy Moore, "Religious Liberty: Roger Williams and the Revolutionary Era," Church History 34, no. 1 (March 1965): 57–76.
37. On Nussbaum's use of Williams's treatment of Native Americans as proto-cosmopolitan, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), esp. ch. 2. For historical detail, see Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: Gregory Dexter, 1643); and "Roger Williams: Founding Providence," Roger Williams National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service).
38. For Williams's "ship of state" metaphor, see his "Letter to the Town of Providence" (c. 1654/55), in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols., ed. Reuben Aldridge Guild (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 6; also available in modern transcriptions. A concise summary is provided in "Roger Williams," First Amendment Encyclopedia (Middle Tennessee State University).
39. For recent evangelical and Baptist uses of Williams in "first freedom" rhetoric and in critiques of Christian nationalism, see Cory D. Higdon, "Roger Williams, Natural Law, and Religious Liberty," Journal of Church and State 63, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 85–108; Cory D. Higdon, "Why Roger Williams Contended for Our First Freedom: Religious Liberty and Our Evangelistic Emergency," Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, May 23, 2024; and Malcolm B. Yarnell III, "Roger Williams's Contribution to Religious Liberty and Baptists: A Reassessment," Southwestern Journal of Theology 63, no. 2 (2024).
40. In this sense, Nussbaum's account of Williams can be seen as a compelling, if historically inaccurate, appropriation rather than a faithful reconstruction. She takes Williams's most powerful tropes about the inviolability, sanctity, and dignity of the soul before God—regardless of creed—and extends them to embodied persons as such, now understood as bearers of inviolable worth and dignity under a broadly natural-law or human-rights framework. There is no rule against such a move; it is a normal operation in the history of ideas. The point is simply to notice it as a move—a creative redeployment of Williamsian language in a new register—rather than a report of what Williams himself, in his time and terms, actually taught.