What caused the Pequot War?

Part 3 of my series on the Pequot War, where we look at its causes.

We’ve seen how the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut were worried about being attacked from many sides: the French to the north, the Dutch to the west, and their own Parliament in England. They were not really focused on a Native American danger until 1634, when the Pequots killed an Englishman, John Stone, on the Connecticut River.

The Pequots were a powerful nation that had recently taken control of the territory that is now eastern New York and Connecticut. The Narragansetts, Niantics, Mohegans, and other groups in Connecticut paid tribute to the Pequots, who controlled the important wampum trade (the best wampum coming from Long Island, to the south).

As with any ruling group, the Pequots faced a mixture of consent and rebellion toward their government. The Narragansetts and Mohegans in particular were looking for ways to overthrow the Pequots in Connecticut. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Pequots were beginning to lose their grip on Connecticut. The arrival of Europeans speeded up that process.

When the Dutch established themselves on Manhattan, they were on the fringes of Pequot territory. When the Dutch set up a trading post on the Connecticut River, on the south shore of Connecticut, the Pequots were directly challenged for control of the area. The local peoples began trading with the Dutch,  and the Pequots struck back, killing a group of Native Americans on their way to the Dutch trading house. And, in 1634, Captain John Stone, lately of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was killed as he put in for the night on the banks of the Connecticut River on his journey to Virginia.

Stone had been unloved by the Puritans in Massachusetts. He was a drunk and a lawbreaker, and had been on the edge of banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony when he decided to leave for Virginia. When the MBC first heard of his death, in January 1634, at the hands of the Pequots (as it was reported), they “agreed to write the governor of Virginia (because Stone was one of that colony) to move him to revenge it.” (Winthrop diary, 21 January 1634).

The odds of the governor of Virginia taking any action at all on this matter were slim, to say the least. In short, the Puritans were glad Stone was gone, and had no interest in avenging his death. In fact, the MBC officers received a Pequot ambassador and his party in September 1634. The Pequots were asked about Stone’s death. According to MBC Governor John Winthrop’s account of the conversation, the Pequots said Stone had attacked them first, and was justly killed in revenge. Winthrop records that this seemed believable and the Puritans accepted it.

“The reason why the Pequots desired so much our friendship,” Winthrop continued, “was because they were now in war with the Narragansetts whom till this year they had kept under [their control], and likewise with the Dutch who had killed their old sachem and some other of their men, for that the Pequots had killed some Indians who came to trade with the Dutch at Connecticut; and by these occasions they could [now] not trade safely anywhere… They agreed to deliver us the 2 men who were guilty of Stone’s death, to yield up Connecticut, to give us 400 fathom of wampum, and to peaceful trading”. 

So the MBC had a treaty proposal for the Pequots to take back to their sachem. It specifically did not include the Puritans pledging to defend the Pequots against other Native Americans. But when the Puritans heard that 200-300 Narragansetts were coming to kill the Pequot ambassador and his party, they sent out a party of militia to stop the attack. It turned out to be only about 20 Narragansetts on an annual hunt, but the Puritans told the Narragansetts about the peace treaty, asked them to honor it, and promised to give the Narragansetts some of the wampum they would receive from the Pequots in return.

For a year, nothing else happened. Although the Pequots did not accept the treaty, their sachem realizing there was no way he could hand over all of Connecticut, all sides—Puritan, Narragansett, and Pequot—stayed mostly out of each other’s hair.

This peace was broken in July 1636, when John Oldham was found dead on Block Island. Oldham had a trading post at Wethersfield, Connecticut, and had sailed to Block Island to trade. He and all but two boys in his party were killed. The Puritans heard about this from the Narragansetts; their sachem Canonicus sent messengers with a letter from Puritan settler Roger Williams, who had founded Rhode Island in Narragansett territory, saying that the Narragansett leader was very sorry for the death of Oldham. Winthrop wrote Canonicus back saying that until the two boys taken prisoner by the Narragansetts were returned, and the killers of Oldham killed by the Narragansetts and their bodies brought to Boston, the MBC would be “suspicious” of Canonicus and his people. Miantonomi, the nephew of Canonicus, fulfilled these two requests.

How does this help start the Pequot War? When the Narragansetts set out to find Oldham’s killers, those men fled to the Pequots. Because all the suspected killers could not be found by the Narragansetts, the Puritans sent a party of militia to Block Island to finish the job. The plan was to kill the men on Block Island, then sail to Connecticut to confront the Pequots about the refugees they were harboring. But the militia found Block Island seemingly deserted, and assumed all the people there had fled to the Pequots in Connecticut. The militia men burned down many villages on Block Island, then went to Connecticut, only to be kept waiting for hours to see the Pequot sachem, who never appeared.

Furious, the Puritans spent the day burning Pequot villages, then left for Boston. The Pequots had now been doubly insulted, first by the Narragansetts, then by the Puritans. They wasted no time in attacking Saybrook, an English settlement in their Connecticut territory on October 8.

So as 1636 comes to a close, the war is about to begin in earnest. In part four, we’ll go through the battles and the diplomatic maneuvering of the war.

Puritan New England on the Edge: 1637

In part 2 of my series on the Pequot War, we look at the condition of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the settlements in Connecticut and New Haven on the eve of war.

The MBC was founded in 1630 by Puritans led by John Winthrop. They had left England because persecution of Puritans was being stepped up by King Charles I’s new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The Puritans who founded the MBC were determined to be self-ruling. But they faced many threats to their security.

To the north, in today’s Maine, were the Catholic French, stretching out from Canada. To the west, in Manhattan and western Connecticut, were the Dutch, whose government claimed the land the Puritans settled on. In Europe, the Thirty Years’ War was being fought against the Spanish; if the Spanish won, Catholicism would triumph in Europe, and the Dutch possessions in New York would become Spanish (since Spain was fighting in part to resume control over Holland). And at home in England, Laud was urging King Charles to take direct control of Massachusetts and bring it in line by outlawing its Puritanism.

These threats were immediate and real. You notice there is no mention of Native Americans. To most Puritans, Native Americans were the least of the threats facing the colony. The Native Americans were few, and unarmed, and frankly, off the radar for the Puritans, whose focus was completely on fellow Europeans, both in Europe and in America.

As early as 1633, just three years after settlement, the MBC found out that a group of English men, some former American settlers, had presented a petition to the king saying the Puritans in America were traitors, and ought to be destroyed. Friends of the colony still in England stepped in to deny this claim, and the king was persuaded not to act. But the next year, news came that the Commission for Regulating Plantations run by Archbishop (and Puritan-hater) Laud had been granted authority over the colony. Months later, the commission demanded that the Puritans send back their patent to England for “revisions.”

The patent was the grant signed by the king that allowed the Puritans to settle in Massachusetts and to govern themselves as they saw fit, so long as they did not make laws contrary to English law. If it was sent back to Laud, it would be destroyed, and Laud would write a new patent making Massachusetts a royal colony, under the king’s control.

Several times over the next few years the colony refused to surrender its patent. It began arming itself for war with England, fortifying Castle Island and other positions. During this stressful time, the French attacked and destroyed a trading post set up in Maine by Plymouth Colony, and the Dutch refused to abandon a trading post they set up on the Connecticut River.

So the Massachusetts Bay Colony was alarmed and preparing for war well before trouble with the Pequots arose in late 1634. When it did, the Pequots were seen as just one more threat to the colony. Contemporary historians often describe the Puritans as chomping at the bit to have an Indian war, but in reality, the Puritans were certain that at least one war was coming to them, and when it turned out to be an Indian war, they must have been a little surprised.

Next time: What caused the Pequot War?

The Pequot War: was it really a war?

Welcome to part 1 of my series on the Pequot War in Connecticut in 1637. The Pequot War is known as the first war between Native Americans and English settlers in North America, and its importance to our nation’s history is unquestionable.  Sadly, most Americans have never heard of it, and there’s a lot of myth clouding the story of what really happened at that time. 

The use of “war” in the Pequot War is almost a misnomer. The conflict between Connecticut and the Pequots featured only two real battles and went on only sporadically for only about three months in 1637. Fewer than 200 men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony were called up to serve, out of a population of tens of thousands. In short, the Pequot War does not seem at first glance to really merit the title of war.

The reasons it is called a war, however, are many. First, the Puritans of Connecticut and Massachusetts called it a war. Connecticut colonists declared war formally, and Massachusetts recognized the declaration. Second, it was the first planned armed encounter between English settlers and Native Americans in North America. There had been sudden attacks by English on Native Americans, and vice-versa, many times, particularly in Virginia. The Pequot War was a planned conflict that was fought as a war by its participants and ended with a peace treaty.

But the biggest reason it is called a war is because of the devastation it brought to the Pequots. The one great battle of the war, the attack on the Pequot settlement/fort at Mystic, Connecticut, cost the lives of 500-700 Pequots, and only 150 of those were warriors. The rest were women, children, and the elderly, brutally burned alive in the fort by the English. At the second, much smaller battle, the New Haven swamp fight, 180 more civilian Pequots surrendered and were portioned off as slaves to the Narragansetts and Niantics, with a few being sent as slaves to the West Indies.

These losses were near-fatal to the Pequots, who were already greatly reduced in number from the smallpox epidemic that had ravaged all Native Americans in 1619, killing 90% of the American population of New England the year before the Pilgrims arrived. On top of the deaths at Mystic and the slavery of New Haven, the Puritans ordered the Pequots never to live in Connecticut again, ordered other groups not to take in Pequots, even women and children, and made speaking the Pequot language or even saying the name “Pequot” illegal.

So what caused the Pequot War? What led the Puritans to try to erase the Pequots from the map? We’ll begin to get to the bottom of things in part 2: Puritan New England on the edge.

Why the Puritans persecuted Quakers

It seems simple enough: the Puritans believed Quakers were heretics. In fact, anyone who was not an Anglican was a heretic, including Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Quakers, Ranters… in short, anyone who was not Anglican.


Heretics were seen as blasphemers who put barriers in the way of salvation; they were also considered traitors to their country because they did not belong to the official state religion. This was true throughout Europe in the century following the Protestant Reformation: whatever religion the king chose became the official state religion of his country, and all other religions or sects were made illegal. In fact, the Puritans had left England because they had been considered heretics there, and had been persecuted by the government. Technically, they were not heretics because they did not leave the official Church of England (the Anglican Church), but their demands for big changes to that church made them outsiders. It was enough to get the anti-Puritan Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, to launch a campaign of persecution against them.


So when Quakers showed up in Boston in the 1650s, it’s no surprise they were persecuted. Puritan Congregationalism was the official—and only—religion of New England. Like every other state they knew of in Europe, the Puritans enforced a state religion that it was treason to oppose. But it wasn’t just about their religion. The persecution of Quakers was also part of the Puritans’ determination to rule themselves, independent of England.


The Puritans who had remained in England during the Great Migration to America of the 1630s drifted apart from their New England brethren. They were more inclined to allow toleration of other professions of Christian faith. The impossibility of reforming, or purifying, the Anglican Church in England was slowly rejected in favor of the much more doable task of simply confirming England as a Protestant nation by allowing any and all Protestants to worship relatively freely. The English Puritans also supported presbyterianism, a system in which the state governs the church and appoints a hierarchy to oversee all churches.

To the New England Puritans, both toleration and presbyterianism were unacceptable. They had spent painstaking years establishing a system of church government called the New England Way that was based on the independence and power of the individual congregation. The state in Massachusetts did not appoint clergy, nor was there one over-arching body that regulated churches. Each church was a sovereign unit. And only one church was tolerated in Massachusetts: the Puritan, or Congregational church (which was, to them, the purified Anglican church in America).


Worried that the English government would try to force its new rules of toleration and presbyterianism on them, the Puritans of Massachusetts made preparations to fight for their independence. They elected their own governor and General Court (a combined legislature and judiciary). They built many forts to protect their harbor and drilled their militia men regularly. And they continued to persecute Quakers, who, determined to bring their version of the Gospel to New England, continued to trespass into Boston despite the harsh and often cruel punishments they knew they would receive.


Those Quakers were not meek and mild innocents who just wanted to talk. They were as righteous a group of zealots as most Puritans, and when they entered a Massachusetts town they tried to wreak maximum havoc: bursting into church services, yelling in the streets, banging pots and pans together, and even stripping off their clothes (to show their lack of attachment to worldly things). The Puritans reacted with vehement rejection, and submitted Quakers who would not heed the warnings to leave and never return to terrible punishments. Boring holes through their tongues was just one of these.


The Quakers had no one to turn to for help until 1660, when the monarchy in England was restored, and Charles II came to the throne. One of his first acts as king was to send a letter to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the most powerful New England colony) ordering the persecutions of Quakers to stop. According to the “King’s Missive,” any Quaker accused of breaking the law in Massachusetts should be sent unharmed to England for trial.

Charles II issued his order for two reasons. First, he was a Catholic sympathizer, and Quakers and Catholics were about the only groups who found absolutely no acceptance in England. If Charles could win tolerance for Quakers, perhaps he could win eventual tolerance for Catholics. Second, he cast a dark eye on Massachusetts’ independence. Disgruntled ex-colonists who left New England to return home told Charles the Puritans were rebels. It didn’t help that two of the judges who had condemned his father, Charles I, to death had fled to New Haven and received a hero’s welcome there.


The new king put Massachusetts in a bind: if they stopped persecuting Quakers, and sent them to England for trial, that lessened the authority of their locally elected General Court. If they gave up the authority to prosecute Quakers, what other bit of their independence would they have to give up next? It was a slippery slope leading to direct English rule. But on the other hand, if they did not stop persecuting Quakers, they would be in violation of the King’s law, traitors, and would be immediately occupied by English soldiers and forced to accept a royal governor (rather than their own elected governor). Massachusetts made its choice: they would stave off English rule as long as possible rather than call down instant English rule on themselves. Slowly the persecution of Quakers came to an end.


They would win many small battles with the king and maintain their independence until 1691, when Massachusetts’ charter was revoked and the powerful colony came at last under direct rule from England. By that time, toleration was the rule even in New England, and Quakers were no longer a dangerous and radical sect but commonplace members of society. But resentment of English rule did not die out amongst New Englanders; less than 100 years later, the descendants of the Puritans would buck off English rule in America for good.

(For more on the Puritans and Quakers, their differences, and their battles, see Puritans v. Quakers in the battle for our sympathies.)

The real “Greatest Generation”

I was going to say that it would have to be the Founding generation. But then I changed my mind.

TV news anchor Tom Brokaw put out a book a few years ago called The Greatest Generation, in which he identified Americans who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, then fought the Second World War in the 1940s, as the greatest generation of Americans.

Great as the difficulties were for this generation of Americans, they must pale in comparison to those facing the Founding generation. If you were 20 years old in 1780, you would have trouble remembering a time before the crises of the 1770s, and then the Revolutionary War. As you lived on, you would experience a failed U.S. government (that operating under the Articles of Confederation) that was dismantled in 1787, a referendum to vote on the new and radical Constitution, desperate poverty and inflation, two armed citizen rebellions (Whiskey and Shays), and then when you were 52, the British would invade the U.S. and burn down the White House.

That’s a lot to face, especially with no history, really no inkling of experience with a democratic government. You would be building democratic government with your own hands and brain. There were no guideposts to reassure you, and several times the whole experiment of your new nation seemed on the brink of failure.

People growing up in the 1930s had a long history of being American, long experience of our form of government, and generally clear and well-established standards of American/democratic behavior to guide them.  If they were tempted to abandon these, that might be understandable, but the fact that they did not simply speaks to their historical advantages over the Founding Americans.

Well, that’s the case for calling the Founders the greatest generation. But after all, I did change my mind about the whole idea of choosing one group to be the greatest Americans.

The real Greatest Generation of Americans is each and every one that lives up to the principles this nation was founded on, the principles of promoting and protecting natural rights and equality of opportunity for all Americans. Every generation that does this is truly the greatest, simply because it’s very hard to do. Our founding principles demand that we rise above human nature in many ways, and offer justice and freedom to all. Any generation that does this deserves our praise.

That opens up the opportunity to those of us living in America right now to be the next greatest generation. Rather than thinking we missed the boat and cannot partake of the glory of any past generation of our ancestors, we must see that they simply carried the baton for a while, and have now passed it to us. It can’t go out on our watch, lest we fail the next greatest generation coming after us.

American Revolution, 1638

The Massachusetts Bay Colony had an ongoing battle with Parliament over its royal patent, issued by Charles I and given to John Winthrop to carry over to New England with the Puritan settlers in 1630.

The patent gave the colony’s governor and officers the power to make laws for themselves and basically to be self-governing, so long as their laws did not contradict the laws of England.

What’s interesting there is that the colonists were supposed or allowed to make their own laws. If those laws were not supposed to contradict those of England, then why allow them to make laws at all? Why not just say “follow the laws of England”?

The answer may be twofold. First, on England’s side, there was no real written body of laws, no constitution, to copy and take with them. Second, on the Puritans’ side, there was the understanding that special and/or unexpected conditions in the New World might call for new laws not pertinent to England. But on MBC’s side, there was also the firm if unspoken intent to function as a nearly sovereign state. The battle it fought to remain so is amazingly similar to the battle against royal authority in which Massachusetts took the lead in the 1770s.

As early as 1634, the Commission for Regulating Plantations, headed by Puritan foe Archbishop Laud, was seeking a revocation of MBC’s patent. In September 1634 Winthrop received a letter from the Commission stating its power to oversee MBC, call in its patent, make its laws, remove and punish its (elected) governors, “hear and determine all causes, and inflict all punishments, including death itself.” Sounds remarkably like the terms of what we call “the Intolerable Acts” of 1774.

In January 1635 we find the MBC reacting to this threat, calling all ministers, the governor, and the assistants together in Boston to discuss “what we ought to do if a general governor be sent out of England.” The decision was “we ought not to accept him but defend our lawful possessions (if we were able); otherwise, to avoid or protract [the confrontation].”

This very early decision not to accept direct rule from England is startling. This is from a colony only 4 years old, and far from secure. The MBC perceived threats from the French in Canada and today’s Maine, the Dutch in New York and western Connecticut, and potentially the Pequots or Narragansetts in Eastern Connecticut. Yet it was determined to manage its own affairs.

Over the years, the MBC used the “avoid or protract” strategy to parry many requests that it send its patent back to England for “review.” Winthrop particularly used a wide variety of ruses to avoid this. Once a demand for the patent was included in a packet of personal letters for Winthrop, and so, since the demand had not come by the usual official government messenger, Winthrop decided it was not a valid demand, and instructed the person who had delivered it to him to say the letter did not exist.

By September 1638, there was “a very strict order” from the Commission for sending back the patent. Again the governor (Winthrop) and the court of assistants agreed not to do so, “because then such of our friends and others in England would conceive it to be surrendered, and that thereupon we should be bound to receive such a governor and such orders as should be sent to us, and many bad minds, yea, and weak ones among ourselves would think it lawful if not necessary to accept a [royal] governor…”

It’s pretty astonishing to see English colonists in 1638 stating that only the bad or the weak would think it lawful to accept a governor from their home country, from the king they are supposed to be loyal to, from the government supposedly governing them.

The final quote on this could have come from 1775: in February 1641, the Long Parliament was in session, and its triumphant English Puritans wrote to MBC asking for its best men to come back to England to join Parliament and further their great work. The MBC’s response?

“But consulting about it, we declined the motion for this [reason], that if we should put ourselves under the protection of the parliament we must then be subject to all such laws as they should make, or at least such as they might impose upon us, in which course though they should intend our good, yet it might prove very prejudicial to us.”

It’s no surprise that Massachusetts led the way to Revolution in the 18th century. From its English settlement it was led by people who were determined to self-govern. This determination was largely if not completely based on religion, in that the Massachusetts Puritans had left England in order to live under a government consonant with their religious principles. Before 1640 they would not be ruled by an Anglican Parliament. After 1640, they would not be ruled by any Parliament. (The English Parliament’s espousal of toleration and presbyterianism quickly and completely alienated the Massachusetts Puritans, who then had dangerously difficult relations with the English Puritan government.)

The active leaders of rebellion in Massachusetts were mostly born in the 1730s and 40s. Those people would have had grandparents born in the late 1600s, who remembered when Massachusetts was at last subdued under a royal government in 1690.  Those grandparents would have known and told stories about their own grandparents, who fought Parliament in the mid-1600s. So the link between the rebellion of the 1630s and the rebellion of the 1770s is not so distant. When we look for the seeds of rebellion in America, we need to look all the way back to the beginnings of colonization, in the Puritan settlement at Massachusetts.

Time to retire “people of color”?

I was reading Lacy Ford’s fantastic article “Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problem of Slavery, 1787-1838” and had reached page 116 where Ford discusses how slaveholding American southerners began to sour on the idea of sending black Americans “back” to Africa because the slaveholders felt that it was really a plan to end slavery rather than a plan to get freed black people out of the country and “whiten” it. I found this statement:

“As the Georgia legislature later explained, whatever support the [colonizers] initially enjoyed in the lower South resulted ‘from the general impression in the Southern states’ that its object ‘was limited to removal’ of the ‘free people of color and their descendants and [not slaves].”

What phrase leaps out at you? “People of color.” This phrase was being used in 1827 by slaveholders as a euphemism for formerly enslaved black people.

I was under the impression that “people of color” was a 21st-century phrase (hey, my specialty is the 1600s; I’m not up on everything). But now we see it has a long and ugly history, just like every other word used for black Americans, from Negro to the other n-word to darky and even colored.

In fact, “black” seems to be the least-baggaged term used to describe black Americans.

The real problem with “people of color” is that it makes it so that black people are the only people on Earth who have a race. If a black person has “color,” that implies that a white person does not. Therefore race remains a stigma, something white people are free of. All other people are raced, but white people just are. It’s as if whiteness was the norm and all other people have been tainted with a color.

“People of color” reminds me of a conversation I heard years ago. Someone described another person as having an “ethnic name.” To which the other person replied, “What name isn’t an ethnic name?” That is, what name is not from a geographic place? Jones is an ethnic name. Mitchell is an ethnic name. All names are ethnic.

And all people have race. We are all people of color. To cleanse white people of race by referring to black people (and sometimes Asian or Latino people) as people of color is to say, “Normal people are white, but other people are colored.”

White is a race. It’s even a color. Everyone has a race, everyone has an ethnicity. Whites are not magically free of racial markers or racial history. For too many centuries white people have been tempted to see themselves as distinct from people of other races. But they’re not. We’re all colored and we’re all people, and it may be time to retire yet another term that seems to contradict that.

Warren Harding and his “Negro” percentage

Someone somewhere has once again rolled out the old story of President Warren Harding (1921-23) having a great-grandfather who was black.

John McLaughlin apparently barged into the comments of a guest on his news show “The McLaughlin Group” who was expressing excitement about Barack Obama running for president by saying, sternly and loudly, “You act like there’s never been a black president before.” As the guest paused in confusion, McLaughlin shouted, “Warren Harding was a Negro!”

Why he chose to say “Negro” is unclear. Suffice it to say McLaughlin looked absolutely crazy when he said it. But the saddest thing about his comment is that now people will once again pointlessly debate whether one of Harding’s great-grandfathers was black (something that should be pretty easy to prove or disprove).

I find this at once sad and hilarious because it gets all of us 21st century modernites talking and thinking like 19th century quack doctors. Grown, modern American adults start talking about what “percent” black blood Harding may have had, what “percent” of black blood makes you black, etc.

While you can have percentages of ancestors (for example, one can say “50% of my ancestors were black, 20% were Chinese, and 30% were white”), you cannot have a percentage of blood. The blood in a body is not 50% or 10% or 1% anything but blood.

It’s also sad and hilarious, but more sad, that Barack Obama, whose father was black, is not considered black by some Americans, while Harding, who may or may not have had one multiracial great-grandfather, is considered black therefore by some Americans.

What we all are is 100% American, and presidents should be judged on how well they uphold our founding principles, and nothing else.

Roger Williams: saint of Rhode Island or lunatic of Massachusetts?

There’s a great article on Roger Williams at American Creation, a new blog devoted to studying religion in early America. (Disclaimer: I contribute articles on the Puritans for this blog from time to time.)

Williams was a complicated character. He caused the Puritans of Massachusetts nothing but trouble, yet he was so charismatic and charming they could not bring themselves to punish him for years.

The article at American Creation tells most of the story. I’ll just add that Williams not only challenged the bases of Puritan theology, but also claimed that the royal charter that created Massachusetts Bay Colony was null and void because it was granted by King Charles, a sinner and false king, who had no earthly authority.

Williams would have had the Puritans go back to London, rip up their charter, try to convert Charles, and get a new, valid charter. For Puritans trying hard not to arouse an already hostile king’s anger, this was too much.

Williams was supposed to be sent back to England in chains as a traitor, but John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, intervened. Williams claimed that Winthrop told him what was being planned, and urged him to escape secretly. Winthrop had every reason to detest Williams, but he did not. He saw Williams’ sincerity and youthful innocence, and perhaps had faith Williams would eventually settle down. They remained close throughout Winthrop’s life.

Williams took off for what is now Rhode Island, and many years later got his own royal charter. By that time (1663), he had undergone a radical change from a man who had excluded everyone but his wife from the list of the saved to a man who welcomed everyone as equal.

This is the Williams who is well-known and loved. The story of how he got from A to B is a fascinating one.

National security v. elites at the Constitutional Convention

We tend to think that our politics in the 21st century are uniquely characterized by fears that powerful elites are in control of the government, robbing the people of their voice. But whenever this fear is raised, and people question those in power, those in power turn the conversation toward national security, justifying their grasping power by saying it is necessary to protect the nation.

But all this is as old as the United States. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution claimed that it empowered elites to run the government at the expense of the “real” people, mainly the yeoman farmers. Jefferson was of this group. The problem as they saw it was that by centralizing the government in Washington, the Constitution took representatives out of their states, far from the poverty and problems of their constituents. In Washington, surrounded by men of privilege, those representatives to Congress would start making laws that benefited the rich.

The Federalists who supported the Constitution decided that the best way to win this argument was to ignore it and turn the subject to national defense. A strong centralized government was needed, they said, to maintain national security by observing treaties, protecting American shipping, and dealing with other national governments. In fact, the majority of the enumerated powers of the federal government laid out in the Constitution have to do with national defense.

At a time when the young United States were vulnerable to outside attack or harrassment by more powerful nations, this was a strong argument, and it won out over fear of elitism.

The difference between then and now is that the security of the country was not guaranteed by violation of the rights of the people, or of the checks and balances of the government. The early federal government observed the terms and spirit of the Constitution Congress had written, and accepted the Bill of Rights the people wrote (through their state assemblies) as an addendum or even a corrective to that Constitution.

Let’s hope we are returning to that system, our original and founding principle of democracy.