The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience

Roger Williams, a deeply religious minister in seventeenth-century New England, revolutionized thinking about the role government should play in religion. Banished from Massachusetts for his controversial views, he founded the Town of Providence on the basis of full liberty of conscience and total separation of church and state. These radical ideas were adopted by the Colony of Providence Plantations, which later became known as the Colony and then State of Rhode Island. Williams also insisted, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that Europeans could acquire American land only through voluntary transactions with Native Americans.

This is the story of the dramatic life, thought, and work of a man who refused to accept the conventional wisdom of his time and who forged a new way of thinking that came to characterize the best in the American tradition.