Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding Father

Suggestions for Further Reading and Research

k 181 k suggesTions FoR FuRTheR ReaDing anD ReseaRch RogeR Williams The study of Roger Williams must begin with his writings and correspondence . The Publications of the Narragansett Club issued six volumes of Williams’ writings between 1866 and 1874, and these were reprinted in 1963 with a seventh volume of additional material as The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell & Russell). This latter project was the work of Perry Miller, who wrote an interpretative essay about Williams for the seventh volume. The most recent significant addition to the scholarship on Williams is the two-volume edition of Williams’ letters (with extensive footnotes and annotations), edited by Glenn LaFantasie, The Correspondence of Roger Williams (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988). More books have been written about Roger Williams than any other seventeenth-century American. He has gone from being largely forgotten by the beginning of the eighteenth century and being regarded as a “polemical porcupine”1 to being elevated recently as the source of half of the “American soul.”2 In 1834 James Davis Knowles wrote the first biography of Williams, Memoir of Roger Williams: The Founder of the State of Rhode-Island (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands). Since then many biographies and studies of Williams’ thought and writing have appeared, including 1 John Quincy Adams, entry in his diary on May 19, 1843. See The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/jqa diaries/index.cfm. 2 John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking Adult, 2012). 182 k Decoding Roger Williams studies by Oscar S. Straus, James Ernst, Samuel H. Brockunier, Perry Miller, Ola E. Winslow, Edmund Morgan, John Garrett, W. Clark Gilpin , Edwin Gaustad, and, most recently, John Barry.3 Baptist scholars first promoted Williams, especially those connected with Brown University in the nineteenth century,4 but nonreligious historians , such as George Bancroft, fixed upon Williams as a great hero of religious liberty in America.5 As freedom of religion was increasingly touted as part of the American way of life, Williams was given great credit for his contributions by historians and writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the 1920s Williams had come to be identified by the “Progressive historians” as one of the founders of the liberal tradition in America,6 so much so that by the 1930s and 1940s, historians began to lose sight of Williams’ intensely religious character. By 1940, he had become an “irrepressible democrat” and a thoroughly modern man.7 In the 1950s Perry Miller restored Williams to his own time by emphasizing Williams’ religious focus.8 Since then, writers have sought to place Williams in the Puritan-Separatist tradition of the seventeenth century.9 3 Oscar S. Straus, Roger Williams: Pioneer of Religious Liberty (New York: Century, 1894); James E. Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: Macmillan, 1932); Samuel H. Brockunier, The Irrepressible Democrat: Roger Williams (New York: Roland Press, 1940); Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953); Ola E. Winslow, Master Roger Williams: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); John Garrett, Roger Williams: Witness beyond Christendom (London: Macmillan, 1970); W. Clark Gilpin, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Barry, Roger Williams. 4 The first major Baptist promoter was Isaac Backus, who wrote A History of New England with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians called Baptists, 3 vols. (1777–1796); see also David Benedict, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America and Other Parts of the World, 2 vols. (Boston: Manning & Loring, 1813); Romeo Elton, Life of Roger Williams: The Earliest Legislator and True Champion for a Full and Absolute Liberty of Conscience (New York: G. W. Putnam, 1852); William Gammell, Life of Roger Williams: The Founder of the State of Rhode Island (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1854); Francis Wayland, Notes on Principles and Practices of Baptist Churches (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1857); and Reuben Guild, Footprints of Roger Williams (Providence: Tibbetts & Preston, 1886). 5 George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols. (New York: Appleton Century, 1886), vol. 1...