The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience
My book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience is available in paperback and Kindle e-book editions at Amazon websites throughout the world. I have posted errata and supplemental comments here. On August 6, 2015, I was interviewed about Roger Williams and this book. A video of the interview is posted here. This video is part of my YouTube channel regarding Roger Williams and New England history.
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. Born and raised in England, Williams knew or otherwise personally encountered—during his youth or in later return visits—some of the greatest figures of English history: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, King James I, the young man who became King Charles I, John Milton, Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to such famous contemporaries, Williams persistently argued, publicly and unambiguously, for complete liberty of conscience and a "wall of Separation" (Williams's words) between church and state—both for America and for Europe. At a time when most of the governments in Europe and America promulgated some form of established religion that persecuted religious dissenters, Williams founded a polity that was explicitly based on the principles and values of what became, more than 150 years later, the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The First American Founder traces, often in Roger Williams's own colorful words, the conflicts that Williams and his settlement experienced in maintaining a haven for persecuted religious minorities. Those challenges came both in the form of military and political imperialism from other colonies and from internal dissension. The book explains how Williams faced these issues and managed to create and preserve a political society whose principles we could recognize today. It also discusses how Williams influenced, directly and indirectly, the generation that later fought the Revolutionary War and established the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
This work is written for both the general reader and the professional historian. The main text is readable by all. The endnotes and appendices contain scholarly documentation and discussion that will satisfy the most meticulous student of history.
Questions and comments about the book are welcome on the present blog.
My reviews of primary and secondary sources regarding Roger Williams and related (or other) historical, legal, and philosophical matters, are posted here. See also the Roger Williams topic of my "Political Philosophy and Ethics" Goodreads group.
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. Born and raised in England, Williams knew or otherwise personally encountered—during his youth or in later return visits—some of the greatest figures of English history: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, King James I, the young man who became King Charles I, John Milton, Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to such famous contemporaries, Williams persistently argued, publicly and unambiguously, for complete liberty of conscience and a "wall of Separation" (Williams's words) between church and state—both for America and for Europe. At a time when most of the governments in Europe and America promulgated some form of established religion that persecuted religious dissenters, Williams founded a polity that was explicitly based on the principles and values of what became, more than 150 years later, the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The First American Founder traces, often in Roger Williams's own colorful words, the conflicts that Williams and his settlement experienced in maintaining a haven for persecuted religious minorities. Those challenges came both in the form of military and political imperialism from other colonies and from internal dissension. The book explains how Williams faced these issues and managed to create and preserve a political society whose principles we could recognize today. It also discusses how Williams influenced, directly and indirectly, the generation that later fought the Revolutionary War and established the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
This work is written for both the general reader and the professional historian. The main text is readable by all. The endnotes and appendices contain scholarly documentation and discussion that will satisfy the most meticulous student of history.
Questions and comments about the book are welcome on the present blog.
My reviews of primary and secondary sources regarding Roger Williams and related (or other) historical, legal, and philosophical matters, are posted here. See also the Roger Williams topic of my "Political Philosophy and Ethics" Goodreads group.
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Question: Why does your book quote Roger Williams and other seventeenth-century writers instead of summarizing or paraphrasing in twenty-first-century English what they wrote?Answer: There are two reasons.
First, I discovered when researching this book that many historians over the centuries have given inaccurate accounts of Roger Williams and his times. Not all historians are guilty of such inaccuracies, but many of them, especially those writing before the twenty-first century, have asserted things about Williams and his contemporaries that simply have no basis in the primary sources and, in fact, often contradict what is in the primary sources. I have made every attempt in this book to avoid such errors. One of the methods I have used to ensure accuracy is to quote specific statements made by Williams and others in their writings. For example, many historians have asserted that Williams only intended to protect the church from the state and not the state from the church. I disprove this assertion by quotations from Williams's own writings that state quite the contrary.
Second, although many of Williams's letters were written in haste and with extreme brevity (likely for the purpose of conserving paper, which was scarce), others are literary masterpieces of almost Shakespearean quality. Similarly, although some of Williams's published works follow the rules of the outdated and tedious early modern disputation genre, some specific statements within those works, as well as statements in other writings outside the disputation genre, are literary and philosophical gems that no summary or paraphrase can adequately capture.
This book is not a light read and is not for everyone. Although it may take the reader a while to become acclimated to the seventeenth-century language of the quotations, the effort results in a genuine understanding of early modern history and of Williams's radical thought. I try to assist with bracketed translations of words and phrases not familiar to twenty-first-century readers. But if you are looking for something that will not challenge your mind (and very possibly your preconceptions), this book is not for you.
I have created a reading list entitled Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83) on Goodreads' Listopia. I consulted the primary and secondary sources on this list in researching and writing my recently published book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. I also consulted some other sources (for example, scholarly essays and substantially dated books) that I did not include on the list. Inclusion of a particular book on this list does not indicate my agreement with all of its contents. In fact, I disagree with at least some of the factual or interpretative statements made in probably all of the secondary sources published before my book on Roger Williams. My account of Roger Williams was based mostly on the primary sources included in this list.Alan E. Johnson
Chapter 9 of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience is entitled "Roger Williams and the Founding of the United States of America." I have posted an excerpt of part of that chapter here. The endnotes cited in the text of the excerpt follow the text.This excerpt examines the interaction of historical figures influenced by Roger Williams (especially Stephen Hopkins and Isaac Backus) with such late eighteenth-century US Founders as John Adams, Samuel Adams, Robert Treat Paine, and Thomas Cushing. This interaction occurred most notably in an October 14, 1774 evening meeting of some of the delegates to the First Continental Congress with Baptist and Quaker representatives at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia. At this meeting, Stephen Hopkins (Revolutionary War pamphleteer, former Rhode Island governor, and friend of Benjamin Franklin), Baptist leader Isaac Backus, Quaker leader Israel Pemberton, and others confronted the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress about that colony's continuing religious discrimination against and persecution of Baptists and Quakers. Massachusetts had imprisoned and whipped Baptists and executed Quakers in the name of the "true religion" during the seventeenth century. Although Massachusetts public officials no longer whipped and executed religious dissenters, eighteenth-century Massachusetts laws and governmental practices still discriminated against them.
Other portions of Chapter 9 (not included in this excerpt) address the direct or indirect influence of Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83) on such famous US Founders as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and on other important public figures of that generation such as Richard Cranch, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsay, and Royall Tyler.
The list price for the paperback edition of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience is $23.99 in the US and comparable prices in other currencies plus shipping and any applicable sales or VAT tax. If, however, you purchase the paperback through my Amazon CreateSpace eStore, you can obtain a 10% discount from the list price by entering the discount code B4HJWA53 at checkout. Please note that when you purchase through this site, you may have to create a new CreateSpace account even if you already have an Amazon account.This book is also available in paperback and Kindle e-book editions at Amazon.com and other Amazon websites throughout the world, including Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it, and Amazon.es. However, the 10% discount is available only at my eStore and only for the paperback edition. Although the Kindle edition is not available at my eStore and is not eligible for the 10% discount, it is affordably priced at $9.99 at Amazon.com and comparable prices in other currencies at other Amazon websites.
Alan E. Johnson
The National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS) has now published a review by NCIS member Serena Newman of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience (Pittsburgh: Philosophia Publications, 2015) here.8/5/2017 Note: This review was also published in the NCIS journal, The Independent Scholar 3, No. 3 (June 2017): 61, which can be located here.
Several months after the publication of The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, I came across the following statement jotted down by the philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his private notebook:"For myself, I would rather not write history than write it for the purpose of following the prejudices and passions of the times.
"Here, someone makes the Capetians descend from the Merovingians; there, someone else has it that the name very Christian has always been applied to the {French} princes.
"They don't form a system after reading history; they begin with the system and then search for the proofs."
Montesquieu, My Thoughts, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Henry C. Clark (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), 70 (pensée 190).
Montesquieu's approach to writing history is the approach I took in writing this book. The exact historical truth about Roger Williams has eluded many (though not all) writers about him for almost four centuries. Sometimes their mischaracterizations were deliberate; other times they were the result of shoddy research or just plain negligence. Often they were the result of a conscious or unconscious attempt either to defame Williams or to remake him into a man of the writers' times. In the present book I followed an inductive approach of laboriously attempting to ascertain the true historical facts about Williams and his influence on subsequent generations. I offered my own interpretations only after performing the historian's task of getting the facts straight and reading every extant word in Williams's own voluminous writings and in other relevant primary sources. I recorded my overall assessment of him in the conclusion of chapter 8: "Some of what he said and wrote during his lifetime belongs to the seventeenth century. But much of his historical and philosophical record speaks to us across the centuries." He was, indeed, a remarkable man whose life and work remain relevant to us today.
A review of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience (Pittsburgh: Philosophia Publications, 2015) appears in the May 2016 issue of The Federal Lawyer, the magazine of the (US) Federal Bar Association (FBA). The review is no longer accessible to persons who are not members of the FBA or subscribers to its magazine. FBA members and subscribers can access the review here (pages 85-86).This review is very well written and brings out several important aspects of the book. Although the reviewer proved herself to be quite capable of understanding and discussing the more scholarly and lawyerly aspects of the book, she seemed to yearn for a somewhat more popular presentation. That’s fine; there have been many popular books on Roger Williams, most of which have been not quite historically accurate. All in all, her review highlights many important points that I wished to get across to the reader.
The reviewer (whom I do not know) is Neysa M. Slater-Chandler, a native Rhode Islander who is a US government attorney; a graduate of the US Naval Academy, Defense Intelligence College, and Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law; and a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. She is past chair of the FBA's Federal Career Service Division and past vice chair of its Sections and Divisions.
(updated 7/10/2017)
Another formal review of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience was published today in the Spring 2016 issue of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Among other things, the review stated:“Williams held the novel view that the religious and civil worlds should be completely separate, and that everyone is entitled to freedom of conscience. This view may not seem remarkable in the early twenty-first century, but it is still a view not shared by all, even in the United States, as one can see in the debate over whether marriage is a civil or a religious right, in the backlash against mosques in some neighborhoods, in remaining blue laws that prohibit retail establishments from operating on Sundays, and so on. . . . It is Johnson’s assembly of Williams’s writings on the subject and the presentation of them which make his book so important and a highly recommended read.” John B. Tieder, Jr., in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 42, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 559.
Although no separate URL for this review exists, the entire Spring 2016 issue of Interpretation can be accessed and downloaded here. The review is the penultimate item in this issue (pp. 557-62).
I shall not comment on the review, which was mostly favorable, except to note that the allegedly missing discussions either were actually in the book (sometimes in the endnotes) or were not broached as a result of the absence of primary-source material. As the review observes, I declined to speculate on matters for which reliable primary-source material does not exist. Thus, my book is a work of history, not of historical fiction. As for the organization of the book, including the separate appendices, I had my reasons, which need not be elaborated here.
This is the third and possibly last formal review of my book. I am not aware of any other reviews in the pipeline.
(Revised 5/24/2016 and 7/10/2017)
Alan E. Johnson will present a one-hour seminar entitled "Church-State Law from the Seventeenth Century to the Present: An Overview" at the law offices of Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin, US Steel Tower, Suite 2900, 600 Grant St., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219, USA, from noon to 1:00 p.m. EDT on July 13, 2016. Pennsylvania attorneys in attendance will receive one substantive CLE credit hour.The seminar will begin by describing the theocratic legal regimes of seventeenth-century Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven. It will discuss how Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts on account of his religious liberty and related views and how he established a new settlement at Providence (later in Rhode Island) in 1636. Providence and the later Rhode Island colony were, in stark contrast to the other New England colonies, founded on the principles of church-state separation and liberty of conscience. These principles were later incorporated into the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. However, the First Amendment initially applied only to the federal government. Massachusetts continued a somewhat modified theocracy until 1833, and Massachusetts and other states continued to have theocratic laws of one kind or another throughout the nineteenth century and during many of the decades of the twentieth century. By 1947, the US Supreme Court held that both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause applied to state and local government by way of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868. However, the Supreme Court's holding that the Establishment Clause applies to state and local government remains controversial, and the seminar will conclude with a discussion of the current judicial, scholarly, and political debate about this issue.
Persons wishing to attend this seminar must communicate their intention via email to Alan E. Johnson (alanjohnson10@comcast.net) by noon EDT on June 29, 2016. Attendees will have to go through security at the US Steel Tower and will not be admitted absent prior approval. The seminar will not be available on the internet and will not be videotaped.
Following up on the preceding post, on July 13, 2016, I presented a one-hour Continuing Legal Education (CLE) course entitled "Church-State Law from Seventeenth-Century New England to the Present: An Overview" at the Pittsburgh Office of the law firm of Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin. The course materials are posted here. As a result of the one-hour time limitation, the actual presentation on July 13, 2016, only covered legal developments up to the 1787 US Constitution. Part 2 of the presentation, which will be conducted sometime in October 2016, will discuss church-state constitutional developments from the time of the 1787 US Constitutional Convention to the present. Additional course materials will accompany the second part of the presentation.Alan E. Johnson
10/5/2016 Note: See the following post regarding the October 28, 2016 seminar and course materials.
On October 28, 2016, I will present a seminar entitled "Separation of Religion and Government from the 1787 U.S. Constitution to the Present" at the Pittsburgh Office of the law firm of Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin. The course materials for this seminar are located here.This is the second of two seminars on U.S. church-state law from the seventeenth century to the present. The first session (see preceding post) occurred on July 13, 2016, and, as a result of a one-hour time limitation, concluded before reaching the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The present course materials substantially expand the earlier course materials for the period 1787 to the present.
This is a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar. Attorneys licensed in Pennsylvania will receive a one-hour CLE credit (substantive) for attendance. All attendees must be preregistered. Please email me at alanjohnson10@comcast.net if you wish to attend.
Alan E. Johnson
On August 11, 2018, I will be giving a talk based on my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience at the Roger Williams Family Association in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. The Roger Williams Family Association is an organization composed of people who are descendants of Roger Williams. At the present time, the meeting is open only to Association members. If that changes, this notice will be updated.Alan E. Johnson
I have posted updated (as of August 6, 2017) Errata and Supplemental Comments to my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience here.
Willard wrote: "I am seeking up and coming indie book authors to interview. If you are interested, please email me to be considered for a featured author interview this month plus promotion on the website and soci..."Thank you, but I'm not interested. I already have a marketing program with which I am satisfied.
I have posted here an excerpt from Chapter 2 of the paperback under the title "The Banishment of Roger Williams from Massachusetts Bay (1635-36)." The endnotes for this excerpt appear after the text.
The book is also available in a Kindle e-book edition.