In short, it was a place where anything goes and everyone kicked out of everywhere else went. Then, like today, folks tolerated each other, but few got along.
Undoubtedly the freest colony in America, and the major source of anarchistic thought and institutions, was little Rhode Island, which originated as a series of more or less anarchic settlements founded by people fleeing from the brutal politico-religious tyranny of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay (who referred to the new territory as “Rogue’s Land”). Unsettled and untouched by the land grants or the Crown, the Rhode Island area provided a haven close to the Massachusetts Bay settlement. (Source: “The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in America,” by Murray N. Rothbard.)
The First Rogue of Rhode Island was Roger Williams. Banished from Massachusetts, he founded the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which later became a state, and gave a burgeoning nation its first taste of religious liberty, a Narragansett-English dictionary, and free speech without the threat of government clampdown. Now vandals are defacing his statue, a tree root consumed his skeleton, revisionists want to knock down his monuments and some people want to truncate the name he gave us. Roguishness never goes out of style, but apparently it never rests in peace, either.
Williams was actually a pretty complicated man. His tolerance became less expansive as he aged and the “lively experiment” of Rhode Island, a utopian ideal of free thinking, free living, free wheeling libertarianism degenerated into a free-for-all of selfish and scandalous behavior. Rhode Island turned out to be a cauldron of tempers and egos. Communities formed, then split along political/religious lines. They formed somewhere else, then split again. This process continued ad nauseam until you have what we have today – 39 towns with almost no shared or centralized resources among municipalities. By the end of his life, Williams had hardened his views.
But then, he was never a true anarchist. Not like the Rhode Islanders that followed. According to Rothbard:
The honor of being the first explicit anarchist in North America belongs to Williams’s successor, a leading religious refugee from Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson. Anne and her followers, who had become far more numerous a band of heretics than Williams had amassed, emigrated to the Rhode Island area in 1638 at the suggestion of Williams himself. There they purchased the island of Aquidneck from the Indians and founded the settlement of Pocasset (now Portsmouth).
Follower and fellow founder, the wealthy merchant William Coddington, had a political and religious falling out with Hutchinson. So he left to form a new settlement called New Port at the southern end of the island and almost immediately declared war upon Portsmouth. The settlements eventually united, but Hutchinson’s radical views on liberty got her in trouble in her own colony. She was forced to abandon Rhode Island for New York, where Mahican Indians killed her in a raid.
Another prominent Rhode Island individualist was Samuell Gorton. Rothbard says:
An English clothier, his libertarian political and religious views and individualistic spirit got him persecuted in every colony in New England, including Providence and Portsmouth…Fleeing Anglican England, Gorton successively had to escape from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Providence. In the Providence incident Roger Williams began to display that totalitarian temperament, that impatience with anyone more individualistic than he, that was later to turn him sharply away from liberty and towards statism…Accused of being “anarchists,” denounced by Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay as a “man not fit to live upon the face of the earth,” Gorton and his followers were forced in late 1642 to found an entirely new settlement of their own: Shawomet (later Warwick)…
On and on it went. New idealists included The Rev. Thomas Olney, John Field, John and Rebecca Throckmorton, Catherine Scott (sister of Anne Hutchinson), Robert West, Ann Williams, William and Robert Harris. These Baptist anarchists fought tooth-and-nail with Williams, who by that time was up to his neck with individualists and was eager to ship them all to Oliver Cromwell. When the mad Puritan ordered Rhode Island to punish all “intestinal commotions,” the colony greased a new law to send “ringleaders of factions” to England for trial.
Two points: It is interesting to note that all of these religious and political free thinkers had multiple followers, even though they didn’t have Twitter accounts.
It is also curious that people are so divided as to whether being a rogue is a scarlet badge of shame or pride.
Earlier this decade, the blog “Snarkout” concluded a post with the following:
Rhode Island has been called (and may well be) the most corrupt state in the Union, but if arguing in favor of separation of church and state and the essential worth of the Narragansetts made Williams a rogue, “Rogues’ Island” is a title Little Rhody can bear with pride.
Last year, in his blog “Liberty and Culture,” Jason Pappas brought up the phrase “Rogues’ Island” in conjunction with historian John Fiske’s charge that Colonial Rhode Islanders, in trying to evade economic law, printed paper money but got no quarter from the merchants, plunging the colony into a financial abyss. As farmers and merchants fought and factions took sides, said Fiske:
These outrageous proceedings awakened disgust and alarm among sensible people in all the other states, and Rhode Island was everywhere reviled and made fun of…and forthwith the unhappy little state was nicknamed Rogues’ Island.”
So Pappas wonders: “Have we become a Rogues’ Island nation?”
Answer: Not until every state’s founder rests in archival eternity as a tree root.
Who is your favorite Rhode Island rogue?
