How Democratic Was Roger Williams

Abstract

HE special character of American history-its deceptive resemblance to a short story with a simple plot-offers peculiar temptations to the practice of the cult which delights in revealing our ancestors as the pioneers of modern times. Most of us have learned to smile at the complacency of Macaulay in studying English history as an experiment in Whiggery, but nothing seems more natural than to go on studying American history as an experiment in democracy. Our best textbooks can find no more suitable title, and a good portion of our scholarship has always consisted in grooming the remoter personalities in our history into the torchbearers of the grand idea. Admittedly, the further back the investigator went, the harder it grew, until astonishing powers of audacity or ignorance were required to make the early Puritan conform to type; but even hereif not among the orthodox Puritans, at least among the rebels-glittering prizes awaited the brave. Who could fail to be thrilled by the nonconformist who hurled defiance at the oligarchy, founded his own colony on a radical separation of church and state, did his best to thrust the Englishmen in England up the same enlightened path, and lived to boast, among the wrecked hopes of the revolutionary generation, that nowhere on earth was such liberty enjoyed as in Rhode Island? Such a figure, discovered precisely where the darkness of European history should have been first dissipated on these shores, seemed like a luminous beacon lighting the way to the century of the common man. Of course these heady excitements have always been resisted in some quarters. And even students have been known to open one of Roger Williams's pamphlets, under the impression that they were going to meet a familiar figure, only to shut it hastily again with the feeling that there must have been some mistake. More recently there has been a thorough reinspection of the Puritan mind by a group of scholars who have nothing in common with the myth-makers. But as long as there existed no passable biography of Williams and no short cut through the wilderness of his