Wunnaumw�yean: Roger Williams, English Credibility, and the Colonial Land Market

Abstract

Wunnaumwáyean:Roger Williams, English Credibility, and the Colonial Land Market Jeffrey Glover (bio) In early 1638, John Winthrop wrote to Roger Williams requesting information concerning a series of recent land sales by Narragansett sachems to Antinomian settlers in Narragansett Bay. Writing back, Williams confirmed sales on two islands, reporting that a party led by William Coddington had claimed ownership of a tract of land on the north shore of the Isle of Aquidneck. However, even as Williams charted in detail the extension of an English presence into the bay, he suggested limits to the use of English documentary systems for describing exchanges that established ownership of such large amounts of Indian land. "[B]e pleased to understand your great mistake, "Williams replied. "Neither of [the islands] were sold properly, for a thousand fathom would not have bought either, by strangers. The truth is, not a penny was demanded [by the sachems] for either, and what was paid was only gratuity, though I chose, for better assurance and form, to call it sale" (Correspondence 165). The problem of documenting land sales was much on the mind of Boston magistrates as the population of the Massachusetts Bay Colony swelled from successive waves of emigration in the late 1630s. As the Antinomian and other theological controversies spread, groups of religious dissenters and other settlers fanned out across the Narragansett Bay region asserting land claims and entering into markets in cattle, pelts, and wampum. In describing the transfer on the islands as a gratuity, Williams hit on the anxiety, often noted in Winthrop's journal, that dissenters would purchase land through gifts of tribute to Narragansett leaders. To Winthrop, English deeds emphasizing Native legal systems were evidence that Williams or other settlers might have "turned Indian" (Williams, Correspondence, 163). The participation of nonconformists in Native ceremonies seemed yet another manifestation of dissent, only one that now threatened to cross racial as well as religious boundaries. [End Page 429] The letters exchanged by Williams and Winthrop offer a revealing window into how land purchases from Native groups shaped the politics of religious dissent in early New England. From the Massachusetts Bay Colony's inceptions in the 1620s, Boston leaders saw the documentation of land sales as crucial for maintaining the appearance of social order in the colony. To attract and reassure metropolitan investors, they sought to distinguish their venture from the well-publicized failure in Virginia by insisting that all purchases of Native lands be authorized by the colony's royal charter and documented according to English standards.1 The movement of Antinomian settlers to the Narragansett Bay strained these controls by enabling many dissenters to circumvent the Boston land system and establish claims through direct purchase from sachems, often in ceremonies that combined elements of Native and English legal systems. Based as they often were on friendship with Native leaders, a form of cultural capital most available to wandering Separatists like Williams, these ceremonies offered an expedient means for religious dissenters to found settlement communities beyond the political reach of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In this essay, I turn to the most publicly active English dissenter, Roger Williams, in order to show how conflicts over recording land exchanges with Natives figured in the establishment and defense of Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. In doing so, I seek to situate these legal conflicts in the broader context of what the scholar Phillip H. Round has described as the "transatlantic civil discourse" through which colonists performed their credibility for financers and colonial administrators (xi). Legal histories of early New England have tended to describe the replacement of indigenous oral systems of land transference by written deeds, a process that excluded Native people from land markets.2 However, in looking at the range of documents Williams generated in the struggle to claim legality for the land purchases that formed the basis of Providence Plantations, I hope to reveal the extent to which Puritan settlers saw Native legal systems as accounting media capable of transmitting powerful information about English credibility throughout the coastal region and even across the Atlantic. To the extent to which settlements on Indian lands threatened to breathe political life into controversial opinion, the...