important political fact in American history is its grandeur and its mystery. For three centuries,
almost until 1900, there were crucial things about the interior of America which were unknown
to its inhabitants. But what they were sure of, right from the start, was that there was a lot of it,
and that it was open. Here was the dominant geopolitical fact which bore down upon the settlers
from their first days on the new continent: if they did not like the system they found on the coast,
and if they had the courage, they could go on. Nothing would stop them, except their own fear.
This was the point made by Roger Williams (1603-83), the second great American to emerge.
Williams was a Londoner, of Welsh descent, who was ordained a minister in 1628 and came to
the Bay Colony three years later. His original intention was to be an Indian missionary. Instead
he became pastor in Salem. He was clever, energetic, and public-spirited, and promptly made
himself a well-known figure in local society. Whereas Winthrop stood for the authority-
principle, Williams represented the liberty-principle, though curiously enough the two men liked
and respected each other. Williams loved the vastness of the New World and took the
opportunity to explore the hinterland of the Bay. He liked the Indians, made contact with them,
established friendships. He tried to learn their tongue; or, as he quickly discovered, tongues. In
the early 17th century the 900,000 or so Indians of what is now the United States and Canada
were divided by speech into eight distinctive linguistic groups, all unrelated, which in turn
branched out into fifty-three separate stocks and between 200 and 300 individual languages. Of
these, the most widely spoken, used by about 20 percent of all Indians, was Algonquilian.
Williams learned this, and noted other Indian languages, and eventually published his findings in
A Key into the Languages o f America (1643), the first and for long the only book written on the
subject.,' His friendships with individual Indians led him to conclude that there was something
fundamentally wrong with settler-Indian relationships. The Europeans had come to bring
Christianity to the Indians, and that was right, thought Williams. Of all the things they had to
impart to the heathen, that was the most precious blessing-far more important than horses and
firearms, which some settlers were keen to sell, and all Indians anxious to buy. But in practice,
Williams found, few New Englanders took trouble to instruct Indians in Christianity. What they
all wanted to do was to dispossess them of their lands and traditional hunting preserves, if
possible by sheer robbery. Williams thought this profoundly unChristian. He argued that all title
to Indian land should be validated by specific negotiations and at an agreed, fair price. Anything
less was sinful.
None of this made Williams popular among right-thinking freemen of Boston. But his
religious views, and their political consequences, were far more explosive. He did not believe, as
Winthrop's Anglicans held, and as even the Pilgrim Fathers had accepted, that God covenanted
with a congregation or an entire society. God, he held, covenanted with each individual. The
logic of this was not merely that each person was entitled to his own interpretation of the truth
about religion, but that in order for civil society to exist at all there had to be an absolute
separation between church and state. In religion, Williams was saying, every man had the right to
his individual conscience, guided by the inner light of his faith. In secular matters, however, he
must submit to the will of the majority, determined through institutions shorn of any religious
content. So to the Massachusetts elders Williams was not merely an antinomian, he was a
secularist, almost an atheist, since he wanted to banish God from government. When Williams
began to expose these views in his sermons, the authorities grew alarmed. In October 1635 they
decided to arrest him and deport him to England.