the goRtons And sLAdes 11
of their home at the height of the worst blizzard so far experienced by the
New England settlers.”^6 Mary was nursing an infant.
Eventually, they made their way to Aquidneck Island (Newport), only
to discover another haughty governor, William Coddington, intent upon
establishing his own fiefdom. Gorton and his allies succeeded in having
him temporarily deposed, broadened the electorate and basically insti-
tuted one-man, one-vote government. It has been called “America’s first
experiment in civil democracy,” Gadman notes. When the governor re-
gained power, Gorton and several of his followers—Gortonists or Gor-
tonites, as they were called—were arrested on trumped-up charges. After
yet another judicial charade, Samuell was publicly flogged and banished
once again. “Still half naked and bleeding from the lash, he dragged his
chains behind him to pursue Governor Coddington as he rode away,
promising to repay him in kind.”^7
Gorton and two followers returned to London around 1645. They found
a champion in the Earl of Warwick and were instrumental in obtaining a
patent for Rhode Island to become an independent colony. Appearing
three times before a commission on foreign plantations, Samuell elo-
quently defended his settlement’s political independence from the threat
of dominance by Massachusetts.
In 1651, he became president of the Rhode Island colony and in 1657
penned the earliest known American protest against slavery. The Gorton
Act abolished “life servitude” in the colony some 200 years before Lin-
coln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Samuell also “stood for the rights of
Indians, paying them for his lands when many other colonists merely ap-
propriated their real estate.” Gadman concludes that “more than any
other figure in New England Gorton’s enlightened approach resembles
what we recognize today as modern Christianity.”^8
whenAM s ueL goRton iv married Ruth Slade in 1742, another illustrious
English name entered the family—this one with roots in Cornwall on the
southwest tip of Great Britain. The first Slade Gorton, born in the 1750s,
was the seventh of 11 children. He served under General Washington in
1775 and 1776 as the New England militia men who surrounded Boston to
bottle up British troops were molded into the Continental Army. Senator
Gorton has his ancestor’s bayonet in his library.9*
- The legacy of Samuell Gorton, the patriarch, includes another noted Washington State
politician—the late congresswoman Jennifer Dunn. Senator Gorton and the vivacious Re-
publican from Bellevue were tenth cousins, once removed, but could have passed for
brother and sister.^10