The January Blizzard

January of sixteen thirty-six was one of the coldest winters New England had seen in years. A man named Roger Williams walked fifty-five miles through the snow from Salem, carrying almost nothing, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for what the court called "diverse, new, and dangerous opinions." He had argued that the magistrates had no right to compel anyone's conscience in matters of religion. He had argued that the land belonged to the Native people, not to the English king's charter. The court had heard enough. They sentenced him to exile.

The Wampanoag people found him half-frozen and sheltered him at their winter camp under Sachem Massasoit. When spring came, Williams crossed the Seekonk River by canoe. Narragansett men on the far shore called out to him. Their greeting, in the language he had been learning: "What cheer, Netop", hello, friend.

He purchased land from sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. He called the place Providence, named for what he called God's merciful Providence in revealing a haven for those "distressed of conscience." That phrase, distressed of conscience, was his operative principle. You did not have to hold any particular belief to settle here. You simply had to extend the same liberty to your neighbor that you claimed for yourself.

The settlement Williams organized in sixteen thirty-eight distributed roughly six acres per household. The agreement they signed declared their determination to "hold forth liberty of conscience", one of the first places in the modern Atlantic world where citizenship and religion were formally kept apart. The man who walked through the blizzard had arrived somewhere genuinely new.