Hostile words were soon followed by hostile acts. Gorton and his companions were besieged in their house by an armed band, compelled to surrender, carried by force to Massachusetts, tried for heresy, and barely escaping the gibbet, condemned to imprisonment and irons. A reaction soon followed. Public sentiment came to their relief. They were banished indeed from Massachusetts, but they were set at liberty and allowed to return to Rhode Island. At Aquidneck they were received with the sympathy which generous natures ever feel for the victims of persecution, and Gorton was raised to an honorable magistracy in the very colony wherein he had been openly whipped as a disturber of the public peace. It was not till the claims of Massachusetts had been virtually set aside by the charter which Roger Williams obtained for his Colony that Gorton returned to Shawomet, and set himself to rebuild the Colony of Warwick.
Meanwhile great changes had taken place in the relations of the white man to the red. I have told how kindly the natives received Roger Williams, and how justly he dealt by them. I will now tell, though briefly, with what a Christian spirit he used the influence over the Indians, which his justice had won for him, to protect the white men who had driven him from amongst them. On the western border of the territory of the Massachusetts dwelt the fierce and powerful Pequots. No Indian had ever hated the whites with a hatred more intense than they, or watched the growth of the white settlements with a truer perception of the danger with which they menaced the original owners of the soil. They resolved upon war, and to make their triumph sure, resolved also to win over the Narragansetts as active allies. Tidings of the danger soon reached the Bay Colony, and Governor Vane appealed to Roger Williams to interpose and prevent the fatal alliance. Not a moment was to be lost. The Pequot embassadors were already in conference with Canonicus and Miantonomi on Conanicut. Forgetting his personal wrongs, and barely taking time to tell his wife whither he was going, he set forth alone in his canoe, “cutting through a stormy wind and great seas, every minute in hazard of life.”
Greater hazard awaited him on shore. English blood had already been shed by the Pequots, and knowing their fierce nature, he “nightly looked for their bloody knives at his own throat also.” For three days and three nights he confronted them face to face, and so great was the control which he had gained over the Narragansett chiefs that he succeeded in “breaking in pieces the Pequot negotiation and design, and made and finished by many travels and charges the English league with the Narragansetts and Mohegans against the Pequots.” The war came. The Narragansetts were on the side of the English; fearful massacres were committed; the Pequots were rooted out from their native soil forever; Massachusetts was saved; but the Christian, forgetting of injuries wherewith Williams had come to her aid in the critical moment of her fortunes, was not deemed of sufficient virtue to wash out the stain of heresy, and the sentence of banishment was left unrepealed on the darker page of her colonial records.
The Pequots were crushed. The turn of the Narragansetts came next. It was the fate of the red man to everywhere give way as a civilization irreconcilable with his habits and his beliefs advanced, and it is for the good of humanity that it is so. But it is sad to remember that the Christian, with the Bible in his hand, should have sought his examples in the stern denunciations of the Old Testament, rather than in the injunctions to love and mercy of the New. Six years after the formation of the league against the Pequots, a war broke out between Sequasson, an ally of Miantonomi and the Mohegans. The Narragansett Sachem, trusting to the good faith of his adversary, the powerful Uncas, was betrayed in a conference, and his followers, taken by surprise in open violation of the laws of even Indian warfare, were put to flight. The unfortunate chief fell into the hands of his enemy, who, fearing the English too much to put an ally of theirs to death, referred the question of his fate to the Commissioners of the United Colonies—Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven—who were about to hold a conference in Boston. Rhode Island, which had been excluded from the league, had no voice in this outrage, and Williams, whose remonstrances might have been of some avail, was in England. To give greater solemnity to their deliberations the Commissioners called to their aid “five of the most judicious elders,” and by their united voices Miantonomi was condemned to die. The execution of the sentence was entrusted to Uncas, and the only condition attached to the shameful act was that the generous friend of the white man should not be tortured. His people never recovered from the blow. In the very next year they placed themselves by a solemn resolution under the protection of the King, and appointed four commissioners, one of whom was Gorton, to carry their submission to England.
CHAPTER V.
CHARTER GRANTED TO PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.—ORGANIZATION UNDER IT.—THE LAWS ADOPTED.
We have seen that in 1643 Roger Williams had been sent to England as agent to solicit a charter for the three colonies of Narragansett Bay. He found the King at open war with the Parliament, and the administration of the colonies entrusted to the Earl of Warwick and a joint committee of the two Houses. Of the details of the negotiation little is known, but on the 14th of March of the following year, a “free and absolute charter was granted as the Incorporation of Providence Plantations in Narragansett Bay in New England.” It was not such as Charles would have given. But one fetter was placed upon the free action of the people—“that the laws, constitutions, punishments for the civil government of the said plantation be conformable to the laws of England”—and that was made powerless by the qualifying condition that the conformity should extend only “so far as the nature and constitution of that place will admit.” Civil government and civil laws were the only government and laws which it recognized; and the absence of any allusion to religious freedom in it shows how firmly and wisely Williams avoided every form of expression which might seem to recognize the power to grant or to deny that inalienable right. The regulation of the “general government” in its “relation to the rest of the plantations in America,” was reserved “to the Earl and Commissioners.”
Yet more than three years were allowed to pass before it went into full force as a bond of union for the four towns. Then, in May, 1647, the corporators met at Portsmouth in General Court of Election, and, accepting the charter, proceeded to organize a government in harmony with its provisions. Warwick, although not named in the charter, was admitted to the same privileges with her larger and more flourishing sisters.