On the fourth day of June, 1677, probably the year of his death, Samuell Gorton, Senior, was elected “to the Towne Counsell for the ensuing yeare,” as the ancient records tell us, and his son, Capt. Samuell Gorton, was at the same time chosen Town Treasurer. On the 20th of July the father signed a deed of lands owned by him in the Narragansett Country to his sons, his six daughters and their husbands also being remembered in the disposition of this property; and on the 27th of November of the same year, by another deed, he divided his entire remaining estate among his three sons, Samuell, John and Benjamin.[[61]] To the former, who was evidently a man after his own heart, and who had aided in supporting the family, he gave his homestead at Old Warwick, his household furniture, library and most precious literary possessions. He also committed to him the care of his mother during her widow-hood, providing that she should be maintained with convenient housing and necessaries, and that means should be furnished for her “recreation in case she desires to visit her friends.”[[62]] His lands at Coweset, beyond the boundaries of the Shawomet grant, he gave in equal possession, undivided, to his three sons. The document attesting the final division of these lands by the surviving sons, Samuell and John, bears date on the town records, Dec. 4, 1699, being executed, as it says, “according to the expressed wish of our Ancient and Honored ffather, Mr. Samuell Gorton, one of the first settlers of this Plantation of Warwick in New England.” His son Benjamin, then deceased, had been one of the founders of the new town of East Greenwich, the organization of which dates from the year of the original bequest.
VII
SAMUELL GORTON’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
The enemies of Samuell Gorton charged that he was a practical anarchist—a denier of all governmental authority. As the indictment of the Massachusetts magistrates reads: “Upon much examination & serious consideration of yor writings, & with yor answers about them, wee doe charge you to bee a blasphemous enemy of the true religion of or Lord Jesus Christ and his holy ordinances, & also of all civil authority among the people of God, perticulerly in this iurisdiction.”[[63]] To the impartial student of this history, his entire career offers a sufficient answer to this accusation. Even Gov. Arnold, his lineal descendant and strenuous defender in many things, who regarded him as “one of the most remarkable men who ever lived,”[[64]] falls into the error of stating that “he denied the right of a people to self-government.”[[65]] What Samuell Gorton really denied was the dogma of “squatter sovereignty,” that false conception of popular government which holds that a majority of the actual settlers in any given locality have a right to legislate and govern as they please, without regard for the claims of the minority, the law of civilized communities, or the principles of equity and justice. Had he lived a generation ago he would have stood with Lincoln and Sumner and Garrison in denouncing this mischievous dogma. His doctrine was identical with that of the defenders of the Union against the alleged right of secession. In his own day he held, simply, that no Englishman expatriated himself by becoming a colonist in the possessions of the Mother Country; that he did not by emigration to America forfeit the rights of an Englishman, or the protection guaranteed by the long line of statutes, decisions and precedents, beginning with Magna Charta, which had become the heritage of Englishmen everywhere.
Samuell Gorton held that as subjects of Great Britain the Colonial governments should conform in their legislation and judicial action to the principles of English common and statute law.[[66]] If chartered, they were bound to do this by the terms of their charters. If not chartered, each individual had the right to claim the protection of English law, and any denial thereof was a usurpation of authority. This was the head and front of his alleged anarchism. It was not anarchism, but the conviction that liberty is a chimera save under the protection of the sacred majesty of law. This is good English and American doctrine to-day. It is distinctively Rhode Island doctrine. No one two hundred and fifty years ago saw it more clearly than Samuell Gorton. His political vision was more lucid and prescient than that of Roger Williams, though the latter soon saw the force of Gorton’s position, and adhered to it the rest of his life. Had Gorton lived until the time of Andros and James the Second he would have beheld the Colonies fighting for their charters as the very foundation of their liberties. His position was already justified.[[67]]
In defence of “soul liberty” and the limitation of the functions of government solely to civil affairs, Gorton and Williams stood side by side from the beginning. Authority, he says, cannot safely be entrusted to magistrates “if their place and office bee not bounded within the compass of civill things.” He argues clearly and logically in the introduction to his “Incorruptible Key, Composed of the CX Psalme,” that if magistrates are permitted to extend their authority to things spiritual they are consistently bound to enforce their own convictions of religious duty, and to persecute all who dissent therefrom. The only safety is in forbidding them “to intermeddle between God and the consciences of men. * * In that way only is the preservation and honour of all States, in their several ways of rule and government.”
This theory, for the first time in the world’s history, was clearly proclaimed, embodied in constitutional law, and practically tested, in the Commonwealth founded by Roger Williams and Samuell Gorton. The Puritan theocracy and the doctrine of “soul liberty” for a time maintained a competitive existence, side by side in the New England Colonies. The latter began in relative weakness—almost in anarchy—but it survived, and ultimately obtained recognition in our Federal Constitution. The former failed, and was practically discarded in less than two generations. Connecticut, an offshoot from Massachusetts Puritanism, under the leadership of Hooker reversed the Massachusetts theory that citizenship should be conditioned on church membership, and absorbed the theocratic Colony of New Haven. Rhode Island gained, in numbers and in internal cohesion, and Massachusetts lost, with every attack which she made on heresy. The idea that intolerance and persecution were necessary to insure the survival of the community—to prevent its disintegration—broached by apologetic writers, is therefore disproven by the palpable facts of history. Disintegration and secession were ever the products of intolerance. The story of the Saracens, in Spain, the Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England, was repeated in Massachusetts. Internal schisms were promoted rather than prevented by the policy of persecution.
In the end, local public opinion was a powerful aid to the compulsion of the Mother Country in compelling the cessation of persecution. The policy of intolerance failed on its own chosen ground, and Massachusetts became a powerful and united State only when she followed the example of her despised Little Sister and became a Commonwealth of Ideas as well as a Commonwealth of Goods.
VIII
SAMUELL GORTON’S RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS
Samuell Gorton was a man of a profoundly religious nature. His views, have been little studied, and have been greatly misunderstood, both by his contemporaries and the historians of later generations. John Fiske dismisses him with a sentence, in his admirable School History of the United States, as “a man of queer ideas.” The more extended reference of this fair-minded historian, in his “Beginnings of New England,” hardly does justice either to Gorton’s political sagacity, or to the remarkable character of his religious opinions. Charles Francis Adams, in his monograph on “Massachusetts, its Historians and its History,” alludes to Samuell Gorton as a “crude and half-crazy thinker.”
His contemporaries in Massachusetts assailed him with a choice collection of opprobrious epithets in the place of arguments: he was an “arch-heretic,” a “beast,” a “miscreant,” a “proud and pestilent seducer,” a “most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties.”[[68]]