Free Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis Page B

zealously adhere to him, and who cried out of the Persecution that was against him, keeping that one principle, that every one should have the liberty to worship God according to the light of their own consciences. [Emphasis added.]
     
    Born in London, Roger Williams (1603?–83), a clergyman, was a strong supporter of religious and political liberty and believed that people had a right to complete religious freedom, rather than mere religious toleration that could be denied at the government’s will.
    Williams entered Cambridge University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1627. A religious nonconformist, he disagreed with the principles of England’s official church, the Church of England. At the time, King Charles I and William Laud, bishop of London, were persecuting dissenters, and as a result, Williams began to associate with nonconformists who were anxious to settle in New England.
    Williams and his wife came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. After refusing an invitation to become the minister of the church in Boston because he opposed its ties to the Church of England, he became the minister of the church at nearby Salem. There, many people favored his desire to have a church that was independent of the Church of England and of the colonial government. But Williams gained a reputation as a troublemaker when he argued that the royal charter did not justify taking land that belonged to the Indians, and he declared that people should not be punished for religious differences. When threatened by authorities, he fled into the wilderness in 1636, and Narragansett Indians provided Williams with land beyond the borders of Massachusetts where he founded Providence, later the capital of Rhode Island.
    Williams established a government for Providence based on the consent of the settlers and on complete freedom of religion. In 1643, American colonists organized the New England Confederation without including the Providence settlement or other settlements in Rhode Island, because of disagreement with their system of government and of religious freedom.
    Williams’s most famous work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), stated his argument for the separation of church and state. He wrote it as part of a long dispute with John Cotton, the Puritan leader of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it explained his belief that the church had to be spiritually pure to prepare corrupt and fallen human beings for eternity, and that governments were for earthly purposes only. From 1654 to 1657, Williams was president of the Rhode Island colony. In 1657, he contributed to Rhode Island’s decision to provide refuge for Quakers who had been banished from other colonies, even though he disagreed with their religious teachings. Williams earned his living by farming and trading with the Indians. He went on missionary journeys among them and compiled a dictionary of their language. While he had always been a close friend of the Indians, he acted as a captain of the Providence militia and fought against the Indians during King Philip’s War (see Chapter 2, p. 49). He died in 1683.
    Who started New York?
     
    The Englishmen who were quickly populating the Atlantic seaboard from the Carolinas to New England had no monopoly on the New World. French and Dutch explorers had also been busy, and both nations were carving out separate territories in North America. The Dutch founded New Netherlands in the Hudson Valley of present-day New York State, basing their claims upon the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609.
    An Englishman, Hudson was hired by a Dutch company that wanted to find the Northeast Passage, the sea route to China along the northern rim of Asia. In 1609, Hudson set off instead, aboard the Half Moon , for the northwest alternative. Sailing down the Atlantic coast, he entered Chesapeake Bay before making a U-turn and heading back north to explore the Hudson River as far upriver as Albany. Noting the absence of tides, he