Samuel Gorton

So I wanna talk about one of those people today.

His name was Samuel Gorton, and he is going to be very influential in the founding of the Rhode Island colony.

So one thing that's really interesting about this Murray Rothbard book that I'm reading is it starts at the very beginning.

Like, this book starts in, like the 1400, 1500s, explaining why people were even coming to America, what was happening in Europe to make them want to come to America, and it's also talking about every colony and how it got started.

It w- it was so ridiculous what could get you in trouble with this religious government.

So this starts happening more and more, and so you have these figures stepping up who are like, "Hold on.

This is not what we came here to do." And Samuel Gorton is one of those people.

So like all the good people from, you know, the Founding era and before, Samuel Gorton is going to believe in natural law.

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the last of the rhode island settlements was at shawamet or warwick on the western mainland at the upper end of the bay there samuel gorton the mystic and transcendentalist one of the most individual of men in an era of striking individualities after many vicissitudes found an abiding place he was of london a clothier and professor of the mysteries of christ a believer in established authority as the surest guardian of liberty and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties arriving at boston in sixteen thirty seven at the height of the hutchinsonian controversy he had sought liberty of conscience first in boston then in plymouth and finally in portsmouth where he had become a leader after the withdrawal of coddington but in each place his instinct for justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a home that would shelter him and his followers no sooner however was he settled at shawamet than the massachusetts authorities laid claim to the territory and it was only after arrest imprisonment and a narrow escape from the death penalty followed by a journey to england and the enlisting of the sympathies of the earl of warwick that he made good his claim gordon returned in sixteen forty eight with a letter from warwick as lord admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs ordering massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people and he named the plantation warwick after his patron samuel gordon played an influential and useful part in the later history of the colony and his career of peaceful service to rhode island belies the opinion based on winslow's partisan pamphlet hypocrisy unmasked and other contemporary writings that he was a blasphemer a crude and half-crazy thinker a proud and pestilent seducer and the most prodigious mentor of exorbitant novelties He preferred the university of human reason and reading of the volume of visible creation to sectarianism and convention.

No wonder the Massachusetts leaders could not comprehend him.

He questioned their infallibility, their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his heresies.

Any door, the right support.

the last of the rhode island settlements was at shawamet or warwick on the western mainland at the upper end of the bay there samuel gorton the mystic and transcendentalist one of the most individual of men in an era of striking individualities after many vicissitudes found an abiding place he was of london a clothier and professor of the mysteries of christ a believer in established authority as the surest guardian of liberty and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties arriving at boston in sixteen thirty seven at the height of the hutchinsonian controversy he had sought liberty of conscience first in boston then in plymouth and finally in portsmouth where he had become a leader after the withdrawal of coddington but in each place his instinct for justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a home that would shelter him and his followers no sooner however was he settled at shawamet than the massachusetts authorities laid claim to the territory and it was only after arrest imprisonment and a narrow escape from the death penalty followed by a journey to england and the enlisting of the sympathies of the earl of warwick that he made good his claim gordon returned in sixteen forty eight with a letter from warwick as lord admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs ordering massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people and he named the plantation warwick after his patron samuel gordon played an influential and useful part in the later history of the colony and his career of peaceful service to rhode island belies the opinion based on winslow's partisan pamphlet hypocrisy unmasked and other contemporary writings that he was a blasphemer a crude and half-crazy thinker a proud and pestilent seducer and the most prodigious mentor of exorbitant novelties He preferred the university of human reason and reading of the volume of visible creation to sectarianism and convention.

No wonder the Massachusetts leaders could not comprehend him.

He questioned their infallibility, their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his heresies.