Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father

by Linford D. Fisher, J. Stanley Lemons, Lucas Mason-Brown

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable ...
... until ...
A team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked Williams' code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of Williams' writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believer's baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan "Apostle to the Indians," John Eliot. Amazingly, Williams' code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of Eliot's book supporting infant baptism.
History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger Williams' final treatise. Decoding Roger Williams reveals for the first time Williams' translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts.

Genres: History

212 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Professor Fisher grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 and joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. Professor Fisher's research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America and co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters. He is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War, tentatively titled America Enslaved: The Rise and Fall of Indian Slavery in the English Atlantic and the United States. He is also the principal investigator of the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas project, which seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time.

Reviews

[Alan Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For centuries, a shorthand essay of Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83), written sometime during the last few years of his life, was left undeciphered and was accordingly unavailable to historians. In a remarkable scholarly achievement, a team of professors and students recently decoded much of this essay (hereafter referred to as the "lost essay"). The result is this book, which also contains appropriate scholarly commentary and related materials.

Although portions of Williams's lost essay could not be deciphered, his principal arguments emerge from the successfully translated material. Significantly, the lost essay establishes that Williams held certain views rather consistently during the last several decades of his life. The first is that "believer's baptism" (baptism of adults who were "born again") was, to Williams, the only scripturally authorized form of baptism. Moreover, Williams believed that the New Testament mandated "dipping" (the correct translation of the Greek word for "baptism") or immersion as the only proper method of baptism. The expression of these views by Williams in this late writing shows his continuing agreement with the Baptists and his opposition to the traditional baptism doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran churches, and most of the Calvinist churches, including the New England Congregational churches of his time.

Williams was a religious minister, and he was, according to most historians, instrumental in founding the first American church based on Baptist principles in 1638 or 1639. Strangely, however, he withdrew from this church, located in Williams's new settlement in Providence (Rhode Island), after a few months and never again associated with a formal church, though he continued to preach to those interested in listening to him. Given his continuing adherence to Baptist principles, a question arises as to what accounts for Williams's disassociation from the church he helped establish in Providence.

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams suggest that Williams was not—as alleged by his enemies—a "Seeker." Ibid., 20, 53n43, 53nn49-52. The question becomes, however, a semantic issue regarding how "Seeker" is defined. In an endnote, the editors observe: "If the Seekers actually existed as an organized movement, they were held to believe in universal salvation, to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, to say that there was no heaven or hell, to believe that God dwelled within each person, who could become sinless—all ideas which Williams utterly rejected." Ibid., 53n52. It is certainly true that Williams, who was in most (but not all) respects a Calvinist, did not agree with any of these positions attributed to the Seekers, as is especially evidenced in his correspondence as well in his last treatise published during his lifetime, George Fox Digg'd out of his Burrowes . . . (Boston, 1676).

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams also correctly observe that "[t]he one thing [Williams] shared with [the Seekers] was the view that a true visible church no longer existed and could be restored only by a new apostle commissioned by Christ." Ibid., 53n52. The editors note that, during the early 1650s, Williams sent to John Eliot (the Massachusetts Bay preacher whom Williams was opposing in his lost essay) a copy of John Jackson's A Sober Word to a Sober People: or A Moderate Discourse Respecting As well The Seekers, (so called) As The Present Churches . . . (London, 1651). Decoding Roger Williams, 67n237. Jackson acknowledged being a Seeker, but he rejected the common misimpressions of what a Seeker was. Rather, he defined Seekers as "such, as, not seeing a sufficient ground for the practice of Ordinances [religious requirements] are said to seek them." A Sober Word to a Sober People, 2. In the remainder of his work, Jackson questioned the scriptural authority for the current churches and ministry. Although Williams may not have agreed with all the details of Jackson's analysis, it is clear from several of Williams's writings that he was a Seeker in Jackson's definition of the term.

Accordingly, the paradox presents itself of Roger Williams supporting the Baptist view of baptism while rejecting the scriptural authority of any current church or minister, Baptist or otherwise, to baptize. Williams himself was quite explicit in acknowledging this inconsistency in a November 10, 1649 letter to John Winthrop, Jr. (cited in Decoding Roger Williams, 20). Williams's lost essay seems to support fully the Baptist view, without (at least as far as the essay has been deciphered) any reservations about the authority of any existing church or minister to administer a scripturally appropriate baptism. Since the lost essay is Williams's last word on the subject, perhaps he had by then modified his Seeker views and finally adopted the standard Baptist position. But this conclusion is by no means certain.

The second major topic addressed in Williams's lost essay is the question of conversion of Native Americans. As the editors of Decoding Roger Williams observe, Williams seemed eager to attempt to convert the Natives to Christianity during his early years in New England. However, he then began to question, following his developing Seeker views, whether he or anyone else had apostolic authority to seek such conversions and, additionally, whether such conversions would be genuine. Williams's lost essay questions the validity of the many apparent Native conversions effected by John Eliot, the most famous Puritan missionary of that century to the Native Americans. Although Williams himself would occasionally discuss Christianity with interested Natives, he did not attempt any massive conversion of them in the manner of Eliot. The lost essay confirms Williams's turn from the early conversion enthusiasm of his youth to the more sober, cautious approach of his maturity.

The editors of Decoding Roger Williams include in their work a lengthy, well-documented essay entitled "A Key into the Language of Roger Williams: Cracking and Interpreting the Roger Williams Code." This essay and the other editorial material in the book provide helpful historical and other information relating to Roger Williams and are a valuable contribution to scholarship.

I discuss Decoding Roger Williams and many other matters relating to Roger Williams in my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience.

(Originally published 10/26/2014; revised 8/19/2015)