A Short History of Rhode Island

In 1631, a young minister named Roger Williams arrives in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with ideas that would cost him everything: that the state had no right to dictate matters of conscience, and that the native peoples whose land he walked upon deserved fair dealing. This is the story of his banishment, his desperate winter journey through the wilderness, and the small settlement he would carve from it , Providence, where the radical principle of religious liberty would first take root in American soil. George Washington Greene's 1877 account renders this foundational chapter in colonial history with the verve of a novelist and the precision of a scholar. He traces Rhode Island's improbable birth from a banished man's stubborn faith in individual conscience, through its fragile early years when survival depended on Native American alliances, to its emergence as a singular experiment in democratic governance. The book illuminates why this smallest of American states played an outsized role in defining what religious freedom would mean for a nation still two centuries from its founding. For readers curious about the ideas that shaped American democracy, Greene offers both a narrative of dramatic stakes and a meditation on the price of conviction.