Samuell Gorton: A Forgotten Founder of Our Liberties; First Settler of Warwick, R. I.

In 1642, a cloth worker from England arrived in Boston with radical ideas about God and government. Within years, Samuell Gorton would be exiled from three colonies, nearly executed for heresy, and ultimately found himself at the center of the first great American debate over religious liberty. Lewis G. Janes's 1896 biography resurrects this indispensable founder from obscurity, tracing Gorton's journey from English dissenter to founder of Warwick, Rhode Island. Gorton wasn't easy to love. He was combative, uncompromising, and gleefully antagonized the Puritan authorities who controlled New England. Yet his stubborn insistence that conscience belonged to the individual and not the state laid the intellectual foundations for American liberty. Janes writes with 19th-century admiration but also with genuine historical rigor, examining the court records, pamphlets, and testimonies that document Gorton's many battles. The result is both a portrait of a fascinating, difficult man and a corrective to the myth that Rhode Island's tradition of religious freedom emerged fully formed from Roger Williams alone. For readers interested in the messy, contentious origins of American liberty, this is essential, overlooked history.