Just Who Are You, Roger Williams?
These people weren't sheep, either. They were the kind who didn't get along anyplace else, and the kind who relished the fact that they had the freedom to argue with one another once they got here. They were dissidents of varying stripes: Anne Hutchinson and William Coddington, who settled on Aquidneck Island, and Samuel Gorton, who established Warwick.
We have thousands of his words in more than 200 letters. We can read pages and pages of the books he wrote. But he mentioned little about what he called his "body of clay". He rarely referred to his family or his day to day life, though he did write a book for his wife, Mary, to share with her his views on spiritual development.
Who was this independent minded man, Roger Williams?
He was a talker and a walker, (once trekked to Hartford and back). He was a diplomat, a farmer, a minister, a theologian, a friend of the Narragansetts, the Wampanoags, and the English gentry. He knew Oliver Cromwell, England's Lord Protector, and John Milton, the poet.
He was a deeply religious man who prayed and read the Bible with fervor. He spoke Dutch and French and languages of the Native Americans.
He was the town clerk of Providence and the president (forerunner of governor) of Rhode Island. He was a trader and a tract writer.
Like many of us, he was full of contradictions. He viewed the Pope as the Antichrist, yet he said no one, absolutely no one -- "Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks" -- should be forced to worship in any particular manner.
These things are known about Williams the hero. The private Williams, the husband and father (six children), remains very much a mystery. To talk about the private Williams, and even the public Williams, is to rely on words like probably, maybe, and perhaps.
Did he have thick, strong hands that tightly grasped a woodsman's ax to cut logs of oak or birch in the early light of Rhode Island spring days? Did he have deep set brown eyes, or were they blue? Was he short, or tall? Fat, or small?
Did he have a long, luxuriant mane in the manner of Charles II, the way the statues in Washington, D.C., New York, and Roger Williams Park depict? In 1643 he complained of men with hair of "excessive length and monstrous fashion". Maybe he wore a bowl haircut, like the statue at Providence's Prospect Terrace.
Perhaps he wore somber, Pilgrim-like clothes, with a wide brim hat. The carving atop Providence City Hall suggests so, as does a statue in Geneva, Switzerland.
The only trace left of Williams's physical presence is the whorls of his thumb imprinted in wax on the letters that he wrote. If any paintings or drawings were ever made from life, it isn't known.
The Great Fire of London, in 1666, presumably destroyed the records of Williams's birth, baptism, and family. Ten years later, in America, fire during King Philip's War burned many of Providence's buildings, including Williams's house. Probably many of his personal papers were destroyed.
His first biographer, James D. Knowles, 150 years ago wrote, "I found almost every important fact concerning him stated differently."
