Episode Details

Providence in 1636 was a handful of houses and a radical idea — that the state had no business in a person's relationship with God. The Bay Colony to the north had not forgotten Roger Williams, and it had not forgiven him. What followed was a systematic campaign to destroy what he had built: militiamen marching through his streets, land deeds forged in Bay courtrooms, Rhode Island's borders picked apart by neighbors who smelled weakness.

Williams fought back the only way he could. He sailed to England — through New Amsterdam, because the Bay had threatened to execute him if he set foot on their soil — and arrived in a country tearing itself apart in civil war. At the Westminster Assembly, he argued for something no European government had yet considered: not tolerance, but the complete removal of the state from the question of religion entirely. Parliament burned his book. He came home with a royal charter.

This is the story of how a man driven into a January blizzard became the inspiration for the men who would eventually write America's aspiration — and how his exact words reached the First Amendment.