Gorton, Samuel, 1592 - 1677

Samuel Gorton, a Puritan dissident and founder of Warwick, Rhode Island, emigrated from London to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1637 with his wife and children. Although he was sympathetic toward the antinomian views of Anne Hutchinson, he did not participate in the controversy and soon moved to Plymouth Colony. Within a year, Plymouth authorities tried him for heterodoxy, including preaching a radical spiritism, whereupon he relocated to the Antinomian stronghold of Aquidneck. There he refused to recognize the authority of the local government on a trespassing complaint and was banished from the settlement. He then moved to Providence, where he clashed with Roger Williams, and then settled with a group of followers at Shawomet (later Warwick) along the Pawtuxet River. Together with his companions, which included John Wickes, Randall Holden, and John Warner, he obtained Indian land through the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo.  Gorton continued to clash with neighbors who placed themselves under the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s jurisdiction.  In 1643, the Bay Colony summoned him and his companions to Boston to answer sachem Pumham’s complaint that they and Miantonomi had defrauded him of his lands at Shawomet. The magistrates sentenced Gorton and his followers to hard labor, but they were freed within a few months. In March 1644, Gorton sailed with John Greene and Randall Holden to England to redress their grievances to the English Commissioner of Plantations, of whom the Earl of Warwick was governor-in-chief. Before sailing, they attended a council of the Narragansetts, presided over by sachems Canonicus, Pessicus, and Mixan, in which Gorton drew up the papers for the Narragansetts to submit to the authority and protection of the Crown in Old England.  While in England, Gorton wrote pamphlets about his theological views and experiences in New England and joined the growing radical Puritan faction against Charles I. He returned to Shawomet in 1648 with a letter of protection from the Earl of Warwick. Subsequently, Gorton became a respectable citizen holding important civil offices, however, or the remainder of his life, he continued to espouse his own peculiar brand of radical Puritan theology. ANB; Connole, Indians of the Nipmuck Country, 61-7, 273n; Thomas Williams Bicknell, The History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (New York: American Historical Society, 1920), vol. 1, 382-84; vol. 3, 1002-5; Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: