Providence Plantations

Providence Plantations was the settlement founded in June 1636 by the Puritan separatist Roger Williams on land obtained from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomoh, after Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his religious dissent and his objection to the colony's taking of Native land without payment. Williams organized the settlement on principles of liberty of conscience and, in a 1655 letter to the town of Providence, set out an early statement of the separation of church and state, extending religious freedom to residents regardless of belief. He obtained a charter in 1644 to protect the plantation from annexation by Massachusetts Bay. The settlement endured the Pequot War of 1636 to 1638, during which Williams helped secure the Narragansett alliance with the English colonists, and King Philip's War of 1675 to 1678, when Providence itself was burned in 1676 and later rebuilt. From 1686 to 1689 it was absorbed into the Dominion of New England under King James II. Providence Plantations was eventually joined with the Rhode Island settlements on Aquidneck Island to form the united self-governing colony that became the state of Rhode Island, with Providence as its capital. Given its self-governing, elected government under Williams's own charter, distinct from a monarchy or a crown-appointed proprietorship, it is grouped here among Historical Republics.