Roger Williams

Roger Williams (c. 1603–1684) was an English Puritan minister, founder of the colony of Rhode Island and an early advocate of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Educated at Cambridge, he emigrated to Massachusetts in 1631, where his insistence that the civil magistrate had no authority over conscience led to his banishment in 1635. He founded Providence on land bought from the Narragansetts, obtained a charter in England. His Key into the Language of America (1643) was the first study of a Native American language; The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) his classic argument for toleration.