Southern New England, 1638-45, image 17 of 19
Coddington’s House, Newport, Rhode Island
“Newport was settled by nine of the leading men of Pocasset – or, as it was this year named, Portsmouth – including all its magistrates. Of these, the first who built a house was Nicholas Easton, who, with his two sons, Peter and John, arrived in a boat on the first of May, perhaps a little in advance of his eight associates. He and his sons, at any rate, were the first to provide themselves with a permanent shelter. At the First recorded meeting of the emigrants on the 16th of May, the site of ‘the plantation now begun at this southwest end of the island’ is fixed as on both sides of the spring, ‘by the seaside southward’; this spring was on the west side of the present Spring Street near the State House, its stream running to the harbor. The town grew rapidly, and in five months numbered one hundred and one persons. Winthrop says in his journal of that month: ‘They [at Acuidneck] also gathered a church in a very disordered way; for they took some excommunicated persons, and others who were members of the church of Boston and not dismissed.’ He probably refers to a gathering at Pocasset, but these nine founders of Newport must have been its chief members, and were not likely to have lost their Christian fellowship by their removal. The ‘disordered way’ was ere long the Baptist Church of Newport, with the Rev. John Clark as pastor, – the Puritan mind ‘a confusion worse confounded.’ ”
“Hutchinson died in 1642. Only the summer before a son and a son-in-law of the family had been imprisoned and fined on a visit to Boston, and it is far more probably that Mrs. Hutchinson, longing for peace and tranquility, sought, after her husband’s death, to escape persecution and calumny by removing to New Netherland, out of reach of her own countrymen, than that it became intolerable to her, as her detractors would have us believe, to live in any peaceful and well-ordered community. ‘She and her party,’ says Winthrop, ‘would have no magistracy.’ But there was no evil he was not willing to believe of that unhappy Lady. He even suspected her of witchcraft, and that she had bewitched this young man Collins, who married her daughter; for ‘it was certainly known,’ he says, with the utmost solemnity, that her ‘bosom friend,’ one Hawkin’s wife, ‘had much familiarity with the devil in England.’ ”