Roger Williams founds Providence

In 1636, Roger Williams founded Providence on land at the head of Narragansett Bay after the Massachusetts General Court had banished him from Massachusetts Bay. Williams secured the site with the consent of Narragansett leaders Canonicus and Miantonomi and named the settlement Providence in gratitude for divine mercy. The new town offered a refuge for colonists who rejected the union of civil authority and enforced religious conformity in Massachusetts.

Providence addressed a question that Massachusetts Bay had answered very differently: whether a colony could maintain public order without compelling a single church settlement. Roger Williams argued that civil magistrates had no authority over the soul and that a 'hedge or wall of separation' should stand between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world. Providence therefore made religious liberty, voluntary worship, and local covenant central principles of political life in Rhode Island.

Williams's Providence became the core of Rhode Island's broader experiment in toleration, later confirmed by the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Charter of 1663. That charter gave legal standing to ideas about liberty of conscience that had first taken institutional shape in Providence in 1636.