Colonial Newport and Providence
I. Statement of Outstanding Universal Value
Religious freedom. The separation of church and state. These are the bedrock of American society and ideals
democratic countries around the world have aspired to. These ideas were once considered so radical that
people lost their lives trying to enact them. Human history contains many instances of societies where toleration
proved fragile, evanescent, and short-lived. Rhode Island’s “lively experiment” in religious tolerance, begun in
the 1630s, was one of many such experiments at a time when Europe and its colonies were weary of consuming
religious war. Of all such establishments, Rhode Island’s was the first legal codification of full religious freedom
and the separation of church and state in any western political entity in the early modern world; it was also the
broadest in scope and proved to be the most robust, persistent, and influential. Its success preceded and
affected later colonial charters, the emergent American republic, and the concept of the modern secular state.
Colonial Newport and Providence, embodied in the ensemble of properties described below, represent a pivotal
successful experiment in the establishment of a society that had no established church and was religiously
plural, tolerant of religious difference officially and in practice, and legally bound to maintain a wall of
separation between church and state.
II. Nominating Criteria
(iii) bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or
which has disappeared.
Colonial Newport and Providence bear unique witness to the embrace of religious and cultural diversity as
physically manifested in the configuration of public spaces and structures that were the armature of community
life. The diversity began with the dissidents exiled from more restrictive societies who founded the colony;
others who sought refuge soon joined them—Jews, Quakers, Baptists, non-conformists. Both religious freedom
and cultural diversity are manifest in two physical ways: 1) the unusually close positioning of churches and
places of worship of disparate denominations and 2) the designs of those churches and places of worship that
are visually representative of those disparate denominations. All lived in close proximity and associated with
each other in their private, religious, and business lives. Over time, they built the open and tolerant society
whose architecturally distinguished civic landmarks remain intact, as do the values and purposes they represent.
These works, at the core of Newport’s extensive 18th-century structural inventory, are outstanding examples of
building types whose design and configuration played—and play still—an important role in the community’s
tolerant, egalitarian, and entrepreneurial ethos.
(vi) be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and
literary works of outstanding universal significance.
While other English colonies over time embraced various versions of religious toleration, Rhode Island was the
first to enact it in its most radical and inclusive form, as full religious freedom. The ensemble bears witness to
the power of an idea of freedom and acceptance that emerged out of more than a century of religious strife.
The challenges faced in those violent times foreshadowed many we face today. Roger Williams, John Clarke, and
Charles II saw that legally protected soul liberty, toleration, diversity, and the separation of church and state
could mark a path to peace, stability, and prosperity. These radical ideas made their way into the founding
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documents of other colonies, the American republic, the United Nations, and democratic nations and
institutions around the world.
III. History and Description of Site
History
Recent scholarship has documented the ways in which Charles II used England’s colonial outposts as laboratories
for experiments in toleration. He had reasons of state to attempt this. In an epoch in which Europe was weary
after a century of strife, Charles was not alone in asking if different policies could subdue the frenzy, but he
alone had the means, opportunity, and cunning to find out. The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy had done
little to quell the unrest that had led to the English Civil War, the execution of Charles’ father, and a decade of
repression under Cromwell. Once on the throne, Charles found himself stymied in his efforts to expand
toleration in England. Abroad he had more latitude and many different forms were tested around the empire,
each offering a degree of toleration in exchange for loyalty to the Crown. The intent was to spur economic
development and determine if any of these arrangements would lead to greater civic peace.
Research findings place Rhode Island at the far—that is, most open—end of the tolerance/toleration spectrum.
For Rhode Island, the stakes were high: the tiny cluster of small villages comprising a motley crew of religious
dissenters was squeezed between two overbearing neighbors (Massachusetts and Connecticut). Its very survival
and way of life were at risk. The colony’s first charter, won from Parliament by Roger Williams in 1644, with the
English Civil War raging, established the separation of church and state in the province and granted an
unprecedented degree of self-government. The charter granted by Charles II in 1663 was drafted by Newport’s
John Clarke, who spent over a decade in London lobbying for it. It gave royal leave to conduct a “lively
experiment,” with the intention of determining whether a stable government could co-exist with full freedom of
conscience under which, as a matter of law, no man could be called into question for differences of opinion in
matters of religion. The U.S. Bill of Rights lay 125 years in the future.
These legal safeguards led to the development of Rhode Island’s characteristic open culture, its frame of
government and forms of discourse, its individualism and entrepreneurial spirit. There are many examples of the
difference these factors made early in the colony’s history. In 1654, the Jews expelled from Recife (Brazil) by the
Portuguese were invited to Newport, where their skills, experience, and connections were needed and where
they would be free to worship and conduct themselves as they pleased. Three years later, a small group of
Quakers, scorned, feared, and persecuted elsewhere, including every English colony, came to Newport, a full
decade before Pennsylvania was founded. Soon members of the Society of Friends became the moral as well as
business leaders in Rhode Island. In 1672, one Quaker, Nicholas Easton, became governor; a year later, Rhode
Island enacted the first law excusing men from military service for religious reasons, a validation of Quaker
pacifism. By the 18th century, the Society of Friends, pacific, close-knit, and astute in business, had become the
most influential of Newport’s many congregations. Despite Rhode Island’s economic dependence on the slave
trade, Newport’s Quakers were among the first religious groups to organize in opposition to slavery; the Baptists
and Congregationalists were not far behind. The souls of slaves mattered. In 1784, the Rhode Island General
Assembly passed “An Act authorizing the Manumission of Negroes, Mallattoes, & others, and for the gradual
Abolition of Slavery.”
Description (Note: Properties included in the ensemble are indicated in bold)
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The plans of both towns, as much as their remaining structures, demonstrate their foundational ideologies.
While Newport follows a fairly traditional settlement pattern, often called a cluster plan, it lacks the typical
central element of New England towns: a meeting house or church. In what became the town center, now called
Washington Square, it is a civic structure, the Colony House, which dominated the residents’ views and lives. In
Providence, the founder and philosophical force behind the colony’s establishment of separation of church and
state, Roger Williams, chose a linear pattern for his town with the houses on only one side of Towne Street (now
South Main St). Here, homeowners were not under the watchful gaze of their neighbors across the way. This
community did not depend on surveillance.
Structures from the 17th and 18th centuries that reflect these originating ideas survive in both cities. In Newport,
the town square is anchored by the Colony House (1740) at one end and the Brick Market (1762) at the other.
Off the square are the Great Friends Meeting House (1699)—the oldest surviving house of worship in Rhode
Island—Trinity Church (1725) and Touro Synagogue (1763). Up the hill lies the Redwood Library and
Athenaeum (1747), and at the end of Farewell Street is the Common Burying Ground (beginning 1660s). These
properties form the civic core of Newport’s extensive 18th-century structural inventory. Many continue to play
the role they played centuries ago, embodiments of the community’s tolerant, egalitarian, and entrepreneurial
ethos. Three—the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, the Brick Market and Touro Synagogue—form a unique
ensemble designed by America’s first professionally trained architect, Peter Harrison.
In Providence, the Roger Williams National Memorial, established by Congress in 1965, includes the freshwater
spring that was the center of the settlement founded by Williams in 1636. On this site, Williams fought in word
and deed for soul liberty, giving “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” Providence’s extant colonial
buildings, too, illustrate the values Williams expressed that were embedded in Rhode Island’s 1663 charter. The
towering First Baptist Church in America (1774-1775) signifies Rhode Island’s protection of a religious sect
persecuted elsewhere. University Hall (1770), the original building of The College of Rhode Island (Brown
University), represents the colony’s commitment to interdenominational cooperation and non-sectarian
educational opportunity. Joseph Brown, of Providence’s famous Brown Brothers, designed the Market House
(1775), a symbol of Providence’s emergence as a thriving commercial center at the crossroads of New England.
The 17th century Tillinghast Burial Ground remains on Benefit Street, an artifact of the town’s original plan.
IV. Comparative Analysis
This application rests on a foundation of research into the history of Rhode Island and ostensibly similar sites.
Recent research surveying modalities of toleration in the Restoration Empire places Rhode Island in a broad
Atlantic perspective.i This evidence as well as comparative studies of English colonial charter language
conducted by the Newport Historical Society show that both of Rhode Island’s charters—the Parliamentary
Patent issued in 1644 and the “Lively Experiment” royal charter of 1663—protected an extraordinary level of
autonomy, religious and cultural diversity, and freedom of conscience in the province. The language of the forms
of toleration adopted in the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere later in the 17th century seems to have
been derived from Rhode Island’s experiment, even as these later colonies did not embrace the full radicalism of
Rhode Island’s policies of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
The accompanying chart, “Religious Freedom and Toleration in the 17th-Century English Empire,” compares a
broad spectrum of English Atlantic colonies and those of other nations on a range of characteristics. As it
illustrates, Rhode Island’s guarantee of full religious liberty, legally enacted for the first time in the early Atlantic
world, constitutes a uniquely early and complete instance of the separation of church and state and religious
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freedom. While other states, notably Pennsylvania and South Carolina, lay claim to this, what they had was a
different, much more limited version of toleration—for example, a Trinitarian toleration or a Protestant
toleration. Rhode Island was alone in its articulation and enactment of full religious liberty, even for atheists.
Full religious liberty is different from the common practice of allowing Catholics or Jews into a colony but
limiting their public worship and civic participation, as the Dutch, notable in the literature for their
toleration/tolerance, did. Moreover, in all of these other instances, toleration (official state policy)—as opposed
to tolerance, that is, local, on-the-ground willingness to let differences slide—did not extend to nearly as many
forms of difference as did Rhode Island’s. In each case, too, it came along later and proved less durable and
robust. Most importantly, Rhode Island’s strict separation of church and state was unprecedented and
complete. Many “tolerant” societies had established, that is, government-supported, churches. In many of these
colonies, now states, established church arrangements persisted into the 19th century.
Comparative analysis demonstrates that colonial Newport and Providence represent not only the world’s first
legal, codified establishment of religious freedom and separation of church and state, but a radical innovation in
social organization and cultural temperament. Further, this analysis indicates that this experiment proved
unusually persistent and robust, resulting in a unique society whose ideals and practices exerted influence on
other colonies established later, were absorbed into the forms and practices of the nascent American republic,
and served as a prototype for the modern secular state worldwide.
i
Cf., for example, E. Haefeli, “How Special Was Rhode Island? The Global Context of the 1663 Charter,” in Beneke & Grenda, The Lively
Experiment: The Story of Religious Toleration in America…, (Rowman & Littlefield, NY, 2015).
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