Five of the most valuable of the first settlers of the village—­Weston, Waterman, Scruggs, Alford, and Bishop—­were thus early driven into exile, or subdued to silence, by the stern policy on which the colony was founded.  It is an error to characterize this as religious bigotry.  It was not so much a theological as a political persecution.  Its apparent form was in reference to tenets of faith, but the policy was deeper than this.  Any attempt to make opposition to the existing administration was treated with equal severity, whatever might be the subject on which it ventured to display itself.

The men who sought this far-off “nook and corner of the world,” crossing a tempestuous and dangerous ocean, and landing on the shores of a wilderness, leaving every thing, however dear and valuable, behind, came to have a country and a social system for themselves and of themselves alone.  Their resolve was inexorable not to allow the mother-country, or the whole outside world combined, to interfere with them.  And it was equally inexorable not to suffer dissent or any discordant element to get foothold among them.  Sir Christopher Gardner’s rank and title could not save him:  he was not of the sort they wanted, and they shipped him back.  Roger Williams’s virtues, learning, apostolic piety, could not save him; and they drove him into a wintry wilderness, hunting him beyond their borders.  It was not so much a question whether Baptists, Antinomians, or Quakers were right or wrong, as a preformed determination not to have any dissentients of any description among them.  They had sacrificed all to find and to make a country for themselves, and they meant to keep it to themselves.  They had gone out of everybody else’s way, and they did not mean to let anybody else come into their way.  They did not understand the great truth which Hugh Peters preached to Parliament, “Why,” said he, “cannot Christians differ, and yet be friends?  All children should be fed, though they have different faces and shapes:  unity, not uniformity, is the Christian word.”  They admitted no such notion as this.  They thought uniformity the only basis of unity.  They meant to make and to keep this a country after their own pattern, a Congregational, Puritan, Cambridge-Platform-man’s country.  The time has not yet come when we can lift up clean hands against them.  Two successive chief-magistrates of the United States have opened the door and signified to one-eighth part of our whole people, that it will be best for them to walk out.  So long as the doctrine is maintained that this is the white man’s country, or any man’s, or any class or kind of men’s country, it becomes us to close our lips against denunciation of the Fathers of New England because they tried to keep the country to themselves.  The sentiment or notion on which they acted, in whatever form it appears, however high the station from which it emanates, or however long it lasts in the world, is equally false and detestable