Samuel Gorton - Plymouth, Portsmouth and Providence

Plymouth, Portsmouth and Providence

Gorton lived in London when he filed suit in a chancery case in February 1634/5. Two years later, in March 1637 he arrived in Boston from London, bringing his wife and several children, and shortly thereafter went to Plymouth where he rented part of a house from Ralph Smith. Gorton was a volunteer from Plymouth during the Pequot War, as was his older brother Thomas. He soon had differences of opinion on religion with his landlord, and in December 1638 he was summoned to court based on the latter's complaints. In court Gorton "carried himself so mutinously and seditiously" towards both magistrates and ministers that he was sentenced to find sureties for his good behavior during the remainder of his tenure in Plymouth, and given 14 days to be gone from the colony. He left Plymouth shortly, and was in Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island (later named Rhode Island) where on the last day of April 1639 he and 28 others signed a compact calling themselves subjects of King Charles and forming a "civil body politick."

Things did not go any better for Gorton in Portsmouth than they had in Plymouth. In 1640 his servant maid assaulted a woman whose cow had trespassed on his land, and this servant was ordered to court. Gorton refused to allow her to appear, and he went in her place. With his hostile attitude towards the judges, he was indicted on 14 counts, some of which were calling the magistrates "Just Asses," calling a freeman in open court "saucy boy and Jack-an-Apes," and when Governor Coddington said, "all you that own the King take away Gorton and carry him to prison" Gorton replied, "all you that own the King take away Coddington and carry him to prison." Since he had previously been imprisoned, he was sentenced to be whipped, and soon left Portsmouth for Providence.

Trouble continued to follow Gorton to Providence, where his democratic ideas concerning church and state led to a division of sentiment in this town. On 8 March 1640 Roger Williams wrote to Massachusetts magistrate John Winthrop, "Master Gorton having abused high and low at Aquidneck, is now bewitching and bemadding poor Providence, both with his unclean and his foul censures of all the ministers of this country (for which myself in Christ's name have withstood him) and also denying all visible and external ordinances in depth of Familism..." Being a bitter partisan by nature he used his talent and energy to consolidate many discordant elements of the discontented into a destructive party within the comparatively peaceful settlement established by Williams. This group became known as the Gortonists or Gortonites. Because of his disorderly course, he was never received as an inhabitant in Providence. At this point Gorton moved once again to an area called Pawtuxet, along the Pawtuxet River, about five miles south of the settlement at Providence (later the dividing line between the Rhode Island towns of Cranston and Warwick).