Gone three days before

What happened

In October 1635 the Massachusetts General Court banished Roger Williams for denying that magistrates may punish breaches of the first table of the law, and for attacking the king's right to grant land the Indians owned. Because winter was coming he was allowed to stay until spring if he kept quiet. He did not. In January the governor and assistants learned that he was preaching in his own house at Salem to more than twenty followers who meant to plant a settlement on Narragansett Bay, and they ordered him seized and shipped to England. Captain Underhill took a pinnace to Salem and found that Williams had gone three days before, "but whither they could not learn." Rothbard has him fleeing alone into the wilderness and trudging south through the snow (CiL, p. 175), in a winter so hard, John Barry writes, that Narragansett Bay froze. Williams recalled long afterward that for fourteen weeks he did not know what bread or bed meant. He wintered among the Narragansett, was joined in the spring by four friends, and after being pushed out of Seekonk he founded Providence, where the land was bought from the natives and no one was punished for belief. Rothbard calls his life there "free and safe" (p. 176). The southward flight from Massachusetts had begun, and it began with one man walking.