Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Reassessed

WHEN IN 1635 THE GENERAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS BANISHED ROGER Williams for heresy, it provoked perhaps the most basic controversy of colonial New England. In the ensuing seventeen years, in a series of letters and books directed against John Cotton, the outcast denounced the magistrates' "bloody tenent of persecution" and, attacking the very concept of a theocracy, advocated the absolute separation of church and state. For promulgating this doctrine he has become something of a legendary American hero, acclaimed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as "the founder of the democratic form of government in the new world."' Recently, however, Perry Miller has presented the whole conflict in a new perspective. "The secular interpretation of Roger Williams," he finds, "is a misreading of his real thought. . . . To understand him we must recognize that his slant was theological, not political"; that, specifically, his radicalism consisted in his uncompromising