The Life and Times of Samuell Gorton

The History of the Americans

Kenneth W. Porter, writing in The New England Quarterly in 1934, said that “Samuell Gorton could probably have boasted that he caused the ruling element of the Massachusetts Bay Colony more trouble over a greater period of time than any other single colonist, not excluding those more famous heresiarchs, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.” As we shall see, he was charismatic, eloquent in speech, and often very funny in the doing of it, although nobody much considered him a laugh riot at the time. Gorton would, for example, address the General Court of Massachusetts, men not known for their happy-go-lucky ways, as “a generation of vipers, companions of Judas Iscariot.”

And yet Gorton (who spelled his first name “Samuell”) would be second only to Roger Williams in shaping the civic freedom of Providence and Rhode Island.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

Useful background: “Roger Williams Saves Rhode Island,” The History of the Americans Podcast

Selected references for this episode

Kenneth W. Porter, “Samuell Gorton: New England Firebrand,” The New England Quarterly, September 1934.

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (Commission earned)

Michelle Burnham, “Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 2010.

Philip F. Gura, “The Radical Ideology of Samuel Gorton: New Light on the Relation of English to American Puritanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1979.

Samuel Gorton (Wikipedia)