Political Quotes

“in 1638--375 years ago--a small, brave group of free thinkers banded together to establish an independent democratic community founded upon civil liberty and religious toleration. The settlers were followers of Anne Hutchinson, a highly educated midwife and controversial figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where ideological conformity was enforced by the gallows and the lash. Hutchinson and many of her allies were banished from Massachusetts for challenging the orthodoxy of the Puritan establishment. At the urging of Roger Williams, who had founded the colony of Providence Plantation just 2 years earlier, they settled on nearby Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay. The group called themselves the freemen of Pocasset, after the Native American name for the area. Eventually the new community settled on the name of Portsmouth. With the signing of the Portsmouth Compact on March 7, 1638, these religious dissenters, including John Clarke and William Coddington, formed a ``Bodie Politick'' that held forth the freedom to worship according to one's own conscience. Together with Roger Williams and his Providence colony, they blazed the path for American freedom of religion, one of our enduring national blessings.…”