Book Review

In the early years of the colony of Rhode Island, a less than sympathetic Dutch visitor observed that the new colony was in fact the "latrina" of New England, welcoming as it did into its midst those religious and political eccentrics and social deviants particularly unwelcome in Massachusetts. While the Bay Colony had its own share of dissenters in the first generation of settlement, the more famous, such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, did seem always to make their way south to the several towns slowly and painfully taking shape as a colony along the shores of Narragansett Bay. In this posthumously published work, Sydney V. James has offered a far more complicated tale as he meticulously described institutional growth in a pariah colony that began uncertainly, almost in a state of nature, but that had constructed by the time of the American Revolution a society and a political community founded decidedly upon consent. In a process James defined as dialectical rather than evolutionary, the several generations of Rhode Islanders mixed a persistent sensitivity to town and family localism and to personal religious freedom together with a slowly developing commitment to a necessary, but limited, colony government.

. . .