William Coddington

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Providence Plantations, earliest settlement in Rhode Island, established at Providence (1636) by Roger Williams, who with five others had been exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He attracted other colonists of liberal beliefs, and a plantation covenant was adopted (1637) in which the civil and religious authorities were separated. Another unprecedented feature of Williams's administration was his purchase of the territory from the Narragansett Indians, through their leaders Canonicus and Miantonomo. William Coddington, Anne Hutchinson, and John Clark (1609–76), all Antinomians, meanwhile settled at Portsmouth (1638) and Newport (1639), and Samuel Gorton seceded from Williams's group to found Warwick (1643). After a struggle between Williams and Coddington for leadership, the four settlements were united (1647) under Williams's charter of 1644 for the Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay. The union split (1651) into two groups, the one including Providence and Warwick, the other Portsmouth and Newport, but it was reunited by Williams (1654), who obtained a new charter for Rhode Island and Providence Plantation (1663).