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).

William Coddington 1601-78, one of the founders of Rhode Island, probably b. Boston, England. He came to America in 1630 as an officer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and was its treasurer from 1634 to 1636. He supported Anne Hutchinson in the antinomian controversy. With her, John Clarke , and other Puritan exiles, he purchased the island of Aquidneck (Rhode Island) from the Narragansett and founded Portsmouth (1638). Deposed (1639) as leader of the settlement by Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton , Coddington withdrew with Clarke and founded Newport . The two towns were joined under Coddington's governorship in 1640. He opposed, however, the union with the mainland settlements of Providence and Warwick, which took place in 1647 under a patent received in 1644 by Roger Williams . The commission Coddington received in 1651 to govern for life Aquidneck and neighboring Conanicut Island was denounced by the island people, and Williams and Clarke succeeded in having it revoked in 1652. Coddington remained influential in Newport affairs and was governor of the united colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1674, 1675, and 1678.