Roger Williams: The Stubborn Rebel Who Built American Liberty

In 1860, Providence residents dug for their founder's grave and found no skeleton, only a massive apple tree root grown into the exact shape of a human body, curving at the spine, splitting at the hips, bending at the knees. The tree had eaten Roger Williams. But his ideas became the root system for American liberty.This episode explores the life of a brilliant, uncompromising rebel: a language prodigy who founded Rhode Island, pioneered the separation of church and state, and lived a life full of jarring contradictions, including his complicated participation in slavery.Why he refused the prestigious Boston pulpit and got banished for calling colonial land charters illegitimateHis 55-mile winter trek through a blizzard and the Wampanoag and Narragansett who kept him aliveThe 1637 Providence Civil Compact, the first place to fully separate citizenship from religion, and his "wall of separation" metaphor later echoed by JeffersonThe hard truths: enslaving Native captives, his ignored 1652 anti-slavery law, and brokering slave sales after King Philip's WarThe 234-page "Mystery Book" written in secret code, finally cracked by a Brown undergraduate in 2012