Roger Williams arrived at the head of Narragansett Bay in 1636 already marked — exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for insisting that the church and the state had no business governing each other. He named the settlement Providence, after what he called "God's merciful Providence," and built that founding instinct into the place itself: two years later he established the congregation that became the First Baptist Church in America on the same separationist principles. The idea held. When Rhode Island College relocated from Warren to Providence in 1770, the colony's center of gravity shifted here. Two years after that, Providence residents burned a British customs schooner in the Gaspee Affair — the first armed resistance to British rule in North America — and Rhode Island became the first colony to renounce the Crown. The dissenter's settlement turned out to be practice for something larger.
