John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island, 1638-1750.

Miller, Glenn

John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island, 1638-1750. By Sydney V. James. Edited by Theodore Dwight Bozeman. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. xiv + 202 pp. $35.00 cloth.

John Clarke's career as a physician, Baptist leader, and colonial representative spanned Rhode Island's formative years. Clarke made an important contribution to the early development of American religious liberty through his Ill-Newes from New England and his work as agent in securing the second Rhode Island charter from Charles II, shortly after the Restoration. The church that he led, the First Baptist Church of Newport, was one of the most important early Baptist congregations.

James's fascinating volume fills out the story of Clarke's career by a careful examination of the surviving records. The result is a picture of a life that, while twice blessed by moments of brilliance, was lived in the midst of the ordinary. Clarke's life consequently gives us a picture of what everyday life was like in seventeenth-century Rhode Island: the raising of sheep for the Boston market, struggles over property with neighbors, and the seemingly endless round of spousal deaths and remarriages. Clarke experienced his years in London as his colony's agent in the 1650s and early 1660s as a relief from the tedium of colonial life, and one can sympathize with his emotions!

Historians of the Baptist movement will find much more in this volume. James has read the surviving records of the Newport church with extraordinary care and an especially acute eye for detail and nuance. The resultant picture of the congregation reveals a church that does not easily fit the stereotypical categories of Particular and General Baptists. Instead, we meet a diverse community that debates such issues as the laying on of hands and the observance of the Saturday Sabbath with verve and biblical citation. In this fluid congregation, opinions change, mature, and are discarded. Moreover, this church is fluid in its patterns of leadership, authority, and membership.

The book also focuses attention on John Clarke's will--the legacies in the title--and the way that will influenced the development of colonial procedures around laws of trust. While the will was highly complex (and a complete copy is included), the crux of the issue was the extent to which the trustees established by the will were responsible to the town (and to the law) for their administration of the law. One gets a not-too-pleasant, but delightfully human, picture of the town council as it tries to force the trustees to do more to help Newport's poor. But at this point the book plunges into questions of larger significance. The struggle over the Clarke legacy was among attempts to struggle with the relationship between voluntary churches and such clearly governmental issues as the administration of trusts and bequests. No sooner had Rhode Island constructed its separation of church and state than financial concerns forced them to coordinate their administration in certain key areas. Experience proved that it was easier to separate the bodies and souls of people in a minister's study than in the rough-and-tumble world of competing interests and the consequent legal attempt to handle those competing claims justly.

Glenn Miller Bangor Theological Seminary