It began in England, where the king started a new religion. That would have been fine except he commanded everyone in England to join it and stop all their other religious beliefs. Some people didn’t like it. 
          Those people called themselves Puritan. They planned to leave England and go to the Massachusetts colony. In Massachusetts anyone who voiced disagreement with anyone else’s religious beliefs was breaking the law. A man named Roger Williams disagreed with that law. He thought that people should be able to worship as they liked. That idea would later lead him to start the Rhode Island colony.
     William broke the law and disagreed with the Puritans religious beliefs.  The Puritans were going to arrest William, but he ran away.  William left his family and his home in Massachusetts and went to  Narragansett Bay, later to be known as Rhode Island. He wanted to start a colony where the church and government were separate. 
     After walking for days he came to a Wampanoag (or native American) village.  The chief welcomed him because he had attended the first Thanksgiving.  William stayed at the village for several months. William found some other people who wanted to begin a colony too.  Together they started a small town called Providence, meaning “guided by God.”
     In a while some other people who disagreed with the Massachusetts system came and lived in Providence. They built three more towns, Portsmouth, Warwick and Newport. The four towns decided to join and become an official English colony. The towns sent William to England to get permission from the King. 
     The King approved and gave them a charter which protected them from being taken over by other colonies or countries. Later there was a new King so William went to get a new charter. The charter said that everyone in Rhode Island had full religious freedom and that the colonists could make their own laws and choose their own governor. William treated Indians fairly.  He even studied their language, housing , and so on. Many colonists took the Indian's land away. The chief was mad about it and joined up with four other tribes to drive the settlers back to England. Chief died fighting in the war.

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