This chapter examines a lesser-known subscription listing in Rev. Samuel Hopkins’s System of Doctrines (1793). It is a list of seventeen free Black women and men from Rhode Island; they are five women and twelve men who have paid to purchase or to support the publication of Hopkins’s treatise on systematic theology. It is their living – as it is presented in this listing – that asks us to read closely for their story and in a way that, as literary scholar Lois Brown asserts, is “nuanced and meditative.” The “Free Blacks” gather in a published list that not only publicizes the purchasing power of those named and their intention to read, but also, and most importantly, publicizes their desire to make a place for themselves on their own terms and outside the limits of Rhode Island.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and South Carolina do not use any form of popular election in selecting state judges. Selection is (or was) through either election by the legislature or appointment by the governor. In each of the three states, one or more controversies surrounding either the selection process or serving judges provided the impetus for changes that required persons selected as judges to have been screened and either approved or recommended by a committee or commission. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, the screening body forwards a short list to the selecting authority; in South Carolina, the screening body reviews applications from persons who desire to be on a list of those eligible for appointment in the future. To the extent that partisanship influenced the change process, it was primarily focused on the composition of the screening body rather than on whether there should be such a body.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.

John Cotton and Roger Williams were Puritan ministers in colonial New England. Cotton authored Abstract of the Laws of New England (1641), an early example of American constitutionalism drawing from both scripture and English law. Cotton’s Abstract was adopted by the New Haven colony and influential in the legal systems of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Cotton also became a prominent spokesman for the laws of Massachusetts Bay, and also advocated a particular style of Congregationalism significant for development of American political and legal thought. Roger Williams, once an apprentice and recording secretary for the eminent English jurist Sir Edward Coke, served briefly as a minister in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Exiled for his criticism of the colonial charters and the Puritan partnership of church and state, Williams eventually founded the colony of Rhode Island and served as its President. Williams argued eloquently for religious liberty, provoking Cotton to engage him in a now-famous “Bloudy Tenant” debate published in London and read on both sides of the British Atlantic. Both Cotton and Williams were articulate representatives for opposing sides of a legal question contested as much in colonial America as today, the question of church-state relations and religious liberty.