page_title: Nicholas Easton
section_title: Rhode Island
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Easton / Rhode Island
caption_attribution_description: English: Map by Charles Blaskowitz. A Plan of the Town of Newport in Rhode Island. London: Faden, 1777. Hand-colored engraving. [1]
context_page_description: Nicholas Easton was an early colonial President and Governor of Rhode Island. Born in Hampshire, England, he lived in the towns of Lymington and Romsey before immigrating to New England with his two sons in 1634. Once in the New World, he lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony towns of Ipswich, Newbury, and Hampton. Easton supported the dissident ministers John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson during the Antinomian Controversy, and was disarmed in 1637, and then banished from the Massachusetts colony the following year. Along with many other Hutchinson supporters, he settled in Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, later a part of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. He was in Portsmouth for about a year when he and eight others signed an agreement to create a plantation elsewhere on the island, establishing the town of Newport.
  In Newport, Easton became active in civil affairs, serving as assistant to the governor for several years, and in 1650 was elected President of the four towns of the colony. During this time the colony was very fragile, and its authority was frequently usurped by its much larger neighbors, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony.
context_section_description: Easton was apparently a minister of sorts in his own right, and aroused the ire of the Massachusetts magistrate John Winthrop who wrote in 1638, "Those who were gone with Mrs. Hutchinson to Aquiday [Aquidneck Island] fell into new errors daily.  One Nicholas Easton, a tanner, taught that gifts and graces were that antichrist mentioned Thes[salonians]., and that which withheld, &c, was the preaching of the law, and that every of the elect had the Holy Ghost and also the devil in dwelling."
  A year after arriving in Portsmouth there was discord among the leadership of the settlement, and several of the leaders decided to go elsewhere.  Easton was one of nine men to sign an agreement on 28 April 1639 whereby a new plantation would be formed.  The men and their families soon moved to the south end of Aquidneck Island, establishing the settlement of Newport, under the leadership of William Coddington, who had been the judge (governor) of Portsmouth up to this time.  In November of the same year, Easton and John Clarke were appointed to inform Mr. Vane of the state of affairs on the island, and to look into obtaining a patent for the island from the king.
  Winthrop wrote periodically about affairs in Rhode Island, seeming to always find justification for the removal of its leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  In August 1641 he made some remarks directed largely at Easton's theology when he wrote, "Other troubles arose in the Island (Aquidneck) by reason of one Nicholas Easton, a tanner, a man very bold, though ignorant." He went on to discuss Easton's theological views in a disparaging way, and then concluded his paragraph, seeming to gloat over Rhode Island's difficulties with church governance by writing, "Then joined with Nicholas Easton, Mr. Coddington, Mr. Coggeshall and some others.  But their minister, Mr. Clarke, and Mr. Lenthall and Mr. Harding, and some others dissented and publicly opposed, whereby it grew to such heat of contention, that it made a schism among them."
caption: Goat Island and Easton's Point (1777 Newport map)
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