John Porter (settler)

John Porter was an early colonist in New England and a signer of the Portsmouth Compact, establishing the first government in what became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

He joined the Roxbury church with his wife Margaret in 1633, but few other records are found of him while in the Massachusetts Bay Colony until he became involved with John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson during what is known as the Antinomian Controversy.

"[3] Scores of the followers of Wheelwright and Hutchinson were ordered out of the Massachusetts colony, but before leaving, a group of them, including Porter, signed what is sometimes called the Portsmouth Compact, establishing a non-sectarian civil government upon the universal consent of the inhabitants, with a Christian focus.

[3] The court, satisfied that the complaints were valid and "having a deep sense upon their hearts of this sad condition which this poor ancient matron is by this means reduced into," ordered that the real and personal estate of Porter remaining in their jurisdiction be secured until his wife was given appropriate support.

In October 1667 an indictment was made "against Mr. John Porter of Narragansett in the King's Province and Harrud Long alias Gardiner for that they are suspected to cohabit and so to live in way of incontinency.

By an earlier marriage, Porter's wife, Margaret, had a daughter named Sarah Odding who married yet another signer of the Portsmouth Compact, Philip Sherman.

[3] Notable descendants of John Porter include Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry,[10] American hero of the Great Lakes during the War of 1812; his younger brother Commodore Matthew C. Perry,[10] who compelled the opening of Japan to the West with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854; and Stephen Arnold Douglas[11] who debated Abraham Lincoln in 1858 before a senate race and later lost to him in the 1860 presidential election.