FREE BAPTISTS, formerly called (but no longer officially) FREEWILL BAPTISTS, an American denomination holding anti paedobaptist and anti-Calvinistic doctrines, and practically identi cal in creed with the General Baptists of Great Britain. Many of the early Baptist churches in Rhode Island and throughout the South were believers in "general redemption" (hence called "general" Baptists) ; and there was a largely attended conference of this Arminian branch of the church at Newport in 1729. But the denomination known as "Free-willers" had its rise in 1780, when anti-Calvinists in Loudon, Barrington and Canterbury, New Hampshire, seceded and were organized by Benjamin Ran dall (1749-1808), a native of New Hampshire. Randall was an itinerant missionary, who had been preaching for two years before his ordination in 1780; in the same year he was censured for "heterodox" teaching. The work of the church suffered a relapse after his death, but from 1820 to 1830 the abbreviation of the denominational name to "Free Baptists" suggests their liberal policy—indeed open communion is the main if not the only hin drance to union with the "regular" Baptist Church.
See I. D. Stewart, History of the Free Will Baptists (Dover, N. H., 1862) for 1780-183o, and his edition of the Minutes of the General Conference of the Free Will Baptist Connection (Boston, 1887) ; James B. Taylor, The Centennial Record of the Free Will Baptists (Dover, 1881) ; John Buzzell, Memoir of Elder Benjamin Randall (Parsonfield, Maine, 1827) ; and P. Richardson, "Randall and the Free Will Baptists," in The Christian Review, vol. xxiii. (Baltimore, 1858) ; J. T. Christian, A History of the Baptists (Nashville, Tenn., 1922) ; W. T. Whitley, A History of British Baptists (1923) ; G. Yuille, History of the Baptists in Scotland (Glasgow, 1926) .