Benjamin Laker was an English Baptist who arrived in colonial Carolina as early as 1685. Laker had been associated with Thomas Grantham, a prominent General Baptist theologian and writer, and had signed the 1663 edition of the General Baptists' Standard Confession of Faith. The earliest Free Will Baptists in America developed from English General Baptists in Carolina, who were dubbed "Freewillers" by their enemies and later assumed the name.[1]