RIRhode Island History

First to renounce the king, last to ratify the Constitution

On May 4, 1776 the Rhode Island assembly struck George III's name out of its oaths and legal writs, two months before the Continental Congress got around to declaring anything. Fourteen years later the same colony was the last of the thirteen to accept the federal Constitution, refusing to send delegates to the Philadelphia convention, voting the document down at town meetings, and giving way only on May 29, 1790 by a margin of 34 to 32, after Congress had begun preparing to tax its shipping as though it were a foreign country. Both decisions came from the same instinct, which is the through line of the smallest state's history: an old and stubborn suspicion of anyone claiming authority over it.

Narragansett Bay before the exiles

The bay cuts nearly halfway up the state and gave the Narragansett a protected world of shellfish beds, planting ground and canoe routes. The Wampanoag held the eastern shore, the Niantic the southwest corner, the Nipmuc the inland woods. Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed in during 1524 and compared an island near the mouth to Rhodes; the Dutch trader Adriaen Block later called Aquidneck the red island for the color of its clay. Historians still argue over which remark produced the state's name.

A colony built out of people other colonies expelled

Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay in October 1635 for insisting that the king could not grant land the Narragansett already held and that magistrates had no business policing conscience. He walked out in winter, was taken in by Canonicus and Miantonomi, and named his settlement Providence in 1636. The pattern repeated: Anne Hutchinson and William Coddington, run out of Boston after her heresy trial, founded Portsmouth on Aquidneck in 1638 and Newport in 1639; Samuel Gorton, expelled from nearly everywhere, settled Warwick in 1642. A parliamentary patent stitched the towns together in 1644, and the Royal Charter of 1663 confirmed what no other English colony offered, full liberty in religious matters with no established church. That charter served as the state constitution until 1843, the longest run of any written frame of government in America. Newport's tolerance drew Quakers, Baptists and a Jewish congregation whose Touro Synagogue, finished in 1763, is the oldest synagogue building still standing in the country.

Tolerance did not extend to war. In King Philip's War colonial forces stormed a Narragansett winter fort in the Great Swamp near South Kingstown on December 19, 1675 and killed hundreds of people, many of them noncombatants. The following March the Narragansett burned Providence, and Williams, then in his seventies, watched it go.

Rum, slave ships and the burning of the Gaspee

By the middle of the eighteenth century Newport and Bristol merchants ran the American end of the transatlantic slave trade. Newport distilleries turned West Indian molasses into rum, the rum bought captives on the African coast, and the captives were sold in the Caribbean and the southern colonies. Rhode Island ships accounted for the majority of all slaving voyages sent out from North America, and the DeWolf family of Bristol was the largest slave trading operation in the country, continuing after the federal ban of 1808. A gradual emancipation law in 1784 freed children born after its passage while leaving their parents enslaved.

That maritime economy also made the colony quick to fight the customs service. When the revenue schooner Gaspee ran aground on a spit below Providence on June 9, 1772, men rowed down from town overnight, shot her commander and burned the ship to the waterline, and a royal commission of inquiry could not get a single conviction. The war that followed wrecked Newport. The British held the town from December 1776 until October 1779, its population fell by more than half, and the harbor never regained its place. The Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778 included the reorganized 1st Rhode Island Regiment, which enlisted enslaved men on the promise of freedom. Rochambeau landed his French army at Newport in 1780 and marched it south to Yorktown the next year.

Slater's mill and the rebellion over the vote

In December 1790 Samuel Slater, an English apprentice who had memorized Arkwright's spinning machinery and left the country in disguise, started water-powered cotton spinning on the Blackstone River at Pawtucket with Moses Brown's money. It is the usual starting point for American industrialization, and within forty years the Blackstone and Pawtuxet valleys were lined with mills and mill villages.

The mills exposed the 1663 charter's weakness. It restricted voting to owners of real estate, so by 1840 fewer than half of adult white men in the most industrial state in the Union could vote, and the excluded were largely Irish immigrants and landless wage workers. Thomas Dorr's People's Convention wrote its own constitution in 1841, elected him governor, and set up a parallel government. His attempt on the Providence arsenal in May 1842 fizzled, and he was convicted of treason against the state. The charter government then wrote the 1843 constitution, which gave the vote to native-born men without property but kept a real estate requirement for the foreign born that lasted until 1888.

The hurricane, the fleet's departure and a name on the ballot

French Canadian, Italian, Portuguese and Cape Verdean workers filled the mill villages, and Providence built a second economy in costume jewelry and silverware. Textile capital began moving south in the 1920s, so Rhode Island's industrial decline started before the Depression rather than after the war. On September 21, 1938 a hurricane no one had forecast drove the sea up the bay and put downtown Providence under more than thirteen feet of water, killing over 250 people in the state; a barrier across the river was finally built in 1966. The Navy became the replacement employer, until the 1973 decision to withdraw the Atlantic destroyer force and close facilities took thousands of jobs at once, leaving the Naval War College, founded at Newport in 1884, as the main remnant. Providence answered in the 1980s and 1990s by uncovering and moving the rivers that had been paved over downtown. In November 2020 voters changed the state's formal name, dropping the words and Providence Plantations that had stood since the seventeenth century.

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