Rhode Island, located in the northeast part of the United States, is the smallest state by size. The full name is the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Geography
Although it is only 1,045 square miles, Rhode Island's geography is complex because of its large islands and a mainland carved by an ice-age glacier. While the state is not an island, it includes an island named Rhode Island that is also known as Aquidneck Island. It is the biggest island in Narragansett Bay, one of the world's greatest natural bays. The island stretches from north to south in the eastern bay; on its northeast coast is Portsmouth (also known as Pocasset) and on its southwest coast is Newport. To the west of Aquidneck Island are Prudence Island and Conanicut Island, roughly aligned northeast (Prudence) to southwest (Conanicut).
These islands and most of the mainland of Rhode Island are part of the Coastal Lowlands, a broad geological structure that extends along much of America's northeastern coast. The lowlands have many excellent areas for farming and during America's early history, Rhode Island's lowlands helped feed the nation. Northern Rhode Island is in the New England Uplands that extend south into Pennsylvania and north into Maine. When the state's most recent glacier pushed into Rhode Island, it carved into both the Coastal Lowlands and the New England Uplands; when it retreated roughly ten thousand years ago, it left behind not only Narragansett Bay but lakes and ponds, and valleys and hills. Newly formed rivers and streams ran through the valleys. The northeastern Blackstone River fed into Narragansett Bay near where the city of Providence was established. The rivers and streams, including the southwestern Pawtucket River, provided power for mills during the first several decades of Rhode Island's industrialization; the lakes and ponds served to store water, especially when dammed.
Early Settlers
The first European settler in what is now Rhode Island was an Anglican minister, William Blackstone, who settled near what is now called Blackstone River, close to modern Lonsdale, in 1635. In June 1636, the father of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, brought some of his followers from Massachusetts to escape religious oppression. The people of Massachusetts were Congregationalists—Puritans who had fled England due to persecution by the Church of England. The freedom they sought was not freedom for all; it was freedom to practice their religion, consequently forcing non-Congregationalists to practice it too. They imprisoned, tortured, and even executed people who did not follow their church laws. Roger Williams wanted to establish a colony where people could worship freely. He believed that that one should not infringe on another's right to worship, and should have the ability to practice any religion of choice.
When he settled in Rhode Island, Williams named his settlement Providence. He took the time to learn the languages of the Native Americans, publishing the guide, A Key into the Language of America in 1643. Narragansetts populated most of the area, with a large tribe, the Wamponoags, to the south, and the Pequots in what is now Connecticut. There were also the small groups of Nipmucks, Niantics, Cowesetts, and Shawomets inhabiting the area. The tribes were part of the large cultural and language group, the Algonquins, who spread over much of eastern North American, from the future North Carolina into the future Canada. Williams and his followers negotiated treaties and bought land from the Native Americans; on 24 March 1638, they acquired a deed for their Providence "plantation" from the preeminent sachems (meaning chiefs) of the Narragansetts, Canonicus, and young Miantonomi. Williams always dealt with the Native Americans honestly, which the local tribes valued highly.
Williams's idea of a land of free religious practices attracted others. In 1638, Antinomians established Portsmouth on Aquidneck, which had been purchased that year. Nonconformist William Coddington established Newport on Aquidneck Island in 1639. The first American Baptist church was founded in Providence in 1839. In 1642, Samuel Gorton established Warwick. Small settlements of religious dissidents were established in the general area of Providence, becoming "plantations." They featured independent men and women, who insisted on practicing their faiths as they saw fit—much as Williams hoped they would. Prompted by continued Puritan harassment and claims to territory in Rhode Island, Williams went to England in 1643 to get a patent for the new townships and plantations. In 1644, the English Parliament granted Newport, Portsmouth, and Providence incorporation as "Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay in New England," often called "Warwick's Charter" after the Earl of Warwick. Plymouth and Massachusetts refused to recognize the validity of the charter.
From 19 to 21 May 1647, the First General Assembly met in Portsmouth, which established an anchor as a symbol of the colony's freedom and passed a modest number of laws. During the 1650s, Rhode Island attracted a wide variety of religious groups. Notable were the Jews who, in 1658, began establishing congregations (although the first synagogue in the state would not be built until 1763) and the Quakers, who were being executed and tortured in Massachusetts and Plymouth. In 1657, Plymouth demanded Rhode Island surrender its Quakers, and on 13 October 1657, Rhode Island refused, helping establish its reputation as a safe refuge from oppression.
By the 1670s, Williams's carefully wrought relationships with Native Americans began to fall apart. The Wampanoags, angered by the colonists who had cheated them out of much of their land, began to attack settlements. On 19 December 1675, a Narragansett traitor led Massachusetts soldiers into a Narragansett camp, and the soldiers slaughtered the almost 700 inhabitants, 400 of which were women and children burned to death in their wigwams. There followed King Philip's War named for a Wampanoag chief whose Native American name was Metacom. The alliance of Wampanoags and Narragansetts won a few battles and burned Providence (although taking special care not to harm Williams) and some villages. On 12 August 1676, a Wampanoag traitor murdered Metacom. War casualties diminished the populations of the tribes so much that they were never again threats to the settlers.
Independence
From 1686–1689, Rhode Island and other New England colonies were forced into the Dominion of New England by King James II. His governor for the Dominion, Edmund Andros, took control of Rhode Island on 22 December 1686, but on 18 April 1689 he was imprisoned in Boston, and the effort to gather the northern colonies into one unit failed. This may have marked the beginning of Rhode Island seeing its neighbors as allies against English oppression, rather than oppressors themselves.
On 1 March 1689, England and France went to war. The conflict was a world war, but in America, it was referred to as the French and Indian War. It had four separate outbreaks of hostilities that lasted from 1689–1763, when France finally lost its Canadian colonies. During this period, Newport became Rhode Island's major city, enriched by its shipping industry. It was the era of the notorious trade in rum, sugar, and slaves. Rhode Island's General Assembly had tried to outlaw slavery in 1674, but the law was ignored. Williams's vision of a prejudice-free society seemed lost during this era. For example, in February 1728, Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Roman Catholics were specifically given freedom of conscience but were denied the right to vote. In 1730, a census indicated 17,935 people lived in Rhode Island, but the count may have been low because some rural areas were not included. In 1764, the General Assembly authorized the establishment in Warren of "Rhode Island College," which was renamed Brown University in 1804.
Also in 1764, the English Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which required the American colonies to buy their sugar only from other British colonies. This hurt Rhode Island's economy since Britain's colonies did not produce nearly enough sugar to support the molasses and rum industries in Rhode Island. In response, the General Assembly passed a law in September 1765 declaring that only it could tax people in Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders burned the British ship, Liberty, in Newport's harbor on 19 July 1769. On 10 June 1772, the British ship Gaspee, which had been searching all ships was lured into running aground, seized, and burned. On 4 May 1776, aroused by the attacks of British soldiers on colonial militias and civilians, Rhode Island renounced its allegiance to England. The General Assembly approved the Declaration of Independence on 18 July 1776 and on 8 December 1776, the British army occupied Newport. Their looting and other depredations so ruined Newport that it lost its status as Rhode Island's most prosperous city, and thousands of citizens fled. The British looted and burned villages and towns, including, on 25 May 1778, Bristol and Warren. On 9 February 1778, the General Assembly declared that any slaves, black or Native American, who joined the first Rhode Island Regiment would be free; many slaves joined and the state government compensated their former owners. They became famous during the war as the "Black Regiment."
On 29 August 1778, the Continental Army and its new allies, the French, fought the British army in the Battle of Rhode Island. The battle was inconclusive, although the Black Regiment inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy's Hessians. On 25 October 1779, the British left Newport and moved to the southern colonies where the British army was suffering almost unendurable casualties in battles with the Army of the South, led by General Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Islander who had run an iron foundry in Warwick. Meanwhile, in 1778, Rhode Island ratified the Articles of Confederation.
When the Revolutionary War ended, Rhode Islanders wished to keep their independence from outside authority. Their history had included much suffering caused by those who had tried to rule them, and they were distrustful of any central national government. Thus, they resisted the imposition of a new American constitution and did not send delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. In 1784, Rhode Island enacted the Emancipation Act, which declared every child born to a slave to be free at age twenty-one. It was an imperfect abolition of slavery, with the last Rhode Island slave death in 1859. However, Rhode Islanders were angry that the Constitution of the United States of America allowed slavery. Long after other states had ratified the new federal constitution, Rhode Island, which had not acknowledged the validity of the Constitution Convention, refused to accept it. Several times it had been put to a vote in Rhode Island, and each time it had been voted down. Eventually, the federal government threatened to treat Rhode Island as an independent nation and to charge tariffs on its goods. In 1790, the General Assembly met twice to vote on the Constitution; the first time there were not enough votes, but on 29 May 1790, it ratified the Constitution by a vote of 34 to 32. By then, a federal election had already been held, and George Washington had been president since 1789.
Industry
In the 1790s, Rhode Island's economy began to move away from shipping to industrialization. Samuel Slater was a young engineer who had worked in an English cotton mill and had memorized every machine in it. It was illegal for engineers to leave England, but Slater managed to sneak out and come to America. In Moses Brown, a merchant from Providence, he found someone who was enthusiastic about building a cotton mill, and in 1790, they built Rhode Island's first. By 1804, manufacturing cloth was a major industry, and during the 1820s, the capital invested in the manufacturing of textiles surpassed that invested in shipping. By 1860, 80 percent of Rhode Island's capital was invested in manufacturing of jewelry and weapons and a host of other goods.
The growth of manufacturing in the state created significant social problems, exacerbated by an 1822 law that took the vote away from African Americans. Immigrants from all over Europe came to Rhode Island to work in factories, but even if they became naturalized American citizens they were denied the right to vote. By 1840, 60 percent of Rhode Island's adult males were disfranchised. This fostered the Dorr War of 1840–1842. A lawyer, Thomas Wilson Dorr argued that when a government fails to serve its people, the people have the right to over-throw it. He cited the Revolutionary War as an example. In 1841, his followers arranged for a plebiscite, without the permission of Rhode Island's government, to elect representatives to a People's Convention. They drafted the People's Constitution, which won a popular vote in December 1841. Thereafter, a government was elected with Dorr as governor. This created two governments in Rhode Island: the People's government and the Law and Order government led by Governor Samuel Ward King. On 17 May 1842, Dorr and a following of Irish immigrants tried to seize the state arsenal in Providence. They failed, partly because African Americans in the city came to the aid of the militia in defending the arsenal. Dorr's actions frightened many Rhode Islanders, and they supported Governor King. In 1842, the General Assembly offered voters a state constitution to replace a body of laws from 1663, which they passed. It liberalized voting rules and returned the vote to African American males. It also included a $134 "freehold suffrage qualification" for naturalized citizens as a way of punishing poor Irish immigrants for supporting Dorr.
During the 1850s, the Republican Party was formed. In Rhode Island, it attracted Whigs, disaffected Democrats, and some of the Know-Nothings—an anti-immigrant group. They were united in their abhorrence of slavery and in their belief that the Union must be preserved in order to maintain liberty throughout America. In 1860, voters rejected the antislavery Republican candidate for governor, Seth Padelford, electing instead the Conservative Party candidate, William Sprague, who was conciliatory toward slavery. On the other hand, he was a staunch Unionist. When the Civil War broke out, Rhode Island quickly began supplying the Union with goods it needed for the war effort. The state provided 25,236 servicemen, 1,685 of whom perished. During the war, the United States Naval Academy was moved from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island. In 1866, Rhode Island outlawed the segregation of races, but segregation would occur well into in the twenty-first century. For the rest of the nineteenth century, industry continued to grow, and immigration grew with it. In 1886, the legislature passed a state constitutional amendment giving the vote to adult women, but the amendment had to be approved by a plebiscite, and it lost 21,957 to 6,889. It was not until 1917 that Rhode Island passed a women's suffrage law. In an effort to end intimidation of workers by factory owners when voting, Rhode Island established the secret ballot in 1889. In the 1890s, French-Canadians moved to Rhode Island, and by 1895, there were over forty thousand of them residing in the state.
The Modern Era
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands each of Italians, Portuguese, and Poles emigrated to Rhode Island, adding colorful traditions to a society that was among the most culturally diverse in America. In 1900, Providence was made the state's permanent capital. By 1905, at 50.81 percent of the population, Roman Catholics were the largest religious group in Rhode Island. In 1909, the governor was given the right to veto legislation; this was an effort to even out the powers of the legislative and executive branches of the government.
Although Republicans had long controlled the state government, in 1935, Democrats staged the Bloodless Revolution. Led by Governor Theodore Francis Green, Lieutenant Governor Robert Emmet Quinn, and Pawtucket's Democrat party boss Thomas P. McCoy, the Bloodless Revolution replaced the members of the state's supreme court and restructured the government into departments rather than commissions. Further developments, such as calling a new state constitutional convention, fell to the way side due to factional quarreling among Democrats. Disenchanted, voters elected Republicans, who in 1939 passed a civil service act protecting state employees from being arbitrarily fired.
In 1938, Rhode Island was hit by a hurricane with winds reaching 200 mph, killing 311 people and costing $100 million in damage. During World War II, Rhode Island's shipyards saw activity reminiscent of the Revolutionary War era. On Field's Point, the Walsh-Kaiser Shipyard employed about twenty-one thousand workers and built Libertyships, cargo ships that hauled supplies to the United Kingdom. When the war ended and demand for new ships declined, many people were out of work. A sales tax was introduced in 1947 to help the government compensate for lost revenue. During the 1950s, many people moved out of cities and to the suburbs, causing steep declines in urban populations. For example, Providence's population from 1950 to 1960 dropped from 248,674 to 179,116.
The 1950s were marked by two devastating hurricanes. On 31 August 1954, Hurricane Carol killed nineteen people and caused $90 million in damage. On 19 August 1955, Hurricane Diane broke two dams and caused $170 million in damages. In 1966, a hurricane barrier was built on the Providence River.
Rhode Island held a state constitutional convention in 1964 to modernize its constitution, but its new constitution was rejected in a 1968 plebiscite. A state income tax took effect in February 1971 as a "temporary" measure; it was made permanent in July 1971. By the 1980s, corruption of public officials was causing a decline in the citizens' faith in Rhode Island's government. In 1985, mismanagement caused the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation to collapse; money intended to help low-income residents buy homes apparently went into the pockets of administrators. In 1986 and 1993 two state supreme court justices resigned because of their unethical conduct and the imminent prospect of impeachment. In 1991, a superior court judge was sent to prison for taking bribes. Also in 1991, the Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation collapsed, taking credit unions it was supposed to protect down with it.
In 1984, the state held a constitutional convention. By May 1986, the new constitutional provisions approved by voters included a Constitutional Ethics Commission and a requirement that the General Assembly regulate campaign spending. A proposal of four-year terms for elected officials, including legislators, failed in 1986, but a 1992 amendment lengthening just the governor's and a few other executive branch officials' terms to four years passed in a popular vote. In 1994, voters approved an amendment that gave legislators $10,000 a year for their services and eliminated pensions for legislators. Further, the assembly was reorganized to have only seventy-five members in 2003, down from one hundred, and the senate was to have only thirty-eight senators, down from fifty.
Bibliography
Bridenbaugh, Carl. Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636–1690. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1974.
Conley, Patrick T. Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island's Constitutional Development, 1776–1841. Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1977.
Fradin, Dennis B. The Rhode Island Colony. Chicago: Children's Press, 1989.
James, Sydney V. Colonial Rhode Island: A History. New York: Scribners, 1975.
McLoughlin, William G. Rhode Island: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1978.
McNair, Sylvia. Rhode Island. New York: Children's Press, 2000.
Morgan, Edmund S. Roger Williams, the Church and the State. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
Nichols, Joan Kane. A Matter of Conscience: The Trial of Anne Hutchinson. Austin, Tex.: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1993.
Polishook, Irwin H. Rhode Island and the Union, 1774–1795. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969.
Rhode Island's official website. Available from http://www.state.ri.us.
