Rhode Island

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RHODE ISLAND

Rhode Island grew significantly during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, both in size and population. A very favorable boundary settlement with Massachusetts in 1747 resulted in the annexation of Cumberland and the East Bay towns of Tiverton, Little Compton, Warren, and Bristol. Newport continued to prosper commercially, but Providence, at the head of Narragansett Bay, began to challenge it for supremacy. This rivalry assumed political dimensions, and by the late 1740s a system of two-party politics developed, with opposing groups headed by Samuel Ward and Stephen Hopkins. Generally speaking, the merchants and farmers of Newport and South County (Ward's faction) battled with their counterparts from Providence and its environs (led by Hopkins) to secure control of the powerful legislature for the vast patronage at the disposal of that body.

By the end of the colonial era, Rhode Island had developed a brisk commerce with the entire Atlantic community, including England, the Portuguese islands, Africa, South America, and the West Indies. Rhode Island merchants outdid those of any other mainland colony in the lucrative slave trade. Though agriculture was far and away the dominant occupation, commercial activities flourished in Newport, Providence, and Bristol and in lesser ports. In 1774 the colony had 59,707 residents, who lived in twenty-nine incorporated municipalities (up from 32,773 in the census of 1748).

the revolutionary era, 1763–1790

Rhode Island was a leader in the American Revolutionary movement. Beginning with strong opposition in Newport to the Sugar Act (1764), with its restrictions on the molasses trade, the colony engaged in repeated measures of open defiance, such as the burning of the British revenue schooner Gaspée in 1772. Gradually Ward's and Hopkins's factions came together to endorse a series of political responses to alleged British injustices. On 17 May 1774, after parliamentary passage of the Coercive Acts, the Providence Town Meeting became the first governmental assemblage to issue a call for a general congress of colonies to resist British policy. On 15 June the colony became the first to appoint delegates (Ward and Hopkins) to the anticipated Continental Congress. In April 1775, a week after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, the colonial legislature authorized raising a fifteen-hundred-man "army of observation" with Nathanael Greene as its commander. On 4 May 1776 Rhode Island became the first colony to renounce allegiance to King George III. Ten weeks later, on 18 July, the General Assembly ratified the Declaration of Independence. During the war, Rhode Island furnished its share of men, ships, and money to the cause of independence, and helped to create the Continental Navy. Esek Hopkins (brother of Stephen, a signer of the Declaration of Independence) became the first commander in chief of the Continental Navy and Greene became Washington's second-in-command and chief of the Continental Army in the South.

The British occupied Newport in December 1776. An unsuccessful five-week campaign to evict them in July and August 1778 was the first combined effort of the Americans and their French allies. The highlight of that campaign was an American victory on 29 August in the Battle of Rhode Island—a ten thousand–man engagement that is the largest battle ever fought in New England. The British voluntarily evacuated Newport in October 1779, but in July 1780 the French army under Rochambeau landed there and made the port town its base of operations. It was from Newport, Bristol, Providence, and other Rhode Island encampments that the French began their march to Yorktown in 1781.

In 1783 the General Assembly removed the arbitrarily imposed disability against Roman Catholics (dating from 1719) by giving members of that religion "all the rights and privileges of the Protestant citizens of this state." Most significant of several statutes relating to blacks was the emancipation act of 1784, a manumission measure that gave freedom to all children born to slave mothers after 1 March 1784.

Newport's exposed location, the incidence of Loyalist sentiments among its townspeople, and its temporary occupation by the British led to its decline. In 1774 its population was 9,209; by 1782 that figure had dwindled to 5,532. From this period forward, Providence—more sheltered at the head of the bay and a center of Revolutionary activity—and its surrounding mainland communities grew and prospered.

In 1778 the state had quickly ratified the Articles of Confederation, with its weak central government, but when the movement to strengthen that government developed in the mid-1780s, Rhode Island balked. Because of the state's individualism, its democratic localism, and its tradition of autonomy, it resisted the centralizing tendencies of the federal Constitution. Rhode Island declined to dispatch delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which drafted the United States Constitution, and then delayed ratification until 1790. The ratification tally on 29 May 1790, thirty-four in favor and thirty-two opposed, was the narrowest of any state.

rhode island in the new republic, 1790–1830

During the early years of the Republic, the always romantic and sometimes lucrative China trade flourished, then declined, and finally expired in 1841. Rhode Island weathered both a major hurricane (the Great Gale of 1815) and a locally unpopular confrontation with England (the War of 1812). Providence evolved from town to city (1832), and its political party system experienced two phases of opposition: Federalists vs. Democratic Republicans (1794–1817) and National Republican/Whigs vs. Democrats (1828–1854). In two momentous changes, the state's economy transformed from an agrariancommercial to an industrial base, and, after a long period of reform agitation and a serious political upheaval known as the Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842), government transformed from colonial charter to written state constitution.

In 1790 a cotton-spinning frame similar to those used in England was reconstructed and put to use in a mill at Pawtucket Falls on the Blackstone River. This marked the first time cotton yarn was spun by waterpower in America. The men chiefly responsible for this promising venture were Providence merchants Moses Brown, Smith Brown, and William Almy, and Samuel Slater, a young English immigrant with technical knowledge and managerial experience acquired in the cotton mills of his native land. By the late 1820s the processing of cotton displaced commerce as the backbone of the Rhode Island economy. From the mid-1820s onward, Irish Catholics came to Rhode Island in ever-increasing numbers to labor on public works projects, such as canals and railroads, or to work in the textile mills and metals factories.

For a century cotton production, woolens production, a base-metals industry, and the manufacture of precious metals, especially gold and silver jewelry, steadily expanded and dominated the state's economic life. Meanwhile agriculture declined, and many rural towns experienced a substantial emigration. With an 1830 population of 97,210, tiny Rhode Island was emerging as America's first predominantly urban-industrial state.