Rhode Island : a study in separatism

Front matter

BY

IRVING BERDINE RICHMAN

MAP OF

Part II. COMMERCE AND COOPERATION

III. Paper Money 65

rV. Rhode Island and the Sea .... 84

V. The Golden Age of Newport (Commerce) . 107 VI. The Golden Age of Newport — continued

(Letters, Arts, Science) 129

VII. Old Narragansett 146

VIII. Growth of Providbnce : Stephen Hopkins and

Moses Brown 159

IX. Constitutional Development .... 180

Part III. UNIFICATION AND MANUFACTURES

X. Portents of Revolution 197

XL Rhode Island the Theatre of War . . 216

XII. The Federal Constitution ..... 241

XIII. Decline of Commerce and Establishment of

Manufactures 258

XIV. The Dorr Rebellion 285

XV. The Civil War and After .... 308

Part I Agriculture And Separatism

1636-1689

CHAPTER I NARRAGANSETT BAY Geography — Discovery — Present-day Environment

Before the age of Roger Williams Rhode Island was separatist. It was so in its geography. It consisted of a strip or section of territory — a continental or mainland section embracing Narragansett Bay — and of a series of formations within the bay constituting a section of islands.

Within present boundaries the greatest length of the Narragansett Bay commonwealth is forty-eight miles, and its greatest width thirty-seven. Its area, including the bay, is nearly thirteen hundred square miles. The bay itself comprises about two hundred square miles, and is broken into lesser bays, and into straits and channels, by its groups of islands. Of these islands Prudence, Conanicut, and the island of Aquidneck, or Rhode Island, are the largest. The entire coast line (bay and sea) extends four hundred miles, and adjacent to it in South Kingstown, Charlestown, and Westerly the lands are low and marshy. To the northward and westward there is a gradual increase in elevation, the highest point — 805 feet — being attained at Durfee's Hill in Glocester.

Narragansett Bay forms the outlet for three considerable Rhode Island streams, — the Blackstone (Seekonk), the Woonasquatucket, and the Pawtuxet, — and the Atlantic Ocean for a fourth stream, the Pawcatuck. These streams are interrupted by falls and rapids, and in the days of the first settlers were bordered by strips of luxuriant grass land. Aside from the river meadows and coast marshes, the surface of aboriginal Rhode Island was stony or sandy and covered by a thick growth of forest.

Passage from the mainland to the islands, and from the islands to the mainland, was in the early days often difficult and sometimes dangerous, a fact to which official records and private diaries bear concurrent testimony. That Providence and Newport, therefore, should develop on divergent lines is not surprising ; although in calm weather the physical bond between them must have been of a closer nature than would have been supplied by as many miles of Indian forest trail.

In a letter to Francis I of France, dated July 8, 1524, Jean Verrazano describes the shores and islands of Narragansett Bay, a spot upon which he had come, in the spring of the year named, in searching for a channel through the American continent to the regions of Cathay.

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" Weighing anchor," he says, " we sailed eighty leagues toward the East, as the coast stretched in. that direction, and always in sight of it ; at length we discovered an island of a triangular form, about ten leagues from the mainland, in size about equal to the island of Rhodes, having many hills covered with trees, and well peopled, judging from the great number of fires which we saw all around its shores ; we gave it the name of Your Majesty's illustrious mother [Luisa] .

"We did not land there as the weather was unfavorable, but proceeded to another place, fifteen leagues distant from the island, where we found a very excellent harbor. . . .

" This region is situated in the parallel of Rome, being 41 degrees 40 minutes of north latitude, but much colder from accidental circumstances and not by nature, as I shall hereafter explain to Your Majesty, and confine myself at present to the description of its local situation. It looks toward the south, on which side the harbor is haK a league broad; afterwards upon entering it, the extent between the coast and north is twelve leagues, and then enlarging itself it becomes a very large bay, twenty leagues in circumference, in which are five small islands, of great fertility and beauty, covered with large and lofty trees. Among these islands any fleet, however large, might ride safely, without fear of tempest or other dangers. Turning towards the south, at the entrance of the harbor, on both sides, there are very pleasant hills, and many streams of clear water, which flow down to the sea. In the midst of the entrance, there is a rock of free stone [Goat Island], formed by nature, and suitable for the construction of any kind of machine or bulwark for the defense of the harbor."

But Yerrazano possibly was not the first European to visit the bay in question. As early as the tenth century, according to Norse tradition, Leif , son of Eric, sailed from Greenland to the west and south and wintered upon the New England coast at a point which he called Vinland, on a bay identified by the Danish scholar Rafn as that of Mount Hope. In the opinion of the enthusiastic Rafn, the Old Stone Mill at Newport, the mill which Governor Benedict Arnold had built about 1675, and of which he makes repeated mention in his last will and testament, was of Norse construction.

After Verrazano, map-makers were wont to designate Narragansett Bay as the Bay of St. Juan Baptist, although Verrazano himself had christened it the Bay of Refuge. It remained the Bay of St. Juan until 1614, when a Dutchman, Adriaen Block, emulating the brave Henry Hudson, who fourteen years before had sailed up the lordly North River, appeared oE Point Judith in a little ship of sixteen tons. Block touched at the three-cornered island which Verrazano had named

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Luisa, and gave to it his own name, Block — Block Eylandt. He then carefully explored the Bay of St. Juan, calling it Nassau. The west passage he called Sloop Bay, and the east passage Anchor Bay. A small island, believed from his account of its location to have been Hope (it lay to the west of Aquidneck), he described as "een rodtlich Eylandken."

For sketches of the Indians of the Narragansett region we are indebted to both Verrazano and Block. At the time of Block's visit the Wampanoags, or Pokanokets, would seem to have been in occupation of the principal islands of the bay, and the Mohegans and Nyantics of the mainland to the west. Later on the Narragansetts, who abode between the Mohegans and Wampanoags, extended their dominion to the eastward. By 1636, the date of the coming of Roger Williams, the Narragansetts had established a suzerainty over the "Wampanoags, but on the west they were held in check by the warlike Mohegans and Pequods, the latter an invading tribe from the north. Of all the tribes of southern New England, the Narragansetts were the most numerous — eight or ten thousand souls ; and their chief sachems, the aged Canonicus and youthful Miantonomi, were men of exceptional astuteness. Of unusual qualities also were the chief sachems, respectively, of the Wampanoags, Mohegans, and Pequods, — Massasoit, Uncas, and Sassacus.

Occupation of Khode Island on the part of the English was first by an agricultural class, and next by a class that was commercial. In recent years it has been by an industrial class. The agriculturalists, who never formed a very numerous group, dispersed themselves over Aquidneck and through the valleys of the Seekonk, the Woonasquatucket, the Pawtuxet, and the Pawcatuck, and became (in the more remote sections) ignorant, superstitious, and prejudiced. With the decline of agriculture, the best representatives of the group entered commerce, or, after the Kevolutionary War, migrated northwestward into Vermont and New York ; and those left behind — the less energetic — tended yet more to degenerate into a class of poor whites.

Availing themselves (as they freely did) of the fresh water meadows and salt marshes for their cattle and horses, and of the woods and barrens for their swine and sheep, the Ehode Island agriculturists made no great impression on the Narragansett wilderness outside of Aquidneck ; and with the development of commerce the impression made was still less, for commerce tended to draw population (the best of it) to the commercial centres — Newport and Providence. With the rise of manufactures the river valleys became scenes of greater activity than ever before ; but in the interior, away from the valleys, there reigned a solitude that was profound. Agriculture now became markedly depressed, and the depression has not as yet been

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dispelled. Mr. Josiah B. Bowditch, after a review of the census figures for 1900, concludes that the farming population of Rhode Island to-day is no greater than it was in 1790. Some towns, as, for example. West Greenwich, have declined from as early a date as 1748.

To take one's station on a Rhode Island hill and permit one's glance to traverse the Narragansett Bay region, is to behold a commonwealth occupied in its main valleys (those of the Blackstone and Pawtuxet) and along its coast line by an active population of nearly four hundred thousand souls and its back country by an inactive population of not much to exceed thirty thousand souls. This back country, moreover, one would perceive to be a country of hills and forest. " The huge rollers," observes Mr. Clarence Deming, " stretch to the horizon in endless rise and slope . . . and over all is laid the thick mantle of the woods, unbroken save by one or two brown houses on a distant hill, or by a clearing so infrequent and small that it accents the ocean of forest. . . . Swift and clear streams pour through the valleys, fed by springs and sustained in drought by the swamps ; the underbrush is dense, and through vast areas all but impenetrable^ with such cover for quail, partridge, and woodcock as seems to challenge the most destroying energy of the pot-hunter; the wildest of wild flowers, such as the cypripedium, grow by the very roadside in their season ; lakes and ponds, reputed to have good black bass fishing, show hardly a dwelling on their shores or a boat on their waters. . . . Old taverns, lodging no guest and with no welcoming host, front the highways, the dim ghosts of old revelry seeming to peer through shattered pane and shutter. Half the farmhouses are deserted and in every degree of infirmity. The houses where families yet abide are in the decrepit stage of unpainted clapboard, sagging rafter, and wry fence. . . . But saddest of all are the decaying monuments of what was once a region of lively and expansive industry — a whole mill village deserted. ... In wildest Rhode Island the abandoned mill jostles closely the abandoned farm, and both have gone down together before the industrial wave which has swept the smaller factories to the railroad and shore and hived the workers in the greater shops under higher productive organization."

Of course amid a scene of desolation such as this there are to be encountered types of character all the quainter from their surroundings. Impressed with the fact. Miss Esther B. Carpenter, in 1887, published a delightful series of character sketches — "South County Neighbors." The men and women she depicts are survivals from the pristine Narragansett stock with its " Old Jobs " and " Young Jobs " and its " Uncle Simons ; " its " Alzadys," " Celindys," and " Lovisy Anns ; " its "Oseys" [Osiannas], "Pashes" [Patiences], and

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" Phylutys." " Now, neighbor," Uncle Simon was wont to remark, " what d' ye think makes Squire Potter and Squire Hazard always talk to me wheresumever they see me ? " " Why, I don't know. Uncle Simon." "Well, neighbor, I'll tell ye. 'T is to draar knalidge — yes, to draar knalidge." It was (we are assured by Miss Carpenter) a favorite hypothesis of Simon's that if he could only have talked with King George the Revolution need never have occurred.

But, to pursue a query propounded by Mr. Deming, " What does the future hold for Rhode Island's west, where nature is so fast overgrowing man, where meadows and sown field year by year shrink, where the woodlands expand, and the farm problem of Yankeeland repeats itself in its superlative degree ? Will the rich sporting patroons, who have begun to buy up the forests by the square mile at a dollar or two an acre, realize their hopes of a paradise of rod and gun ? Will the strange expanse of the very penumbra of busy cities be given over at last to the well-watched preserves of the sportsmen's clubs and syndicates ? Will it in the maturing of the science of forestry, now in bud, become the source of lucrative timber supply ? Or as populations outside wax and a refluent stream of wealth pours on the picturesque sites of New England, will remote posterity see the semiwilderness cut by electric roads, the truck farmer or tenant driving back the forest, the lands grown fat and costly, and every scenic hilltop crowned by the homes of the rich ? To such surmise," says Mr. Deming, " whether of economist, nature lover, or sportsman, the deepening solitudes of wildest Rhode Island give no reply."

Possibly not, but Professor N. S. Shaler of Harvard confidently predicts a time when, by reason of the exhaustion of more available lands, the lands of New England, especially those of a marshy character, will be widely reclaimed. Be that as it may, " Rhode Island's west " — its sparsely peopled, its intensely individualistic and separatist, west — is even now exerting a preponderant influence in Rhode Island affairs. The nature and tendency of that influence are reserved for consideration in our last chapter.

Chapter II The Age Of Roger Williams

1. Founding of Providence and Warwick

The age of Roger Williams in Ehode Island centres about six historic names and four geographical points. The names are Roger Williams and William Harris ; William Coddington and John Clarke ; Samuel Gorton and Anne Hutchinson. The points are Providence and Warwick on the Rhode Island mainland, and Newport and Portsmouth on the island of Aquidneck.

Roger Williams was born in London about 1603. His parents were James and Alice (Pemberton) Williams, and the occupation of his father was that of merchant tailor. Of his boyhood years we know nothing. Our first glimpse of him is obtained in 1620, when he was a lad of seventeen. Williams (probably with a view to a livelihood) had learned shorthand, and for the purpose of practicing his art had obtained permission to attend sessions of the Court of Star Chamber. Here, by his alertness of mind and openness of heart, he won the regard of Sir Edward Coke — the grim Sir Edward who, as chief justice of the Court of King's Bench, had in 1616 withstood to his face on a question of prerogative the pedantic James the First. Of Williams Coke straightway became the patron, and as such he in 1621 secured for him admission to the Charterhouse School, an institution then newly founded and of which the jurist himself was one of the overseers. In 1652 (long after the death of Coke) Roger Williams sought to enter into correspondence with a surviving daughter, Mrs. Anne Sadleir of Standon, Puckridge, but the dame — grim by disposition like her illustrious parent and incensed at Williams for his iconoclastic religious views — bound his letters into a package and indorsed upon it : " This Roger Williams when he was a youth would in a shorthand take sermons and speeches in the Star Chamber and present them to my dear father. . . . Full little did he think that he would have proved such a rebel to God, the King and his country. I leave his letters that, if ever he has the face to return into his native country, Tyburn may give him welcome."

From the Charterhouse Williams went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1626. His inclination at first was for the law, but the times were times of theology, and in 1629 he was filling the position of chaplain to Sir William Masham of Otes, in Essex. While thus employed he fell deeply in love with a niece of Lady Barrington, the Lady Barrington being an aunt to Oliver Cromwell. Williams's love affair was not prosperous. He had, it is true, won the heart of the maiden to whom he aspired; but in the eyes of Lady Barrington he was a match altogether unsuitable for one of her family, and his passion was frowned upon. In complete despair he wrote to the obdurate lady on May 2, 1629 : " We [his sweetheart and himself] hope to live together in the heavens though ye Lord have denied that union on earth." But this was not all that he did. Cambridge, where he had attended college, was in Cambridgeshire, one of those eastern counties of England into which there had long been migrating from Holland Anabaptists and Mennonites imbued with the idea of severance of Church from State. With this idea Williams himself had become impressed ; so much so, indeed, that he had thought it not unimportant to acquire a knowledge of the Dutch tongue. In his present situation, therefore, — crossed in love and a rebel against episcopacy, — he began to bend his gaze across the sea to a new land : that land whither already had departed the Separatist congregation of Nottinghamshire Pilgrims, and whither the Winthrop company of Puritans from Lincolnshire were soon to set out : a land, moreover, tenanted by a race wild, fantastic, and in need of Christianization — the land of the Massachusetts Bay.

On February 5, 1631, Roger Williams disembarked at Boston from the ship Lyon ; and as though to emphasize the entirety of his renunciation of bygone days and dreams, he disembarked accompanied by a wife, Mary Quee Barnard), and without having visited Stoke House to say farewell to Sir Edward, his patron, whom indeed at this time it would scarcely have been prudent for him to face. In New England — first at Salem, then at Plymouth, then at Salem again — Williams found himself constantly and from the first in opposition to prevailing ideas. Where he had thought to find, if not his own conceptions, at least room for the assertion of those conceptions, he found a hierarchy of ministers and elders and a stiff ecclesiastical discipline ; a hierarchy and discipline to which the distinctively secular agency, government, was in practice subordinated. Yet the conceptions held by Williams were not such — all of them — that any government of the day could wholly have passed them by. They involved opposition to the charter of the colony because it recognized the king rather than the Indians as the source of title to lands ; a delicate point at the moment, for the king was then seeking a pretext for recalling the charter. They involved opposition to the autonomy of the colony under the charter, for they were antagonistic to judicial oaths by which that autonomy was sought to be confirmed. Some things, however, they involved that the government (had it been secular) could well have tolerated: for instance, that the civil magistrate ought not to be empowered to punish sins as such, offenses purely against God — the acts forbidden in the first table of the Decalogue ; that, in other words, magisterial power should extend only to the punishment of misdemeanors and crimes, offenses against man — the acts forbidden in the second table of the Decalogue. Upon this principle there was to be founded the commonwealth of Rhode Island.

The final result of the clash between Roger Williams and Massachusetts was that on October 9, 1635, Williams was ordered to depart within six weeks out of the jurisdiction of the Bay, as one having "broached & dyvulged dyvers newe & dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates," and having " writ Ires of defamacon both of the magistrates & churches." Afterwards the sentence of expulsion was so far modified that Williams was permitted to remain in Salem until spring. But inasmuch as by private discourses and exercises he continued "to draw others unto his opinions," it was decided in January, 1636, to send him to England. The plan was revealed to the culprit in season for him to thwart it by evading Captain John Underhill, who had been charged with its execution, and soon, amid cold and deep snow, he, with his servant Thomas Angell, was on his way to the lodge of his friend Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoags.

In the spring of 1636 Williams broke ground for a habitation at Seekonk (East Providence), on the east bank of the Seekonk River. Here he was joined by three companions, among them William Harris. The party would have remained where they were, but were warned away as trespassers by Plymouth, and in the summer removed to Mooshassuc and began to lay the foundations of Providence.

The arrival at Seekonk of William Harris was an occurrence most significant for the Providence settlement. Williams and Harris had come to Massachusetts in the same ship, but by temperament and training were antipathetic to a degree. Williams was an idealist; Harris was a realist. The former was generous, full of compassion, and not altogether practical. The latter was keen, hard, and regardful of personal advantage. The Providence which together they succeeded in creating partook of the characteristics of both ; and throughout the lives of both, lives lasting almost to the end of the seventeenth century, was racked by the dissensions of themselves and of their respective adherents.

Among the motives which had inspired the coming of Roger Williams to America was a desire to convert the Indians, " to do the natives good." At Plymouth the newly arrived clergyman had early made friends with Massasoit ; and as a result of excursions into the Narragansett country, during which he had carefully studied the Algonquin tongue, he had entered into relations with Canonicus and Miantonomi. When, therefore, he and his companions — a party of five — found themselves at Mooshassuc, Williams was master of tlie situation. The Indians knew him and respected him, and in the fullness of their knowledge and respect executed to him on March 24, 1638, a conveyance of a township of land on the Mooshassuc and Pawtuxet rivers. It was the intention of the grantee to devote the gift to charitable uses. He meant to make of it in part a mission station, and in part a basis for a communal society composed of persons " distressed for conscience." To the latter design he probably was led by the circumstance that persons distressed for conscience — persons harassed at Plymouth or at the Bay — were already congregating about him.

But just here William Harris began to assert himself. He was willing that idealism, in the form of affection, philanthropy, and religion, should win from the Indians a tract of land ; but he was not willing that the land so won should remain "a common stock " for the benefit of all " distressed " comers. Individual ownership was what he sought, and by October 8, 1638, he had so far " wearied " Williams by importunities that the latter executed to twelve men — Stukeley Westcott, William Arnold, Thomas James, Robert Cole, John Greene, John Throckmorton, William Harris, William Carpenter, Thomas Olney, Francis Weston, Richard Waterman, and Ezekiel Holliman — a deed constituting the twelve (along with the grantor) a

"fellowship" in tlie Indian grant. The deed did not create a partnership ; it created a corporation. But to convert the corporate holding largely into holdings in severalty was the work of but a little time. In fact, during the same autumn so much of the Indian grant as lay upon the Pawtuxet Kiver (a portion called the " Pawtuxet Purchase ") was, by agreement between the proprietaries, partitioned into several tracts.

The government which under Williams was first instituted at Providence was by " masters of families." The masters met once a fortnight and dispatched business " by mutual consent." By August or September, 1636, there had been admitted into the community a body of " young men, single persons." The government now was rendered more definite by a stipulation, concluded between the early comers and "young men," that the latter were to be subject " in active and passive obedience " to the orders of the major part of the " present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated into a town, and such others as they should admit, only in civil things." In 1640 a board of five disposers, or selectmen, was established, to " be betrusted " with general matters, and a system of arbitration was set up. In the above mentioned cautious and tentative contrivances the individualism implied in the doctrine of Soul Liberty or Freedom of Conscience was sought as fully as possible to be carried into the domain of politics.

There were no magistrates ; there was no constable. As Williams had written to Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts in 1636, " the face of magistracy did not suit with [the] condition [of the settlement]."

In March or April, 1641, Samuel Gorton appeared in Providence. He was a man of some pretensions to family, and, like the father of Koger Williams, a London clothier. He also was a theologian — one of those extreme products of the Reformation in whom the age abounded ; men and women actuated toward the large mysteries of life, redemption, and immortality by a spirit of daring challenge, and just enough schooled to obscure their lucubrations by garbing them in Hebrew imagery. As an extremist, Gorton believed in Freedom of Conscience. Hence in politics he was an individualist ; but to his political individualism there was imparted stability by the circumstance that he was a profound admirer of the English common law. Wherever that law was enthroned and observed, there for him was civil liberty ; and wherever it was not enthroned, or was not observed, there for him was civil tyrannjr.

Up to the time of his advent upon the Mooshassuc, the life of Gorton in New England had been a succession of small tempests. At Plymouth, where, in 1637, he had removed from rigid Boston, he had had an altercation with the magistrates over their treatment of his serving maid for " smiling in church ; " with the issue that in December, 1638, he had been banished for " contempt." From Plymouth he (Roger Williams like) had made his way, through " snow to the knee," to Portsmouth, on the island of Aquidneck. Here, within a brief time, he had become involved in behalf of another serving maid — one charged with assault — and in due course (for his own defiance of authority) had been banished to the mainland. But Gorton's career, though thus a series of contentions, was not altogether a madness. At Plymouth the proceedings in restraint of the levity of his servant were to him ecclesiastically tyrannous as against conscience, and civilly tyrannous in that (as conducted) prosecutor and judge, contrary to English law, were one. At Portsmouth none of the proceedings were to him justifiable, because on Aquidneck the government was neither of royal nor popular origin, but " set up of itself."

The reception accorded to Gorton by Roger Williams was far from cordial. He demanded that the fugitive, as a condition precedent to admission to the town fellowship, exculpate himself from the charges brought against him at Portsmouth ; and in this demand he was sustained vigorously by William Arnold. Gorton, on his part, found the situation at Providence no more worthy of respect than on the island. A few men, without authority from the king of England, or from any source other than themselves, were (with their f amilies) occupying houses distributed along a narrow highway skirting the Mooshassuc and called " the towne street." Besides a house -lot, these men owned each a six-acre pasture or arable field; and as a body (as a fellowship or corporation) they owned all the rest of Providence. And not only so, but thirteen of them were owners, each, of a great estate on the Pawtuxet. Surely this was all wrong, all an illegal monopoly, and should be overthrown.

Gorton had been accompanied from Portsmouth by various disciples, and he made further converts at Providence. In his train now were Randall Holden and John Greene ; and the entire party — after bringing the settlement so near to revolution that Koger Williams, who at first " in Christ's name had withstood [the intruder]," at length gave up the contest and seriously bethought himself of flight to the island of Patience — settled down at Pawtuxet. At Pawtuxet, however, there were the Arnolds — William and his son Benedict ; and the Arnolds were of no mean order of ability. Their best energies were at once directed to the task of ridding the region of the burden of Gorton.

Already in 1641 Massachusetts had let fall the pregnant hint that it might operate for quiet and good order on the Mooshassuc and Pawtuxet if the more substantial inhabitants were to subject themselves to the jurisdiction of the Bay. So in the autumn of 1642, the Arnolds and their family connections made subjection in the name of Pawtuxet, and notice of the fact was promptly conveyed to Gorton by Governor Winthrop. The Gortonists had been neatly circumvented, and in January, 1643, they, after dispatching to Boston a letter stigmatizing the Puritans as a merciless Jewish brotherhood, removed to Shawomet. Shawomet was a district embracing what to-day are the towns of Warwick and Coventry. It was obtained by the Gortonists from Miantonomi and two local sachems, Pumham and Sacononoco. Gorton possessed something of Williams's faculty for ingratiating himself with the Indians, and his purchase of Shawomet marked the beginning of a friendship between himself and Miantonomi that was to be provocative of much.