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Like Massachusetts, the smaller New England colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Rhode Island all possessed a distinctively Puritan legal regime. Of course, there were differences among them—differences elaborated in this chapter. Unlike Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Rhode Island, for example, did not support its churches through taxation, and Plymouth tried, unsuccessfully, to do the same. Nonetheless, as in Massachusetts, the law of God was the foundation of New England law, was judicially enforced, and served to restrain the exercise of power by the strong against the weak. As in Massachusetts, debt collection was never the main stuff of adjudication; more important was building the infrastructure of the interior towns essential for civilized community living.

Indian unrest and French and Dutch invasion scares threatened New England in 1667, 1671, and 1673. As colonies reacted to these dangers, there were no differences attributable to pacifism between non‐Quaker governments in Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay and Quaker government in Rhode Island; all governments made haphazard, tentative, localized, and inadequate provisions for defense. None called upon the king for aid; all called councils of war, mounted an occasional great gun, set watches, negotiated with the Indians. An occasional individual Quaker demonstrated scruples against one measure or another. One major exception to the absence of pacifist evidence was the legislation passed by the Rhode Island Quaker government, the Exemption of 1673, the first formal legislative provision for conscientious exemption.

In 1675, King Philip's War – a war redolent of sin and flesh – broke out in New England between English settlers and Indians. All of the antagonists in this war saw each other as sinners: the Puritans blamed Quakers for drawing the wrath of God upon them in the form of angry Indians; the Quakers blamed Puritans for persecuting fellow Christians; the Indians felt the English had abused them in multiple ways; the English saw the Indians as Godless, and so as sinners as well. As for flesh, the physical costs of war were devastating: the Indians suffered massive losses of population, and 12 English towns were utterly destroyed. The major leaders when war erupted were King Philip of the Wampanoags, Canonchet of the Narragansetts, the Quaker Governor William Coddington of Rhode Island, Governors John Leverett of Massachusetts Bay, Josiah Winslow of Plymouth, and John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut. Quakers dominated the Rhode Island government and sent Quaker John Easton to negotiate with Philip in a failed effort to forestall hostilities.

The Rhode Island judiciary was not elevated to coequal status with the Rhode Island general assembly until 2004, a result achieved via the passage of an amendment to the Rhode Island Constitution abolishing legislative supremacy in the state. Although Rhode Island's political architecture had no direct influence on Article III of the U.S. Constitution, the Ocean State judiciary's long and curious journey to independence reveals why independent courts are essential to the preservation of liberty, something the framers of the federal Constitution appreciated more than 200 years before the political leaders of Rhode Island. Because Rhode Island only recently committed itself to the separation of powers, this chapter investigates several events that occurred well after the framing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. It discusses the judiciary's subordinate station in the history of the state.

This chapter attends to the separation of a husband and a wife during and immediately after the American Revolution, considering what attended those moments when the ‘silken cords’ of marriage were stretched by distance and disorder. Concentrating on New England (especially Newport, Rhode Island) and England, it seeks to answer the question of why a husband did not return to his wife at the war's end, and what this meant. Women in such circumstances could obtain a kind of limited leverage from eloquent sensibility. Charges of unfeelingness, an important domestic claim, could also take on additional political meaning in wartime situations. At the same time, claims of ‘family feeling’ could also be put in service of some rather dubious political and domestic choices.

This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by considering the early years of colonization, Native American religious beliefs and practices, and the seventeenth-century attempts to evangelize Natives in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island. This chapter also gives a brief social portrait of New England in 1700.

After the end of the French and Indian War, Sarah and Abraham Whipple, along with their two daughters, were able to settle into their Providence community. The wartime efforts of Abraham Whipple had earned him esteem in the colony, and Abraham and several other trusted sea captains were granted more assignments by Nicholas Brown and Company. By the end of the decade, the seaport base of the company was already established within and outside Rhode Island. Although the Rhode Island Assembly was able to meet with both Newport and Providence, public opinion concentrated more on the leadership of Stephen Hopkins and other individuals. The “Newport Junto,” the Royalist faction, was able to lessen the influence of the seaport town particularly during the period of imperial tensions.

This chapter unfolds how Narragansetts understood the areas around Narragansett Bay as vital homelands connecting land and water, focusing especially on conceptions of swamps as valuable, powerful locales that served critical ecological functions. It tracks how Narragansetts interacted with early New England colonizers during the formation of Rhode Island, including the exiled Roger Williams, and experienced difficult pressures in the seventeenth century prior to the outbreak of war in 1675, entailing controversies over land, wampum, sovereignty, and trading relationships. It examines the devastating colonial attack on a Narragansett and Wampanoag encampment inside the Great Swamp in December 1675, and how survivors of that devastating massacre regrouped and navigated new challenges in colonial legal arenas and an emerging tribal reservation system. It then examines a series of colonial monumentalizing activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which developed in tandem with rising attitudes of anti-Indian racism and exclusionary politics, culminating in the forced “detribalization” of the Narragansetts by the state of Rhode Island in the 1880s.

This chapter details how revolutionary rhetoric, the conditions of war (the American Revolution), and the actions of enslaved people ultimately led to the destruction of northern slavery. In Rhode Island, the breakdown of slavery began with Quaker manumissions in 1773, followed by the enlistment of enslaved men in the Revolutionary War in 1778, the passing of the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1784, which ended hereditary slavery, and finally the 1787 slave trade ban, which forbade residents from participating in the Atlantic slave trade. Slaveholding as it existed in the colonial era came to an end in Rhode Island between 1773 and 1787, though the General Assembly would not abolish slavery until 1842. Two parallel and sometimes overlapping histories reveal how and why slaveholding was dismantled in a place that had been and continued to be so wedded to the business of slavery. Enslaved people initiated the process through many modes of resistance (running away, volunteering for military service, and bargaining with their masters) and were responsible for the actual collapse of slaveholding, while black and white abolitionists pushed for a legal end to slaveholding. Nevertheless, the business of slavery remained alive and well in Rhode Island even though the numbers of slaveholders and enslaved people dwindled.

Beyond soldiering, individual Quakers faced other issues relevant to the peace testimony, such as self‐defense and offering sanctuary to others. To seek protection in a garrison house, for example, raised several questions: might it betray a lack of faith in God's protection; should one go in armed, or unarmed; as a site of potential violence, should one avoid it altogether? The records show a range of behavior, from Nathaniel Sylvester's scrupulous avoidance of garrison houses to William Coddington's contorted legalism. Would offering sanctuary to wounded English soldiers be a loving act, or would it be an unconscionable support of military activity? The peace testimony, with the exception of the Rhode Island Testimony, did not appear in disciplinary admonitions until the 1690s among New England Quakers, suggesting that its parameters were too unsettled, its complexities too great.

“Going for doughboys” defines the Rhode Islander summertime tradition of a holiday at the coast. Doughboys, made of sugar-coated fried dough, have a rich history embedded in Rhode Island’s seaside locations and the combined cultural heritage of settlers from England, Greece, Italy, and Portugal. While these ethnic heritages play a part in the nostalgic value of doughboys, their value as a comfort food comes from the social connections created among working-class Rhode Islanders consuming them together. Memories of “going for doughboys” thus provide an anchor by which Rhode Islanders of diverse ethnic backgrounds reify their shared regional identity.

This chapter explores community colleges. The community college is the workhorse of American higher education—and it has never been more popular. Yet community colleges have received relatively little attention from historians, an unfortunate shortcoming both because the community college is the single form of higher education that Americans can lay legitimate claim to having “invented” and because the institution has undergone a remarkable historical transformation. Beginning in the early twentieth century as “junior colleges,” community colleges were designed to provide the first two years of undergraduate study leading to the bachelor's degree. Over time, however, many became training grounds for individuals seeking occupational certification while also serving as resources for small-business development and agents of small-scale technology transfer. The chapter then looks at the cases of the Community College of Rhode Island and Santa Fe Community College to illustrate how a rising ethos of affluence guided the transformation of community colleges.

This chapter summarizes the national discourse on contraception and then examines the changing context for abortion and birth control in Rhode Island from the 1830s to the turn of the twentieth century. Nativism influenced the abortion statutes passed in that state, but legislators pursued their own course with regard to contraception.

The thousands of English settlers who flocked to the north-eastern coastline of the continent of North America during the early seventeenth century established a flourishing society which so closely resembled that of the mother country that it alone, of the many English outposts erected on the far side of the Atlantic, could reasonably be known as New England. Although New England's town-based settlement, diversified economy, and family labour system corresponded broadly to English patterns, colonial society differed in important ways. New Englanders interacted — sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently — with Indian peoples. The established Puritan religion of all New England colonies except Rhode Island constituted religious dissent in England, where for much of the century its adherents were subject to persecution and legal disabilities. The availability of land in New England gave its inhabitants a degree of economic independence that Englishmen could only envy.

Abraham Whipple commanded the Rhode Island Navy, particularly the warships the Katy and the Washington. To their enemies, these ships were perceived as an unlikely force in their cruise that began in mid-August 1775 since the British warships were much larger and more heavily armed. The officers and the crewmen of higher rank had more experience in terms of procedures for naval combat, and some of the loyalists found in Newport were able to provide the British commanders information regarding the whereabouts and the activities of the rebels, as well as important supplies. Captain James Wallace, R.N., was mindful of how the sailing of the two ships were cut short because Captain Whipple fell ill and both ships had to return to Providence. Wallace nonetheless concluded that he was now able to control Narragansett Bay.

This chapter examines the organization of the slaving voyage of the Hare in Newport, Rhode Island in the summer of 1754, arguing that the transatlantic slave trade was a pillar of the local economy. The chapter begins with a discussion of the place of slave trading in the New England economy, and then examines the significance of rum to the regional economy. It then provides a detailed portrait of the vessel’s owners, Samuel and William Vernon, and sketches their mercantile activities. The Vernons were deeply involved in the West Indies trade, which revolved around the exchange of New England foodstuffs and lumber for Caribbean molasses.

The chapter explores the creation of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of U.S. independence. It looks at the central role played by Rhode Island merchants in this traffic, the tensions generated by the expansion of abolitionism in the region, and the broader political debates on the national level.

Beginning with an analysis of a painting of the slaveholding founder of the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island, that shows him holding a copy of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, this chapter documents the reading of Alexander Pope’s works in colonial America in relation to the Atlantic slavery economy. In doing so, it provides a theory that portraiture featuring books should count as evidence of the reception of them. It shows how slavery philanthropy fueled the Rhode Island book trade and endowed its libraries, and how patriot thought and activity emerged from these libraries. In examining the fragmentary remaining circulation receipt books of the Redwood, it shows patterns of reading that suggest that members of the library were more concerned about their own political “slavery” to Britain than with the condition of the Africans they were enslaving. It also investigates Rhode Island abolitionism in figures like Samuel Hopkins.

The origins of the Whipple family in New England could be traced to England, and the surname is said to have initiated with variant spellings during the Norman times. During the “Great Migration,” several of those who were known as “vexed and troubled Englishmen” during the period between 1629 and the early 1640s set out for North America. Most of these Puritans believed that God supported their mission of building the New World settlement with a virtuous government and a “righteous” religion. John Whipple was one of those who participated in the move, and it is he from which Abraham would descend. John Whipple had significant vocational skills, and he was soon given a small parcel of land near Dorchester Neck. He then sold his Dorchester lands and moved his family to Providence Plantations, a part of Rhode Island, where he focused on farming and carpentry. This chapter provides an examination of the beginnings of the Whipple family, particularly on Rhode Island.