Seventeenth Century Rhode Island: Localism vs. Centralization
By Mark Kenneth Gardner, WRICHS Historian
That Rhode Island was not initially established as a colony but as separate, distinct towns meant that from the start, a fundamental tension arose between localism and centralization. This tension pervaded Rhode Island politics well beyond the colonial period. Rhode Island’s first English settlers, informed by a medieval sense of communality, familiarity with the local political institutions of the English parish and with no lack of iconoclasm, were motivated more by adherence to their particular religious principles than in the creation of a unified polity. The settlers of Providence Plantation and Aquidneck Island rapidly fragmented into four independent towns
During the 1600s, Rhode Island’s government was beset by a haphazard series of power struggles between the towns and the colony. In the first decade fiercely independent settlements (Providence, Portsmouth, Warwick and Newport) agreed on very little except to disagree and established their own local institutions, quite deliberately avoiding political ties to one another. The only institution that endured from this very early period was the town meeting. Some variant of community democracy played a significant if not leading role in decision-making in all four towns; Roger Williams and even Newport’s founder William Codington eventually demurred to the will of the freemen. But a fundamental obstacle in the acceptance of political authority was the lack of connection to traditional authority as it was known in England, where power over life and limb emanated from the king and flowed to local magistrates — aristocrats who inherited their authority by long-established custom. In England, the power to punish wrongdoers “require[d] officials and institutions capable of exercising adequate sanctions against offenders. Only the crown and the powerful country gentry possessed such authority in the early seventeenth century.” [1] Simply being a landowner and holding an elective local office did not legitimatize political authority over life, liberty or property in Rhode Island’s first English settlements.
In the first half of the 1640s England plunged into civil war, and the rest of New England formed a confederation for mutual protection that deliberately excluded Rhode Island. These developments convinced many Rhode Islanders that they should begin to cooperate better amongst themselves and obtain a charter to protect their settlements. In 1642 Roger Williams arrived in an England in the midst of political crisis, and it proved impossible for him to obtain a charter from the king. Williams settled instead for a patent granted by Parliament in 1644. Even then, it took several years before consensus finally formed in Rhode Island; the towns did not agree to join a colony government until 1647:
“And now…our Charter gives us powre to governe ourselves and such other as come among us, and by such a forme of Civill Government… It is agreed, by this present Assembly thus incorporate, and by this present act declared, that the forme of Government…is DEMOCRATICALL; that is to say, a Government held by ye free and voluntarie consent of all, or the greater parte of the free Inhabitants…” [2]
This was a promising start to Rhode Island’s new provincial government, but it disintegrated less than a year after it formed. The atomistic tendencies of the previous decade proved too alluring, and the colony government functioned only sporadically for the rest of the 1640s and 1650s. [3]
Other local institutions were created in the brief period of colony-wide cooperation in 1647 that became enduring elements of Rhode Island town government. At the behest of the new provincial government town councils were established, each with six members chosen in town meeting. Highway surveyors were mandated, two for each town. At the provincial level, a system of representative government emerged which gave both the colonial government and the towns the power to create new laws through a system of mutual referendum, and a code of laws for the colony was adopted. [4]
Early Rhode Island towns maintained their local prerogatives long after their submission to provincial authority. It was hoped by some Rhode Islanders (though not by all) that an official connection to England would keep the colony from being swallowed up by Massachusetts and Connecticut — the former lay claim to Warwick and Misquamicut, and Connecticut’s designs to extend its territory eastward to Narragansett Bay were made clear in their claims to the Narragansett Country in their 1662 Charter. For the duration of the seventeenth-century, some institutions from the time of Rhode Island’s first colony-wide government were rejected while others were reinforced. The parochial-provincial dichotomy of the mutual referendum and a lack of enforcement of the colony’s poorly organized laws remained essential characteristics of Rhode Island government long after 1647; the spirit of cooperation among and between communities much less so. Though briefly revived in 1654, a provincial government that most Rhode Islanders found acceptable proved elusive until Dr. John Clarke obtained Rhode Island’s Royal Charter in 1663.
Sources and Notes
[1] David Thomas Konig, “English Legal Change and the Origins of Local Government in Northern Massachusetts,” in Bruce C. Daniels, ed., Town and County: Essays On the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan, 1978), page 19.
[2] Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England. Printed by Order of the General Assembly. Ed. by John Russell Bartlett, (Providence: A. C. Greene and Brothers, 1856-65), Volume I page 156.
[3] Howard K. Stokes The Finances and Administration of Providence (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1903): 52-53; RICR I: 129, James Colonial Metamorphosis, pages 33-34
[4] Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, Volume I pages 150-151.
[5] Sydney V. James, The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island: a Study of Institutions in Change, ed. Sheila L. Skemp and Bruce C. Daniels (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2000), pages 42-48; see also Sydney V. James Colonial Rhode Island: A History, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pages 40-48.