Becoming dissatisfied with conditions at Portsmouth, Coddington and Clarke removed a few miles farther south on the 29th of April 1639, and established a settlement at Newport. In a similar manner Warwick was founded in January 1643 by seceders from Providence under the lead of Samuel Gorton. The union of Portsmouth and Newport, March 12, 1640, was followed by the consolidation of all four settlements, May 19, 1647, under a patent of March 14, 1644, issued by the parliamentary board of commissioners for plantations. The particularistic sentiment was still very strong, however, and in 1651 the union split into two confederations, one including the mainland towns, Providence and Warwick; the other, the island towns, Portsmouth and Newport. A reunion was effected in 1654 through the influence of Roger Williams, and a charter was secured from Charles II. on the 8th of July 1663. In the patent of 1644 the entire colony was called Providence Plantations. On the 13th of March 1644 the Portsmouth-Newport General Court changed the name of the island from Aquidneck to the Isle of Rhodes or Rhode Island. The official designation for the province as a whole in the charter of 1663, therefore, was Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The charter was suspended at the beginning of the Andros regime in 1686, but was restored again after the Revolution of 1689. The closing years of the 17th century were characterized by a gradual transition from the agricultural to the commercial stage of civilization. Newport became the centre of an extensive business in piracy, privateering, smuggling, and legitimate trade. Cargoes of rum, manufactured from West Indian sugar and molasses, were exported to Africa and exchanged for slaves to be sold in the southern colonies and the West Indies. The passage of the Sugar Act of April 5, 1764, and the steps taken by the British government to enforce the Navigation Acts seriously affected this trade. The people of Rhode Island played a prominent part in the struggle for independence. On the 9th of June 1772 the “Gaspee,” a British vessel which had been sent over to enforce the acts of trade and navigation, ran aground in Narragansett Bay and was burned to the water's edge by a party of men from Providence. Nathanael Greene, a native of Rhode Island, was made commander of the Rhode Island militia in May 1775, and a major-general in the Continental army in August 1776, and in the latter capacity he served with ability until the close of the war. In the year 1776, General Howe sent a detachment of his army under General Henry Clinton to seize Newport as a base of operations for reducing New England, and the city was occupied by the British on the 8th of December 1776. To capture this British garrison, later increased to 6000 men, the co-operation of about 10,000 men (mostly New England militia) under Major-General John Sullivan, and a French fleet carrying 4000 French regulars under Count D'Estaing, was planned in the summer of 1778. On the 9th of August Sullivan crossed to the north end of the island of Rhode Island, but as the Frenchmen were disembarking on Conanicut Island, Lord Howe arrived with the British fleet. Count D'Estaing hastily re-embarked his troops and sailed out to meet Howe. For two days the hostile fleets manœuvred for positions, and then they were dispersed by a severe storm. On the 20th, D'Estaing returned to the port with his fleet badly crippled, and only to announce that he should sail to Boston to refit. The American officers protested but in vain, and on the 28th they decided to retreat to the north end of the island. The British pursued, and the next day there was a severe engagement in which the Americans were driven from Turkey and Quaker Hills. On the 30th the Americans, learning of the approach of Lord Howe's fleet with 5000 troops under Clinton, decided to abandon the island. The British evacuated Newport the 25th cf October 1779, and the French fleet was stationed here from July 1780 to 1781.
The influence of Roger Williams's ideas and the peculiar conditions under which the first settlements were established have tended to differentiate the history of Rhode Island from that of the other New England states. In 1640 the General Court of Massachusetts declared that the representatives of Aquidneck were “not to be capitulated withal either for themselves or the people of the isle where they inhabit,” and in 1644 and again in 1648 the application of the Narragansett settlers for admission to the New England Confederacy was refused except on condition that they should pass under the jurisdiction of either Massachusetts or Plymouth. Rhode Island was one of the first communities in the world to advocate religious freedom and political individualism.
The individualistic principle was shown in the jealousy of the towns toward the central government, and in the establishment of legislative supremacy over the executive and the judiciary. The legislature migrated from county to county up to 1854, and there continued to be two centres of government until 1900. The dependence of the judiciary upon the legislature was maintained until 1860, and the governor is still shorn of certain powers which are customary in other states (see Administration). In the main the rural towns have adhered most strongly to the old individualistic sentiment, whereas the cities have kept more in touch with the modern nationalistic trend of thought. This was shown, for example, in the struggle for the ratification of the Federal constitution. Under the Articles of Confederation it was principally Rhode Island that defeated the proposal to authorize Congress to levy an impost duty of 5% mainly as a means of meeting the debts of the Central government. When the constitutional convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to frame a constitution for a stronger Federal government, the agriculturists of Rhode Island were afraid that the movement would result in an interference with their local privileges, and especially with their favourite device of issuing paper money, and the state refused to send delegates, and not until the Senate had passed a bill for severing commercial relations between the United States and Rhode Island, did the latter, in May 1790, ratify the Federal constitution, and then only by a majority of two votes. Rhode Island, like the rest of New England, was opposed to the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. During the Civil War it sent 23,457 men into the service of the Union.
The economic transition of the later 17th century from the agricultural to the commercial régime was followed by a further transition to the manufacturing régime during the closing years of the 18th and the early years of the 19th centuries. Commercial interests have been almost entirely destroyed, partly because of the abolition of the slave trade and partly because of the embargo and the war of 1812, but mainly because the cities of the state are unfavourably situated to be the termini of interstate railway systems. Providence, owing to its superior water-power facilities, has therefore become one of the leading manufacturing centres of New England, whereas Newport is now known only as a fashionable summer resort. The movement as a whole was of exactly the same character as the industrial revolution in England, and it led to the same result, a struggle for electoral reform. The system of apportionment and the franchise qualifications were worked out to meet the needs of a group of agricultural communities. The charter of 1663 and the franchise law of 1724 established substantial equality of representation among the towns, and restricted the suffrage to freeholders. In the course of time, therefore, the small towns came to be better represented proportionally than the large cities, and the growing class of artisans was entirely disfranchised. The city of Providence issued a call for a constitutional convention in 1796, and similar efforts were made in 1799, 1817, 1821, 1822 and 1824, but nothing was accomplished. About 1840 Thomas W. Dorr (1805-1854), a young lawyer of Providence, began a systematic campaign for an extension of the suffrage, a reapportionment of representation and the establishment of an independent judiciary. The struggle, which lasted for several years, and in fact is not yet entirely over, was one between the cities and the country, between the manufacturers and the agriculturists. It was
