Rhode Island and Providence Plantation, English Crown Colony of
Years: 1663 - 1776
The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is one of the original Thirteen Colonies established on the east coast of North America, bordering the Atlantic Ocean.
It is a colony of the Kingdom of England from 1636 to 1707, when the Acts of Union are passed, then a colony of the unified Kingdom of Great Britain until 1776.
After the American Revolution, it becomes the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (commonly known as just Rhode Island).
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Cash crops include tobacco, rice and wheat.
Extraction industries develop in furs, fishing and lumber.
Manufacturers produce rum and ships, and Americans are producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply by the late colonial period.
Cities eventually dot the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs.
English colonists are supplemented by waves of Scots-Irish and other groups.
Freed indentured servants push further west as coastal land grows more expensive.
Roger Williams, after being banished in 1636 from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his religious views, had settled at the tip of Narragansett Bay, on land granted to him by the Narragansett tribe.
He called the site Providence and declared it a place of religious freedom.
Detractors of the idea of liberty of conscience sometimes referred to it as "Rogue's Island".
After conferring with Williams in 1638, Anne Hutchinson, William Coddington, John Clarke, Philip Sherman, and other religious dissidents had settled on Aquidneck Island (then known as Rhode Island), purchased from the local natives, who called it Pocasset.
The settlement of Portsmouth was governed by the Portsmouth Compact.
Disagreements among the founders had caused the southern part of the island to become the separate settlement of Newport.
Samuel Gorton had purchased the Native American lands at Shawomet in 1642, precipitating a military dispute with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In 1644, Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport had united for their common independence as the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, governed by an elected council and "president".
Gorton had received a separate charter for his settlement in 1648, which he named Warwick after his patron.
In 1651, William Coddington had obtained a separate charter from England setting up the so-called Coddington Commission, which made Coddington life governor of the islands of Rhode Island and Connecticut in a federation with Connecticut Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Protest, open rebellion and a further petition to Oliver Cromwell in London, led in 1653 to the reinstatement of the original charter.
Meanwhile, medical doctor and Baptist minister, John Clarke, a leading advocate of religious freedom in the Americas, had traveled to London in 1652 with Roger Williams to secure a new charter for the colony of Rhode Island.
Williams had returned to Rhode Island in 1654, but Clarke remains in England until the charter is granted.
After the overthrow of the English revolutionary government in 1660, it was necessary to gain a Royal Charter from the new king, Charles II of England.
Charles, a Catholic sympathizer in staunchly Protestant England, approves the colony's promise of religious freedom.
He grants the request on July 8, 1663, giving the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations an elected governor and legislature.
Colonel Edward Whalley and Colonel William Goffe, two of the judges who had signed the death warrant of Charles I of England, had fled to New Haven to seek refuge from the king's forces.
John Davenport had arranged for these "Regicides" to hide in the West Rock hills northwest of the town.
A third judge, John Dixwell, joined the other regicides at a later time.
An uneasy competition rules New Haven’s relations with the Connecticut River settlements centered on Hartford.
The colony had published a complete legal code in 1656, but the law remained very much church-centered.
A major difference between the New Haven and Connecticut colonies is that the Connecticut Colony permits other churches to operate on the basis of "sober dissent" while the New Haven Colony only permits the Puritan church to exist.
Following the issuance of a royal charter to Connecticut in 1662, the colony absorbs the colony of New Haven in 1664, fixing the number of the United Colonies of New England at four: ...
...Connecticut, ...
...Rhode Island, ...
...Plymouth and ...
...Massachusetts, the last of which includes New Hampshire and much of the Maine coast.
Seventh Day Baptists are Christian Baptists who observe seventh-day Sabbath, which was the original Sabbath for the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
The first recorded Seventh Day Baptist meeting had been held at The Mill Yard Church in London in 1651 under the leadership of Dr. Peter Chamberlen. (However, many Seventh Day Baptists believe that records showing that the sect had originated in 1617 were lost in a fire.)
Samuel and Tacy Hubbard, two members of the First Baptist Church of Newport, Rhode Island, pastored by John Clarke, withdraw from that church and join with Stephen Mumford, a Seventh Day Baptist from England, and four others, covenanting to meet together for worship in December 1671, calling themselves Sabbatarian Baptists.
Mumford, for his part, had arrived in Rhode Island in 1665, and is mentioned as an advocate for seventh-day Sabbath in many records of this time.
Other than the belief that Christian Sabbath is Saturday rather than Sunday, Seventh Day Baptists are very similar to other Baptists.
The Seventh Day Baptist World Federation today represents over fifty thousand Baptists in twenty-two countries.
New England is traditionally friendly towards privateers, but the pirate captains Bréhal and Paine are arrested on the orders of visiting governor Edward Cranfield, who charges Paine with carrying a counterfeit commission.
Paine is eventually cleared and Brehal allowed to leave.
Paine stays in Rhode Island; he will eventually go into semi-retirement, becoming involved in the cargo reselling for local pirates.
The life expectancy of slaves is much higher in North America than further south, because of less disease and better food and treatment, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.
Colonial society is largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery and colonies pass acts for and against the practice, but by the turn of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans are replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in southern regions.