Interviewees:
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C. Morgan Grefe
- Executive Director, Rhode Island Historical Society
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Richard Ring
- Senior Director for Library & Museum Collections, Rhode Island Historical Society
Rhode Island's Revolutionary identity was rooted in its 1663 royal charter, which enshrined separation of church and state and an extraordinary degree of self-governance. These principles shaped a fiercely independent, merchant-driven colony whose leaders challenged British authority earlier and more aggressively than most. Stephen Hopkins's pamphlet The Rights of Colonies Examined (1764) offered one of the earliest articulations of colonial political standing, and the colony's remonstrance against the Sugar Act was among the first formal protests. The Gaspee affair of 1772—in which colonists burned the British schooner Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, shot its commander, and closed ranks in silence against all investigation—became a celebrated touchstone of resistance up and down the seaboard. Internal politics pitted the Hopkins-Brown faction of Providence against the Ward-Greene faction of Newport and Warwick, a rivalry that gradually mapped onto a Patriot-Loyalist divide. On May 4, 1776, the General Assembly voted to renounce allegiance to the King—two months before Congress declared independence.
