A Course in Rhode Island History #4: 1.3 RI Geography. Political Borders

The third and last section of of Unit I, "Political Borders," will briefly summarize the boundaries for the Narragansett, then the those of the colony of Rhode Island then the establishment of towns from the 17th through 20th centuries. 

According to the Carter Roger Williams Initiative:

There is no particular logic to Rhode Island’s boundaries, which do not follow clear geographical features, like the Connecticut River that separates Vermont and New Hampshire.  They merely reflect agreements that were hammered out centuries ago between Roger Williams and his contemporaries.[1]

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 and culture well beyond the colonial period. 

If one strictly follows a chronological timeline, the "order" for RI borders should be first, the Narragansett, then Providence and the other original towns of Portsmouth, Newport and Warwick, then the colony of Rhode Island. This is because there was no unified "Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," not before 1663. There were only towns. 

The four towns of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, Warwick,
and Roger Williams' Trading Post near present-day Wickford, mid-1640s.
Image source: http://www.findingrogerwilliams.com/images/maps/1648.jpg

But before the English towns were the Narragansett. Archaeologists have identified the earliest evidence so far of Indigenous inhabitants to a spear point found in Wickford dating back 10,000 years. Archaeologists have tried to trace the movement of Pre-Columbian people based on styles of pottery, spear-points and where possible, DNA, but one of the most important signifiers of migration and relationships across the vast spaces of North America has been derived from langrage. The Narragansett are an Algonquian-speaking people, a language group that spanned much of the northern parts of North America.

Algonquian Language Distribution courtesy of Wikipedia (from legendsofamerica.com/algonquian-peoples)

The Narragansett territory included much of what today is "mainland" Rhode Island west of Narragansett Bay and the major islands in the bay that are present-day Newport County (see map [2] below). They were bordered in the east by the Wampanoag and in the west by the Pequot, with whom they had warred with and ultimately defeated in the vicinity of Shannock Falls (present-day Charlestown) in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The two were fighting to control the rich salmon run that ran up the Pawcatuck River to the falls. The Nipmuc to the north controlled the area that is today the northwest corner of Rhode Island diagonally approximately from Cumberland to through Smithfield to Foster. In the south the Narragansett controlled to ocean except where a related tribe, their close allies the Niantic, settled what is today the coastal sections of Charlestown, Westerly and on New Shoreham (Block Island). [3]

According to Roger Williams, Narragansett sachems brought him to Sugarloaf Hill in what is today Wakefield and pointed out the location they originated from on Point Judith Pond in South Kingstown, a place they called Nanihigonset. This is very close to the location of the Pre-Columbian settlement known as site RI110. [3]

[NB: for the following narrative, the Carter Roger Williams Initiative has an excellent series of interactive maps that show the founding and growth of the colony of Rhode Island from 1636 to 1703 on this webpage.]

In 1635, fleeing religious persecution from the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams made his way into Rhode Island in 1636 after being asked to leave Plymouth. He was given refuge by the Narragansett, and Williams founded the town of Providence after purchasing land for the settlement from the Indians. 

Animation of Roger Williams' possible escape route
from Massachusetts via Native American trails.
Credit: Carter Roger Williams Initiative

More religious dissidents fled Massachusetts in 1638, at the height of the so-called "Antinomian Controversy," and followed Williams to Providence. These new settlers included Dr. John Clarke, William Coddington and Anne Hutchinson. But rather than live under the democracy at Providence they quickly left for Aquidneck Island and founded Portsmouth (which today also includes Prudence Island). The following year in 1639, after disagreements arose among the founders of Portsmouth, some of those settlers decided to separate from Hutchinson's group, who stayed in Portsmouth for the time being. These separatists followed William Coddington to the southern end of Aquidneck to establish yet another new town, Newport.

In 1643, in the face of potential conflict with Native Americans over rapid expansion of English settlements (20,000 Puritans arrived in Boston in the 1630s, fleeing persecution in England in the so-called Great Migration) and deteriorating relations with the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut  and New Haven formed a confederation called the United Colonies. They pointedly did not invite the heretics of Rhode Island to join them. When Massachusetts sent troops into Rhode Island and invaded the new settlement of Warwick in 1643 to arrest its founder, John Gorton, and laid dubious claims to lands that today are in Westerly, Williams set sail for England to get a royal charter, to prevent a Puritan takeover of the nascent colony.

However, when Williams arrived, King Charles I was in the midst of the English Civil War and unavailable to draw up and sign any colony charters. Williams then turned to Parliament, who provided him with the next best thing at the time, a Parliamentary Patent, which provided 

the Towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport, a free and absolute Charter of Incorporation, to be known by the Name of the Incorporation of Providence Plantations... [bounded] “northward and north-east by the patent of the Massachusetts, east and south-east on Plymouth patent, south on the ocean, and on the west and north-west by the Indians called Narragansetts; the whole tract extending about twenty-five English miles into the Pequot River and country.” [4]

Even so, this colonial government mostly existed on paper. Only in 1647 did all four towns finally meet under the aegis of the Patent framework to develop policies and draft laws binding on all four towns. This arrangement quickly fell apart, and was only in effect sporadically for the rest of its duration. Typically one or more of the four towns would sit out and refuse to participate in a colony assembly, and the laws passed by their own town meetings took precedence over any passed by the Patent government.

In 1660, the Puritan Commonwealth on England came to an end and King Charles II returned from exile in France to take the throne. The founders of Rhode Island and Connecticut both realized that only a charter from the new king would put them on par with Massachusetts and the other English colonies. Rhode Island decided to send Dr. John Clarke to London obtain such a charter, but the towns took too long to volunteer the money for his transportation to England, and Connecticut's delegation arrived there first. Connecticut proceeded to claim all the land south of Warwick to Narragansett Bay, which Rhode Island had laid claim to -- the so-called "Narragansett Country," i.e., the lands south of Warwick. As a result of Connecticut's pre-emptive charter being issued in 1662, Clarke was forced to accept an arbitration clause in Rhode Island’s 1663 charter regarding the Narragansett Country that led to decades of dispute with Connecticut. But Clarke was successful in getting a charter and by 1703, Connecticut (mostly) relinquished its claims on what became South County. By then, the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations  had 7 towns: Providence Warwick, (East) Greenwich, Kingstown, Westerly, Portsmouth and Newport. However, there is still some dispute over where exactly the border is between Connecticut and Rhode Island in North Stonington and Hopkinton, due to conflicting land surveys conducted a century apart in 1840 and 1940, and new borders drawn up using satellite mapping technology [5]

Another dispute, this time with Massachusetts, emerged in 1693 when King William III granted Rhode Island extended boundaries to include land "three miles east and northeast" of Narragansett Bay, despite this land having been claimed and settled by colonists from Plymouth (which, in 1691 had been forcibly merged with Massachusetts Bay Colony and both were turned into a single royal colony -- Massachusetts). The Plymouth territory, under its 1629 patent, included in the overlapping boundaries the towns of Cumberland, Barrington, Warren, Bristol, Tiverton, and Little Compton. 

However, Rhode Island did nothing to try to enforce this boundary until 1640 when the colony appealed to King George II. He appointed a commission to investigate and decided in favor of Rhode Island, affirming the border in 1746 after Massachusetts appealed and lost the decision. This divided Bristol County in Massachusetts, and a new Bristol County was formed in Rhode Island that included what is now Barrington, Bristol, Warren, Tiverton, Little Compton, as well as Cumberland, Rhode Island (which was carved out of Attleboro, Massachusetts). The last time the boundary was changed between the two states was in 1862, when a Supreme Court ruling required Rhode Island to exchange land to Massachusetts that went Fall River, for land in Massachusetts that was added to Pawtucket and East Providence.        

Counties and Towns of Rhode Island [5]

For students, this rather dense history can all be summarized with a map and a graphic organizer with several categories across several periods. Rhode Island grew from one town in 1636 to seven towns in 1703. Today there are 39 towns and cities in the Ocean State -- see map above [5]. In the first half of seventeenth century, the main reason for the founding of Providence, Portsmouth, Newport and Warwick was religious separatism. After the Connecticut laid claim to the Narragansett Country in its 1662 charter, Westerly, New Shoreham, and in particular Kingstown and East Greenwich were founded to strengthen Rhode Island claims. In the eighteenth century, new towns were created due to the difficulty of getting to town meetings when towns were very large or especially if they were divided by rivers dangerous to cross in the winter months. The towns of the East Bay were formed when border between Rhode Island and Massachusetts were resolved in 1747. 

Once transportation became more reliable in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the rest of the divisions took place when one section of a town became heavily industrialized and densely settled while the rest remained rural farmland. Farmers were reluctant to pay for expensive urban infrastructure that would not benefit them. When Rhode Island's last new town, West Warwick, was divided from Warwick and incorporated in 1913, the political divisions rife in the state were a reason for dividing the town. The western section of Warwick not only had six major industrial neighborhoods but it was heavily Democratic, while the eastern and rural section of Warwick (better known for T. F. Green International Airport today) was deeply Republican.

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[1] "Putting Rhode Island on the Map" Carter Roger Williams Initiative http://www.findingrogerwilliams.com/essays/putting-rhode-island-on-the-map

[2] Map Tribal Territories Southern New England https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tribal_Territories_Southern_New_England.png     Attribution: Nikater; adapted to English by Hydrargyrum, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

[3] Archaeologist Joseph "Jay" Waller in "Highly Significant Pre-Contact Village Saved."  https://forums.arrowheads.com/forum/general-discussion-gc5/archaeology-news-reports-discussion-gc43/93462-highly-significant-pre-contact-village-saved

[4] Parliamentary Patent, 1643. Primary source document transcription, made available through the Rhode Island State Archives. https://www.sos.ri.gov/assets/downloads/documents/Parliamentary-Patent.pdf 

[5] Jane Gordon, "Drawing a Line, And Defending It" New York Times, May 25, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/nyregion/drawing-a-line-and-defending-it.html

[6] "Rhode Island Boundaries" Carter Roger Williams Initiative http://www.findingrogerwilliams.com/maps/cady_interactive

[7] "Counties and Towns of Rhode Island." https://wiki.rootsweb.com/wiki/images/b/b0/Rhode-Island.jpg