During the early years of the republic, the always romantic and sometimes lucrative China trade with the ports of the Orient flourished, then declined, and finally expired in 1841. In this age Rhode Island weathered a major hurricane (the Great Gale of 1815) and a locally unpopular confrontation with England (the War of 1812). Its major municipality, Providence, evolved from town to city (1832) and its political party system experienced two phases of opposition: Federalists vs. Democratic-Republicans (1794-1817) and National Republican-Whigs vs. Democrats (1828-1854). Its transportation system progressed from turnpikes utilizing horse-drawn wagons, carriages, and stages to railroads with steam-powered locomotives. From 1824 to 1828 a canal was constructed through the Blackstone Valley from Worcester to Providence in a vain attempt to capture the central Massachusetts market for Rhode Island entrepreneurs -- an attempt which the Boston and Albany Railroad soon trumped and which the Providence and Worcester Railroad rendered obsolete in 1847.
With Providence civic leader John Howland in the vanguard, a system of free public education was established by the School Act of 1828 after a false start twenty-five years earlier. During the 1830s and 1840s that system grew and prospered, especially in Providence, owing to the exertions of Samuel Bridgham. Nathan Bishop, and Thomas Wilson Dorr. Henry Barnard was imported from 1843 to 1849 as the first state commissioner of education, with the aim of bringing the other towns to the high educational level achieved by Providence.
The large-scale immigration of foreigners of non-English stock also had its origins in this era. From the mid-1820's onward, Irish Catholics came to Rhode Island in ever-increasing numbers to labor on such public works projects as Fort Adams in Newport (begun 1824), the Blackstone Canal (begun 1824), and the railroads (begun 1833), or they found employment in the textile mills and metals factories that had begun to dot and to darken the local landscape.
The most momentous developments in this formative era, however, were a transformation of the state's economy from an agrarian-commercial to an industrial base and a governmental transformation from colonial charter to written state constitution, accomplished after a long period of reform agitation and a serious political upheaval known as the Dorr Rebellion. The economic metamorphosis occurred first and contributed to the constitutional crisis.
The impact of the American Revolution and the state's consequent release from the industrial restrictions of the British mercantile system were the first factors to affect a gradual shift in Rhode Island's economy. Newport, under military occupation during most of the war, declined and yielded its economic ascendancy to Providence, whose merchants and entrepreneurs (most notably the famous Brown family) began to experiment with manufacturing.
The year 1790 was marked by an event that served as the catalyst for the state's economic transition. That occurrence was the reconstruction of a cotton-spinning frame similar to those used in England and its employment in a mill at Pawtucket Falls on the Blackstone River. It was the first time cotton yam was spun by water power in America. The men chiefly responsible for this promising venture were Providence merchant Moses Brown and Samuel Slater, a young English immigrant with technical knowledge and managerial experience acquired in the cotton mills of his native land.
The Rhode Island cotton industry developed slowly, with Providence businessmen supplying most of its funds, managers, and expertise. The significant shift of commercial capital into cotton manufacturing began in 1804, prior to the Jeffersonian embargo and even before the peaking of the state's maritime operations (which now included the China trade). By the late 1820s the processing of cotton displaced commerce as the backbone of the Rhode Island economy, and the river valleys in the northeastern quadrant of the state hummed with activity.
In this era, woolen production also flourished, especially in South County, and the need for textile machinery gave rise to a base-metals industry centered in Providence. Another early and important area of industrial endeavor was the manufacture of precious metals, especially gold and silver jewelry. For a century these four industries -- cottons, woolens, base and precious metals -- steadily expanded and dominated the state's economic life. But while these developments were transpiring, agriculture declined, many farms reverted to forest, and many rural towns experienced a substantial out-migration.
Industrialization and its corollary, urbanization, combined by the 1840s to produce an episode known as the Dorr Rebellion -- Rhode Island's crisis in constitutional government. The state's royal charter, then still in effect, gave disproportionate influence to the declining rural towns; it conferred almost unlimited power on the General Assembly; and it contained no procedure for its own amendment. State legislators, regardless of party, insisted upon retaining the old real estate requirement for voting and office holding, even though it had been abandoned in all other states. As Rhode Island grew more urbanized, this freehold qualification became more restrictive. By 1840 about 60 percent of the free adult males were disenfranchised.
Because earlier moderate efforts at change (beginning as early as 1817) had been virtually ignored by the General Assembly, the reformers of 1840-1843 decided to bypass the legislature and convene a People's Convention, equitably apportioned and chosen by an enlarged electorate. Thomas Wilson Dorr, a patrician attorney, assumed the leadership of the movement in late 1841 and became the principal draftsman of the progressive People's Constitution, which was ratified in a popular referendum in December 1841. Dorr was elected governor under this document in April 1842. The reformers were resisted by a "Law and Order'' coalition of Whigs and rural Democrats, who returned incumbent Governor Samuel Ward King to office in a separate election and then used force and intimidation to prevent the implementation of the People's Constitution. When Dorr responded in kind by unsuccessfully attempting to seize the state arsenal in Providence on May 18, 1842, most of his followers deserted the cause, and Dorr fled into exile. When he returned in late June to reconvene his so-called People's Legislature in Chepachet, a Law and Order army of twenty-five hundred marched to Glocester and sent the People's Governor into exile a second time.
The turmoil and popular agitation against the charter, which produced the Dorr Rebellion, forced the victors to consent to the drafting of a written state constitution. Authur May Mowry, the first major historian of the Dorr War, calls this instrument "liberal and well adapted to the needs of the state." but his appraisal neglects one important item: the 1842 constitution established a $134 freehold suffrage qualification for naturalized citizens, and this anti-Irish Catholic restriction, not removed until 1888, was the most blatant instance of political nativism found in any state constitution in the land. The stranglehold on the senate which the 1842 document gave to rural towns (there was one senator from each town regardless of its population) is also a fact of paramount importance and remained so at least until the "bloodless revolution" in 1935. Cumbersome amendment procedures made reform of the document a very difficult task.
This constitution, overwhelmingly ratified in November 1842 by a margin of 7,024 to 51, became effective in May 1843. Despite the margin of victory, the turnout was meager, for there were more than 23,000 adult male citizens in the state. That the opposition, in mute protest, refrained from voting explains in part the Constitution's apathetic reception and the lopsided vote.
A disillusioned Dorr returned from his New Hampshire refuge in October 1843 to surrender to local authorities. Immediately arrested and jailed until February 1844, Dorr was prosecuted for treason against the state. In a trial of less than two weeks, he was found guilty by a jury composed entirely of political opponents and sentenced to hard labor in solitary confinement for life. He served one year before Governor Charles Jackson -- elected on a "liberation" platform -- authorized his release. A Democratic General Assembly restored Dorr's civil and political rights in 1851 and in 1854 reversed the treason conviction. These gestures did little to cheer the vanquished reformer, whose spirit and health were broken. Disillusioned, he died in December 1854 in the midst of a local Know-Nothing campaign directed against immigrant Irish attempts to secure the vote.