Defending the Rhode Island 'Experiment' - Part 1

Capitalism and social control in the Eighteenth Century

Jeff Knowles

Preface:
Here comes your sailor, child of Rhode Island, to decry “the people” ashore. He is a resident of the State, but the son of two immigrant sailors who settled there after decades of serving the rich on expensive yachts on the Atlantic. He purports to know the logic of that very system he lives and breaths. And yet he claims no independence from that he observes. His history is the transition from child of the Atlantic to student at an institution founded by the very men he implicates in this piece.

‘I was told once that colonial sailors would refuse to learn to swim. If they fell into a stormy sea, those sailors would rather submit quietly to a watery grave than struggle aimlessly for survival. But would not most men rather live quietly then question the roots of their worlds? Those social mechanisms, the social the locks and keys that keep us confined in who we are, they will never be escaped unless we plunge into the sea, battle it wave for wave, and emerge letting whatever can be, be.’


Introduction: an ideology of “freedom” and exclusion


In the summer of 1739, some of the people living in Newport Rhode Island gathered at the Baptist Church to hear their minister, John Callender, speak about the “Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony.” In an unwavering history, the Reverend told of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and how they settled a colony predicated on religious freedom. And with a scholarly confidence, Callender assured his congregation that Rhode Island was the home of a liberty so remarkable that “I do not know if there was ever before, such an instance as the settlement of this Colony and this Island.” While Callender made great claims about freedom in Rhode Island, to understand what these words meant at the time, we must know more about Callender and the congregation he was speaking to. Although we do not know exactly who was in attendance at church that summer, it is clear that Callender’s audience did not constitute “the people” of Newport, if that larger entity has ever existed. On the other hand, Eighteenth Century Newport played host to a pluralism of religious and ethnic groups who each called the city home. In addition to the Baptist Church, there were at least five other places of worship in Newport, each catering to a subpopulation of residents. What is more, these institutions represented a wide selection of religions and a resident of colonial Newport might have attended Trinity Church, Tarro Synagogue, the Quaker Meeting House, or in later years, the African American Unionist Church.

Thus the people of Newport included Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, African Christians and people of other religious identities. As Callender discussed in this “Century Sermon,” which he later published as An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode Island, the colony was also home to a number of ethnic groups including European whites, free blacks, enslaved blacks, Native Americans, and immigrants rich and poor from throughout the Atlantic Ocean. In telling of the Colony’s founding, Callender argued that freedom was characteristic of Rhode Island compared with other places in the Colonial Atlantic. In Callender’s words, Rhode Island was an “experiment” with a novel system of government, which in contrast to past societies entailed an “unprecedented” degree of individual freedom through a secular state. In this way, Callender suggested that the colony had its roots in a “Liberty of Conscience.” But Callender also contends that this religious freedom was possible only because the people of Rhode Island submitted to a “civil government,” which depended on their major “consent” and “obedience.”

Even while embracing freedom of spiritual practice, Callender lamented that a secular state brought the demise of the social rules that originated from the laws of the church and the “Spirit of God.” While Callender considered “wicked [any] attempt to force men to worship god in a way they do not believe, and the restraining them from worshipping Him in a method they [desire],” he also noted that the end of universal religion left room for social disorder. This second concern is associated with a theoretical realization: the dissolution of universal, state mandated religious practice negates the power of religion to structure social life. In a religiously plural society men and women with divergent religious beliefs must find a secular means of defining acceptable behavior, new ways of evaluating each other’s actions, and at the very least, a new understanding enduring social norms. That Callender recognized these changes indicates that he saw religion as more than the worship of god, but also a route social identity, the communication of standards of behavior, and an assurance of order. And the conclusion that Callender drew from observing this aspect of “the experiment” was that to “flourish, the civil state must be secured by ever so many penal laws, and an inquisition to put them in execution…by civil officers chosen out of every religious society…and who preserve public peace.” To replace the order of religion, Callender thought that society must imbue the civil state with laws that put in code those same standards of behavior that before, were encoded by religious culture and enforced by religious governance.

For a historian interested in extolling the American Experiment, Callender’s work might be taken as an early expression of the Revolutionary American Ideal. Without taking up the national party line however, one might also associate Callender with the American Revolution by identifying in both a shared mode of thought. Originally from England and educated at Harvard College, Callender was likely schooled in the thought of those seminal Liberal thinkers who are frequently attributed as the inspiration for the American Revolution. The Historical Discourse is written in the image of major theoreticians such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes whose works are the classics of the Liberal Cannon. Indeed it was on the view of Rhode Island as a Liberal society that Callender argued that strict civil codes of conduct were essential to the preservation of order. Whereas earlier forms of social organization included well-defined social roles: priest and believer, lord and vassal, aristocrat and peasant, the ideal Liberal Society could stay ordered as long as it maintained the universal participation of individuals who conformed to the ideal of a Liberal Actor. This ideal had its origin in the fear of disorder: Hobbes and Locke identified a liberal society by contrast with the “state of nature,” the chaotic conditions encountered by some ideal type yet impossible ancestor. From this thought experiment, liberal thinkers speculated that any rational actor would submit to compliance with civil law for protection from chaos and disorder. Reasoning through Social Contract Theory framed the preservation of order as the principle function of civil government.

Callender invoked this social contract argument when he explained that in Rhode Island, “new comers promised to submit themselves in active or passive obedience to all such orders and agreements as shall be made for public good of the body, in an orderly way, by major consent of the inhabitants.” And he suggested that religion has no place in a Liberal government: “to prevent our religious difference from being carried into civil affairs, let them never make factions in government.” These types of beliefs place Callender in line with better-known ideologists in early America because both embrace the tenants of Classical Liberalism. In his role as minister of a church, Callender directed his thoughts to his congregation; but when he published his work as An Historical Discourse, Callender thought he was talking to “the people of Rhode Island.” With this in mind, the modern observer might take Callender’s “people of Rhode Island” as the same “the people” who would be declared independent 35 years later.

But to truly understand what Callender’s words meant to people in Rhode Island, we must return to the question of his audience. To begin, any modern observer would be quick to point out that “the people” to whom Callender spoke did not include everyone present in Eighteenth century Rhode Island. Following work in the last two hundred years of American Historiography, one can make the immediate observation that entire categories of people were excluded from life in the Liberal society by categories of difference constructed out of traits primordial to their being. African slavery and Native persecution are fundamental tenants of American history and Rhode Island was exceptional only in breadth of its exploitation. The traffic of African Slaves was so widespread in Rhode Island that it is best considered to be an industry: it was a source of wealth for the rich and also a source of subsistence for the poor. Further, Rhode Island, like other European Settlements in North America, depended in its existence on the displacement of those native to the land. Yet these forms exploitation were maintained through social mechanisms that were celebrated, not hidden, by those who perpetrated the oppression. Men like Callender truly believed that Blacks and Native Americans were innately different from white Colonists and that their inferiority precluded them from a place in the new Liberal society. Expressed in the same breaths as the praise of liberty, racial oppression was no secret. The perception of racial and ethnic difference was so engrained that oppression seemed normal.

However, ethnic subjugation and racial enslavement were not the only forms of exclusion in Eighteenth Century Rhode Island. Beneath the religious pluralism Callender claimed in his discourse, there was actually a pluralism of oppressions. Yet unlike the racial carefully structured logic transformed the very freedoms granted to some members of the community were the pillars of a system that excluded others who did not fit the mold. While Callender spoke of universalism, he was simultaneously taking part of a mission to restrict the fruits of the new society to a privileged few. In fact, Callender was a member of a highly exclusive group of the most powerful merchants in Newport who regularly met in a club they called the “Philosophers Society,” or sometimes the “Society for the Promotion of Knowledge and Virtue.” And while they discussed the virtues Liberalism, this tightly knit group of merchants promoted a style of living whose virtue they defined in contrast to the “intemperance, idleness and…indigence” of a lower class that was not welcome in the new society.

In a community whose oldest families had immigrated just 100 years before, leaders imagined a strong local identity and spread paranoia about anything foreign. Callender and his association of philosophers told the people that the greatest threat to their well being was an invasion by the transient poor, the lazy vagrants, and the drunken sailors who “infected” other cities. In town meetings and in the Newport Mercury, residents were told to fear strangers. And to protect local residents from this perceived threat, town leaders implemented strict laws against immigration and a legal process by which unsavory locals could be “warned out” – exiled from the town – or “bound out” – sold into servitude. Advocating a particular way of life was not enough to maintain control of social norms: non-conformers had to be legally banned from entering the towns.

But a problem in the merchants’ view of their colony was that despite their perception, Rhode Island was a community of immigrants and sailors. Localism was imagined because the community was never a stable group of locals, but remained in constant flux. From the 1740’s through the revolutionary war, half of the population in Newport had moved to the town within ten years, which indicates that only half of the community resided in the city for a long term. Many of the merchants were themselves recent immigrants from elsewhere in the Atlantic. And despite their distaste for the ideal type “drunken sailor,” the city was in fact dependent on the sea for the crucial function of facilitating maritime trade in the Atlantic Economy. The ruling class in this port town were the owners and captains of ships, travelers from better established economies, or aristocrats with family wealth and business ties. The owners of ships also owned factories ashore, and the elite group was so tightly put together that the economic well being of all of the residents in Newport and Providence was dependent on the actions of a small group of men. This new structure of control brought many apparent contradictions in the lives of Rhode Islanders at the time: merchants were at once philosophical and oppressive towards the lower class in society, women enjoyed a new type of economic freedom but were also exploited in new ways, free blacks lived in unusual liberty for the period but the colony also took a central role in the production of black slave labor as a commoditized good.

Further, simultaneous with the boon of maritime trade, sailors from Newport also took part in what Markus Rediker describes as a Atlantic wide class war with ship Captains and Owners. Rediker argues that Atlantic merchants perceived themselves as fighting a moral battle with intemperate sailors and other groups of indignant or lazy poor who threatened economic success and moral conventions. In opposition, the working sailors who provided the labor power for the maritime trade flaunted the morals and standards of behavior that were promoted by leaders ashore. But Rediker does not explore is the ideological basis of the merchant’s thought, nor does he identify the ideological apparatuses through which they acted. Consequently, he does not study the means by which the merchants battled their “many-headed hydra.” This study is the attempt to construct a more cohesive understanding of Callender’s audience, and how some people were kept out of Newport while others were let in. A byproduct of this study might be the inclusion of a class of people in the colonial period into a history that they helped to create. But “bringing agency” to this class is not my goal and is a methodology rather than a motive. The various oppressed groups in colonial Rhode Island were not conscious of their historical actions, and they consisted of diverse people who rarely came together as one. One of the reasons that the various proletariats in Rhode Island stayed separate was that each lived different struggles with the particular de facto aristocrats in its economy.

I study just a few of these groups, but in so doing, I hope to identify an exclusion that was implicit in the “freedom” of early Rhode Island that made “liberty” contingent on the acceptance of Liberal mode of life. Sailors and other transients in Rhode Island cities and towns were expected to live up to a strict moral standard codified in legislative law, and kept on the boarders of local society by means of a capitalist exploitation. Even though locals were taught to perceive it as a foreign threat, the Atlantic Proletariat was inseparable from the poor classes who lived for years at a time in Newport and Providence without ever establishing the kind of economic roots necessary for a secure place in the society.


In some ways, Rhode Island did pioneer a democratic system that would later be expanded to encompass the union of states. But more importantly, Rhode Island served as an early experiment with a type of civil society, techniques of social control, and standards of communicating expectations of behavior that would persist in the Nation after it declared itself independent of European Hierarchy. And though many of the specific exploitations explored here in 18th Century Rhode Island are no longer prevalent in the American economy, it is impossible to separate freedom and liberty as they exist in America today from the exclusion that was its genesis in 18th Century Rhode Island. Whenever a modern observer references the traits of liberty and freedom expressed in American history, whenever a politician stands on a marble stage and calls upon the ideal founding father, he or she is playing into the system exclusion that made those liberties and freedoms possible. We can not call upon past American Ideals without also waking “nightmares of [our] past.”