Last to Ratify, Rhode Island and the Constitution

Rhode Island ratified the United States Constitution on May twenty-ninth, seventeen ninety. That made it the thirteenth and last of the original states to join the new union, and it did so by a margin of only two votes, thirty-four to thirty-two. No state held out longer.

No state came closer to staying out entirely. The reasons were not mere stubbornness, though the other twelve states interpreted them that way. Rhode Island's farmers and small merchants distrusted concentrated power on principle.

That distrust was baked into the colony's founding, going back to Roger Williams's insistence that no institution, civil or religious, should hold unchecked authority over ordinary people. A constitution that gave a distant federal government the power to tax, raise an army, and regulate commerce looked to Rhode Islanders very much like the kind of concentrated power they had always resisted. The state had rejected the proposed Constitution outright in a popular referendum, the only state to put the question directly to its voters rather than a ratifying convention.

Congress threatened to treat Rhode Island as a foreign nation and cut off its trade. New York and Providence newspapers published mock obituaries for the state. Finally, enough members of the General Assembly were persuaded that staying out would cost more than it was worth.

The two-vote margin tells you everything. Rhode Island did not embrace the new order enthusiastically. It accepted it narrowly, and it never entirely stopped being suspicious of it.

That independence of mind, that refusal to simply go along, runs as a thread from Roger Williams through the Gaspee burners through the Dorr Rebellion and down to the present. The smallest state, and one of the hardest to move.