The Dorr Rebellion, Democracy's Unfinished Business

In eighteen forty-two, Rhode Island was still governing itself under a charter granted by King Charles the Second in sixteen sixty-three. That charter allowed only men who owned a certain amount of land to vote. By the eighteen forties, Rhode Island had become an industrialized state full of factory workers, tradespeople, and immigrants, none of whom owned land, and none of whom could vote.

More than half of the white men in Rhode Island were disenfranchised. The state was, by any reasonable measure, not a democracy. Thomas Wilson Dorr was a Harvard-educated lawyer from a prominent Providence family, precisely the sort of person the existing system had been designed to protect.

He turned against it anyway. In eighteen forty-one he helped organize the People's Party, which drafted its own constitution, held its own ratification vote open to all white men regardless of property, and declared that constitution the law of the state by the will of the majority. In April of eighteen forty-two, Dorr was elected governor under the People's Constitution, and in May he took office in a parallel government alongside the existing charter government.

Rhode Island briefly had two governors, two legislatures, and two sets of competing laws. Dorr attempted to seize the state arsenal in Providence with a cannon that misfired. His supporters melted away.

He fled the state, returned, was arrested, tried for treason, and sentenced to life at hard labor. He served one year. Public pressure forced his release in eighteen forty-five.

The charter government had already done what it most feared: it had written a new state constitution that extended the vote to all adult men regardless of property, though naturalized immigrants still had to meet a property requirement. The rebellion failed. The democracy it demanded, imperfect and partial, arrived anyway.