By Rep. Michael A. Rice
In recent weeks, there has been a move in the legislature to submit a question to the voters in November 2010 whether to make a change in the state constitution to remove the words “Providence Plantations” from our state’s official name. A number of well-meaning people around the state have interpreted the word “plantations” as meaning “slaveholding enterprise” in a sense widely understood with regard to pre-Civil War U.S. South and have taken offense. Despite these concerns, our state’s official name, “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” has its own rich and distinguished history to consider.
Nobody would dispute the fact that slavery is unacceptable, and that Rhode Island gained in monetary wealth through slave trading by the DeWolf and Brown families among others during the 18th and 19th centuries. But “Providence Plantations” in reality had nothing to do with the slavery enterprise at all.
The name given by Roger Williams in 1636 to his colony was “Providence Plantation,” because of his steadfast faith in divine providence, and the fact that 17th-century small town colonies with an agricultural economy were called “plantation colonies,” and the legal documents that formed their governments semi-independent from the English crown were known as “plantation compacts.” Additionally, there is simply no evidence at all that Williams was a slaveholder.
The second of the plantation colonies on the mainland (following Anne Hutchinson’s 1638 colony of Portsmouth and the 1639 colony of Newport; both on Aquidneck or Rhode Island) was Samuel Gorton’s Shawomet Purchase of 1642 from the Narragansetts. As Gorton settled at Shawomet, the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to his territory and acted by force to enforce their claim. After considerable difficulties with the Massachusetts Bay General Court, Gorton traveled to London to enlist the sympathies of the Robert Rich, the Second Earl of Warwick, Lord Admiral and head of the Parliamentary Commission on Plantation Affairs (responsible for managing the overseas plantation colonies). Gorton returned to his colony in 1648 with a letter from Rich, ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people. In gratitude, Gorton renamed Shawomet Plantation to “Warwick Plantation.”
Plantation compacts were the primary means by which a number of other early colonies in Southern New England and Long Island were formed, including Plymouth Plantation (1620), Quinnipiac or New Haven (1638), Guilford (1639), Milford (1639), Stamford (1640), Southold (1640) and Branford (1643).
The King Charles Charter of 1663 (the original is on display in the State House today) formally established the “Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” as an amalgamation of the two plantation colonies on Aquidneck Island and the two plantation colonies mainland, thus the name of the colony and subsequently the state.
Proponents of changing the state’s name often do not dispute the innocent origins of “Plantations” or the goodwill of Roger Williams in establishing Providence, but they will point out that words and symbols can change meaning with time. For example, the swastika was originally a symbol used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength and good luck. After the Nazis hijacked the symbol in 1920, it lost its original meaning to many people in the world as it assumed powerful negative connotations. Hardly anybody in America these days would be would be brandishing a swastika as a sign of good luck.
Yet in India and all over Asia where the Buddhist religion is practiced, the use of the swastika is still actively used as an important religious symbol. Why did the Buddhists forget to drop their symbol given its ugly Nazi history? Surely the Buddhists were aware of the Nazis, as thousands of Buddhists were executed by Nazi allies in Asia during World War II. Perhaps there is a sense that historical usages of their own symbols continued to remain important and they calmly, stoically but firmly resisted the Nazi hijacking.
To me the rich history of our four original independent Rhode Island and Providence Plantations colonies explains our state’s regionalism and love for local governance. In short, the term “plantation” in early Colonial New England had nothing to do with the cotton plantations and the practice of slavery in the antebellum South. It has everything to do with our earliest heritage of small town self-government and our long-distance relationship with the British crown.