Location

Rhode Island

Rhode Island had been shaped from the outset by resistance to religious compulsion and by suspicion of centralized authority, and those habits remained visible throughout the founding era. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson stood near the colony's beginnings, but by the eighteenth century figures such as Stephen Hopkins and William Ellery carried Rhode Island's distinctive political inheritance into the imperial crisis and the Continental Congress. The colony's merchants and seafarers often chafed under British trade regulation, and the destruction of the customs schooner Gaspee in 1772 became one of the clearest signs before 1776 that imperial enforcement would be met with organized resistance. Rhode Island declared independence from the Crown before the Continental Congress issued the Declaration, showing how far its political culture had moved toward local assertion of authority. Yet the same distrust of distant power later made Rhode Island extremely wary of the Constitution, and it remained outside the new Union until 1790, the last of the original thirteen states to ratify. That hesitation was not mere stubbornness; it reflected a long-standing fear that federal authority might endanger local liberties and the autonomy the colony had defended since its founding. Rhode Island mattered because it joined some of the strongest American commitments to conscience and self-rule with one of the clearest Anti-Federalist warnings against centralized political power.