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The history of Rhode Island is truly remarkable. The Story of Rhode Island is my humble attempt to tell you some of the stories about the people, places, and events that have made Rhode Island the state it is today.
To learn more about the show visit the Story of Rhode Island Podcast website at https://www.storyofrhodeisland.com/
What if I told you there once existed a society so democratic that people thought it was teetering on the verge of anarchy.
And that while most of the world was ruled by monarchs or wealthy aristocrats, this radical little colony gave ordinary people an immense amount of political power.
Not only did it allow 75% of adult white males to vote — a rate of suffrage higher than anywhere else in the world at the time - but the people directly elected nearly all of their government officials.
And When those voters spoke, their government listened. When they needed capital to fuel their businesses and farms, their legislature printed money. When taxes grew too heavy, their representatives pushed back. And even when it came to the seat of government itself, the people trusted no single town with it — forcing their legislature to rotate among five different capitals to ensure it never strayed too far from their watchful eye.
This place wasn’t ancient Athens or a philosopher’s dream.
It was Rhode Island - a place that from its founding to the American Revolution, was the most democratic society on earth.
And America’s founding fathers knew exactly what was going on there.
But it didn’t inspire them - it terrified them.
Which is strange — because what Rhode Island had built was exactly what the founders claimed they wanted. A government run by the people.
The story of why that terrified them is one of the most revealing contradictions of the entire American Revolution.
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[THE COMMON ASSUMPTION]
When we picture the American Revolution, we picture unity. Thirteen colonies bound together by a single idea — that the people should govern themselves. It’s the beating heart of everything the founders built. And we tend to assume they all meant the same thing by it.
Sure, there were tensions. Slavery. Representation. The balance of power between states and the federal government. History doesn’t pretend those disagreements didn’t exist.
But on the core idea — that the Revolution was a shared march toward a government of, by, and for the people — we assume the founders were pulling in the same direction.
That assumption is wrong.
Because in the 1780s, a period historians call the Critical Period, the founders weren’t just debating how to build their new nation. They were watching in horror as the democratic ideas of the Revolution spread further and faster than they ever intended. Reaching people they hadn’t planned on. Giving power to men they didn’t trust with it.
And nowhere was that fear more concentrated than in the tiny state sitting at the edge of Narragansett Bay.
Rhode Island wasn’t a symbol of everything the Revolution had achieved.
To the most powerful men in America, it was a symbol of everything that could go wrong.
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[THE REVELATION]
To understand why the founders feared Rhode Island we need to look at what the founders actually meant when they talked about self-governance.
It wasn’t rule by the masses. Not really. What men like James Madison and his contemporaries envisioned was a republic — a system where educated, propertied gentlemen rose above petty self-interest to legislate for the good of the whole nation. Men of standing. Men of character. Men who could see past the immediate desires of their constituents and make decisions worthy of posterity.
The American Revolution, in their vision, was supposed to do away with the patronage system that dominated European society. Not eliminate hierarchy altogether.
But the Revolution had other ideas.
Once the language of liberty and equality was loose in the world it didn’t stop where the founders wanted it to. It spread. It reached the so-called middling people — the commercial farmers, small traders, petty merchants, and artisans who made up the backbone of colonial society. And those people did exactly what you’d expect people to do when someone tells them they matter.
They got involved.
They showed up to vote. They ran for office. They won. And once in power they passed laws that served their communities, their farms, their livelihoods.
To us today, that sounds like democracy working exactly as intended.
But To James Madison, it sounded like catastrophe.
These middling legislators, in his view, were narrow-minded men with no concern for the public good — always chasing their own interests, always legislating for their constituents rather than for the nation. And the most dangerous law they kept passing, the one that made Madison’s blood boil more than any other, was the issuance of paper money.
Here’s why that mattered so much.
In early America, banks barely existed. Filling that void were Wealthy men who lent their money to farmers and governments. In return, they expected to further increase their fortunes by collecting interest on the loans. It was a system that worked beautifully for creditors. Or at least it did until popularly elected legislatures started printing money.
When governments issued paper money, inflation followed, making the dollars debtors used to repay their loans worth less than the dollars they’d borrowed. Creditors got paid back in currency that had been quietly hollowed out. The wealthy lost. The middling majority won.
This made The founders were furious. Madison called paper money unjust. John Adams warned it would “ruin us.” George Washington, learning that his own debtors had repaid him in depreciated currency while he was away fighting the British, labeled them scoundrels that had taken advantage of him.
To most American leaders this wasn’t just bad economic policy. It was tyranny. Not the tyranny of a king — they’d dealt with that already. This was the tyranny of the majority. Ordinary people using the ballot box to steal from the wealthy minority. The wrong people making the laws, for the wrong reasons, with devastating consequences.
And nobody did it more brazenly than Rhode Island.
Rhode Island’s legislature had been issuing paper money since 1710 and did so nine separate before 1751 alone. Then, After the Revolutionary War, deep in debt and with farmers struggling to pay their taxes, they did it again — issuing 100,000 pounds of paper money and setting penalties for anyone who refused to accept it.
Madison had seen enough. He singled Rhode Island out by name in his working paper on the failures of American government — the only state he condemned directly. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can exceed the wickedness and folly which continue to rule there. All sense of character as well as of right is obliterated there.”
Other founders piled on. Rhode Island, they said repeatedly, represented everything wrong with the nation in the 1780s. They called it a state verging into anarchy and in ruin from excessive democracy.
So in short, Rhode Island was the disease. And Madison was already drawing up the cure.
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[WHY IT HAPPENED]
What the founders never fully grasped — or never wanted to — was that Rhode Island hadn’t accidentally stumbled into radical democracy. It had been built for it, from the ground up, by people who understood exactly what they were doing.
Rhode Island wasn’t founded by men seeking power. It was founded by people fleeing it. Religious dissenters pushed out of Puritan colonies and European nations for daring to worship differently came to the shores of Narragansett Bay because they wanted one thing: to be left alone. No overbearing church. No distant king. No central authority telling them how to live.
And That instinct got written into the colony’s DNA.
Its royal charter of 1663 gave Rhode Island more freedom from outside interference than any other colony in British America. And within Rhode Island, even that loose central authority barely functioned — because the towns themselves refused to yield power to anyone. So deeply suspicious of centralized control were Rhode Islanders that they couldn’t even settle on a single capital. By the eighteenth century they had five — one in each county — rotating so that no town could claim dominance over the others.
Gordon Wood, one of the foremost historians of the founding era, captured it precisely. He explained how because of Rhode Island’s extreme localization of authority, weakness of its social hierarchy, dominant middling character of its people, and high percentage of eligible voters” it was by the eve of the Revolution, the most democratic colony in the entire British Empire.
And those ordinary people with extraordinary power had practical needs.
Rhode Island was the most commercially active colony in America. More of its people were engaged in buying and selling than anywhere else. Because of this Merchants needed capital. Farmers needed credit. And since gold and silver were scarce, the people did what people with power do — they passed laws that solved their problems. Paper money wasn’t a conspiracy. It was common sense to the people writing the checks.
The founders looked at all of this and saw chaos. Mob rule dressed up in democratic language. A cautionary tale about what happens when the wrong people are handed too much power.
But here's what the founders had missed.
Rhode Island had been issuing paper money for decades before the Revolution — and it was working. Rather than dragging the colony into the anarchy and ruin the founders predicted, it was doing the opposite. That flood of readily available capital gave ordinary merchants and farmers something to work with. This fueled trade and funded businesses, eventually turning Rhode Island into the most commercially active colony in America.
The disease, it turned out, had been the engine all along.
But it doesn’t end there. Because it was due to even more paper money policies following the Revolutionary war, Rhode Island was able to pay off its entire war debt by 1789, something many American states failed to do.
And so as we’ve seen, The issuance of paper money wasn’t some grand scheme by the tyrannical majority wanting to rob creditors but a tool ordinary people used to improve not only their lives but the wider economy. It enabled farmers to pay their taxes, fueled trade, and prevented the kind of desperate, debt-fueled violence that erupted in Massachusetts in 1786 — when farmers who couldn’t pay what they owed took up arms in what became known as Shays’ Rebellion. That didn’t happen in Rhode Island. Because Rhode Island gave its people a way through.
And the effects rippled far beyond the Revolution. During the 19th century, Rhode Island continued making capital accessible to ordinary people through the creation of state banks — giving entrepreneurs and emerging businesses the resources they needed to grow. By the end of the century that access to capital had helped transform the tiny state around Narragansett Bay into one of the most industrialized places in America. Paper money alone didn't build that economy. But it was the gas that enabled it to keep running.
Gordon Wood has argued that this pattern extended across the entire region — that it was the proliferation of paper money, the very thing Madison called wicked and foolish, that supplied much of the capital fueling the extraordinary expansion of the northern middle-class economy in the early nineteenth century. The entrepreneurs who built that economy needed capital to start businesses. Paper money gave it to them.
And so, the contagion, it turned out, was actually nourishment that fueled growth.
But the founders never saw it that way. They looked at Rhode Island's chaotic, paper-money-printing, populist driven democracy and saw a problem that needed to be solved. A contagion that needed to be restrained. And so they built a cure.
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[CLOSING]
Rhode Island wasn't the enemy of the founders' ideals.
It was, for its time, the purest expression of them.
For over a century before a single shot was fired at Lexington or Concord, Rhode Island had been doing exactly what the founders claimed to want — giving ordinary people real power over their own lives, laws, and government. It took the saying 'government by the people' seriously — giving upwards of 75% of adult white males the right to vote, a higher rate of suffrage than anywhere else in the world, and allowing them to directly elect every one of their government officials."
Now — was it perfect? No. Women couldn't vote. Black Rhode Islanders couldn't vote. By modern standards it fell well short of the ideals it claimed to represent. But by the standards of its time — a world still run by kings, aristocrats, and inherited power — no society on earth had pushed the idea of self-governance further than Rhode Island had.
And it worked. Not perfectly. But it worked. Its people thrived. Its economy hummed. It paid off its war debt when other states couldn’t. It found a way through crisis after crisis not because of great men at the top making wise decisions — but because ordinary people at the bottom had the power to solve their own problems.
That was Rhode Island’s story. And it was a good one.
But the founders didn’t see it that way.
To Madison and the men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, Rhode Island wasn’t a model. It was a warning. And the new government they built — what we know today as the United States Constitution — was designed in part to make sure what happened in Rhode Island could never spread. They wrote specific provisions to contain it. They even inserted a clause prohibiting the issuance of paper money — aimed, in no small part, directly at the little state on Narragansett Bay.
Then they waited for Rhode Island to fall in line.
But it didn’t.
What happened next — the years of defiance, the battles over ratification, the moment when Rhode Island found itself so at odds with the rest of America that some questioned whether it belonged in the new nation at all — is a story for another episode.
And it’s one worth sticking around for.