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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/
It was inside this building in Providence, Rhode Island - 250 years ago - that something remarkable happened.
On May 4th, 1776, months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the delegates of Rhode Island's General Assembly did something no other colony dared to do. They renounced their allegiance to King George III — stripping his name from every commission, writ, and process of law in the colony.
It was a radical act of defiance. And for many Rhode Islanders, it was something more: proof that their state was the first to declare independence from Great Britain.
To illustrate this pride, Rhode Islanders now celebrate two independence days - one of May 4th and another months later in July.
It's a great story. And it's one worth being proud of.
But there's just one problem.
It's not entirely accurate.
And the gap between what Rhode Island actually did on that spring day in 1776 — and what’s been celebrated ever since — says something fascinating about this state. Something that not only puts Rhode Island at the forefront of the American Revolution, but reveals a long standing devotion to autonomy and a suspicion of centralized authority that has defined it from the very beginning.
BREAK
[CONTEXT]
To truly understand what happened on May 4th, 1776, you need to understand where America was in the spring of that year. Because the Revolution — the one whose march toward independence can seem so inevitable in hindsight — was still in the process of defining itself.
The war itself had started a year earlier. Shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 had dragged the colonies into open conflict with the British military. But open conflict and independence are two very different things.
As late as May of 1775, cutting ties with England was far from a foregone conclusion. Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who would eventually author one of America's founding documents, wrote that the colonies had not raised armies "with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain." They still hoped for reunion.
The phrase that dominated that period wasn't "independence." It was "The Cause." Short for "Common Cause”, which for the most part was still considered a fight to defend their rights as Englishmen, not a clean break from England.
Eventually as time passed and the effects of war continued to impact the colonists some began coming to the conclusion that the only way to protect their sacred rights was by separating from England. The first and most ardent defenders of independence were the New England colonies, a region that acted as the heart of the revolution from its inception. But those colonies knew that without unanimous consent, independence was doomed to fail. And there was still a significant portion of America that pushed for reconciliation. Middle colonies like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware hoped that King George would come to his senses, realize the errors of his administration, and restore the colonists their rights.
But that didn’t happen.
When king George received the Olive Branch Petition — Congress’s formal appeal for peace — in October 1775, he rejected it without even reading it. Then he declared the colonies in open rebellion.
And just like that, the middle colonies lost their strongest argument.
Then, More gas was thrown on the fire in January 1776 when Thomas Paine published Common Sense. The remarkably successful pamphlet convinced Americans from all walks of life that a break from England was inevitable and that “The birthday of a new world is at hand”.
By Spring, those favoring independence in Congress had a clear upper hand and conversations about taking such a decisive act began to heat up. In March and April, the colonial governments of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia gave their delegates a cautious green light — permission to vote for independence if such an act were proposed.
But still, neither congress nor any colony had yet to make any official Declaration of Independence.
And so, It was in this setting, on May 4th, 1776, that Rhode Island took a bold step forward and made a statement about royal authority that no other colony had the nerve to make.
BREAK
[THE CASE FOR YES]
There’s no doubt that by 1776, Rhode Island was ready for independence.
Along with support from the general population and leading citizens like Nathaniel Greene, one of their delegates, Samuel Ward, a man who would unfortunately die in March of 1776, had been openly stating since November that he wanted nothing more than to declare the colonies independent.
But even with such strong public sentiment, Rhode Island’s delegates back in congress still needed an official statement from the colony’s government, the general assembly. And so, with conversations around independence we’re picking up pace, one of those delegates, Stephen Hopkins, wrote home with an urgent question: if independence came to the floor, how should he vote?
The assembly's answer came in May of 1776.
First, they agreed to inform Hopkins that he should support “the most proper measures for promoting and confirming the strictest union and confederation between the United Colonies” and to exert their “utmost abilities in carrying on this just and necessary war.”
But what they did next was their boldest move yet.
Members of the General Assembly — men who were bound by an act that technically required them to swear personal allegiance to King George III — looked at that oath and decided it no longer made sense. The king, they believed, had broken the terms of his own governance. He had forfeited the allegiance of his subjects. And swearing loyalty to the same monarch they were openly rebelling against had become an absurdity no one was willing to maintain.
And so they abolished it.
In its place, all official commissions, writs, and legal proceedings would now reference not the king — but "The Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."
And Just like that the king's name was gone and His authority stripped.
The colony had looked at one of the most fundamental legal bonds tying it to the British Empire and cut it.
No other colony had done this. Not yet. Rhode Island moved first. It stood at the front of the line — and it did it months before the Continental Congress officially declared what everyone in New England had already been thinking.
So That's the case for May 4th. That's why Rhode Islanders have been celebrating it for over a century. And honestly? It's not a bad case.
But when we dig a little deeper we realize that it’s a bit more complicated than it might initially look.
BREAK
[THE CASE FOR NO / THE COMPLICATION]
There’s no doubt that Rhode Island renouncing their allegiance to King George on May 4th, 1776 was a bold move.
But just because it was bold doesn’t mean it was a declaration of independence.
To understand how that could be true, we need to understand the structure of the British government at the time.
By 1776, the British government was more than just the King. As a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 it was a system known as a King-in-Parliament. With this system , Britain was governed by the king and Parliament acting together as one supreme lawmaking authority, with Parliament being the more powerful of the two.
Therefore, by Rhode Island solely renounced their allegiance to King George and not Parliament as well, it only severed their relationship from part of the British government.
And the leaders of Rhode Island knew this. That’s why they referred to their colony as “The Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”. In fact they wouldn’t go on to change it to the “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” until the General Assembly ratified the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776.
Even Stephen Hopkins didn’t see the act as a clear statement on how the General Assembly felt about independence. Still looking for an answer to his original question on how to vote on independence he was forced to ask Governor Cooke for clarification. And Cooke himself replied with something only slightly less vague, reassuring Hopkins that he should not "entertain a doubt of the sense of the General Assembly."
Now Hopkins was able to read between the lines and decided his colony was in favor of independence, which it was, but still the point is that He had to read between the lines.
If Rhode Island had truly declared independence on May 4th then he wouldn’t have had to dig any further. But they didn’t and they wouldn’t until July of 1776, just like every other colony.
But still, just because Rhode Island didn't declare independence on May 4th, 1776 doesn’t mean we should disregard what happened that day.
Because when we take a step back and reexamine what occurred, we see there’s still a story worth telling.
To start, the fact that Rhode Island was the first to renounce their allegiance to the king and strip his name from the legal system confirms something that historians have been saying for ages - that Rhode Island stood at the vanguard of the American revolution.
And given the fact that it was perhaps the most successful revolution in history and one that would forever alter the western world, that’s something to be proud of.
But that’s not all.
Because there's something else buried in what the General Assembly did that day — something that gets overlooked entirely when we argue about whether May 4th was a declaration of independence or not.
Along with renouncing its allegiance to King George III, the assembly gave its delegates in Congress a very specific warning. They told them to take the "greatest care to secure to this colony, in the strongest and most perfect manner, its present established form, and all the power of government, so far as relate to its internal police and conduct of our own affairs, civil and religious."
In other words: make no deal, join no pact, sign no agreement — not even with our fellow colonists — that threatens our autonomy.
Think about that for a moment.
Rhode Island wasn't just defending itself from a monarch thousands of miles away. It was watching the Continental Congress too. Because to Rhode Islanders, independence had always meant something specific: freedom from any government — foreign or domestic — that dared to interfere with its way of life.
And when we think of Rhode Island’s history that makes perfect sense. From day one it was a place built by radical outcasts who simply wanted to live and worship as they pleased without some overbearing authority breathing down their necks. And so, they built something different. A radically democratic government that promised complete complete religious freedom, giving ordinary white male citizens a degree of autonomy unheard of anywhere else in the western world.
And That instinct didn't disappear when the revolution came. It showed up in those instructions to Hopkins. And it showed up again years later when Rhode Island became the last state to ratify the federal Constitution — still guarding its autonomy, still suspicious of centralized power, still Rhode Island.
So when we celebrate May 4th, it shouldn’t be honoring a declaration that was never made. It should be honoring something truer than that — the fact that long before a new nation was built on autonomy and a suspicion of centralized power, a radical little society called Rhode Island had been advocating for those ideals for over a century