24 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter

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THE .STEPHEN HOPKINS' HOME IN PROviDENCE Courtesy of R. I. Development Council

STEPHEN HOPKINS, AN ARCHITECT OF INDEPENDENCE, 1707-1785 by JOHN F. MILLAR One of the positive results of the Bicentennial has been the marked increase in the study and writing of local history. This development has been justly applauded and encouraged by leading historians, who caution, on the other hand, that local historians not overestimate the importance of specific local events and per­ sonalities due to misplaced chauvinism. Chauvinism would not be misplaced, however, in any look into the story of Stephen Hopkins, one of the real giants of American history. No modern biography has been written of Hopkins.! The lack of such a biography has probably contributed to Hopkins' distorted image among scholars and laymen alike: scholars remember him chiefly as one of the principals in Rhode Island's "intestine brawls" or political battles in the 1760's between his followers and the supporters of Samuel Ward, while the general public, if aware of Hopkins at all, sees him as the drunk but amiable Quaker in the 1980 JOHN F. MILLAR 25 musical play 1776. Both images do him a great disservice. He de­ serves a place near the top of the American pantheon, among other such greats as Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Franklin, Hancock, and the two Adamses. Hopkins was born on 7 March 1707 in the section of Provi­ dence now known as Cranston. His father, William Hopkins, Jr., descended from a family that had moved to Providence as early as 1638, and his mother, Ruth Wilkinson, came from a prominent Quaker family, although the earliest record of his own connection with the Society of Friends is from 1755. His mother reared him on the family farm in Scituate and apparently worked hard against the current Quaker prejudice against learning, for John Adams remarked that Hopkins, though raised on a farm, " ... had read Greek, Roman and British history, and was familiar with English poetry . . ., and the flow of his soul made all of his reading our own, and seemed to bring to recollection in all of us all we had ever read." In 1726 he married a Quaker girl, Sarah Scott, who bore him all seven of his children. After she died, he married Anne Smith in 1755. He had four sons who reached maturity, Rufus, John, Silvanus and George, and one daughter, Ruth. He found time to hold various public offices in the town of Scituate, and represented Scituate in the General Assembly in most of the years from 1732 to 1741, at which time he was chosen Speaker. By 1744, he had moved to Providence and was elected one of its deputies to the General Assembly, and was also frequently chosen as moderator of the Providence Town Meetings, a forum which he was later to use to great effect. As early as 1736 he served as a justice on the Court of Common Pleas, and by 1747 was a justice of the Superior Court.2 He was promoted to chief justice in 1751, a post he held periodically thereafter. He was first elected governor in 1755, and held the office through 1767 with the exception of 1757, 1762, and 1765. He was also appointed Rhode Island's delegate to the pan­ colonial congresses of 1746, 1754, 1755 and 1757. The 1754 con­ gress, known as the Albany Congress, had been called chiefly to prepare for the coming war with France, and Hopkins distinguish­ ed himself by sponsoring with Franklin a resolutipn calling for the political and military union of the colonies under a governor­ general as the best defense against France. (The resolution, per­ haps years ahead of its time, was defeated, but Hopkins wrote a pamphlet [published in 1755] in support of the idea.)3 26 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter

On the cultural side, Hopkins was a member of the philosoph­ ical society founded by Berkeley, and was prominent in urging that the society incorporate as a library. He was not actually one of the incorporators of the Redwood Library in 1747, but he was its only Providence member for many years. He was responsible for founding the Providence Athenaeum in 1754, realizing that Providence could only catch up to Newport through increase of knowledge. For the same reason, he founded the Providence Ga­ zette & Country Journal in 1762, and joined in founding the Rhode Island College in 1764. He was appointed chancellor of the College from 1764 to 1785, and saw to it that the College started life with a substantial library. Through his close friendship with the influential Brown family of Providence, he was instrumental in moving the College from its earlier locations in Newport and Warren to its permanent home in Providence, and in seeing that the Brown family was so generous to the College that it was later renamed Brown University in their honor. Hopkins' name is also one of about six named as the architect of University Hall at Brown (built 1769), and it seems at least possible that he was also the architect of the Providence Court House of 1762 at 150 Benefit Street.4

UNIVERSITY HALL AT BROWN UNIVERSITY Courtesy of John Foraste, Brown News Bureau

Hopkins was one of the founders of the Hope Furnace, an important (and possibly, under British law, illegal) step towards preparing Rhode Island for manufacturing. In 1774 he drafted the 1980 JOHN F. MILLAR 27

Negro Emancipation Act for the General Assembly, reflecting the sense of a powerful movement led by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins (no relation), the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles of Newport, and Moses Brown of Providence. The act, passed in the June session, was the first piece of legislation in America outlawing the importation of slaves. As a result of his bill of 26 July 1775 in the Continental Congress, Hopkins also has the dubious and little-known honor of founding the U.S. Postal Service. He patterned it after the Rhode Island system devised by his friend William Goddard, the printer of the Providence Gazette, and he saw to it that another friend, Benjamin Franklin, was appointed the first Pos4_naster General. The foregoing brief list of achievements is sufficient that Hop­ kins be better known today. It is as a Revolutionary leader that Hopkins should be best known, but it is precisely in that field that he has been almost completely ignored. The beginning of Hopkins' Revolutionary career can be traced back to his years as governor during the Seven Years' War with France (1756-63). Rhode Is­ land's - and particularly Newport's - economy had gradually grown to depend chiefly on the duty-free importation of cheap mo­ lasses from the French West Indies (especially from Cap Francais in Saint-Domingue, now known as Cap Haitien in Haiti),5 and the exportation of rum made from this molasses.6 During the war with France Hopkins realized that Newport's economy could go bankrupt without the French molasses supply, so he permitted the trade to continue practically unabated by means of the cartel sys­ tem.7 In order to feed the cartel system and divert British attention from the trade Hopkins encouraged Rhode Island privateers to prosecute the war with particular vigor. He was officially praised for exerting Rhode Island's forces in the war more than any other colony did.8 The British also strongly condemned his policy of handling the French prisoners in Rhode Island and retaliated by strengthening the Navigation Laws with the Sugar Act of 1764. Hopkins saw in the Sugar Act both the financial ruin of Rhode Island and the political ruin of all the colonies and chal­ lenged it with a brilliant essay called The Rights of Colonies Ex­ amined. Although the gist of the essay was widely known for several months it was first published in the Providence Gazette on 26 June 1764 and was subsequently republished as a pamphlet. The essay provoked excited reaction both for and against its senti­ ments. In the essay Hopkins asserted that the Sugar Act was un­ constitutional, that Parliament should not attempt to prohibit trade 28 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter of the British Colonies with non-British parts of the world, that "internal taxes" such as the Stamp Act were unconstitutional without proper American representation in Parliament (Hopkins didn't think such a tax would be right even if Americans were properly represented in Parliament), and that is was impossible to receive a fair trial in the American courts of vice-admiralty, whose powers had been, as he saw it, unconstitutionally extended by the Sugar Act far beyond any reasonable definition of the juris­ diction of an admiralty court. In this essay Hopkins was one of the first to claim the right of complete self-government for the colonies, a position from which he later was forced to retreat slightly. He based his claim on the provisions of the famous Rhode Island Charter issued by Charles II in 1663 - probably the most liberal instrument of government ever granted a colony by a mother country until the mid-nine­ teenth century - and on the thoughts of his Boston acquaintance James Otis, Jr.9 Hopkins claimed that Parliament had no right to legislate for the colonies and certainly none to raise taxes. The general assemblies of each province had the sole right to raise taxes, he said, and the only thing that bound Britain and the colo­ nies together was their allegiance to the same king.

THE SCHOONER ST. JOHN

Hopkins' essay was written as an explanation of a petition to the king from the General Assembly early in 1764 that com­ plained about both the Sugar Act and the proposed Stamp Act. In July 1764 something happened in Newport that highlighted Hop­ kins' position on the Sugar Act; the St. John affair. The British, not satisfied with local enforce'rnent of the Navigation Laws, sent warships to intercept and seize the smugglers before the corrupt 1980 JOHN F. MILLAR 29 local officials could pronounce the imported goods as cleared with­ out duty. The 8-gun schooner St. John was sent to Newport for that purpose and posed such a threat to Rhode Island's economic well-being that it was essential to get rid of her. Finding a suitable pretext, the Governor's Council met at the Colony House (there is no record but presumably Hopkins was with them as he was governor) and ordered the gunner at Fort George on Goat Island to fire his heavy guns at the schooner. Daniel Vaughan fired sev­ eral 18-pounder shots at the schooner, some of them hitting her, but she got under way and escaped. Vaughan was later criticized for not sinking her. These were the first shots ofiresistance fired against British authority in America, twelve years before the Declaration of Independence.ll

Hopkins also took action against the Stamp Act. He intro­ duced a resolution at the Providence Town Meeting12 inviting the other colonies to join in a Stamp Act Congress. The invitation was duly sent out and the Congress was a limited success as the first truly national act of the Revolution. That Hopkins took the first initiative is greatly to his credit, although the idea was already in circulation. The General Assembly ratified the vote of the town meeting on 16 September 1765. During the next few years the British made sporadic attempts to continue where the schooner St. John left off, and local mobs took countermeasures before the guns of Fort George could be used again. The first such incident was when the small schooner Maidstone Tender was seized and burned by the Newport mob on 4 June 1765. This was followed by the seizure, destruction, and burning of the 8-gun sloop Liberty by the Newport mob on 19 July 1769, and the burning of the 8-gun schooner Gaspee in the Providence River by a mob from Providence and Bristol. The British finally reacted by establishing a crown commission of en­ quiry into the Gaspee affair, and Hopkins, Chief Justice of Rhode Island was pointedly excluded from the Commission. Nevertheless he influenced the commission not to find evidence good enough to indict anyone. The commission lamely tried to save face by sug­ gesting that a new gaol be constructed in Newport in an effort to curb the obvious wave of lawlessness.13

While Hopkins was seeing that the commission was unable to make any damaging findings in Rhode Island, he was concerned about the constitutional precedent that such a commission was 30 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter setting. The commission had been issued powers to try anyone it indicted in any court of its choice anywhere in the British world, while the Rhode Island Charter and English Common Law guaran­ teed that subjects must be tried in the court of jurisdiction geo­ graphically closest to the crime. As a watch-dog over this and other threats to American liberties, the Rhode Island General Assembly and the Virginia House of Burgesses voted in March 1773 to es­ tablish committees of correspondence to keep each other and other colonies informed. No documentary evidence has yet been found that Ropkins was the author of this significant measure, but it seems probable that he was. Late in 1773 the Boston Tea Party further angered British officials who were still fuming over the Gaspee episode, and the port of Boston was ordered closed. Hopkins considered that this British move was too serious for the committees of correspondence and that it warranted another full congress. On 10 May 1774 Hop­ kins persuaded the Providence town meeting once again to invite the other colonies to a congress to discuss this and other grievances. When the colonies readily accepted, Rhode Island appointed Hop­ kins and his old rival Samuel Ward as its two delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and the two men shared a coach together.14

In the meantime the British had replaced the Gaspee in New­ port with a fleet of larger ships led by Commodore James Wallace in the 24-gun frigate Rose. Rhode Island's sea-borne trade was brought to a standstill and by late summer 1775 more than four­ fifths of the population of Newport had been forced to leave be­ cause of unemployment caused by Wallace's vigilance against smugglers. On 12 June 1775 the Rhode Island General Assembly voted to form a navy to recapture some of the trading vessels cap­ tured by the Rose.15 Soon afterwards the Assembly realized that the true remedy was a bigger burden than Rhode Island alone could handle. On 26 August the Assembly voted to instruct its delegates in Congress to introduce a bill to create a national navy to get rid of the Rose, but Congress was in recess when Hopkins received the instructions. As soon as Congress came into session in September Hopkins introduced a comprehensive bill calling for the creation of a Con­ tinental navy and the construction of 13 frigates. The bill was referred to a committee of which Hopkins was a member and was 1980 JOHN F. MILLAR 31 divided into two separate bills. The first, passed on 13 October, called for the creation of a navy with only two ships (which Silas Deane, a member of the Committee, wrote in a letter were to be the Rhode Island sloop Katy /Providence and the Connecticut brig Minerva), and the second, not passed until13 December, authoriz­ ed construction of 13 frigates, the most powerful of which (the 32-gun Warren and the 28-gun Providence, the only ones armed with 18-pounder cannons) were to be built in Providence. In the meantime Hopkins had been searching for a com­ mander-in-chief for the navy. He first approached Jahleel Brenton of Newport,16 who was the highest-ranking American officer in the Royal Navy, but Brenton declined. Hopkins then turned to his seafaring brother Esek, and Congress confirmed the appointment on 5 November. Hopkins also made certain that a disproportion­ ately high number of the officers of the navy came from Rhode Island, including Esek's son John. This was in part a political favor for friends at home, but also a reflection of the fact that Rhode Island depended more upon the sea for its livelihood than any of the other continental colonies and thus could be expected to produce a good number of excellent seamen. As for independence both Hopkins and Ward had long been in favor of it. Hopkins was no doubt glad to see that the General Assembly had taken the first initiative in that direction on 4 May 1776 by proclaiming Rhode Island's independence in a controver­ sially-worded document.17 Hopkins had virtually committed him­ self in 1774 in a speech in Congress recorded by Paul Revere: "Powder and ball will decide this question. The gun and bayonet alone will finish the contest in which we are engaged, and any of you who cannot bring your minds to this mode of adjusting the question had better retire in time." Unfortunately, the strain of the times had taken its toll on the Rhode Island delegates, and Ward died of smallpox in March of 1776, so Hopkins had to sign with a new colleague.18 His sig­ nature reveals the tremors of Parkinson's Disease, from which he had been suffering since 1770,19 and he was forced to retire from Congress in September 1776. Hopkins died in 1785. It is sad that most of his papers were destroyed in the high tide of the 1815 hurricane, and that no known life portrait of him survives.20 When John Trumbull of Connecticut decided to paint a picture to be called "The Signing 32 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter of the Declaration of Independence" he was told that Stephen's son Rufus looked tolerably like his father, and he used Rufus as a model. The sketch was lost for years but turned up a few years ago at Fordham University.21 Before the reappearance of the sketch, it had been assumed that the man with the pr01ninent hat at the back of the room was supposed to represent Hopkins, simply

STEPHEN HOPKINS IN JOHN TRUMBULL'S PAINTING, "SIGNING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE" because he was a Quaker, although he was by no means the only Quaker in Congress, and it is not even certain if he still considered himself a Quaker at that time. Based on agreement with the sketch, the real Hopkins is seated in the front row as befits a man of his national stature. There should be no excuse for any further portraits of the man in the large hat appearing in print anywhere with the caption "Stephen Hopkins." Hopkins probably gave the orders for the first shots of re­ sistance against British authority in America in 1764, he was the father of the Stamp Act Congress, the probable founder of the SUll{dOH UaqdalS aq Ol lq_gnOql A{.IaW.IOJ SliM a.InlOJd SJqJ. NOSNDIOIG NHO£ 34 STEPHEN HOPKINS, 1707-1785 Winter committees of correspondence, the father of the Continental Con­ gress and the founder of the American Navy. How is it then that this architect of American independence is so little known? It seems that the reasons are many and .various. For one thing, Rhode Island's virtual departure from the Confederation in 1782 and re­ fusal to join the Union until the last moment in 1790 made her so unpopular in the rest of the country that all her earlier initiatives were quickly forgotten, and with them the leadership of Hopkins. In addition the first histories of the Revolution were written during the presidency of John Adams, who was hardly likely to encourage any account that overshadowed the activities of Massachusetts. Furthermore, Rhode Island has been for years the state with the highest percentage of immigrant population in the country, and she can therefore hardly be blamed for neglecting the heritage of only a small minority of her people. In spite of the loss of most of Hopkins' papers in the 1815 hurricane, there is ample newly­ discovered material to justify a new biography which could begin the long process of rehabilitating the memory of the man some have called "the greatest man ever born in Rhode Island."

FOOTNOTES 1. The best Hopkins biography to date is William E . Foster, Stephen Hopkins, a Rhode Island Statesman, &c. published in Rhode Island Historical Tracts, No. 19 (2 vols., Providence, 1884) , ed. S. Rider. Other details can be found in the entry in the Dictionary of Ameri­ can Biography; Mark Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revo­ lution (New York: David McKay Co., 1966); David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution (Providence : Brown University Press, 1958) ; Robert G. Ferris ( ed.), Signers of the Declaration (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Of­ fice, 1973, Paul Campbell (ed.) Stephen Hopkins: The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, R .I. Bicentennial Foundation, 1974); and Marguerite Appleton, A Portrait Album of Four Great Rhode Island Leaders (Brovidence : R.I. Historical Society, 1978) . Most of our information is taken from Foster. 2. At that time the Superior Court was the highest in Rhode Island; there was no Supreme Court. 3. See S. Rider (ed.), Rhode Island Historical Tract No. 9, pp. 40-6, ''The Albany Plan." 4. Now the headquarters of the R .I. Heritage Commission, the R.I. Historical Preservation Commission and the R.I. Bicentennial Foun­ dation, this building sadly remains unrestored and looks very little the way it did in its finest hours (1762-1790). 5. Molasses was cheap in the French West Indies because the French government would not permit the planters to convert their molasses (a by-product of refining sugar from sugar cane) into rum, for fear that the rum would compete with the French brandy industry. 6. Rhode Island rum, generally a coarse product, seems to have been widely used as a food-preservative. 1980 JOHN F. MILLAR 35

7. Much of the wartime trade was carried on in this manner : R.I. privateer ships would capture French merchant ships at sea. In order to repatriate the French crews, "cartel" ships were permitted to transport a load of French prisoners to Cap Francais unmolested, and, in order to defray the expenses of the voyage, they were per­ mitted to return to R.I. with a full cargo. The abuse of the system came when each R.I. cartel went to Haiti with a single prisoner aboard instead of concentrating 20 or so Frenchmen in one ship. 8. As early as 1758 Rhode Island had lost more than 100 ships in the war; Providence, still a small town, had lost 65 ships by 1763. 9. Otis had made an important speech in court in 1761 (the text is unrecorded), in opposition to the 1755 Writs of Assistance, and then followed it up with a 1762 pamphlet entitled A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives. In July 1764, he published a further pamphlet called The Rights of the British Colonies As­ serted and Proved, somewhat parallel to H()pkins' contemporary essay. 10. Also written by Hopkins. 11. A bronze memorial plaque to this little-known but important inci­ dent was unveiled on Goat Island in May 1979 by former Secretary of the Navy J. William Middendorf U. 12. The General Assembly was in recess at that moment, so the only immediate action he could take that would have any weight was through the town meeting. 13. The gaol or jail was built on Marlborough Street, Newport, and still stands in altered form - as the Newport Police Station. 14. It is tempting to think that tapes of the Hopkins - Ward conver­ sations in the coach would be far more interesting than ail the tapes of the Nixon White House. 15. This was the first navy of the Revolution. Its first flagship was John Brown's little sloop Katy (later renamed Providence) and its com­ mander-in-chief was a Hopkins in-law, Abraham Whipple, who later received an appointment as captain in the Continental Navy, thanks in part to Hopkins. Whipple wasted no time; 3 days after the As­ sembly's vote he had fought (off Jamestown) and captured the sloop Diana, a John Brown merchant vessel captured by the Rose. 16. See the entry on Brenton in the Dictionary of National Biography. 17. The significance of this R.I. declaration (which appeared shortly after the Rose had left R.I. for routine maintenance at Halifax, and which may have been intended primarily as an attempt to discour­ age her from returning) has been hotly debated for years; this is not the place to continue the debate. 18. William Ellery of Newport was appointed to fill Ward's place. 19. His penmanship previous to 1770 had been noted for its excellence. He is reported to have said as he signed the Declaration: "My hand trembles but my heart does not." 20. Hopkins' house in Providence has been moved twice, and is open to the public under the auspices of the Rhode Island Society of the Colonial Dames of America. His house in Newport no longer stands; on the basis of the incomplete survival of Newport records, Mrs. Bolhouse suggests that it was located roughly where Brick Market Place now stands. 36 NEWPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY Winter

21. There is a possibility that one of the sleeping figures in John Green­ wood's oil .painting, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam c. 1750, (now at City Art Museum, St. Louis) is intended to represent Stephen Hopkins, but it is ·by no means certain. Professor Irma B. Jaffe, Wl1Lting in American Art Journal, vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 1971); see also a short article in the Rhode Islander of 9 June 1974. In spite of the availability of this information, portraits encaptioned ''Stephen Hopkins" continue to appear in print showing the wrong man. The man previously thought to have been Hopkins is now believed to be John Dickinson (who, 'being opposed to Independence, was 111ppropriately placed at the ·back of the room), and the man now known to be Hopkins was previously thought to have been Governor Clinton of New York. When Trumbull was told that his imaginary background differed substantially from the real interior of Independence Hall, he quickly painted a duplicate picture with a more correct background; the former is at the Yale University Art Gallery, and the latter is at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. I would like to sug1gest here that artists be commissioned to paint several portraits of Hopkins, based on the Trumbull pictures, and that these portraits be hung in the State House in Providence, the Providence Colony House, the Newport Colony House, the Hopkins House in Providence, and Brown University, among other places: any takers? Similarly, I think the Postal Service should honor its founder with a stamp on the Trumbull portrait.