Proslavery and Antislavery Politics in Rhode Island's 1842 Dorr Rebellion

Proslavery and Antislavery Politics in Rhode Island’s 1842 Dorr Rebellion

erik j. chaput Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

In the small state of Rhode Island, with a population of about 100,000, there are at this moment two Governors, two Senates, two Houses of Representatives and other things in proportion—a clear exempliﬁcation of Jefferson’s maxim, that “the world is governed too much.” —Charleston Mercury, 27 April 1842 N the morning of 13 May 1842, Daniel Webster per- O formed an unprecedented duty in his capacity as U.S. secretary of state when he agreed to meet with and attempt to broker a compromise between two warring domestic factions. “Threats of violence” had dominated the previous week, and the editorsoftheNew York Spectator prayed that they would cease once Webster intervened.1 Rhode Island, the press reported, was in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Matters had gone so far that two separately functioning governments were claiming

I wish to thank Patrick T. Conley, Raymond Lavertue, Russell DeSimone, James Roger Sharp, Douglas R. Egerton, and Carol Faulkner for their careful reading of earlier versions of this essay and Lynn Rhoads for her steadfast support and skillful editing. Generous research support for this article was provided by Hugh Silbaugh, the Dean of Faculty at Northﬁeld Mount Hermon. All material from the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society is used with the permission of the organization’s directors. 1New York Spectator, 14 May 1842; New York Express, 14 and 27 May 1842; Providence Journal, 18 and 26 May 1842. Thomas Wilson Dorr to Aaron White, 12 May 1842,box4,folder12, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, John Hay Library (JHL), Brown University, Providence, R.I. See also Arthur May Mowry, The Dorr War: The Constitutional Struggle in Rhode Island (Providence: Preston and Rounds, 1901), pp. 191–93.

658 SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 659 legitimacy. One had been installed in the usual manner as es- tablished by the state’s 1663 charter, widely seen as outmoded and restrictive, while the other derived its powers from a revolutionary constitution resting on a literal interpretation of the alter or abolish provisions in the Declaration of Independence. In late 1841, the Rhode Island Suffrage Party had held a convention, adopted a constitution, and called for a vote by the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 citizens of the state, who roundly endorsed it—all without any authorization from the sitting legislature. Thomas Wilson Dorr was elected the “People’s governor” on 18 April under the so-called People’s constitution; the incumbent, Samuel Ward King, was reelected on 20 April under the colonial charter. King appealed to the federal government to help him unseat Dorr and dismantle his shadow government. Northern abolitionists understood that if President John Tyler intervened in Rhode Island’s constitutional crisis he would set a precedent, a precedent of federal government involvement in state affairs that might lay the groundwork for future antislavery measures. Other abolitionists, most notably New Yorker William Goodell, saw Tyler’s possible interference on the side of the charter authorities as a manifestation of the “Slave Power,” with a “slaveholding executive” destroying the liberties of the people in a “sovereign state.”2 Following a meeting with Dorr on 10 May, Tyler dispatched Webster to New York City.3 A Democrat in Whig’s clothing, who had risen to the presidency when William Henry Harrison died suddenly during his second month in ofﬁce in April 1841, Tyler was searching for a way to forge a political coalition that he could ride to electoral victory in 1844.4 The Rhode Island imbroglio, a bellwether of the nation’s mood on the rights of the people, presented a signiﬁcant test of his political acumen. According to Tyler’s

2Emancipator and Free American, 2 June 1842;seealso12 May and 21 July 1842. 3See Elisha R. Potter Jr., “Memorandum on the Dorr Rebellion,” box 4,folder4, Elisha R. Potter Jr. Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS), Providence. 4See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 130, 138. As Holt notes, Tyler was “trying to build a third party consisting of anti-Van Buren Democrats and southern state rights Whigs” (p. 164). 660 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY campaign calculus, northern Whigs, who saw only chaos and anarchy in what Dorr and his followers were attempting to do, would be content only if he wholeheartedly backed Governor King and sent troops to Rhode Island.5 Material or rhetori- cal support for Dorr’s government would ingratiate Tyler with Northern Democrats but would cost him support among South- ern Democrats, whose leaders were bent on protecting slavery Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 from all hazards, both real and imagined. As Alabama congressman Dixon Lewis rightly observed, the Rhode Island constitutional crisis threatened to “split the Democratic Party” along sectional lines.6 Intent as he was on internal state politics, Dorr had failed to garner support, particularly from Democrats, outside of New England. Into the breach rushed South Carolina Senator William Preston. Tagging Dorr an abolitionist, Preston success- fully painted the thirty-six-year-old reformer as a dangerous demagogue. As one Northern conservative newspaper noted, Dorr’s ideology threatened to “convert the numberless blacks of the South into voters, who could then vote down the Southern state governments at their pleasure.”7 According to a South- ern correspondent of Rhode Island Senator James Simmons’s, if Dorr’s belief in popular sovereignty were allowed to take hold, “then there must be a dissolution of the Union, that the slaves can alter their laws and govern themselves for they are the majority.”8 For many U.S. citizens in 1842, a nation in which both freedom and slavery coexisted constituted a lasting testament to the greatness of American democracy. Dorr’s reform agenda disrupted that balance. In making his appeal to the people’s

5John Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 230–35,and Patrick T. Conley, “Popular Sovereignty or Public Anarchy: America Debates the Dorr Rebellion,” Rhode Island History 60 (Summer 2002): 71–91. 6Dixon Lewis to Richard Cralle, 30 May 1842,inThe Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Clyde N. Wilson, 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 16:263. 7New York Express, 18 May 1842. 8F. H. Richmond to James Simmons, 7 May 1842, General Correspondence, box 15, James Fowler Simmons Papers, Library of Congress (LoC), Washington, D.C. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 661 sovereignty, which he actually viewed as a “middle ground” between revolution and acquiescence to a recalcitrant state government determined to resist political change, Dorr stirred the fears of both the proponents and the opponents of the South’s peculiar institution, thus unwittingly undermining the very reform his initiative was primarily designed to advance: universal male suffrage.9 If timing is everything, Dorr was most unfortu- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 nate in his historic moment. But his misfortune reveals a great deal about the republic’s fractured politics in the years leading up to Southern secession.

The most unlikely of revolutionaries, Thomas Dorr was born into privilege in November 1805, a scion of one of Rhode Island’s wealthiest families.10 His father, Sullivan Dorr, was a Providence businessman and prominent China trade merchant. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and then at Harvard University (class of 1823), Thomas Dorr stud- ied law for two years in New York City under Chancellor James Kent, the author of one of the leading American legal texts of the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, before being admitted to the Rhode Island bar in 1827. Dorr opened a law ofﬁce on College Street, but the restless young man was not yet ready to settle down. He left Providence and toured the country for almost six years, occasionally practicing maritime and commercial law in New York City before returning to his hometown in 1833. That year Dorr assisted the long-time state prosecutor Albert C. Greene in one of the most sensational murder trials in the state’s history, Rhode Island v. Frances Leach.11

9See Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitu- tional Traditions before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 235–75, and Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 159–76. For an analysis of these two important works and others relating to the Dorr Rebellion, see my “The Rhode Island Question: The Career of a Debate,” Rhode Island History 68 (Summer/Fall 2010): 47–76. 10On Dorr’s early life, see my “The Dorr Rebellion: The Politics of the People’s Sovereignty in Jacksonian American” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2011), chap. 1. 11On the Leach case, see my and Raymond J. Lavertue’s “‘The Instigation of the Devil’: Sex, Lust, Abortion and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Rhode Island,” 662 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY In the 1830s, Dorr championed numerous reform causes, including public education, freedom of speech, banking, antislavery, suffrage extension, prison reform, and the elimina- tion of imprisonment for debt. He began his political career as a staunch Whig, with a deep and abiding love for Henry Clay and Daniel Webster; however, disagreements over banking and suffrage reform prompted Dorr to leave the party, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 and he drifted toward the Democrats.12 In 1834,asanewly elected member of Rhode Island’s General Assembly, Dorr joined the Constitutionalists, a third-party organization com- prised largely of Whigs dedicated to political reform. Their suffrage proposal called for an extension of the vote to all native-born white adult males who paid taxes on real or personal property.13 The 1663 charter restricted suffrage to those men who pos- sessed real estate valued at a minimum of $134, a ﬁgure set in 1798. But the majority of the state’s men worked in commercial and manufacturing districts and rented their dwellings; thus, they were disenfranchised. As the Cincinnati Daily En- quirer editorialized, the colonial charter allowed the “Rhode Island nobility” to continue “an oligarchy of white slaves.”14 In percentage terms, fewer people could vote in Rhode Island in 1840 than during the Revolutionary era. Nearly 80 percent of Rhode Island’s white male citizens, despite a freehold requirement, could vote in the mid– to late eighteenth century.

unpublished paper on ﬁle with the authors. David Gibbs and Frances Leach, a known Providence abortionist, were accused of murdering Sally Burdick, a pregnant, twenty- two-year-old wash girl who worked in Gibbs’s inn in Coventry. Despite the presence of the state’s most prominent attorneys on both sides of the case, including Dorr and Greene for the prosecution and Providence attorney John Whipple for the defense, the case has been forgotten. 12See Providence Journal, 11 April 1840, in which Dorr is labeled a Loco-Foco Democrat. 13On the workingman’s movement, see Marvin Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849 (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 18– 23. On the Constitutionalist Party, see Patrick T. Conley, Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island’s Constitutional Development, 1776–1841 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society Publications, 1977), pp. 260–89. 14Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 17 May 1842. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 663 Indeed, the charter marked Rhode Island as a pillar of democratic self-government in the colonial period and into the onset of the early republic.15 By 1840, however, the number of white males who could vote in the state had dropped to about 40 percent. In a letter to Jacksonian stalwart Amos Kendall, written in the months before the election of 1840, Dorr noted that more than 24,000 of the state’s white males were “deprived of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 right of suffrage.”16 As historian Patrick T. Conley has argued, Rhode Island was truly a “democracy in decline.”17 Inthespringof1840, bolstered by the political enthusiasm of an upcoming presidential campaign, members of the newly formed Rhode Island Suffrage Party picked up the torch from the Constitutionalists, who had disbanded as a political organization in 1837. Dorr, perhaps leery of joining another third- party effort, was rather a latecomer to the organization, but by the summer of 1841, he had emerged as its key spokesman. The Suffrage Party members were more determined than ever to enact reform measures and to replace the state’s outmoded charter. Dorr argued that the power to do so remained ex- clusively with the citizenry, a position that echoed the ﬁrst principle of Jacksonian democracy—majoritarianism and states’ rights.18 As Andrew Jackson would later write from his planta- tion home in Tennessee, the “people are the sovereign power and agreeable to our system, they have the right to alter and amend their system of government.”19 Atthesametime,the burgeoning abolitionist community was also drawing upon the rhetoric of revolutionary republicanism to assert its own claims

15D. Kurt Graham, To Bring Law Home: The Federal Judiciary in Early National Rhode Island (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), p. 19. 16Dorr to Amos Kendall, 24 September 1840,box3,folder9, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. On Kendall, see Donald B. Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 17See Conley’s book of that title, as cited above. 18See also Washington Globe, 19 and 20 May 1842,andCincinnati Daily Enquirer, 6 May 1842. 19Andrew Jackson to Francis Blair, 23 May 1842, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1926–35), 6:153. 664 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to authority and to challenge the Southern slaveocracy.20 For example, Samuel Gould, a delegate to the ﬁrst meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, had boldly declared: “In other lands the people do not rule. Who rules in America? THE PEOPLE. The matter, then, is to settle the question whether the people rule, or aristocrats rule among us.”21 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Sharing a faith in the majoritarian ideal, Suffrage Party supporters and abolitionists recognized that this fundamental principle of self-government was being violated by slaveholders and Rhode Island’s ruling oligarchy alike. In the ﬁrst issue of 20 November 1840, the editors of the New Age and Consti- tutional Advocate, the organ of the Suffrage Party, maintained that Rhode Island’s disenfranchised masses were “placed upon a level with the miserable slaves in the shambles of a southern market.”22 In similar fashion, New Hampshire abolitionist Nathaniel Rogers’s popular abolitionist newspaper the Herald of Freedom equated the “landholders” in Rhode Island to those who “practice[d] the cannibalism called slaveholding” in the South.23 Given such compelling analogies, it is not surprising that the emergence of the Suffrage Party had a powerful and uplift- ing effect on Rhode Island’s black community, a group that had been legally disenfranchised since 1822. The United States Census of 1840 listed just over 3,000 blacks in Rhode Island out of a total population of 108,000. The largest segment of the state’s African Americans, roughly 50 percent, lived in the city of Providence, and, as the city census of 1835 recorded, these 1,223 blacks took up residence alongside 18,054 whites.24 Dur- ing the 1830s, the city’s black community had begun to free

20On antislavery in Rhode Island, see Deborah Van Broekhoven’s magisterial The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst: Uni- versity of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 21Liberator, 19 November 1836. 22New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 20 November 1840. 23Herald of Freedom, 26 November 1841. 24J. Stanley Lemons and Michael A. McKenna, “Re-enfrachisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” Rhode Island History 30 (February 1971): 3. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 665 itself from its dependency on the white community, establishing its own churches, schools, and civic organizations. Several blacks owned their homes and could have qualiﬁed to vote under the state’s stringent property requirements had not a whites-only provision prevented them from doing so.25 In an era in which proslavery ideologues stridently maintained that enslaved blacks fared better than their free brethren because Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 African Americans lacked the basic intelligence to attend to their own interests, the Suffrage Party brought blacks into the political process, along with abolitionists, and offered them an opportunity to participate in its activities and to vote in its elections. Thomas Dorr applauded the courage and initiative of Rhode Island’s disenfranchised black citizens and their abolitionist al- lies. In his correspondence with abolitionists in the latter half of the 1830s, Dorr praised former president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams’s condemnation of the Congressional Gag Rule, supported Congressional efforts to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia (the one part of the country over which the national government had undis- puted authority and, thus, a primary target for abolitionists), advocated for jury trials for fugitive slaves, and opposed the annexation of Texas.26 In an essay on republicanism written while he was a student at Harvard, Dorr had concluded that “public virtue and the law of liberty have made us what we are now,andwillmakeus,howeverextendedourterritory[,]...all that we can hope to be.”27 Antebellum economic growth and the westward expansion of slavery, though, had forced Dorr to revisit his position, and in 1837, he feared that the annexation

25On Rhode Island’s black community, see Robert Cottrol, Afro-Yankees: Prov- idence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). See also Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 163–209, and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 535–97. 26See, e.g., Dorr to James Birney, box 2,folder2, Rider Collection, Dorr Corre- spondence, JHL. 27See Dorr’s notes on the nature of republicanism in box 6,folder19, Sidney S. Rider Papers, JHL. 666 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of Texas would postpone emancipation by giving a “perpetual lease . . . to a noxious and fearful institution.”28 When Dorr responded to abolitionist questionnaires, his views were widely circulated in abolitionist newspapers, including Garrison’s Lib- erator and William Goodell’s Friend of Man.29 During the 1839 congressional election, Dorr ran unsuccess- fully as a Democratic candidate, though his margin of defeat Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 (200 votes) was not as large as in his previous attempt in 1837, when he ran under the banner of the Constitutionalists.30 Dur- ing both campaigns, Dorr was endorsed by the New England abolitionist press.31 He was “a most staunch and thorough go- ing abolitionist,” the editor of the Liberator proclaimed, and Garrison was pleased to see Rhode Island “hoist the Demo- cratic anti-slavery standard” by nominating a member of the executive committee of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society for Congress. “Let them send up a Rhode Island Morris to the National Legislature,” beseeched Garrison, in a reference to the Ohio antislavery Democratic senator Thomas Morris, who had earned his antislavery stripes by coining the term “Slave Power” to describe the undemocratic inﬂuence of the slaveholding states.32 The course of Rhode Island history, one may assume, would have been markedly different had Dorr won election to Congress in 1839. Judging from his correspondence and personal papers of the time, which display a blend of the equal rights rhetoric emanating from the radical wing of the Northern Democratic Party and the reform efforts of notable abolitionists, his career might have followed the path of New Hampshire

28Dorr to William Chace, 25 July 1837,box2,folder20, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. 29Liberator, 11 August 1837,andFriend of Man, 17 August 1837. 30Rhode-Island Republican, 6 November 1839. 31See Herald of Freedom, 19 August 1837 and 24 August 1839. 32Liberator, 16 and 23 August 1839.SeealsoHerald of Freedom, 10 August 1839. On the use of the term “slave power,” see Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni- versity Press, 2000). On Morris, see Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 37–48. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 667 antislavery U.S. senator John Parker Hale, who challenged the party’s complicity with slavery and refused to vote in favor of the annexation of Texas, a move that led to his expulsion from the party in early 1845; later that same year, Parker was tri- umphantly reelected as an independent.33 The ongoing effects of the ﬁnancial panic, however, brought to the surface once again the reality that the majority of Rhode Island’s working Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 class lacked the power of the ballot to address their grievances. Dorr would become their champion when he assumed leader- ship of the Suffrage Party. Meanwhile, his connections to the Democratic Party—a political organization that on the whole condemned the abolition movement as a conservative plot designed to distract the masses from the more important issues of banking and currency reform—were also growing stronger in this period, and as they did so, the antislavery activism that had marked his political career in the late 1830s began to dissipate.

On 26 August 1841, the Suffrage Party’s paper, the New Age, called all those Rhode Islanders who would be covered under the proposed suffrage reform to vote for delegates to a convention to be held in the fall. “Every American male citizen, twenty-one years of age and upwards, who has resided in this state one year, preceding the election of delegates,” the an- nouncement specified, “shall vote for delegates to the convention, called by the state committee to be held at the state house in Providence on the first Monday in October next.”34 The word “white” was not mentioned. However, on delegate election day, officials in Providence’s sixth ward turned away a black man who attempted to cast a ballot.35 Garrison would later unfairly blame Dorr for that decision. “While professing to be an abolitionist,” Garrison charged, “he is willing to be the representative

33Peter Wallner, “Franklin Pierce and Bowdoin College Associates Hawthorne and Hale,” Historical New Hampshire 59 (Spring 2005): 29–30. 34New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 26 August 1841. 35Providence Journal, 30 August 1841. 668 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and head of a party which makes the right to wield the elective franchise dependent on the complexion of men.”36 Late in the evening on 8 October, the fourth day of the People’s convention, Providence’s black community presented Dorr with a memorial that explicitly stated that lacking as they did the benefit of suffrage, African Americans were being denied the privileges and immunities of citizenship.37 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 The memorial, which sought to redefine the public discourse on democracy, was brought to the convention by Alexander Crummell, the young black minister of Providence’s Christ Episcopal Church, and signed by Ichabod Northrup (laborer), Ransom Parker (teacher), Samuel Rodman (laborer), James Hazard (clothier), and George Smith (coachman) (but not by Crummell). Crummell, whom the Republican Herald referred to as “a respected colored man,” had taken up his ministerial post in Providence the previous March.38 His prominence as a young intellectual had earned him a spot as keynote speaker at the antislavery New York State Convention of Negroes when it met in Albany in 1840. “We know of no system of political ethics in which rights are based on the complexion of the skin,” the memorial stated. The “annals of nations clearly teach that there is always danger in departing from clearly defined and universal truths, and resorting to unjustifiable invidious partialities,” it observed.39 Drawing on the language of the Suffrage Party itself, the petition forcibly argued that racial discrimination was contrary to notions of natural rights and representative democracy, and it “cautioned the convention against departing from their principles by all the considerations of justice and moral right, lest the poisoned chalice should in the course of events be returned to their own lips.”40

36Liberator, 26 August 1842. 37Report of U.S. House of Representatives, Interference of the Executive in the Affairs of Rhode Island, 29th Cong., 1st sess., 1844, report no. 546, pp. 111–13; hereafter cited as Burke’s Report. 38Republican Herald, 13 October 1841; New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 22 October 1841. See also Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. 35. 39Burke’s Report, p. 113. 40Republican Herald, 13 October 1841. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 669 Several delegates were moved by the petition, including Dorr and Portsmouth delegate Benjamin Arnold, who immediately recommended that the word “white” be stricken from the draft constitution that had been prepared earlier that day to replace the $134 landed property requirement with one that extended suffrage to all white adult male citizens who had lived in the state for at least one year. That color restriction was, they Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 agreed, “inconsistent” with the values of the Suffrage Associa- tion. “Will 15,000 men vote in violation of a principle involving their own rights for the sake of excluding a few hundred?” Dorr asked.41 The “enemies” of reform were anticipating that the suffragists would “split” on the “rock” over the black vote and (switching metaphors) that it would prove to be a “dagger in their bosom.”42 For his part, Dorr, a man who was said to be “friendly to the freedom, education and encouragement of the colored race,” gave an elegant defense of black voting rights. He forcibly argued that excluding blacks from the franchise was a “violation” of the “just principle of suffrage” and that political “expediency” could “never” be justified. During the American Revolution, he reminded his fellow delegates, they “were willing” to allow blacks “to encounter danger and toil and privations, and to shed their blood with us, and lay their bones along the Atlantic shores” in order “to purchase that liberty of which we would now deprive them.”43 It seemed, at first, that the petition would be well received because Dorr openly favored it. However, Dutee Pearce, Dorr’s former ally in the bank wars of the 1830s, opposed him. Dorr took the principles of the American Revolution to their log- ical conclusion, whereas Pearce asserted the practicalities of the historical moment. Perceived notions of black inferiority, he insisted, ensured that the People’s constitution would not be ratified without a whites-only clause, and so compromises

41New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 22 October 1841. 42Providence Journal, 11 October 1841. 43New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 22 October 1841. On Rhode Island’s black regiment, see Christian McBurney, The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2011), pp. 187–92. 670 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY must be made with idealism. In the 1836 presidential campaign, Southern opponents had repeatedly denounced Martin Van Buren’s support for preserving the suffrage of those blacks who met a $250 freehold requirement, making it clear that upholding the voting rights of African Americans was a political liability.44 His hometown of Newport being a favorite spot for vacationing Southerners, Pearce quashed debate on Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 the whites-only provision to avoid the convention taking on the appearance of an abolitionist enclave. Pearce also resisted an initiative to provide jury trials for fugitive slaves found within the state as well as protections for slaves accompanying their traveling masters.45 A delegate from Smithfield supported the measure because, in his analysis, if blacks could vote, “a nigger might occupy” a position of authority in the new government.46 On 8 October the delegates voted to retain the qualifier “white”byavoteof46 to 18.47 Consequently, the word “white” appeared in a published draft of the constitution. All that the People’s constitution had created, the Herald of Freedom lamented, was a “Jim Crow State House.”48 On 18 November, when the People’s convention reconvened for its final session, Dorr managed to insert a provision over Pearce’s objection enshrining in Article I, section 14 of the Peo- ple’s constitution that fugitive slaves be accorded the benefit of a jury trial. Charter government proponents, claiming that the “cloven foot of abolitionism” (a reference to the devil) had over- taken Dorr and that his constitution would “dissolve the union,” would later use this clause against him.49 A motion also carried

44Nicholas Wood, “‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837–1838,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011): 85–86. 45Providence Journal, 11 October 1841. 46Providence Journal, 9 October 1841. 47New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 22 October 1841; Providence Journal, 11 October 1841;andNational Anti-Slavery Standard, 30 September and 21 October 1841. 48Herald of Freedom, 17 December 1841. On the antebellum origins of the phrase “Jim Crow,” see Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 12. 49See the broadside “Trouble in the Spartan Ranks” (1843), Cartoon Prints Col- lection, LoC. There are over two hundred known broadsides relating to the Dorr SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 671 to place the whites-only exclusion before the voters at the first election of the People’s government.50 The promise thus em- bodied in the new government’s founding document to revisit the whites-only clause did not satisfy abolitionists; the Boston Liberty Association, for example, implored Dorr to speak out against the constitution that he had been so instrumental in creating.51 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 In his memoirs, Frederick Douglass, who was careful to point out Dorr’s antislavery leanings, reflected on the People’s constitution and how all “the arguments which the Dorr men could urge against a property qualification for suffrage were equally cogent against a color qualification.” He continued:

This constitution was especially framed to enlarge the basis of representation so far as the white people of the state were concerned—to abolish an odious property qualiﬁcation and to conﬁne the right of suffrage to the white male citizens only. Mr. Dorr was himself a well- meaning man, and, after his fashion, a man of broad and progressive views quite in advance of the party with which he acted. To gain their support he consented to this restriction to a class a right which ought to be enjoyed by all citizens.52

Undoubtedly disappointed that his colleagues did not share his broadly egalitarian views, Dorr nonetheless refused to aban- don his project altogether. The constitution had “imperfec- tions,” to be sure, but on the whole he believed that it secured

Rebellion. See Russell J. DeSimone and Daniel Schofield’s invaluable book, Broad- sides of the Dorr Rebellion (Pawtucket: Rhode Island Supreme Court Historical Society Publications, 1992). 50New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 19 November 1841. Article XIV, section 22 of the People’s constitution: “The General Assembly shall, at their first session, after the adoption of this Constitution, propose to the electors the question, whether the word ‘white,’ in the first line of the first section of Article II of the Constitution, shall be stricken out. The question shall be voted upon at the suc- ceeding annual election; and if a majority of the electors voting, shall vote to strike out the word aforesaid, it shall be stricken from the Constitution; otherwise, not.” The People’s constitution can be viewed on the Dorr Rebellion project webpage: http://library.providence.edu/dps/projects/dorr/pcon.html. 51Liberator, 10 December 1841. 52Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Library of America, 1994), pp. 666, 665. 672 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to the white male portion of the citizenry “a measure of political justice and republican freedom” of which it had too long been deprived.53 On this point, Dorr agreed with William Good- ell; rights that could be captured in one arena for one segment of humanity should not be sacrificed simply because universal rights had yet to be achieved. Goodell chastised those abolitionists who thought it proper to “shoulder arms Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 against human rights” in Rhode Island. “If abolitionists may stand aloof from the oppressed white men of Rhode Island because they and their friends in other states stand aloof from the oppressed colored men of the country, then may the oppressed whites of Rhode Island . . . stand aloof from the efforts of abolitionists, on the grounds that they do not care,” declared Goodell.54 The majority of New England abolitionists, however, were not forgiving. The whites-only provision in the People’s constitution was a “base, cowardly, a hypocritical attempt...togradatetherightsofmanbythecomplexionof the skin,” declared the Suffrage Examiner, a Providence paper launched with the express goal of defeating the People’s constitution.55 Prior to the vote scheduled in late December 1841 to rat- ify the People’s constitution, the who’s who of New England abolitionism—including William Lloyd Garrison, John A. Collins, Stephen S. Foster, Abby Kelley, Parker Pillsbury, Abel Tanner, and the fiery Douglass—descended on Rhode Island to protest it. As Susan Sisson, a prominent female abolitionist and women’s rights activist in the mill village of Pawtucket, insisted, only the abolitionists were the “true champions of freedom” in Rhode Island.56 Douglass’s addresses against the People’s constitution, among his first major speaking engagements after

53Dorr to Samuel Allen, 13 December 1841,box3,folder17, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. 54William Goodell, Lessons of a Single Day (New York, 1842), pp. 7 and 3,andThe Rights and Wrongs of Rhode Island (New York, 1842), p. 4. 55Suffrage Examiner, December 1841;seealsoNational Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 December 1841. 56Susan Sisson to Abby Kelley, 15 March 1842, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, Amer- ican Antiquarian Society (AAS). SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 673 escaping the bonds of slavery, introduced the compelling orator to a public that would soon hear much from him.

When the ballot counting ﬁnally concluded in early January Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 1842, Rhode Island learned that the People’s constitution, despite resistance from New England’s abolitionists and a boy- cott by charter government supporters, had been approved by an overwhelming majority: 13,944 in favor and just 52 opposed.57 The New Age proclaimed that it “ought to be and is the paramount law and Constitution of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”58 The euphoria was, however, short lived. Opposing Dorr’s government was the aptly named Law and Order Party, or the “legal party,” as it was known in conservative circles. The party, whose stated mission was to prevent the state from falling into “civil war,” was a coalition of urban Whigs, led by Governor Samuel Ward King, and rural Democrats, led by former governor John Brown Francis and attorney Elisha Potter Jr.59 Waging an effective, two-strategy campaign, the party alarmed the state’s upper classes by spreading a rumor that the Dorrites planned to redistribute property and by tapping nativist propaganda that the People’s constitution would allow hordes of Irish Catholic immigrants to take over the state.60 In March 1842, the Dorrites defeated a constitution issuing from a convention authorized by the charter assembly by the ominously narrow margin of 8,689 to 8,013. The delegates to the charter constitutional convention ignored an eloquent petition drafted by Ichabod Northup and James Hazard on behalf of the state’s black community: “We petition the abrogation of that odious feature of the statute, which, in making the right of citizenship identical with color, brings a stain upon the state,

57Burke’s Report, p. 205. 58New Age and Constitutional Advocate, 14 January 1841. 59See the diary of Levi Lincoln Newton, 16 and 19 May 1842, in the Newton Family Papers, AAS. 60See Conley, Democracy in Decline, pp. 370–73. 674 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY unmans the heart of an already injured people and corrupts the purity of republican faith.”61 The ﬁnal document made no provisions whatsoever for black suffrage, either in a clause in the document itself or, as the People’s constitution did, via a subsequent statewide referendum. On 3 May, Dorr was sworn in as the People’s governor under the constitution he had played such a large role in writing the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 previous year. Rhoda Newcomb, a Providence resident who watched the inaugural procession pass by her home, informed her son Charles King Newcomb, a boarder at George Ripley’s utopian experiment at Brook Farm and formerly Dorr’s class- mate at Harvard, that open warfare was inevitable. She “looked upon” this fact, that is, the People’s government, “as evil per- mitted by divine Providence” to cleanse the state of its “sins.” She did not elaborate upon what she meant by the state’s “sins.” Perhaps she was referring to its notorious participation in the international slave trade. In any case, she mocked her son’s support for Dorr’s reform cause. “Don’t you see bars fall down, locks give way, see the people rush in, hear the sheriff remonstrate the people, hurrah, down with the government, we are all sovereign?”62 On 4 May, the day after Dorr’s inauguration, the charter authorities declared that Rhode Island was in the midst of an insurgency, and they submitted a formal appeal to President Tyler “to interpose the authority and power of the United States to suppress such insurrectionary and lawless assemblages, to support the existing government and laws, and protect the State from domestic violence.”63

Shortly after his inauguration, Dorr accompanied Dutee Pearce and Burrington Anthony to Washington where they,

61See “Memorial of Colored Citizens,” 4 November 1841, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence. 62Rhoda Newcomb to Charles Newcomb, 3 May 1842,box3, Charles Newcomb Papers, JHL. 63Burke’s Report, pp. 672–73. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 675 too, intended to ask President Tyler for federal assistance. A devout states’ rights man, Dorr was apprehensive about the request, but he was persuaded to make the journey because, as his friend Walter Burges noted, only he knew “all the principles in all their bearings, all the measures that have been pursued and all the facts from beginning to end of both governments.”64 Not to be outdone, King dispatched Potter, Francis, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 and Richard Randolph, a Whig representative from Newport. King’s choice of Randolph was brilliant. A transplanted Vir- ginian, former slaveowner, and nephew of William Henry Har- rison, Randolph could easily ingratiate himself with Tyler, and he was able to secure an appointment with the president on 9 May, prior to that of the People’s delegation. According to Potter’s notes of their meeting with Tyler, Randolph succeeded in painting Dorr as an abolitionist and the Suffrage Party as an abolitionist cabal.65 At the same time, Potter informed Tyler that William Preston, the powerful senator from South Car- olina whom a president facing reelection could hardly ignore, insisted that Dorr’s doctrines would “ruin S. Carolina” because the “blacks would revolutionize them.” If Dorr’s ideology pre- vailed, what would prevent the “negroes [from] revolutionizing the south?” asked Preston.66 A correspondent of the Providence Daily Express, apro- Dorr paper, blamed Rhode Island’s incumbent senator James Fowler Simmons for stirring up Southern sentiment against Dorr in the U.S. Congress. “Simmons was daily engaged in whispering into the ears of all the southern Senators to whom he had access, that the suffrage cause was an abolition movement,” the writer claimed, “and that Governor Dorr was one of the leaders of the abolition party.” He urged Dorr to remind Southern Democrats of “the fact that the abolitionists were of all others the most ardently opposed” to the People’s

64Walter S. Burges to Dorr, 5 May 1842,box1,folder7, Thomas Wilson Dorr Papers, JHL. 65Potter, “Memorandum on the Dorr Rebellion,” box 4,folder4, Potter Papers, RIHS. 66Potter, “Memorandum on the Dorr Rebellion,” box 4,folder4, Potter Papers, RIHS; quoted with permission. 676 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY constitution.67 Meanwhile, Rhode Island Whigs were remind- ing Simmons of Dorr’s service on the executive committee of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society and insisting that his “abolition feelings” were “as strong as his suffrage feelings.”68 When he met with the delegation from the People’s government on 10 May, the president did not mince words. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 According to one report, Tyler “told Dorr, Pearce and Anthony that their proceedings were treasonable against the state and if they committed any overt acts and resisted the force of the U.S. they would then commit treason against the U.S. and as sure as they did so they should be hanged for treason!”69 There was no “doubt,” wrote Secretary of State Webster to John Whipple, that the “Government of the United States pledges itself to maintain the existing constitution and laws till regularly changed.”70 In one of the many ironies of antebellum political history, Northern Democratic politics were also working against Dorr. Inthespringof1842, a large contingent of New En- gland Democrats began supporting John Calhoun, senator from South Carolina and former vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, for the presidency with the assumption that he would choose a New England man as his running mate.71 The likely choice for that role was Levi Wood- bury, a U.S. senator from New Hampshire who had championed Dorr.72 Given his rising ambitions, Woodbury mufﬂed

67Providence Daily Express, 30 May 1842. 68William Watson to James F. Simmons, 23 April 1842, Simmons Papers, LoC. 69John Brown Francis to Elisha Potter Jr., 23 May 1842,box1,folder7, Potter Papers, RIHS. 70Daniel Webster to John Whipple, 9 May 1842, Daniel Webster Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society (NHHS), Concord. 71Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, p. 186,andCalhoun Papers, editor’s intro., 17:xxii– xxiii. See also Craig M. MacAllister, “New England’s Calhounities: The Henshaw Fac- tion of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, 1828–1850” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009). 72On Calhoun and Woodbury, see Joseph Scoville to Levi Woodbury, 17 June 1842, and George Barsten to Woodbury, 23 August 1842, in the Levi Woodbury Family Papers, LoC. On Woodbury’s connection to Thomas Dorr, see Dorr’s letters to Woodbury, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13,and19 April 1842, and John Harris to Woodbury, 9 May 1842,box4,folders5–8, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL, and SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 677 his defense of the revolutionary reform movement in Rhode Is- land, leaving as an advocate in the Senate only Ohio’s William Allen. Potter reported that Woodbury had come to regret back- ing Dorr because “he and Calhoun are said to be negotiating to run on the same ticket for P and VP.” According to Potter, Woodbury’s devotion to Dorrite principles did not “suit the South.”73 Silas Wright Jr., of New York, another 1844 Demo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 cratic presidential hopeful and correspondent of Dorr’s, also began to distance himself from the cause of the Suffrage Party. Wright insisted that the “great duty now resting upon” the People’s governor was “caution, caution, caution; forbearance, forbearance, forbearance.” Wright urged Dorr to use “discre- tion” in the weeks to come and, at all costs, to avoid conflict with the charter authorities.74 John Calhoun’s opposition to Dorr’s ideology was consistent with his fear of majoritarian tyranny and his desire to protect the rights of a minority under a popular government, as ex- pressed in his theory of nullification.75 As Calhoun’s friend and fellow slave owner Abel Usher noted, the People’s constitution demonstrated the “very madness of democracy and was a fine example” of the dangers of the “majority principle.”76 To allow the federal government to decide which government in Rhode Island should be recognized as the true republican representation of the people’s will would set a dangerous precedent that some future Northern president might capital- ize upon to disrupt the South’s peculiar institution. Congress did have the Constitutional authority to decide whom to seat, which it would exercise during Reconstruction. In the antebellum period, however, Southern politicians resisted that power because they feared that it would grant the federal government

Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 234–35. 73Elisha Potter to John Brown Francis, 14 May 1842, Dorr War microfilm, RIHS; quoted with permission. 74Silas Wright to Dorr, 16 April 1842,box4,folder6, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. 75John Calhoun to William Smith, 3 July 1843, Calhoun Papers, 17:270–91. 76Quoted in Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, p. 244. 678 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY full control over admitting new states and thus, by extension, slavery’s expansion. Southern senators could remember just such an interpretation of the “Guarantee Clause” (Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution) as it was urged by antislavery congressmen two decades before in the debates over the Missouri Compromise. Timothy Fuller of Massachusetts, for one, had argued that the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Declaration of Independence “provided substantive content to the vague textual phrase ‘republican form of government.’”77 According to Calhoun, “in determining whether the Govern- ment of a State be, or not be republican, within the meaning of the Constitution, [the federal government] has no right . . . to look beyond its admission to the Union.”78 Virginian James Madison had made the same point in The Federalist.Inthe forty-third installment of the classic essays on the Constitution, Madison declared that all existing state governments in 1788–89 were republican and would be guaranteed in their continuance, or in any republican modification, by the federal government.79 Calhoun maintained that the federal right to intervene against a state’s rulers was a “high and delicate one.” The “forms of the governments of the several States, composing the Union, as they stood at the time of their admission” constituted the only legitimate “standard.”80 Although debate about the “Rhode Island Question” was gen- erally muted on the floor of Congress, all restraints were lifted in Washington’s backrooms. Calhoun gave Dorr a verbal tongue lashing in the private confines of his office.81 Reflecting on his experience in Washington in a letter to Walter Burges, Dorr stated that he now understood that his Jeffersonian doctrine of the people’s sovereignty could be construed to include all men and thus had given white Southerners the false impression that

77William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 120. 78Calhoun Papers, 17:277. 79The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2001), p. 225. 80Calhoun Papers, 17:277. 81Calhoun Papers, editor’s intro.,16:xviii. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 679 he meant to include slaves in his deﬁnition of “the people.” While some Southern members of Congress were “with the People of Rhode Island,” Dorr observed, they were “not with all People in asserting principles, which might be construed to take in the Southern blacks and to aid the abolitionists.”82 Hav- ing traveled to Washington with the hope of winning Tyler’s support, Dorr left the city on 11 May with no more satisfac- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 tion than a hard-won lesson in sectional politics. Now a marked man in his home state—the mayor of Providence had issued a warrant for his arrest—he was bound for New York.83 Shortly after Dorr left the White House, Tyler, hoping to calm tensions and to prevent blood from being shed, dispatched Webster to New York.

Calling Webster and Tyler “Tories of the rankest sort,” Dorr did not expect much from the meeting on 13 May, even though a decade earlier he had sent portraits of his hero, Webster, to friends near and far.84 John Harris, Burrington Anthony, and former congressman Dutee Pearce represented the People’s government; attorney John Whipple represented the charter government. In truth, Whipple had no express authorization from Governor King, whose executive council had refused to negotiate with a “party in open rebellion against the laws and Government of the State.” A friend of Webster’s and a former mentor of Dorr’s, Whipple had asked to participate in the hope of preventing bloodshed.85 While Harris, Anthony, and Pearce were developing their strategy for securing some sort of compromise from Webster, Dorr was being fetedˆ by radical New York Democrats such as

82Dorr to Walter Burges, 12 May 1842,box4,folder12, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. 83A copy of the warrant was recently discovered at the Providence City Archives by researcher Thomas Lonsdale. 84Dorr to Walter Burges, 12 May 1842,box4,folder12, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL. 85William Channing Gibbs to Daniel Webster, 12 May 1842, Webster Papers, NHHS. See also Providence Journal, 28 May 1842. 680 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Levi Slamm, editor of the New Era, and the ﬁery labor radical Mike Walsh. Dorr was given a sword purported to have been used by Andrew Jackson during his Florida campaign against the Indians, and he found himself the object of massive rallies, mounted, strangely enough, by New York workingmen who were part of what historian Sean Wilentz has called Calhoun’s Northern “left wing,” men who believed that Southern slaves Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 enjoyed fairer working conditions than Northern laborers.86 While in Washington, Pearce and Anthony had experienced the power of rumor and conspiratorial innuendo. Success- fully linking Dorr to abolitionism, Senators Preston and Sim- mons had thereby connected the reformer to the most radical and dangerous political creed of the era. Pearce and Anthony quickly realized that a brokered peace was the best option for the People’s government. Whipple, who was more liberal than King’s executive council, promised that he would persuade the General Assembly to rescind a draconian piece of legislation calling for the arrest and imprisonment of any citizen suspected of being in league with the Suffrage Party. Despite pleas from Whipple, as well as Harris, Anthony, and Pearce, Dorr ﬂatly rejected the compromise offer that emerged from the meeting with Webster: that is, to have the federal courts decide the fate of the People’s constitution. A verdict supporting the le- gality of the People’s constitution, Dorr was convinced, would never emerge from a district court over which Joseph Story presided.87 As Dorr later noted, if the “judges should decide that the People in a state have no right to alter or amend their institutions, without the authority of the legislature,” then they would, quite simply, thereby “abrogate the Declaration of Independence and the American system.”88 John Harris’s

86See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York:W.W.Norton,2005), pp. 533–34. See also Michael A. Bernstein, “Northern Labor Finds a Southern Champion: A Note on the Radical Democracy, 1833–1849,” in New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780–1870, ed.ConradE.Wright and William Pencak (New York: New York Historical Society, 1989), pp. 147–68. 87New York Express, 27 May 1842. 88Dorr to William Simons, 11 November 1842,box5,folder17, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspondence, JHL SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 681 recommendation that the People’s legislature and the Gen- eral Assembly simultaneously issue calls for another convention, with voting for delegates being governed by the suffrage provisions in the People’s constitution, was also dismissed.89 On the afternoon of 14 May, Anthony, Pearce, Whipple, Harris, and Dorr took a ferry to Stonington, Connecticut. Ac- cording to the conservative New York Commericial Adver- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 tiser, Dorr met his “sympathizers at Tammany Hall,” where his “imaginary Excellency then ascended a barouche” and was led to the steamboat by six hundred adoring fans.90 A few days later, Whipple tried again, with the help of Anthony and Dorr’s brother-in-law Moses Brown Ives and his uncle Crawford Allen, to prevail upon the People’s governor to back down, but it was to no avail.91

On 16 May 1842, as the three-car train carrying the thirty- six-year-old People’s governor wound its way north from Ston- ington, Connecticut, through southern Rhode Island’s fertile farm land, Providence was alive with anticipation. For his part, Dorr’s passions had been fanned by events of the last few days, and arriving in Providence, he unleashed them. Brandishing the sword he had been given in New York City, he delivered what the Charleston Mercury labeled a “bloody minded proclamation.”92 Despite the power of his oratory, only the most in- toxicated among the crowd were persuaded to join him in the rash scheme he planned for the following night: an attack on the state arsenal in Providence. King’s executive council issued an order recommending “citizens, throughout the state, who are in favor of supporting the laws of the state and good order in the community to adopt immediate measures for exercising themselves in military

89Providence Journal, 26 May 1842. 90New York Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1842. 91New York Express, 27 May 1842,andProvidence Journal, 26 May 1842. 92Charleston Mercury, 23 May 1842. 682 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY discipline.”93 A member of a Providence militia unit loyal to King told a family member in Boston that he believed the whole city would soon be engulfed in flames.94 On the afternoon of 17 May, dozens of heavily armed Dorrites raided the armory belonging to the United Train of Artillery, just blocks from the Dorr family mansion on Benefit Street. There they seized two Revolutionary war cannon that had been confiscated Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 from British General John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga, which they proceeded to drag to Dorr’s headquarters at Bur- rington Anthony’s house on Federal Hill.95 The two cannons, along with several other artillery pieces, were then aimed down the hill at the center of the city. That night, notices calling the citizens of Providence to “repair to the state arsenal and take arms” were posted across the city. “Alarm bells were sounding alloverthecity...andDorr’sFreeSuffrage Party were all in arms,” noted one charter government supporter.96 Among those who rallied to defend the city’s cache of weapons were Dorr’s father, his brother Sullivan Jr., his uncle Zachariah Allen, and his brother-in-law Samuel Ames.97 After midnight on 18 May, Dorr’s men marched from Anthony’s home to the arsenal, but as morning drew nearer forces that had numbered over two hundred at one point began to dwindle. Taking control at around 2 a.m., Dorr, who had no military training to speak of, ordered the remaining fifty or so men to hold their ground. In the ensuing confusion, some- one attempted to ignite the cannons. Both flashed, but, the damp night air likely affecting the seventy-year-old relics, they failed to hurl projectiles toward the arsenal.98 With no means of

93See box 3,folder31, Sidney S. Rider Papers, JHL. 94William Bailey to Jane Keeley, 17 May 1842, William Bailey Papers, RIHS; quoted with permission. 95Joshua Spooner to George Ader, 17 May 1842, Joshua Spooner Papers, RIHS; quoted with permission. 96Newton, diary, 18 May 1842, Newton Family Papers, AAS. 97Dorr’s sisters were all married to detractors of their brother: Ann Dorr married Moses Brown Ives, Candace Dorr married Edward Carrington Jr., and Mary Troop Dorr married Samuel Ames. 98Dorr reflected on the failed attack in his 21 May 1842 proclamation. See New York Tribune, 28 May 1842; see also Conley, Democracy in Decline, pp. 337–41. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 683 sustaining an attack on the heavily fortified arsenal, Dorr made his way behind enemy lines and back to his headquarters. Ac- cording to Zachariah Allen, King’s executive council was prepared to get rid of Dorr however it might, and so Crawford and Phillip Allen, Zachariah’s brothers, helped their nephew escape the city.99 Dorr’s attempt on the arsenal on the morning of 18 May re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 minded Southerners of Denmark Vesey’s abortive 1822 attack two decades earlier, when it was said that nearly nine thousand blacks were ready to join the slave who planned to seize the arsenal at Charleston, South Carolina, and, as slaveholders feared, exterminate the state’s white male population. Closer in memory was Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt in Virginia, which resulted in the deaths of over fifty whites. With a keen sense of their readers’ concerns, the editors of the Charleston Mer- cury devoted extensive coverage to Dorr’s failed assault on the Providence arsenal.100 Despite the consistent opposition of Rhode Island’s black community and New England’s abolitionists to the People’s constitution, the editors of the Madisonian, a pro-Tyler paper in Washington, continued to bolster the opposition by playing the race card. Describing Dorr’s “evil purposes” of 17–18 May, the editors declared themselves “thoroughly convinced that the wire workers who endeavor to get up a violent and bloody scene in RI, are a band of desperate abolitionists.” Those who “encouraged the commission of outrage against the existing government” in Rhode Island were said to be “of the same class that instigated the slaves on board the Creole to commit murder and mutiny.”101 In November 1841, the month in which the People’s convention had met in Providence, slaves being transported on the Creole, which had left Virginia bound for New Orleans, captured control of the vessel and diverted it to the Bahamas. The report linking Dorr to a revolt on board a

99Diary of Edward Peckham, 17 May–2 July 1842,JHL. 100Charleston Mercury, 24, 25,and26 May 1842. 101Madisonian, 21 May 1842. 684 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY slave ship enraged Rhode Island’s reform supporters because they had taken steps to exclude blacks from the franchise. With a heavy dose of sarcasm, the pro-Dorrite Providence Daily Express rebutted the Madisonian.

The sagacious Madisonian will stick to it that it was an “Abolition Plot” in Rhode Island to adopt a Constitution which prohibited colored Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 people from voting! Papers in Mississippi, Georgia, the Natchez Free Trader and the Augusta Constitutionalist—with numerous journals in other slave states—appear to be deep in the plot the wiseacre of the Madisonian had discovered.102

Soon others were jumping on the bandwagon that the Madisonian had set in motion. Dorr’s intention was clearly to spread his “revolutionary spirit south,” declared Rhode Island Whig Samuel F. Man.103 With “regard to Dorr’s Abolitionism we have only to say, that he is and always has been the most rabid and ultra Abolitionist in all New England,” declared the Providence Journal, the voice of Rhode Island’s conservative forces.104 Given Dorr’s past re- lations with “hot-headed” Northern abolitionists, his opponents maintained, he was undoubtedly working in conjunction with their “cherished object” of eradicating the institution of slavery.105 Just as the issue in Rhode Island was moving from a war of words to one of arms, Dorr’s old associate abolitionist Edmund Quincy was advancing disunionist resolutions at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.106 Garrison had begun pressing for disunion in April, capitalizing on a petition the citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, had sent to Congressman John Quincy Adams at the beginning of 1842. The petition asked Congress to “adopt measures peaceably to

102Providence Daily Express, 27 May 1842. 103Samuel F. Man to James F. Simmons, 23 May 1842, Simmons Papers, LoC. 104Providence Journal, 11 June 1842. 105Samuel Man to James Simmons, 27 May 1842, Simmons Papers, LoC. 106National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 May 1842. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 685 dissolve the Union of these states.”107 Soon Garrison was joined by a vocal abolitionist minority—including Wendell Phillips, Maria Weston Chapman, Henry Clarke Wright, and Quincy— who agreed, as Wright told the Liberator, that “we ought to have laid before the slaveholders, long ago, this alternative. You must abolish slavery, or we shall dissolve the Union.”108 In May, the Liberator’s masthead began calling for “A REPEAL Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 OF THE UNION BETWEEN NORTHERN LIBERTY AND SOUTHERN SLAVERY.” There “was no moral horror, or political treason . . . in advocating disunion,” noted New York Quaker abolitionist James Gibbons.109 Despite the Dorrites’ disavowal of black suffrage, the rhetoric of Rhode Island’s ex- tralegal reform effort was unmistakably reminiscent of Garri- son’s rhetoric of disunion. “We are all aghast about the rebellion in Rhode Island,” wrote North Carolina Whig congressman William Graham. “Every mail is looked to for news of bloodshed and outbreak of war.” He continued, “The pretended governor has organized a government and is guarded constantly. By the last account he has seized several pieces of artillery, and attempted an attack on the arsenal.” According to Graham’s intelligence, Dorr, past “president of an abolition society,” promoted “the doctrine” that “a majority, without regard to color or condition,” had “at any time a right to overturn the existing government.”110 Lovers of liberty on both sides of the Mason Dixon line deemed the abolitionists’ apparent willingness not only to disrupt sectional harmony but to disband the Union treasonous. Just hours before Dorr marched on the arsenal, Ohio Sen- ator William Allen addressed the Senate after his colleagues Calhoun and Preston ﬁnally backed off of their steadfast opposition to discussing the “Rhode Island Question.” Insisting

107W. Caleb McDaniel, “Repealing Unions, American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism,” Journal of the Early Republic 28 (Summer 2008): 252, 251. 108Liberator, 29 April 1842. 109Liberator, 13 May 1842. 110William Graham to Paul Cameron, 20 May 1842, The Papers of William Alexan- der Graham, ed. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (Raleigh, N.C.: State Department of Archives, 1959), p. 313. 686 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY that, prior to Dorr’s inauguration on 3 May, there had been “no constitutional form of government in Rhode Island,” Allen attempted to introduce two resolutions: the first focused on the absolute sovereignty of the people; the second prohibited federal interference on behalf of the Rhode Island charter authorities. Unbeknownst to Allen, however, events in Rhode Island were playing directly into Calhoun and Preston’s hands. What- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ever support Dorr may have enjoyed in Congress had vanished by the afternoon of 18 May, and compromise measures then in progress were dashed. “Mr. Dorr’s recent proceedings have been of so extravagant a character as almost to extinguish the last hope of a peaceable result,” wrote President Tyler to Elisha Potter Jr. on 20 May.111 New Era editor Levi Slamm tried to reassure Calhoun, who had a sizeable following within the readership, that he and other Southern Democrats had nothing to fear from Dorr.112 Unpersuaded, Calhoun wanted to challenge Dorr on the floor of the Senate. The “doctrine that a majority has a right at all times, according to its will and pleasure, to subvert the Government of a State, and to alter or change its constitution without observing the forms prescribed for its amendment, is revolutionary in its character, and inconsistent with all ideas of Constitutional government,” he argued in a draft of a resolution he had prepared.113 Although Calhoun’s associates convinced him that formally offering his resolution on the Senate floor would cost him Northern support, news of his opposition to Dorr was reported in numerous Northern Democratic newspapers, eventually destroying his hopes of a political alliance between Southern slaveholders and Northern labor.114

111Burke’s Report, p. 678. 112Democratic Republican New Era, 26 May 1842. For a response to Slamm’s editorial, see Dixon H. Lewis to Joseph Scoville, 30 May 1842,inCalhoun Papers, 16:265–67. 113Congressional Globe, 17 May 1842,p.507; “Resolutions Prepared to be Offered had the Rhode Island Controversy Been Brought up for Discussion,” in Calhoun Papers, 16:270. 114See, e.g., Democratic Republican New Era, 26 May 1842,andNew York Her- ald, 19 May 1842. On Calhoun’s dashed hopes, see Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, p. 539. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 687

After hiding out in New York City for a month, Dorr decided to return to Rhode Island and prepare to reconvene the Peo- ple’s legislature on 4 July. King’s forces were in firm control of Providence, so Dorr chose as his base the northern village of Chepachet, where Samuel Y. Atwell, a leading associate, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 resided. A few days after arriving in Chepachet, however, Dorr realized that all was lost. Only two hundred fifty supporters showed up to defend the People’s camp on Acote’s hill, while over three thousand heavily armed militiamen were drilling in Providence in preparation for marching on Chepachet. On 27 June, Dorr issued an order to disperse. No shots were fired, no casualties suffered. Once again, he fled across state lines. After secluding himself in Thompson, Connecticut, for a few days, he made his way north to the Democratic stronghold of New Hampshire. The majority of prisoners that government forces managed to take into custody on 28–30 June had been not active participants in Dorr’s historic enterprise but merely curious onlookers.115 When the charter government, the authority that had denied African Americans the franchise for the past twenty years, issued its call to mobilize, more than two hundred blacks were among the nearly thirty-five hundred men who formed Rhode Island’s militia and volunteer companies.116 Their involvement owed, in part, to the skillful negotiations of shoemaker William J. Brown. When the charter government announced on 25 June that delegates should be nominated for a constitutional convention, it did not restrict participation to whites alone. In exchange for this right, Brown suggested that Providence’s black community aid charter authorities in their military operations against Dorr.117 A reporter for the Boston newspaper Emancipator and

115On the events in Chepachet, see Clifford W. Brown’s informative essay on the website for the Chepachet Free Will Baptist Church: http://www.chepachetfreewill .org/dorrrebellion1.htm. 116See Russell J. DeSimone and my “Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Race in Antebellum Rhode Island,” Common-Place 10:2 (January 2010). 117Lemons and McKenna, “Re-Enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” p. 12. See also The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, with Personal 688 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Free American noted that blacks in Rhode Island were “placed in the ranks according to their height and I saw no manifestation of disrespect” by “any member of the company, but on the contrary all praised and honored them for their noble devotion to the interest of the great cause of regulated civil liberty which they were now called to defend.”118 The week following Dorr’s defeat at Chepachet, the city’s black community was repre- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 sented in the July Fourth parade by its own marching band, complete with musical instruments supplied by the state from items confiscated at Chepachet. When another constitutional convention convened in Newport in September 1842, abolitionists were adamant that a new constitution not restrict the franchise to whites only. Lucinda Wilmarth, the head of Rhode Island’s antislavery society, implored Abby Kelley to enlist help from Frederick Douglass, who had earlier canvassed the state against the People’s constitution. “Every abolitionist I have seen,” wrote Wilmarth, “is of the same opinion” that Douglass, “who stole the hearts of the RI people,” must return to the state to campaign for an egalitarian constitution. It “is the deep con- viction of Rhode Island that there has never been a better time and so important a time here in an antislavery point of view.”119 Thomas Stead, a key military official in Providence who had been alert to the service of African Americans in quelling Dorr’s rebellion, informed Senator James Simmons that a constitution that did not include a provision for black suffrage would not pass.120 Still, on 29 September 1842, cautious delegates opted to isolate the question, as the People’s constitution had pre- viously done, and place it directly before the people in a referendum. Meanwhile, on 21–23 November, a vote was held on the proposed constitution, which Rhode Island citizens ratified by the lopsided vote of 7,024 to 51; Dorrites boycotted the polls. The referendum on admitting blacks into the body

Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island, ed. Joanne Pope Melish (Hanover: Univer- sity Press of New England, 2006). 118Emancipator and Free American, 11 August 1842. 119Lucinda Wilmarth to Abby Kelley, 11 July 1842, Foster Papers, AAS. 120Thomas Stead to James Simmons, 19 September 1842, Simmons Papers, LoC. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 689 politic was attached to the ballot and was approved by a greater than 2-to-1 margin, thus making Rhode Island the only state in the Union to re-enfranchise blacks after having legally deprived them of their rights.121 “There is not so much scolding about letting the blacks vote as was expected,” Elisha Potter informed John Brown Francis. Rhode Islanders “would rather have the Negroes vote than the d d Irish.”122 The constitu- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 tion mandated a one-year residency requirement for freehold- ers and a two-year residency for the native-born lacking real estate but owning $134 worth of personal property. Affirming the state’s long-standing predilection to subjugate immigrant laborers, naturalized citizens were still required to possess $134 of real estate to earn the right to vote.123 While debate over the new constitution was proceeding, Dorr was in Concord, New Hampshire. After the 1843 state elections destroyed any future prospects for the Rhode Island Suffrage Party, Dorr turned himself in to authorities and was subjected to a farcical trial in Newport. He insisted in his defense that the act of establishing a People’s government was not treasonable but, rather, a legally justified action sanctioned under the Peo- ple’s constitution. The jury was not convinced. Dorr was found guilty, the first person to be convicted of treason against a state in U.S. history; the murdering abolitionist John Brown would, in 1859, have the distinction of being the second. In addition to his eight months in a Newport jail, the People’s governor lan- guished in the state penitentiary in Providence for exactly one year; in 1845, after Charles Jackson captured the governorship on a “Liberation” ticket, Dorr was released. His imprisonment had greatly impaired his already fragile health.124

121Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion, p. 148. 122Elisha Potter Jr. to John Brown Francis, 22 July 1842, Dorr War microﬁlm, RIHS; quoted with permission. 123For an informative overview of the differences between the 1843 constitution and the People’s constitution, see Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island in Rhetoric and Reﬂection: Public Addresses and Essays by Patrick T. Conley (Providence: Rhode Island Publications Society, 2003), pp. 174–76. For the full text of the 1843 constitution, see http://library.providence.edu/dps/projects/dorr/locon.html. 124See my “The ‘Rhode Island Question’ on Trial: The 1844 Treason Trial of Thomas Dorr,” American Nineteenth-Century History 11.2 (June 2010): 205–32. 690 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Ten days before Dorr was transferred from Providence to Newport for trial, Edmund Burke, a U.S. congressman from New Hampshire, presented a petition from the Democratic members of the Rhode Island General Assembly on the ﬂoor Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 of the House. Burke informed Dorr that he was determined “to give to the country the full history of the Suffrage movement and to put in my report the true doctrines of Democracy upon the great question involved.”125 What Burke really meant was that he was preparing to write a Democratic manifesto that could be used in conjunction with Dorr’s imprisonment to battle the Whig Party in 1844.126 One Democratic congressman saw the issue as embodying the essence of the Declaration of Independence.127 Dorr acknowledged that “nothing” would do “Mr. Van Buren,” favored for the party’s nomination at that point, “more good or the democracy more good than the full, faithful, earnest discussion of the whole matter in Congress.”128 The resolutions Burke presented had been ghost written by Dorr, who challenged the right of Henry Cranston and Elisha Potter Jr. to their current seats in Congress, called for a full in- vestigation of John Tyler’s conduct in 1842, and asked Congress to utilize the guarantee clause to reinstate the People’s constitution.129 As Dorr sat in the Newport jail awaiting trial, the memorial was debated at length in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.130 In a close vote held on 21 March 1844, Burke won a motion that empowered his committee to summon persons and gather papers. With help from Dorr, Walter Burges, and Massachusetts’ Benjamin Hallett, Burke assembled a one-thousand-page tome on the “Rhode Island

125Burke to Dorr, 7 April 1844,box8,folder9, Rider Collection, Dorr Correspon- dence, JHL. 126See the 1844 campaign newspaper, the New England Democrat, edited by the prominent Massachusetts Democrat Lewis Josselyn, at the AAS. 127Congressional Globe, 13 March 1844,p.379. 128Dorr to Edmund Burke, 26 February 1844, Edmund Burke Papers, LoC. 129Burke’s Report, p. 4. 130Congressional Globe, 9 March 1844,p.363. SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 691 Question” by June. Burke’s Report, as the lengthy brief quickly became known, was far from neutral. Its first printed page re- produced a daguerreotype of Dorr taken on 3 May 1842,the date of his inauguration. The first 90 pages recapitulated Dor- rite philosophy; the next 900 offered documents, depositions, court records, and voting lists for the People’s constitution.131 On 17 June 1844, Maryland congressmen Jacob Preston and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 John Causin compiled a minority report that sought to vindi- cate President Tyler’s conduct. For Causin, the “Rhode Island Question” was “one of the most important questions that could be brought before Congress—neither more nor less than a question of war or peace; and if war should result, the whole Union would be convulsed to the center.”132 After a government has been formed, he maintained, “the majority have no right to change or alter it, as an exercise of peaceful authority, without common consent, and that consent can only be given through” the legislature, which is “instituted by all, directs and acts for all.”133 The Causin Report clearly reflected Southern legislators’ sensitivity to the possibility of a Northern majority using federal power to challenge their peculiar institution.134 Indiana Whig Caleb Blood Smith, who later served in Abra- ham Lincoln’s administration, believed that Dorr’s philosophy was a recipe for a war between the races, especially in the states where the “colored population outnumber the whites.” If by the “law of nature and the law of God, the people of one portion of the country can overturn their government, and adopt a new one, where did the gentleman [Burke] find the authority to exclude from political rights the negroes of South Carolina and Virginia?”135 Although Burke was careful to note that Dorr’s actions in 1841–42 constituted a lawful attempt to ensure a republican

131There were two editions of the report. The first was created in June 1844,and a second, with minor revisions, in January 1845. 132Congressional Globe, 16 April 1844,p.523. 133House Report #581, 28th Cong., 1st sess. (17 June 1844), p. 18. 134William M. Wiecek, The Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 109. 135Congressional Globe, 14 March 1844,p.384. 692 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY form of government to Rhode Island, he did not, as Dorr wished, ask the House retroactively to apply the federal guarantee clause to the People’s constitution. Instead, by not rais- ing the matter, the report allowed the state constitution that Dorr’s opponents had subsequently proposed and that had been ratified by the populace to stand, thus rendering the specific issue of the People’s government null and void.136 Nonethe- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 less, resolutions were still before the House, and Northern and Southern Democrats, split over the issue of the people’s sovereignty and focused on the approaching presidential election, avoided a vote on them. Soon, the continued controversy over the “all absorbing Texas Question” drew attention away from the Rhode Island memorial. According to Aaron White, a close friend of Dorr’s who fled to Connecticut after Chepachet, the “Rhode Island Question” had become merely “a puddle in [the] storm” over Texas.137

Little evidence survives about what happened in Dorr’s final days at his father’s elegant home on Benefit Street. A gap in the vast Dorr correspondence at Brown University suggests that he was too ill to write, and on 27 December 1854,he succumbed to his long struggle with debilitating health issues. One can only wonder at his final thoughts. Throughout his life, Dorr meticulously preserved all of the letters he received along with numerous drafts of his outgoing correspondence. We do not know if he reviewed his correspondence about the Rhode Island constitutional crisis in his waning weeks, but if he did so, he most certainly would have paused over a letter from his most loyal associate, Aaron White, who unlike Dorr, had supported the Liberty Party. Reflecting on Tyler’s decision to send his secretary of war, John C. Spencer, to Rhode Island armed with full authority to order military intervention if necessary, White

136Burke’s Report, p. 84. 137Aaron White to Dorr, 12 May 1844,box8,folder14, Rider Collection, Dorr Cor- respondence, JHL. See also Joel Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). SLAVERY AND THE DORR REBELLION 693 argued that that move (even though federal troops were never mobilized in 1842) now gave opponents of slavery a means of attacking it:

When President [James] Birney takes the throne, we will cram Eman- cipating Constitutions down the throats of the Southern nabobs by the same rule. For if President Tyler under pretence of suppressing Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 domestic violence can interfere in behalf of a minority to guarantee an Aristocratic Constitution, a fortiori, may President Birney interfere to guarantee a Republican Constitution.138

In the 1850s, the antislavery National Era attempted to make a similar point when it commented on the federal administration’s supposed unwillingness to protect Rhode Island from rebellion but the U.S. government’s present willingness to use its resources to assist in the capture of fugitive slaves:

A rebellion breaks out in Rhode Island; that rebellion is countenanced in the ﬁrst city of the Union; a great dinner is given to Dorr by the magnates of the Democratic party in the city of New York; a sword is presented to him; he is escorted to the ship that is to convey him and his fortunes to the civil war in his native State. No proclamation ensues. The Federal Government folds its arms; no rebuke is uttered against those who furnished men and means. It was only rebellion; it was only treason; it did not interfere with the slave question or the slave power. And why should our pro-slavery Government interfere?139

In time, Abraham Lincoln would do exactly what Aaron White and the editors of the National Era hoped he would: he used his executive power to end the institution of slavery. Thus, the Dorr Rebellion is more than a limited, local event two decades removed from the grand drama of the Civil War; rather, events in the Union’s smallest state reverberated throughout the halls and backrooms of Congress as the nation’s

138Aaron White to Dorr, 3 June 1842,box4,folder17, Rider Collection, Dorr Cor- respondence, JHL; emphasis added. See also George M. Dennison, “Republican Form of Government—The Dorr War and Political Questions,” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook (1979), p. 41. 139Quoted in Liberator, 6 March 1851. 694 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY politicians tried to sort out the meaning of freedom. Like the issue of the status of slavery in the territories, the “Rhode Island Question” raised profound constitutional questions about the location and the nature of sovereignty that only war would ultimately resolve. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/658/1792800/tneq_a_00231.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

Erik J. Chaput received his B.A. and M.A. from Providence College and his Ph.D. in early American history from Syracuse University. He teaches at Northﬁeld Mount Hermon School and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. Currently he is in the ﬁnal stages of preparing a book-length manuscript on the Dorr Rebellion, which will be published by the University Press of Kansas in the fall of 2013. He is also editing with Russell J. DeSimone the Se- lect Letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr, which will be posted to http://library.providence.edu/dorr in late 2012.