On May 4, 1776, the Rhode Island General Assembly convened at the Old State House on Benefit Street in Providence and did something no American legislature had done before. By unanimous vote in the upper house and an overwhelming majority in the lower house, with only the six-member Newport delegation dissenting, it passed the Act of Renunciation, formally repealing the oath of allegiance to King George III that every colonial official in Rhode Island had been required to swear before assuming office.
Rhode Island, the smallest of the thirteen colonies and the one most deeply shaped by a tradition of defiant independence, became the first colony in North America to officially renounce allegiance to the British Crown, doing so exactly two months before the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The act was a milestone not only in American history but in the history of self-governance itself, and it was the product of a colony whose entire identity had been built on resistance to authority since its very founding.
The Founding of Rhode Island: Roger Williams and the Tradition of Defiance
The story of Rhode Island’s May 4 declaration cannot be understood without beginning 140 years earlier, with a minister named Roger Williams and the act of expulsion that set the entire colony in motion.
Roger Williams was born around 1603 in London, England. He studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he absorbed Puritan theology, and was educated as a minister in the Church of England. He arrived in Boston in February 1631 aboard the ship Lyon. From the moment of his arrival, Williams’s beliefs put him in direct conflict with the Puritan leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He argued that the civil government had no authority over religious conscience, that the royal charter gave no valid title to land that belonged to the indigenous peoples, and that true religious practice required the complete separation of church from state. These were not minor theological quibbles. They struck at the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s self-understanding as a godly commonwealth with the authority to enforce religious conformity.
The Massachusetts General Court tried Williams in October 1635 and convicted him of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions.” He was ordered to be banished and sent back to England. Officials delayed executing the order because Williams was ill and winter was approaching, but when he failed to comply with demands that he stop publicly teaching, the sheriff came in January 1636. Williams had already slipped away three days earlier, traveling 55 miles on foot through deep snow. He found shelter with the Wampanoag people and their sachem Massasoit through the winter.
In the spring of 1636, Williams and a small group of followers established a new settlement on the shores of Narragansett Bay on land he had purchased from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. He named it Providence, expressing gratitude for what he described as divine guidance through his ordeal. Providence was designed from its founding on a principle that no other English colony had yet attempted: government had authority only over civil matters, and every individual was free to follow the dictates of their own conscience in religious affairs. Williams called this principle “liberty of conscience.” Rhode Island was, in his formulation, a “lively experiment” in the possibility of civil peace without religious uniformity.
Other religious dissenters soon followed. Anne Hutchinson, whose Antinomian views had likewise brought her into conflict with the Massachusetts Bay authorities and led to her expulsion in November 1637, established a settlement with her followers at Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island. William Coddington and several other families split from Portsmouth in 1639 to found Newport at the southern end of Aquidneck Island. Samuel Gorton purchased lands at Shawomet in 1642 and eventually founded the settlement of Warwick. By the early 1640s, four distinct settlements occupied the Narragansett Bay region, each governed according to its own principles, each a refuge for people who had been expelled from or rejected by the more powerful neighboring colonies.
Williams traveled to England in 1643 and obtained a parliamentary patent for Providence Plantations in 1644, providing the legal basis for the colony’s existence. In 1663, King Charles II granted the colony a comprehensive royal charter explicitly establishing religious toleration for all inhabitants, making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter. The colony was officially named the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a name that endured until 2020 when voters approved dropping “and Providence Plantations” from the official designation.
This founding tradition mattered enormously to Rhode Islanders’ understanding of themselves. They were not simply colonists in America; they were people who had chosen their colony precisely because it stood for the principle that no external authority had the right to dictate the terms of their inner lives or their commerce. That instinct, transferred from the religious sphere to the political, would drive everything that followed in the 1760s and 1770s.
British Taxation and the Rhode Island Economy: The Grievances That Built
Rhode Island was, by the eighteenth century, one of the most commercially active and economically independent of all the American colonies. Providence and Newport were among the busiest ports in the Atlantic world, and Rhode Island’s merchants had built a trading network that depended critically on access to sugar and molasses from the French and Spanish Caribbean islands. This trade was technically illegal under existing British mercantile law, but it had been conducted so long and so openly that most Rhode Islanders treated it as simply the normal basis of their economy.
The Sugar Act of 1764 changed everything. The Act imposed duties on sugar and molasses imported into the colonies from non-British sources, and unlike earlier trade legislation that had been loosely enforced, this one came with a new determination to collect. Rhode Island’s government submitted an official remonstrance that acknowledged the technical illegality of much of its Caribbean trade and stated bluntly that strict enforcement would wreck the colony’s economy. The economic complaint was not abstract. Rhode Island’s rum distilleries relied on cheap French and Spanish molasses. Those distilleries supplied the goods that Rhode Island merchants exchanged on the West African coast in the triangular trade. Enforcement of the Sugar Act threatened to collapse a commercial system that had sustained the colony’s prosperity for generations.
To enforce the new mercantile regulations, British revenue ships patrolled the coastal waters of New England with increasing persistence and assertiveness. None was more effective, or more despised in Rhode Island, than the HMS Gaspee.
The Burning of the Gaspee: Rhode Island’s First Act of Armed Resistance
The incident that most dramatically illustrates the character of Rhode Island’s resistance to British authority came not on May 4, 1776, but four years earlier, on the night of June 9 to 10, 1772.
The HMS Gaspee was a British revenue schooner assigned to patrol Narragansett Bay and enforce the customs laws. Its commander was efficient and aggressive in his enforcement, and the ship had made enemies throughout the merchant community of Providence and Newport. On the afternoon of June 9, while chasing the packet sloop Hannah, the Gaspee ran aground on Namquit Point, about seven miles south of Providence. The grounding left the ship stranded and defenseless until the tide rose.
Word of the Gaspee’s situation spread quickly through Providence. That evening, a group of prominent citizens organized by merchant John Brown assembled at Sabin’s Tavern. A party of men, perhaps 50 to 70 in number, boarded longboats and rowed to the stranded vessel. They overpowered the crew, wounded the ship’s commander in the attack, removed everyone from the vessel, and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.
This was the first act of armed rebellion against the British Crown in America, predating even the more famous Boston Tea Party of December 1773 by more than a year. The British government was furious. A Royal Commission of Inquiry was established to identify the perpetrators and bring them to trial in England, a prospect that alarmed colonists across all thirteen colonies because it threatened to deny accused Americans the right to trial by their peers in their own colony. Despite the fact that hundreds of people knew who had participated, the Commission could find no witnesses willing to testify. No one was ever prosecuted for the Gaspee Affair.
The Gaspee Affair, and the establishment of the Royal Commission to investigate it, contributed directly to the formation of Committees of Correspondence across the colonies, which became the organizational infrastructure of colonial resistance. It also contributed to Rhode Island’s call for a Continental Congress. Rhode Island was the first colony to call for such a Congress, when a Providence town meeting on May 17, 1774, proposed the idea. Rhode Island elected the first delegates to the Continental Congress, Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward, on June 15, 1774.
The History.com article on Rhode Island’s declaration of independence provides a concise account of the colony’s path to May 4, 1776, available at the History.com article on Rhode Island renouncing allegiance to George III.
The Road to May 4: Rhode Island’s Accumulating Defiance
In the period between 1774 and 1776, Rhode Island accumulated a series of firsts in colonial resistance that reflected both its independent tradition and the particular intensity of its grievances against British policy.
The Rhode Island General Assembly created the first standing army in the American colonies, raising 1,500 men on April 22, 1775. On June 15, 1775, the first naval engagement of the American Revolution took place in Narragansett Bay, when an American sloop commanded by Captain Abraham Whipple, acting under commission from the Rhode Island General Assembly, chased and captured an armed tender from the British frigate Rose. Later that same month, the General Assembly commissioned two armed sloops, the Katy and the Washington, under Commodore Abraham Whipple, effectively creating the first American naval force, a forerunner of the Continental Navy.
By early 1776, the momentum toward independence was building across all the colonies, but the timing of the final break remained uncertain. Several other colonies had taken significant steps. South Carolina had adopted its own constitution on March 26, 1776. North Carolina had empowered its Continental Congress delegates to concur with others in declaring independence on April 12. Massachusetts had on May 1 replaced all references to the King with references to the state government on civil documents. But none of these acts had explicitly and formally renounced allegiance to the Crown.
Rhode Island did exactly that on May 4, 1776. The Act of Renunciation passed by the General Assembly that day repealed the earlier colonial statute titled “An Act for the more effectual securing to His Majesty the Allegiance of his Subjects in this His Colony and Dominion of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” The preamble of the new act stated the philosophical basis for the repeal in terms that invoked the political contract tradition: that protection and allegiance were reciprocal, and that a king who violated his duties to protect his subjects had broken the compact that gave allegiance its basis. The act declared that George III had entirely departed from the duties and character of a good king and was instead endeavoring to destroy the good people of the colony, introducing fleets and armies to confiscate property and spread devastation.
The Britannica article on Rhode Island’s history covers the colony’s founding, its role in colonial resistance, and the consequences of the American Revolution for the state in detail, available at the Britannica article on Rhode Island’s history.
What the Act Said and What It Did Not Say
The Act of Renunciation of May 4, 1776, was simultaneously bold and carefully limited. It did not declare Rhode Island an independent nation. It did not renounce Parliament or the broader framework of English law and colonial status. What it did do, precisely and specifically, was end the personal allegiance of Rhode Island’s officials and institutions to King George III and replace all references to royal authority in legal documents, court proceedings, commissions, and writs with references to the authority of “the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
Courts that had been the King’s Courts became simply the courts of the colony. Commissions that had been issued in the King’s name were issued in the colony’s name. The oath of loyalty that every Rhode Island official had sworn to the King was abolished. These were practical, institutional changes with profound symbolic significance: the mechanisms of government no longer derived their authority from the Crown.
The passage of the act was made by a unanimous vote in the upper house, the House of Magistrates, and an overwhelming vote in the lower House of Deputies. The only dissenting votes came from the six-member Newport delegation, whose coastal city was most exposed to British naval power and faced the most immediate consequences of defiance.
Rhode Island’s two delegates to the Continental Congress, William Ellery of Newport and Stephen Hopkins of Providence, both voted for the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and both signed the final engrossed copy of the Declaration, becoming two of its 56 signers. On July 18, 1776, the Rhode Island General Assembly convened and ratified the Declaration of Independence. On July 20, the Assembly formally altered the colony’s official name, requiring that the title of the government henceforth be “the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” From May 4 until July 20, Rhode Island had technically remained an “English colony” even while having renounced allegiance to its king.
The Paradox of Rhode Island: First to Defy, Last to Ratify
The colony that was first to renounce allegiance to King George III would prove to be the last to ratify the United States Constitution, and the contrast reveals something important about Rhode Island’s political character.
Rhode Island boycotted the Constitutional Convention of 1787 entirely, refusing to send delegates. Its citizens’ attachment to local sovereignty and their suspicion of centralized authority, the same instincts that had driven Roger Williams into the wilderness in 1636 and had driven Rhode Islanders onto the Gaspee in 1772, made them deeply wary of a new federal government with broad taxing powers. Rhode Island’s economy depended heavily on maritime trade, and the prospect of paying large federal trade duties that would benefit larger states alarmed its merchant class.
The state initially refused to ratify the Constitution and submitted it to a series of town meetings rather than a ratifying convention, a process that produced decisive rejections. Other states threatened to treat Rhode Island as a foreign country and impose trade tariffs. Eventually, the calculation shifted: Rhode Islanders came to realize they would pay heavier trade costs as a non-member state than as a member of the Union. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of the original thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, doing so by the narrow margin of 34 to 32.
The Wikipedia article on Rhode Island traces this arc from the colony’s earliest years through its role in both the Revolution and the constitutional debates, available at the Wikipedia article on Rhode Island.
Rhode Island continues to observe May 4 as Rhode Island Independence Day. Since 1909, when a 25-year campaign by Smithfield town clerk James S. Slater resulted in the official designation, the date has been recognized as a state holiday. The smallest colony with the longest name had given the American independence movement its first definitive legislative act, demonstrating that the logic of liberty the colonies had inherited from the founding generation was, in Rhode Island at least, something people were willing to put into law well before July 4.
