In the patent of 1644 the entire colony was called Providence Plantations. On March 13, 1644, the Portsmouth-Newport General Court changed the name of the island from Aquidneck to the Isle of Rhodes or Rhode Island. The official designation for the province as a whole in the charter of 1663, therefore, was Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The charter was suspended at the beginning of the Andros regime in 1686, but was restored again after the Revolution of 1689. The closing years of the 17th cen tury were characterized by a gradual transition from agricultural to commercial activities. Newport became the centre of an exten sive business in piracy, privateering, smuggling and legitimate trade. Cargoes of rum, manufactured from West Indian sugar and molasses, were exported to Africa and exchanged for slaves to be sold in the southern colonies and the West Indies. The pas sage of the Sugar Act of April 5, 1764, and the steps taken by the British Government to enforce the Navigation acts seriously affected this trade.
The people of Rhode Island played a prominent part in the struggle for independence. On June 9, 1772, the "Gaspee," a British vessel which had been sent over to enforce the acts of trade and navigation, ran aground in Narragansett bay and was burned to the water's edge by a party of men from Providence. Nathanael Greene, a native of Rhode Island, was made com mander of the Rhode Island militia in May 1775, and a major general in the Continental army in Aug. 1776, and in the latter capacity he served with ability until the close of the war. In the year 1776, Gen. Howe sent a detachment of his army under General Henry Clinton to seize Newport as a base of operations for reducing New England, and the city was occupied by the British on Dec. 8, 1776. To capture this British garrison, later increased to 6,000 men, the co-operation of about Io,000 men (mostly New England militia) under Maj.-Gen. John Sullivan, and a French fleet carrying 4,000 French regulars under Count D'Estaing, was planned in the summer of 1778. On Aug. 9, Sul
livan crossed to the north end of the island of Rhode Island, but as the French were disembarking on Conanicut Island, Lord Howe arrived with the British fleet. Count D'Estaing hastily re-em barked his troops and sailed out to meet Howe. For two days the hostile fleets manoeuvred for positions, and then they were dis persed by a severe storm. On the 2oth, D'Estaing returned to the port with his fleet badly crippled, and only to announce that he should sail to Boston to refit. The American officers protested but in vain, and on the 3oth the Americans, learning of the ap proach of Lord Howe's fleet with 5,000 troops under Clinton, decided to abandon the island. The British evacuated Newport on Oct. 25, 1779, and the French fleet was stationed here from July 1780 to 1781.
The influence of Roger Williams' ideas and the peculiar con ditions under which the first settlements were established have tended to differentiate the history of Rhode Island from that of the other New England States. In 1640 the General Court of Massachusetts declared that the representatives of Aquidneck were "not to be capitulated withal either for themselves or the people of the isle where they inhabit," and in 1644 and again in 1648 the application of the Narragansett settlers for admission to the New England Confederacy was refused except on condition that they should pass under the jurisdiction of either Massachu setts or Plymouth. Rhode Island was one of the first communities to advocate and to put into practice religious freedom and political individualism.
The individualistic principle was shown in the jealousy of the towns toward the central Government, and in the establishment of legislative supremacy over the executive and the judiciary. The legislature migrated from county to county up to 1854, and there continued to be two centres of government until 1900. The de pendence of the judiciary upon the legislature was maintained until 1860, and the governor is still shorn of certain powers which are customary in other States. In the main the rural towns have adhered most strongly to the old individualistic sentiment, whereas the cities have kept more in touch with the modern nationalistic trend of thought. This was shown, for example, in the struggle for the ratification of the Federal Constitution. Under the Articles of Confederation it was principally Rhode Island that defeated the proposal to authorize Congress to levy an impost duty of 5% mainly as a means of meeting the debts of the central Government. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to frame a Constitution for a stronger Federal Government, the agriculturists of Rhode Island were afraid that the movement would result in an interference with their local privileges, and the State refused to send delegates, and not until the Senate had passed a bill for severing commercial relations between the United States and Rhode Island, did the latter, in May 1790, ratify the Federal Constitution, and then only by a majority of two votes. Rhode Island, like the rest of New England, was opposed to the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. During the Civil War it sent 23,457 men into the service of the Union.