In Rhode Island, 1842, politician Thomas W. Dorr (calling himself “The People’s Governor”) threatened civil war throughout New England. His main target was the famous colonial Charter issued by King Charles II in 1663. In the 19th century the document of world historical importance—the planet’s oldest existing written constitution at the time, and surely the most liberal in its own day. Radical Jacksonian and America’s first professional historian, George Bancroft, declared, “Nowhere in the world have life, LIBERTY, and property been safer than in Rhode Island.”

Further Readings/References:

Chaput, Erik. The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. 2013.

Conley, Patrick T. Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island’s Constitutional Development, 1776-1841. Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society. 1977.

Shalhope, Robert. “The Radicalism of Thomas Dorr,” Reviews in American History 2, No. 3 (Sep., 1974): 383-389.

Dan King, “The Life and Times of Thomas Wilson Dorr” (1859)

Music by Kai Engel

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