Rhode Island in 1840

Rhode Island’s population in 1840 was 108,830, substantially more than the 68,825 counted in 1790. Although population growth didn’t keep pace with the national rate, the state was a leader in America’s Industrial Revolution. As historian William McLoughlin summarized it,

The economic fact of major importance in the early 1840s was the enormous influx of cheap labor from Ireland, providing the manpower, womanpower, and childpower for the tremendous growth in the textile business in following years. And then, of cultural significance, the coming of the Irish brought the first serious clashes between the old Yankee Protestants and new Roman Catholic forces. These reached a peak of infamy at the end of the decade with the Know-Nothing movement and continued to be a source of tension for the next century….

Finally, of course, the 1840s are an important turning point in the state’s technological development. In this decade steam power finally replaced waterpower in the factories, and the Corliss steam engine, invented by a Rhode Islander and manufactured here, was the key to that important transformation. Steam power required coal, and coal became a major shipping import along with cotton and immigrants. With steam power the railroad replaced the horse and wagon as the major source of inland transportation, and the steamboat rapidly replaced the clipper ship. The 1840s also brought the successful invention of the telegraph, enabling Rhode Islanders to keep in constant touch with the stock market, the fluctuations in the price of cotton, and their many customers at home and abroad. [William G. McLoughlin, “Ten Turning Points in Rhode Island History” in Rhode Island History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (1986), pp. 45-46.]

Although Rhode Island was on the cutting edge of industrialism, politically it lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Since the Revolution, historian J. Stanley Lemons points out, “Rhode Island had evolved from the most to the least democratic state.” Only white adult males owning property worth at least $134 were eligible to vote; by 1830 this excluded over 50% of that group. The charter lacked any procedure for amending voting requirements or reapportioning the legislature. Rural landowners, increasingly outnumbered by the growing urban population, were entirely willing to exercise minority rule. As Lemons says,

The Dorr War was a culminating point for political, social, ethnic, and religious tensions that built up as a consequence of industrial and urban development…The dominant political power in Rhode Island, the landowning freeholders, refused to budge….Calls for reform started in the 1790s and were repeated every decade. The malapportionment of seats in the General Assembly was more than matched by the increasing proportions of the disenfranchised….The freeholders feared not only the loss of political power, but also religious and cultural submergence.

Not until the suffrage movement held the extralegal People’s Convention in 1841 and wrote an overwhelmingly approved constitution did the landowners begin to undertake some reforms. When the landowners’ version of a constitution was rejected in a referendum and the suffrage supporters attempted to impose their popularly approved constitution, the situation flared into the “Dorr War.” [J. Stanley Lemons, “Rhode Island’s Ten Turning Points: A Second Appraisal” in Rhode Island History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May 1986), pp. 62-63.]