Thomas Wilson Dorr was born in Providence on November 5, 1805, the eldest of the seven children of Sullivan Dorr, a wealthy merchant and business leader, and Lydia Allen, a prominent socialite and sister of noted inventor Zachariah Allen and governor and U.S. senator Philip Allen. Dorr, studious and dutiful as a youth, graduated with honors from Harvard in 1823, the second-ranking pupil in his class. He then studied law in New York City under Chancellor James Kent, passed the bar, toured the country, practiced law in New York, and returned to Providence in 1833 to begin a life of public service.
As a Whig state legislator (1834–37), the leader of a constitutional reform effort (1834–37), a Democratic state chairman (1840–41), a political insurrectionary (1842), and the leader of the Equal Rights wing of the Rhode Island Democratic Party (1842–54), Dorr was the catalyst that hastened the demise of the Royal Charter of 1663 and the adoption of a written state constitution. Ironically, neither document met with his approval, for his egalitarian philosophy was best expressed in the so-called People’s Constitution, of which Dorr was the principal draftsman. Dorr’s attempt to put this constitution into effect by invoking his version of the Lockean doctrine of popular constituent sovereignty precipitated the Dorr War in 1842. Dorr’s political goals—”free suffrage” with no discrimination against the foreign-born, “one-man, one-vote,” an independent judiciary, a more powerful and dynamic executive, and the secret ballot—were not permanently achieved in Rhode Island during his lifetime. Still, they placed him in the front rank of the political reformers of Jacksonian America.
Late in December 1841, the progressive People’s Constitution was approved in a three-day referendum by a majority of Rhode Island’s free white adult males acting in defiance of the existing state authorities. In April 1842, Dorr, a reluctant candidate, was elected the “people’s governor” under this new regime, and the state was confronted with two rival governments. Generally, urban Whigs and rural Democrats opposed the Dorrites and united to form the Law and Order Party. These conservatives prevailed, and after surrendering to them, Dorr was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for treason against the state.
The Whig-led Law and Order coalition dominated state politics for the remainder of the decade despite a brief intraparty dispute in 1845 over whether to liberate Dorr. Counting the time he spent awaiting trial, the vanquished reformer was confined to prison for a total of twenty months. This ordeal shattered his fragile health and contributed to his political and physical demise. Dorr’s liberation, finally achieved on June 27, 1845, stirred national interest and was a Democratic issue in the 1844 presidential campaign, as evidenced by the slogan “Polk, Dallas, and Dorr.”
Dorr’s rebellion was no tempest in a teapot; it had national repercussions and enduring significance. The most critical and controversial domestic occurrence of the John Tyler administration eventually involved the president, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Of even greater significance, the Rhode Island upheaval inspired the substantial contributions of John C. Calhoun, John L. O’Sullivan, Orestes Brownson, Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, Benjamin Hallett, and others of similar stature to the theories of suffrage, majority rule, minority rights, and constitutional government.
Dorr’s economic and social concerns are much less known but no less significant. Despite his patrician status, Dorr gradually evolved into a laissez-faire Democrat with a deep aversion toward economic privilege. As a young state legislator, he sponsored the first comprehensive statute regulating state banks, a measure that led to his break with the local Whig Party. The People’s Constitution was permeated with Equal Rights (Locofoco) economic doctrine that sought to curb the abuses of special corporate “privileges” and monopoly grants from the government.
Dorr was also a pioneer of free public education, and his People’s Constitution made education a fundamental right. As a member and then chairman of the Providence School Committee (1836–42), he established that city’s secondary school system and significantly improved teacher education, recruitment and certification, administrative reorganization, and physical facilities. When the famed educational innovator Henry Barnard came to Rhode Island in 1843 and observed the workings of the Providence school system, he announced that his goal as state commissioner was to bring the schools in the other towns up to the standards established by Dorr in the city of Providence.
Dorr was intensely concerned with the status of minorities. His support of equal voting rights for Irish Catholic immigrants was exploited by his opponents and led to the breakup of his reform coalition. Though not an abolitionist, Dorr actively opposed slavery, urged civil rights for Blacks, and worked with the leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society as a delegate to that group’s national convention. Dorr, a bachelor, worked well with local women’s rights leaders, and they played a major role in the agitation leading to his liberation from prison.
In 1851, Dorr’s uncle, Philip Allen, the new leader of Rhode Island’s reform Democrats, captured the governorship for three successive one-year terms because the rural Democrats had decamped from the Law-and-Order Party. When the Allen faction (called “Dorr Democrats”) pardoned Dorr, reversed his treason conviction, and attempted to reenact the People’s Constitution, the agrarians again defected. At this juncture, Know-Nothingism and the rise of the Republican Party produced a major political realignment in Rhode Island.
Dorr participated in the Equal Rights resurgence of the early 1850s as a political strategist and advisor to his popular uncle. As the tide of reform began to ebb, he died in Providence on December 27, 1854, from respiratory problems aggravated by his twenty-month incarceration in damp, poorly ventilated-prisons. He was buried in a relatively modest family plot in Swan Point Cemetery.
Dorr is best known as the determined leader of the Dorr Rebellion, Rhode Island’s crisis in constitutionalism, but he was much more than merely a rebel or a political reformer. He was a man of quality education, with a high social standing and diverse intellectual and social interests.
Some American historians have suggested the name “Age of Egalitarianism” for the period from the mid-1820s to the mid-1850s because a passion for equality of opportunity was the overriding theme of political, social, and economic activists. A more broadly based democracy, an assault on neomercantilism and government-granted privilege, and a crusade for a more just, humane, and upwardly mobile social order were hallmarks of the era. This was the first great age of American reform, and Dorr was in the midst of it as an archetypical Equal Rights proponent.
By the end of the turbulent 1850s, the Republicans, who revived the Law-and-Order coalition, dominated state politics and would continue to do so until the New Deal. The urban wing of the Democratic Party, appealing mainly to Equal Rights advocates and Irish Catholics, was consigned to minority status until well into the twentieth century. They enshrined Dorr as their hero, and in 1935, when the state’s Democrats finally gained control of the governorship and both houses of the General Assembly via the “Bloodless Revolution” for the first time since 1854, Governor Theodore Francis Green justified the coup by telling a statewide radio audience that his party’s success was inspired by “the spiritual presence of the patron saint of the Democratic Party in Rhode Island—Thomas Wilson Dorr!”
Thomas Wilson Dorr is a pivotal figure in Rhode Island history. He drew his heritage, training, and moral values from the old order and applied them to the betterment of the new. He exemplified the best traits attributed to old-stock Rhode Islanders: individualism, daring, defiance of unjust authority, and a passion for democracy and self-determination. Simultaneously, he inaugurated the role of patrician reformer typified in the modern era by such Rhode Island statesmen as Theodore Francis Green (who admittedly drew inspiration from Dorr), Claiborne Pell, and John Hubbard Chafee.
Dorr thus served as the bridge between early and modern Rhode Island, between old stock and new, and between the charter government that served Rhode Island for 180 years and the present constitutional order. More than any other person, he influenced the governmental transition from the old Royal Charter regime to a new political system based on a written constitution. Although his preferred basic law—the People’s Constitution—was denied implementation, its provisions and principles were gradually incorporated into the Rhode Island Constitution throughout the century and a half since Dorr’s defeat.
But Dorr was not merely a force for constitutional change; he was also the quintessential reformer of America’s first great age of reformist activity. In the economic realm, he drafted and secured the enactment of the first statute in any state providing for governmental regulation of state-chartered banks, and he worked diligently for the abolition of imprisonment for debt. He might well be described as Rhode Island’s first consumer advocate. Dorr also attacked neomercantilism, whereby the state granted special privileges and monopolies to private business corporations; such a practice, he declared, violated equal rights. Dorr pioneered his advocacy of an economic system regulated in the public interest—the modern regulated economy.
Dorr’s reformist zeal also extended to the social order. He was an early member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Rhode Islander Arnold Buffum, and he fought unsuccessfully to enfranchise Blacks via the People’s Constitution. In the aftermath of his defeat, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier extolled his efforts. Though Dorr despised slavery, eventually, he came to believe that the demeanor and demands of the radical abolitionists could destroy the Union.
Governor Dorr also encouraged the involvement of women in the public sphere. His leadership of the People’s Party in 1842 inspired the first large-scale involvement of Rhode Island women in the political process. Support of Dorr’s cause and sympathy for him because of the harsh treatment accorded the deposed people’s governor led women to undertake such unprecedented political activities as forming free-suffrage associations, raising funds for the relief of those imprisoned for supporting the people’s government, staging rallies and clambakes in support of reform, organizing a campaign for Dorr’s liberation and writing political and legal defenses of the people’s movement, most notably Might and Right (1844) by Frances Harriet Whipple.
In addition, Dorr made a significant contribution toward the development of free public education in Rhode Island, both as a state legislator, in which office he earmarked the famous federal deposit of 1836 for the permanent school fund and as a member and then president of the Providence School Committee, where he played the leading role in implementing such modern improvements as the appointment of Providence’s first superintendent of schools, the establishment of teacher certification and training programs, the creation of Rhode Island’s first public high school and the construction of modern school facilities.
On the burning issue of foreign immigration, Dorr attacked the nativism of his day. As early as 1833, when nativist violence first erupted, he made a public appeal for toleration toward Roman Catholics. Dorr’s exhortation to his fellow Rhode Islanders revealed his humanity: “It is quite time that a better state of feeling should prevail and that narrow illiberal prejudices should be discarded. Whatever good the division into sects may have done, it is time that they should overlook the party lines behind which they have entrenched themselves and extend to each other the hand of fellowship. If men cannot agree on religious opinions—and, from the constitution of the human mind, such an agreement can never exist—they certainly can agree to differ peaceably. There is a common ground of goodwill and charity on which they can and ought to meet as brethren.”
Consistent with his principles and pronouncements, Dorr befriended and defended the Irish Catholic immigrants of the 1840s, structuring the People’s Constitution to give naturalized Irishmen equal rights to those of native-born citizens. He helped to organize the defense for John Gordon in the famous Amasa Sprague murder trial. Then he spoke against the death penalty meted out to this hapless Irish Catholic merchant of Spragueville.
Optimistic, articulate, and concerned were among Thomas Dorr’s qualities. Belief in fundamental human goodness, the brotherhood of men, and majoritarian rule were basic articles in his political creed. Liberty and equality were, to him, as much as to any reformer of this remarkable age, the indispensable conditions of human activity.
Dorr’s 1843 lament—”All is lost save honor”—may well have been the story of his rebellion and his life, but it is neither his legacy nor the ultimate verdict of history. At the conclusion of his trial for treason, Dorr made an impassioned plea: “From the sentence of the court, I appeal to the People of our State and of our Country. They shall decide between us. I commit myself without distrust to their final award.”
Dorr died on Dec. 27, 1854, at the age of 49. He was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 1973.
To his credit—and ours—the confidence of this optimistic, if somewhat naive, Democrat continues to experience an inexorable, though painfully gradual, vindication in Rhode Island. In the many decades since his defeat and death, the judgment against him from Justice Job Durfee’s biased court has been appropriately overruled by time and experience.
For further reading:
● The Makers of Modern Rhode Island, Patrick T. Conley, History Press, 2012.
● “Thomas Wilson Dorr.” Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936.
● Erik J. Chaput, The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (University Press of Kansas, 2013)
● The Dorr Rebellion Project at the Phillips Memorial Library, Providence College, by Eric Chaput and Russell DeSimone.
● Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Race in Antebellum Rhode Island from the Rhode Island State Archives.