By Patrick T. Conley
The 1841-42 fight over democracy in Rhode Island, often called “the Dorr Rebellion,” had an ugly anti-Catholic element that persisted for decades in state politics. When reformers led by patrician Thomas Wilson Dorr framed a “People’s Constitution” to replace the outdated royal charter of 1663, opponents invoked the ethnic card.
Among its many limitations, the charter did not guarantee democracy – it permitted laws to limit voting to male citizens who owned real estate. Defenders of the status quo, especially rural Rhode Islanders, tried to meet the reformers halfway, first with the “Freeman’s Constitution” and then the “Law and Order Constitution.” These granted suffrage without qualification – except for naturalized citizens (mostly Irish Catholics) who still had to own real estate to gain the franchise.
In debates over rival constitutions, nativistic rhetoric became inflammatory. One broadside told natives that the People’s Constitution “would place your government, your civil and political institutions, your public schools, and perhaps your religious privileges, under the control of the Pope of Rome, through the medium of thousands of naturalized foreign Catholics.”
This widely disseminated leaflet further advised that support of the Freeman’s Constitution was essential unless the native-born wished “to see a Catholic bishop, at the head of a posse of Catholic priests, and a band of their servile dependents, take the field to subvert your institutions under the sanction of a State Constitution.”
As one suffragist complained in a letter to Dorr, “Men were called upon not to vote for a constitution but to vote against Irishmen.”
The Providence Journal, under editor Henry Bowen Anthony, added that “The balance of power rests in the hands of the Senators from the agricultural areas of the state. Where will the balance be under Messrs. Dorr, Brown and Company . . . Where but among 2,500 foreigners and the hundreds more who will be imported. They will league and band together, and usurp our native political power….
“Their priests and leaders will say to a political party as they say in New York City, give us by law every opportunity to perpetuate our spiritual despotism. At the feet of these men will you lay down your freedom . . . Foreigners still remain foreign and are still embraced by mother church. He still bows down to her rituals, worships the host, and obeys and craves absolution from the priest. He cannot be assimilated.”
Eventually the existing state government called out the militia to prevent Dorr’s party from implementing the People’s Constitution. They invoked martial law and forced Dorr into exile.
With reformers largely sitting out, a greatly reduced electorate passed the Law and Order Constitution in November 1842. Among its reactionary features was the requirement that naturalized citizens own real restate to vote and hold office – which made Rhode Island’s basic law the most nativistic in America.
When Irish Catholics campaigned in the 1860s (?) to remove this restriction, Anthony, now a U.S. Senator, declared his unyielding opposition — even for Civil War veterans. Anthony also used his influence to limit the U.S. constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment to the Black vote, thereby preserving Rhode Island’s discriminatory suffrage from federal oversight.
As Anthony’s Journal opined, if that restriction is removed, “Rhode Island will no longer be Rhode Island when this is done. It will become a province of Ireland: St. Patrick will take the place of Roger Williams, and the shamrock will supersede the anchor and Hope.”
Anthony took this position to his grave in 1884. Four years later the people voted to amend the state constitution to remove this restriction. But political leaders put forth this change primarily for partisan political purposes, rather than for equal rights.
Patrick T. Conley is historian laureate of Rhode Island, and co-author of Catholicism in Rhode Island: The Formative Era. Reach him at ptconley@aol.com.