This essay is an expanded version of an address delivered on Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2012, to Infantry Lodge Associates at the Squantum Club, East Providence, at the invitation of Brigadier Generals Richard J. Valente, commanding, and Thomas M. Frazer, administrator; delivered again at the Fabre Line Club on December 12, 2012.
Rhode Island’s observance of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 has been about as enthusiastic as the state’s support for that war itself. The current commemoration of that conflict, hailed by historians as “America’s Second War for Independence,” is in sharp contrast to our enthusiastic observance of our first War for Independence–the American Revolution. As the volunteer chairman of the Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission (ri76), I had the pleasure and good fortune to be involved in the myriad of activities associated with America’ s birthday. These included the largest gathering of Tall Ships in our history, huge parades and reenactments, numerous historical publications, a comprehensive commemorative athletic program, the refurbishing and ground-level display of the Independent Man, dozens of cultural events staged by the eighteen specially created Rhode Island ethnic heritage committees, and innumerable local bicentennial activities in the only American state where every municipality became an official bicentennial community. And these were merely the highlights!
Now, in 2012, there is no volunteer state bicentennial commission and virtually no interest in America’s Second War for Independence, except for the efforts of the Woonsocket Museum of Work and Culture, the reenactors at Lincoln’s Heathside Mansion, and a Newport-based nonprofit group that is constructing, at great expense, a 132-foot-long steel-hulled sail training vessel named the Oliver Hazard Perry. This ship is to be completed by September 2013, a date that will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the famed Rhode Island commodore’s crucial victory in the Battle of Lake Erie.
Two centuries ago most Rhode Islanders opposed the War of 1812 and derisively called it “Mr. Madison’s War.” The unsuccessful policies of economic coercion employed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison from 1807 onward, aimed at pressuring warring England and France to respect American neutral rights on the high seas, had crippled this state’s commerce. England’s impressment of American seamen into the Royal Navy and seizures of our merchant vessels by both England and France nonetheless persisted. This deliberate violation of American rights prompted Madison to propose, and Congress to approve, a declaration of war against England, the greater, and more vulnerable offender, in June 1812.
The agrarian-based Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and Madison generally supported the vote for war. The commercially oriented Federalist Party opposed it. Federalists feared war with England, the “Mistress of the Seas,” would destroy all American commerce and expose our coastline to English raids.
In Rhode Island’s elections of 1811, the Federalist Party seized control of state government from the Democratic-Republicans in reaction against the commercial and allegedly pro-French policies of Jefferson and Madison. Under the Federalist leadership of Governor William Jones and the powerful, like-minded General Assembly, the state opposed the war in various ways, beginning with a demonstration in the coastal towns where flags were flown at half-staff, church bells were tolled, and stores closed for a day, and later by refusing to provide militia or financial assistance to aid the American military effort. In November 1813 Jones delivered a Thanksgiving Day message that urged the president and American supporters of war to repent “for all their personal and national sins.” In February 1814 the General Assembly voted against assuming the state’s share of the federal tax to finance the war, rejecting an arrangement that “would release the general government from the odium of collecting the tax which their own mad policy has brought upon the country.”
That Governor Jones strongly opposed this second was with England is ironic in view of his varied and distinguished record during the American Revolution. Jones first served as a captain in Colonel Daniel Hitchcock’s Rhode Island Continental regiment. His militarily active term included a winter at Valley Forge. Jones then volunteered for duty as a captain of marines under the command of Commodore Abraham Whipple, an assignment that resulted first in his delivery of instructions to the American delegation in Paris in June 1778 after the ratification of the treaty of amity and commerce with France and, finally, in his capture by the British at the Battle of Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. Jones was a proud original member of the military Society of Cincinnati, holding a diploma signed by George Washington and America’s first secretary of war, Henry Knox, an association that made his obstructionist policies and his subsequent pacificism even more unusual.
During the Revolution the Jones family had moved from British-occupied Newport to the relative safety of Providence, where William Jones married Anne Dunn, maintained a profitable hardware business, and became active in politics as a Federalist. Prior to his election to the governorship, Jones had served as a representative from Providence in the General Assembly, and in May 1809 he was named Speaker of the House. His legislative leadership position facilitated his subsequent rapport with the General Assembly during the hotly disputed encounter with England.
Historian Harvey Strum has closely chronicled Rhode Island’s litany of official opposition to the War of 1812. He has also documented the fact that some Rhode Island shippers actually supplied goods to the British navy in the waters off Block Island. A few resourceful merchants even arranged to have their ships “captured” by the British and then gave a portion of their cargo as ransom. Others carried on a brisk commercial relationship with Canada’s maritime provinces. Such actions made these individuals traitors as well as traders, but none were ever prosecuted as such.
As the conflict continued, our Federalist political leaders moved from reluctance and defiance to action that bordered on disloyalty to the Union. In December 1814, Federalist delegations from the New England states (Rhode Island included) met in convention at Hartford, where they approved a series of states’ rights proposals that would have seriously crippled the national war effort. Before these resolutions could be presented to Congress, news of Andrew Jackson’s resounding victory at New Orleans and the signing of a peace treaty by our negotiators at Ghent discredited the Hartford conventioneers and their demands. Defiant to the end, the Rhode Island General Assembly tabled a resolution congratulating General Jackson for his success.
Given this historical scenario, Rhode Island’s reluctance to memorialize the conflict in 2012 is understandable. The depth and persistence here of the current Great Recession also dampens enthusiasm–my own included. But the heroic exploits or achievements of a few Rhode Islanders should never be forgotten or ignored.
First and foremost is the aforementioned Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, born in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, on August 23, 1785, the eldest son of Christopher Perry, a Revolutionary War sailor from an old-line Rhode Island family, and Sarah Wallace (Alexander) Perry, an immigrant from Ireland. Christopher met Sarah when he was confined to a British internment camp in Kinsale, Ireland, as a war prisoner. After the conflict Christopher sailed back to Ireland to bring Sarah to America.
Oliver and his younger brother, Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858), who opened Japan to Western trade and influence, both received an educational foundation from their mother and learned maritime sciences from their father and from schoolmasters in Newport, where the family eventually moved.
The newly created Navy Department (established in 1798 under Federalist auspices) appointed Oliver a midshipman in April 1799 and assigned him to his father’s Warren-built frigate General Greene, where he saw combat during the limited naval war with France. During the next several years Oliver served in the Mediterranean Sea and engaged in various skirmishes with the Barbary pirates of North Africa to prevent them from raiding American shipping.
From 1807 until the outbreak of the War of 1812, Perry was assigned to duty along America’s east coast. In 1811 he married Elizabeth Champlin Mason, a member of a prominent Newport family, with whom he had four sons and a daughter.
When the War of 1812 was declared, the experienced Perry sought a naval command, and in early 1813 his request was granted; Perry was given instructions to build, assemble, and lead a fleet on Lake Erie that would prevent the British and Canadians from launching an amphibious attack on the coastline of western New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio.
By September 1813 Perry commanded a squadron of ten ships, mounting fifty-five guns, which he stationed at Put-in-Bay, located off an island just north of present-day Port Clinton, Ohio. From this base Perry engaged a British fleet under Captain Robert H. Barclay on September 10, 1813, in the famous Battle of Lake Erie. Lasting less than five hours, the encounter was marked by bitter fighting and heroic determination by Perry, whose flagship Lawrence was in the thick of the action. At 3:00 p.m., when Barclay surrendered his entire Lake Erie squadron, Perry sent his famous message to General William Henry Harrison (known as “Old Tippecanoe”), commander of the northwestern theater of war: “We have met the enemy and they are ours! Two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop.” Notable is the fact that three of Perry’s nine ships were commanded by Rhode Island sailors–Thomas Brownell, Stephen Champlin, and Thomas Almy– and many of his seamen were Rhode Islanders.
Perry’s great strategic victory made the twenty-eight-year-old sailor an immediate American hero, elevating him to national prominence and earning him a captaincy and command of the frigate Java, which he sailed until war’s end in 1815. Following a tour of duty in the Mediterranean with the Java, Perry was dispatched by President James Monroe to South America to open diplomatic relations with Simon Bolivar (called “the Liberator”), the leader of the colonial revolt against Spanish rule. After a journey into the interior of Venezuela, Perry contracted yellow fever and died in August 1819. His crew buried him at Port-of-Spain on the island of Trinidad, but in December 1826 his remains were brought to Newport and reinterred there in Island Cemetery. Oliver Hazard Perry’s death at the age of thirty-four cut short a most promising naval and diplomatic career.
Perry’s significance in American history is based upon his Lake Erie victory, which facilitated the American invasion of western Ontario by General Harrison and allowed General Harrison’s American army to defeat the British in this region thereby securing the Northwest Territory and opening the West to future American settlement. Gerard Altoff, former chief ranger at Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial on Lake Erie, near Port Clinton, has become the leading authority on that crucial skirmish, while former Rhode Island Historical Society curator Nathaniel Shipton has documented the role of Rhode Islanders in that fateful encounter.
The battle on Lake Erie also produced another Rhode Island naval hero, albeit one of lesser rank and renown. His name was Usher Parsons, and he was destined to become Rhode Island’s foremost physician of the early nineteenth century. Born in Alfred, Maine, on August 18, 1788, Usher was the youngest of the nine children of Abigail Blunt and William Parsons, a farmer and trader. Though Usher had little formal schooling, he began the study of medicine as an apprentice to a physician in Alfred and then to Dr. John Warren of Boston. Parsons was licensed to practice by the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1812, and he immediately gained valuable experience as a surgeon’s mate for Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie. Parsons’s distinguished naval service brought him not only a medal and prize money but also a promotion to the rank of surgeon and Commodore Perry’s praise and friendship.
Parsons’s performance in the pivotal battle was extraordinary. Because of a temporary illness afflicting his two associate medics on Perry’s flagship Lawrence, the whole duty of attending to nearly a hundred wounded men and as many more sick with fever fell squarely on twenty-five-year-old Parsons. In a letter to the secretary of the Navy, Commodore Perry praised Parsons’s heroic effort: “Of Dr. Usher Parsons, surgeon’s mate, I cannot say too much . . . [I]t must be pleasing to you, sir, to reflect, that of the whole number wounded, only three have died. I can only say that, in the event of my having another command, I should consider myself fortunate in having him with me as a surgeon.”
After several years of naval service, including duty with Perry against the North African pirates and a European cruise on Commodore Thomas MacDonough’s frigate Guerrière, a trip that gave him the opportunity to meet with several prominent English and French physicians, Parsons earned his M.D. at Harvard in 1818. He became a professor of surgery and anatomy at Dartmouth College in 1820 for a brief period before coming to Providence in 1822 to assume a professorship at Brown University’s short-lived medical school. In that year Parsons married Mary Holmes of Cambridge, Massachusetts, elder sister of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the eminent poet and father of the noted jurist. Mary died in 1825, leaving Usher with one son, Charles, who also became a prominent physician. Mary’s death so devastated her husband that he never remarried.
In 1820 Parsons published Sailor’s Physician, a manual of sea medicine for use on merchant vessels. Retitled Physician for Ships, the volume went through four editions and remained a standard work in its field for decades. Dr. Parsons was president of the Rhode Island Medical Society from 1837 to 1839, a founder and president of the Providence Medical Society, and one of the organizers of the American Medical Association, serving as its acting president in 1854. He also led the campaign for the establishment of Rhode Island Hospital and lived just long enough to see that dream realized in the autumn of 1868. His eventful life is the subject of a biography written by Dr. Seebert Goldowsky, entitled Yankee Surgeon (1988), and Parsons’s War of 1812 diary has been edited and published by prominent military historian John C. Fredricksen.
The Ocean State’s third U.S. naval hero is less known locally than either Perry or Parsons, but he was no less intrepid. Captain William Henry Allen was born in Providence on October 21, 1784, the son of Sarah Jones, sister of Governor William Jones, and Major William Allen of Providence, a distinguished Revolutionary War soldier, later a brigadier general of militia and sheriff of Providence County.
Little is known of Captain Allen’s education, but his surviving journals and letters show a skilled penman and artist whose sketches in his writings were well executed. Allen wanted a naval career, so his influential parents, despite serious misgivings, prevailed upon U.S. Senator Ray Greene to secure his appointment as a midshipman in April 1800. The purpose of the fifteen-year-old Allen’s first cruise–a voyage from Philadelphia to North Africa aboard the George Washington–was to bring tribute to the dey of Algiers so that the dey’s pirates would not attack American shipping.
In June 1807, as an officer on the U.S.S. Chesapeake, Allen allegedly fired the only shot at the H.M.S. Leopard when that British warship boldly impressed American seamen from the decks of this U.S. naval vessel, an incident precipitating the crisis with England that led to President Jefferson’s December 1807 embargo.
During the early part of the War of 1812, Allen was serving as Captain Stephen Decatur’s first lieutenant on the frigate United States when the American vessel gained a decisive victory over the Macdeonian. Allen himself brought the British warship into Newport as a prize on December 6, 1812. Allen’s distinguished service soon earned him his own vessel, the brig Argus, a two-masted light cruising vessel, 95½ feet long on the upper deck, where eighteen 24-pound cannon and two 12-pound long guns were mounted.
Allen and his ship have been memorialized by naval historian Ira Dye in a meticulously researched book entitled The Fatal Cruise of the Argus: Two Captains in the War of 1812 (1994). As Dye recounts Allen boldly sailed his new command into the waters off the British Isles, where he became a scourge to England in the summer of 1813. By mid-August he had attacked twenty vessels, burning, sinking, or destroying the cargo of all but two of them. This tally, says Dye, “was more than any other single American warship of any size had done or was to do” during the War of 1812.
Then, on August 14, 1813, Allen rashly chose to turn and fight, rather than easily evade, a pursuing British warship, the H.M.S. Pelican, under the command of Captain John Maples. The decision was fatal. In a pitched battle the out-gunned Argus was beaten, and the Pelican took ninety-seven prisoners. Twelve American sailors were killed, including Allen, who succumbed to wounds four days after the encounter. Ironically the foes of the heroic Captain Allen gave him a huge military funeral in Plymouth, England, where he now lies buried in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, despite the wishes of some to return him to Rhode Island for reinterment, as was Commodore Perry.
The work that Captain Allen performed as a naval officer was duplicated (and then some) by Bristol merchant James DeWolf. In wars during the age of sail, it was common for a government to give what were called “letters of marque and reprisal” to private shipowners that allowed them to outfit and arm their vessels–then called “privateers”–in order for these quasi-warships to attack the commerce of the enemy. The most famous and successful privateer of the War of 1812–fittingly named the Yankee–belonged to James DeWolf.
“Captain Jim,” as he was known locally, was a most unlikely hero. He was born in Bristol in 1764, the son of Mark Antony DeWolf and Abigail Potter, daughter of Simeon Potter, the town’s preeminent merchant. James, who served on a privateer during the American Revolution, was destined for a career in commerce, but while Providence merchants of his era engaged in the China Trade, DeWolf preferred Africa. Prior to 1808, when Congress banned the foreign slave trade, DeWolf brought hundreds of slaves from Africa to Charleston, South Carolina, and after 1808 he carried his black cargo to his sugar plantations in Cuba.
When the War of 1812 interrupted his usual and nefarious activity, DeWolf outfitted several privateers including the 160-ton brigantine Yankee, which he armed with eighteen 6- and 9- pound guns. During her six voyages under four different captains, the Yankee seized at least thirty-six enemy prizes (Bristol historian George Howe claims forty-one, but his own narrative totals only thirty-six). These captures inflicted approximately three million dollars of losses upon England and brought about one million dollars in prize money to DeWolf’s home port. According to pioneer Bristol historian Wilfred A. Munro, the Yankee “inundated Bristol with her golden stream.”
In 1821 the Rhode Island General Assembly, undisturbed by his unsavory past, chose the very wealthy and powerful DeWolf to be a United States senator. At the time of his election, he occupied the position of Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. DeWolf resigned from the U.S. Senate on October 31, 1825, and he returned to the state legislature in 1829, where he served until his death on December 21, 1837.
Some individual Rhode Island recruits of the Democratic-Republican persuasion, mostly farm boys, joined with Connecticut volunteers in a few regular units, most notably the 25th Infantry Regiment, which distinguished itself in battles against the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular veterans on the Niagara frontier in 1814 at Chippewa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie. For the most part, however, the men of the Ocean State (as it is now called) built and manned coastal fortifications from Newport to Providence. Stay-at-home regular forces in Rhode Island were called “sea-fencibles” in the language of the time, because of their role in defending the coastline. Rhode Island militia activity (and it was considerable) consisted of helping these regulars staff the state’s defenses. These protective facilities extended from Newport’s Fort Adams and the more heavily garrisoned Fort Wolcott on nearby Goat Island to the head of Narragansett Bay, where Fort William Henry on Field’s Point guarded the entrance to Providence’s harbor. Further northward, fortifications were constructed by militia and apprehensive citizen-volunteers on Fox Point and Kettle Point, the latter on what was then the Massachusetts bank of the Providence River.
The militia’s only foreign foray came in September 1814, when Jones sent five companies to defend Stonington, Connecticut, from a threatened British attack reminiscent of its sack by Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution. The militia’s march was not long; Stonington is a coastal community located just across the Pawcatuck River from Westerly. However, as England got more aggressive, Jones did comply with Madison’s 1814 draft call for 550 Rhode Island volunteers. This state corps was to serve under federal control, but the men would at no time leave the state, and Jones would appoint the officers. Despite a recruitment bounty offered by the General Assembly, less than a third of the federally requested requisition was met by war’s end.
Despite the state’s official disapproval of the War of 1812, Rhode Island produced one of its persuasive legal defenders, Henry Wheaton. This Providence-born editor, court reporter, jurist, diplomat, and expounder of international law was the son of Seth Wheaton, a merchant, civic leader, and banker, and Abigail Wheaton, Seth’s distant cousin. Henry graduated from Brown in 1802, studied civil law in France in 1805-6, and practiced law in Providence until 1812, when his legal defense of the maritime policies of Jefferson and Madison prompted Democratic-Republicans in New York City to offer him the editorship of the National Advocate, their local party newspaper. Writing forcefully and with learning on the questions of international law growing out of the War of 1812, Wheaton was considered the mouthpiece of the Madison administration during his three-year wartime tenure with the paper. He was rewarded with the post of first U. S. Supreme Court reporter in 1816 and performed that job with ability and with praise from jurists and lawyers alike until 1827, when he embarked upon a long and successful diplomatic career. In 1847 Harvard offered him a distinguished lectureship in civil and international law, but he died before he could assume this new position.
Wheaton’s most enduring achievement was his work as an expounder and historian of international law. His classic study Elements of International Law (1836) went through numerous editions and translations. Its excellence has prompted historians to rank Wheaton with John Marshall. James Kent, and Joseph Story as major architects of the American legal system. In addition to his landmark study of international law, Wheaton also translated the Code Napoléon into English and wrote a notable essay on the African slave trade in 1842 after the Amistad incident.
Jonathan Russell, Rhode Island’s sixth wartime luminary, was born in Providence on February 27, 1771, the son and namesake of merchant Jonathan Russell and his wife Abigail. After his graduation from Brown University in 1791 at the top of his class, the young Russell spent several years in the mercantile business. He also became an activist in politics, publishing several pamphlets in support of the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and Madison. Russell’s political advocacy prompted President James Madison to appoint him American diplomatic chargé d’affaires in Paris in 1811, replacing U.S. minister John Armstrong, and then chargé in London after U.S. Minister William Pichney departed in frustration. As chargé when the War of 1812 began, Russell had the honor of informing the British ministry of America’s declaration of war.
Russell was one of the five American commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the conflict, doing so while also serving as U. S. Minister to Sweden from 1814 to 1818. Upon his return to America he settled in Mendon, Massachusetts, and secured election to Congress in 1821. Despite serving only one term, Russell was selected as the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs based upon his European experiences. He died in Milton, Massachusetts, on February 17, 1833, and was interred there in the family plot on his estate.
When this contentious and stalemated conflict was over, North Kingstown-born Gilbert Stuart painted portraits of its heroes. Among Stuart’s subjects were President and Commander in Chief James Madison and his wife Dolley, who courageously saved a number of White House valuables when the British burned Washington, D.C., in August 1814, including Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington, commissioned by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Stuart also did portraits of Secretary of War, and later President, James Monroe; Major General Henry Dearborn, who commanded troops both in the Revolution and on the Niagara frontier during the War of 1812; Commodore Thomas MacDonough, hero of the 1814 Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain; Commodore William Bainbridge, commander of the U.S.S. Constitution (“Old Ironsides”); and Captain James Lawrence of the ill-fated Chesapeake, whose dying words, “Don’t give up the ship!” have echoed through American naval history. Stuart even painted portraits of Congressman John Randolph of Virginia, Madison’s most vocal and acerbic Democratic-Republican critic, and Harrison Gray Otis, a leading Massachusetts Federalist, who was a voice of moderation at the infamous Hartford Convention.
With the coming of peace, Americans–especially Democratic-Republicans–hailed the victories of Perry and Jackson as proof of victory and denounced the Hartford Convention as evidence of treason. Both claims were partisan and exaggerated. However, the bold confrontation with England gave rise to a burst of national pride, and the encounter was soon regarded as “the Second War of American Independence.” I am in agreement with my friend Gordon Wood of Brown University, the most eminent and thoughtful historian of the American founding, with regard to the war’s significance. In his recent book Empire of Liberty, Wood concludes that “the War of 1812 did finally establish for Americans the independence and nationhood of the United States that so many had recently doubted.”
Certainly this war had its vehement doubters. When one considers, as historian Alan Taylor has done, the contrary stances taken during this very unpopular conflict, not only by Federalist politicians, merchants, and anti-administration Democratic-Republican congressional malcontents but also by many recent immigrants from England legally classified as “alien enemies,” as well as by apprehensive Native Americans, from the Shawnee of the northwest southward to the Creeks, who saw their lands threatened by the war’s supporters, it is small wonder that Taylor has titled his new (2010) book about this struggle The Civil War of 1812.
Among its many effects, the War of 1812 vindicated our national honor, reaffirmed our independence, intensified national pride, and earned America respect among the nations of the world. On a more mundane level the war dealt a death blow to the dissenting Federalist Party, even as its economic program–a national bank, a protective tariff, and federally financed internal improvements–was embraced by a majority in the opposition party who soon came to be known as “national Republicans.” The conflict also dissolved the northwest Indian confederacy, whose leader, Tecumseh, was killed in the 1813 Battle of the Thames. Its demise (and his) facilitated western expansion by white settlers and the admission to the Union of five trans-Appalachian states by 1821. Conversely, our reluctant involvement in the Napoleonic Wars led America to embrace an isolationist foreign policy towards Europe for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
The war also revealed the inadequacy of state militias and the defensive gunboat policy of the Jeffersonians, prompting the federal government to support a regular professional army and a sea-going navy. Ironically, changes in the miliary and naval establishments were accompanied by the development of a seminal and significant antiwar movement that some historians have called the “American Peace Crusade.” Rhode Island became an early participant in that campaign when Moses Brown, former governor William Jones, and others formed the Rhode Island Peace Society in 1818, with Jones as its president. Clearly the War of 1812 had a profound impact upon life in America.
In fairness to Rhode Island’s Federalists, their fears for the state’s maritime future were realized. The commercial restrictions imposed by the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, the war itself, and the British blockade of America’s coastline combined to cripple the state’s foreign commerce (except for the China Trade) and induced an irreversible decline in ship construction. The transition from commerce to manufacturing that began before the war was accelerated by it, but Rhode Island’s resourceful businessmen were quick to snatch economic victory from the jaws of impending defeat. Within a generation following the war’s end, Rhode Island ranked as America’s most urbanized and industrialized state, a process that historian Peter Coleman has aptly described as “the transformation of Rhode Island.”
Unfortunately, Americans–including Rhode Islanders–are presently too emotionally dispirited, too economically depressed, and too politically divided for celebrations of the War of 1812 like those lavish observances of independence in 1976 and for the bicentennial of the Constitution and statehood from 1787 to 1790 (both of which I directed in Rhode Island). Like the Federalists two centuries ago, we will sit this one out.
Patrick T. Conley