Meanwhile Bellemont, whose hostility was embittered by the instigations of Randolph, went on collecting document upon document, till the formidable list amounted to twenty-five heads of accusation—chief of which was connivance with pirates—and, as he wrote to the Board of Trade, “making Rhode Island their sanctuary.” Should the Board of Trade accept these accusations, what could preserve the Colony from a quo warranto? Nothing did save her but the death of the Royal Governor.
To this period belongs the story of Captain Kidd, long the subject of many a fearful tradition and all the more widely known from having exchanged an admiral’s flag for the black flag of the corsair. After a wild and adventurous career in the Indian ocean he came to the American coast, and showing himself boldly in the streets of Boston was arrested, sent to England for trial and hanged.
CHAPTER XVI.
COLONIAL PROSPERITY.—DIFFICULTIES OCCASIONED BY THE WAR WITH THE FRENCH.—DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF THE COLONY.
If we may judge the prosperity of the Colony by the increase of taxation—and taxes it must be remembered were self-imposed—we shall find that Rhode Island at the beginning of the new century had made real if not rapid progress in all the branches of national prosperity. Her population in 1702 was estimated at ten thousand, exclusive of Indians. She drew supplies from foreign ports in bottoms of her own, and raised the staples of life on her own farms. Her citizens were merchants, farmers, fishermen and sailors. There was a beginning, also, of manufactures—to the sore displeasure of the Board of Trade.
We perceive, also, by the same test that Providence had regained the relative position which she had lost during Philip’s war, and was once more the second town of the Colony.
The soul liberty of which I have spoken so often had borne rich fruits. Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Puritans and Sabbatarians had their respective places of worship and their independent pastors. Among the Baptist pastors we find John Clarke. Among the Congregationalists Samuel Niles, a native of Block Island, and the first Rhode Islander that graduated at Harvard. In 1704 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent out James Honeyman to build up an Episcopal church in the southern part of the Colony. He found much to do as rector of Trinity, in Newport, and missionary to Freetown, Tiverton and Little Compton on the main. His memory is still preserved in Episcopal traditions and Honeyman’s Hill, the highest land in the southern extremity of the island, is a familiar name to the inhabitants of Newport. In 1706 an Episcopal society was founded in Kingston, with Rev. Christopher Bridge for rector. So well was the work on the church done, that after remaining where it was built ninety-three years, it was removed to Wickford, where it is still used under the name of the Church of St. Paul. One of the most interesting of these denominations was that of the Sabbatarians, or Seventh-day Baptists, who had also a flourishing church in Westerly. To meet their peculiar views two weekly market days were, set apart for them.
The meetings and acts of the Assembly still continue to form the principal record of our history. The Assembly itself claimed equal rights with those exercised by Parliament over its own members, and at a special session in 1701, suspended an assistant who had married a couple illegally and refused to acknowledge his error. The Board of Trade had more than once called for a printed copy of the laws of the Colony, and as a proof that they were regularly administered Governor Cranston sent a full statement of the mode of procedure in all the courts. I have already spoken of Lord Bellemont’s plan for the formation of a great vice-royalty over all the colonies, including the Bahama Islands. After his death this wild scheme, fatal to the freedom and prosperity of British America, was revived by Dudley. The irregular administration of the navigation laws was the chief pretext, and it probably was held to be a sufficient concession to freedom that the local government was left in the hands of the colonial assemblies. A bill for this purpose was drawn up near the close of William’s reign and brought forward early in that of Anne.