A short history of Rhode Island

by George Washington Greene

Among the laws which were brought every day to every door was the law which made the price of wheat the standard of the price of bread. Every baker was required to have his trade mark and make every loaf of a specified weight. The bread that fell short was forfeited to the poor.

As an aid to commerce the Colony granted the control of the shores of all the waters comprised within a township to the town itself. This led to the building of wharves and store houses, and added to the wealth of the town.

In the midst of the progressing civilization we find occasional traces of barbarism. A slave had murdered his mistress with circumstances which aggravated the crime, and despairing of escape drowned himself. A fortnight after his body came ashore at Little Compton, and “the Assembly ordered that his head, legs and arms should be hung up in some public place near Newport, and his body be burnt to ashes.”

We now meet the odious slave-trade, carefully watched over and protected by England as a source of wealth, but generally disliked by planters for “the turbulent and unruly tempers” of its miserable victims. Rhode Island drew most of her slaves from Barbadoes at the rate of twenty or thirty a year, and sold them at the average price of from thirty to forty pounds each. The moral question had not yet come up, but according to the old record the trade did not flourish because the people “in general” preferred white servants to black.

In 1708 the first census was taken by order of the Board of Trade, giving for result seven thousand one hundred and eighty-one inhabitants, of whom one thousand and fifteen were freemen. The militia amounted to one thousand three hundred and sixty-two. There were fifty-six white servants and four hundred and twenty-six black.

In the same year we meet for the first time, “vendue masters” and public auctions. The subject of “a uniform value for foreign coins in the colonies” was discussed in Parliament, and made the subject of a circular letter from the Board of Trade. The increase of the settlements made it necessary to provide for the Indians. A committee was appointed to confer with Ninigret about lands for his tribe, the Niantics, and choose the site of a new town in Narragansett.

I have already spoken of the judicial functions of the Assembly. They had increased so much that it was deemed necessary to impose a tax of two pounds upon every appellant before his case could be taken up.

The reports to the Board of Trade and the commutation table of taxation throw much light upon the commercial and agricultural progress of the Colony. In the commutation roll Indian coin was rated at “two shillings a bushel, barley at one and eightpence, rye at two and sixpence, oats at fourteen pence, wheat at three shillings, and wool at ninepence a pound.” From the statistical reports to the Board of Trade, we learn that the annual “exports sent to England by way of Boston amounted to twenty thousand pounds; that the principal direct trade was by the West Indies; and that within the past twenty years the amount of shipping had increased six-fold.” This increase it was said was owing to the superiority of the colonial shipwrights.

Eighty-four vessels of all sizes had been built in the Colony within eleven years. The population was divided. Aquidneck “was taken up in small farms,” and the young men took to the sea.

In 1709 a printing press was set up in Newport and a public printer appointed. This pioneer printer was the son of a New York printer named Bradford, who offered to do the public printing of the Colony for fifty pounds a year. The offer was accepted for one year.