In the late 17th through the early 18th century, Rhode Island colony experienced a slow influx of migration, stimulated only by the maritime and slave trades which boomed in the early 1700s.
12 friends, as Roger Williams dubbed them, founded Providence, Rhode Island in1636. These were religiously-independent Englishmen, soon followed by their wives and families and other religious refugees persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay colonies. They were overall a hard-working group, as they, unlike some southern and Caribbean colonists, for example, did not expect aid from the crown or native tribute. They knew they would forge their own way in that forested Rhode Island shoreline. This lifestyle and the general disdain that Massachusetts held for the colony – in fact, far from supporting this infant colony, Massachusetts sought to destroy it – kept its numbers small. The initial wave of settlers occurred between 1636 and1645, but over the next few decades population growth was very slow, mainly only the descendants of the original generation which had multiplied itself by then with children and grandchildren, etc. The English maintained a handful of towns consisting of several hundred families total, roughly two thousand people according to my estimate. Quakers established themselves particularly in Newport, and small populations of Jews, Catholics, and variant protestant remnants found sanctuary in this relatively tolerant society of misfits. Indians, though usually not included in population estimates, also thrived there, though they sold a large portion of their land to the settlers for profit.
The next wave of immigration occurred after King Philip’s War, which began in 1674 and after almost a two-year bloody conflict ended in 1675. Squashing native strongholds allowed the English to feel a new sense of ownership of their colony, originally purchased from the Narragansett and until 1675 dependent upon Indian trade and relations. Now the English formed a stronger government, spread out across the previously sparsely settled land, and began to receive immigrants directly from England. By 1689, the population doubled, perhaps 4000 people, again not counting the Indians.
Over the next twenty years, the rate of growth slowed somewhat, yet still the population nearly doubled again by 1708, when a census recorded 7,181 persons living in Rhode Island – a tiny number compared to the great plantation states of Virginia and Pennsylvania, surely, but a respectable growing community considering its unofficial beginnings in ratio of people to land area. Of this number, there were many descendants of the original first generations, people who tended to keep to themselves and would not have infiltrated the neighboring colonies too much. There were also newcomers, many of them lured by the prosperous fishing business, and by the ever-growing, highly profitable slave trade. And finally, the colony was now not as unpopular as it once was with the Massachusetts folk, now that Indian friendship had been minimized and official English government had been established.
Maritime industries brought some success to the small, formerly isolated colony; however, it was not until the lucrative slave trade was established in Newport and surrounding ports that Rhode Island became a really powerful, wealthy colony. The slave trade brought with it international affiliations, rum-running, and even more maritime fame. As will be revealed later in our study, this new-found status brought with it a sudden population boom, and by 1774 a census listed tiny Rhode Island’s population at 59,678 person – more than 8 times as many people as in the 1708 census taken only two generations years earlier.
SOURCES:
Fisch, Lila M. [untitled]. Review of Economic development and Population Growth in Rhode Island, by Kurt. B. Mayer. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1954): 240-242. Accessed online March 18, 2011. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3348354
Whitney, Herbert A. “Estimating Precensus Populations: A Method Suggested and Applied to the Towns of Rhode Island and Plymouth Colonies in 1689.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 55, No. 1 (1965):179-189. Accessed online March 18, 2011. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2561608.
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