We Are True Whigs

Abstract

Black Rhode Islanders were disfranchised with little fanfare in 1822 but regained the vote in 1842, in the context of the Dorr War, an all-white armed insurgency to overturn the state government based on a sharply restricted franchise. Having defeated the insurgents, the “Law and Order” government (future Whigs) instituted a property requirement for naturalized voters, mainly Irish, and opened the franchise to African Americans, who had helped suppress the Dorrites. From then through the Civil War, led by party operatives like William J. Brown, black voters operated as a submachine, a balance of power keeping the Whigs and their conservative Republican successors in control of the state. In the later 1850s, however, the wealthy New York hotelier George T. Downing moved to Newport and organized a fierce but unsuccessful campaign for school integration, roiling the black community.