Rhode Island

The smallest state, founded by people the neighbours had thrown out, and the first to make the separation of church and state absolute. Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for arguing that civil magistrates had no authority over conscience and that the king could not grant land the Narragansett already owned; he bought land from them and founded Providence. Anne Hutchinson, expelled for holding theological meetings in her home, settled at Portsmouth. The colony's 1663 charter guaranteed liberty in religious concernments in terms no other English possession matched, and it drew Baptists, Quakers and, in 1658, the Jewish congregation whose Touro Synagogue at Newport is the oldest surviving in the country. That tolerance sat alongside deep involvement in the slave trade: Newport and Bristol merchants dominated the American share of the Atlantic traffic, and Rhode Island ships carried more enslaved Africans than those of any other colony. The state was first to renounce allegiance to the Crown in May 1776 and last to ratify the Constitution, in 1790, holding out for a bill of rights. It refused to send delegates to the convention at all. Its official name was the longest of any state until 2020. Providence is the capital and largest city. The state covers about four thousand square kilometres. Narragansett Bay cuts deeply into it, and it has over thirty islands. Newport's Gilded Age mansions were built as summer houses. The state's full former name included Providence Plantations, dropped by referendum in 2020. It is the smallest state by area and among the most densely populated.

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