Note: The newest installment of The Road to the American Revolution is now live on Substack. Follow the series on Facebook, Instagram, and X to keep up with new essays and join the conversation. An excerpt from the article appears below.

As described earlier in this series, in January 1776, Tom Paine’s Common Sense, with its scathing attack on King George, swept the Colonies like wildfire. It seems to have found ample kindling in Rhode Island. Rhode Island’s Royal Charter of 1663 was a strikingly liberal document: it confirmed Rhode Islanders’ liberties, enshrined the Colony’s founding principle of toleration, and tacitly acknowledged that, by rejecting the sway of the Church of England, this non-conformist Colony set itself at some distance from the King himself. More recently, since Spring 1775, Rhode Islanders had been helping besiege Boston, march on Quebec, and attack British shipping. Then, on May 4, 1776, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed what many Rhode Islanders have proclaimed as “the first declaration of independence” among the Colonies, a full two months before the national declaration.

Or did it?

When one looks at the broadsheet that promulgated the May 4, 1776 Act, the first thing one notices is five places where a hand, writing in ink, crossed out the word “Colony” and replaced it with “State.” Presumably, this edit took place on or after July 18, 1776, when Rhode Island’s Assembly passed a declaration of independence, a full two weeks after the national declaration.

This observation alone should dispel the claim that May 4, 1776, was Rhode Island’s “declaration of independence”—much less the first such declaration in the Colonies.

The May 4 Act is what the State itself more accurately describes as a “renunciation of allegiance.” The Act makes its renunciation in a rather roundabout manner. In its first line, it announces that it is repealing an Act, titled “An Act for the effectual securing to His Majesty the Allegiance of His Subjects in this His Colony and Dominion of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” That earlier law—from 1756— allowed the Governor to require that any officeholder suspected of “disaffection” swear a loyalty oath to the King. It was an anti-Catholic measure, antithetical to the Colony’s tolerant temper, and it seems to have never been enforced. This dead letter is what the 1776 Act formally overturns, which would make it a negation of a nullity. But this legal legerdemain does not capture its true meaning.

The Act’s true meaning begins to come to light more clearly in its Preamble, which explains that “in all States existing by Compact, Protection and allegiance are reciprocal, the latter being only due in Consequence of the former.” But, the Assembly asserts, George III has departed from the “Character and duties of a good king,” and “instead of Protecting is endeavoring to destroy the good people” of this and the other colonies through fire, sword, and desolation, endeavoring to submit them to a “detestable Tyranny.” As a result, the Assembly concludes, “we are obliged by necessity and it becomes our highest Duty to use every means with which God and Nature have furnished us, in support of our invaluable rights, & privileges, to oppose that Power which is exerted only for our destruction…”

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