The Settlement of Prudence Island And its Abandonment During the Revolutionary War
By Jerry Cutter with additional research and commentary by Robert A. Geake
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Prudence Island from Blaskowitz map of Bay of Narragansett (1977).
This paper is an account of the settlement of Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, prior to, and including its abandonment during the War for Independence. The purpose for writing this account is twofold. First, it is not common knowledge within Rhode Island that Prudence Island held a full and prosperous community during the colonial period. Second, that while Prudence Island plays its part in Rhode Island history, it also has a unique history of its own.
The indigenous peoples called the Island Chibachuwasa11, and there is evidence that it was the seasonal home for some four to five hundred Narragansett. Near the west side of the island is a large rock called “pulpit rock” where it has long been believed to be a site where Roger Williams preached to the inhabitants. Williams’ friendship with Miantonomo eventually led to the sale of the island to Roger Williams and John Winthrop, then the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Williams named the island “Prudence”, and he believed that a successful stock farm for swine and goats could be run there. He convinced Winthrop of the same, though finding protected grasslands for large herds of cattle, sheep, or swine was a priority in New England where wolves ravaged mainland farms of their livestock. The deed for the Island is recorded in the Rhode Island Land Records as follows;
Cononicus and Miantonomi
TO
Roger Williams and John Winthrop
September 10, 1637
The 10th of the 9th month & the firste yeare the pequts were subdued:
Memorand: that I John Winthrop of Boston Ge. At presnt Governor of the Massachusetts
& Roger Williams of New Providence in the Nanigganick bay, have bought of the 2 chiefe Sachums of Naniggsuck Miantunomu & Connonicus the island called Chibachuweseblying and being in the fore said Naniggansick by the sum of 20 fathem of wampum and 2 coats in witness whereof they may have hereunto Sett their hands with promise that if any Swine or Cattell put thereupon shall be slaine or hurt by any Natives they will see satisfaction made, and the right of the Island Maintained to them their heires or assignes.
In the presence of Jo Throckmorton2
Williams established his stock farm in the vicinity of what would become known as Potters and Sheep Pen Cove, on the northern end of the Island.3 Joshua Winsor was the first white inhabitant on Prudence Island. Winsor has been a servant of Governor Winthrop but had been excommunicated and banished from the colony. He found employment with Roger Williams who constructed a small house on the north end of the island where Winsor lived as a keeper of the goats and swine.
Ultimately the Winthrop and Williams stock farm would fail despite the suitable pastures on the island. It seems Winsor was a shady businessman; he had been selling goats to Dutch ship masters as they plied Narragansett Bay and had kept the profits. He accounted for the loss by accusing the indigenous inhabitants of stealing the livestock.4
Conflicting claims as to the boundaries with both Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut made it necessary for Williams to travel to England and obtain a charter for the colony of Rhode Island in 1639. In April of that year, he sold his lands on the northern half of Prudence Island to John Throckmorton, one of the original settlers of Providence, whose sloop transported the swine as well as corn raised for trade with Boston. Throckmorton and his wife became the first white family to settle on Prudence Island, living initially in the small house that Williams had built for the former stock keeper Winsor.
Map of Newport and nearby islands, 1977.
In 1640, John Winthrop’s holdings on the southern half of the Island were sold to his son Stephen.5 It was during Stephen’s ownership when the first group of settlers began leasing land on a quit-rent basis. These are the families that first cleared the island for development. Some built homes and stayed while others left. Richard Pearce is an example of those who stayed. He was the first of these settlers and remained on the island for five or six years during the 1640s. Pearce moved to Newport, but his descendants remained, and the name appears often in early tax records and the census.
On the other hand, Henry Peran did not stay. It is reputed that he left after his first corn crop was stolen by Indians. While indigenous people on the island may have acted out in retribution for being displaced, these acts did not discourage others who made homes on the Island.6 Prudence had been annexed to the town of Portsmouth in 1647, and by 1659 the Island had become populated to the extant that a town meeting was called to determine a tax rate and how it would be collected.7
In 1654, Richard Parker, a wealthy Boston merchant purchased the northern half of Prudence from John Throckmorton.8 He never settled there but gave 600 acres to his daughter Sarah and her husband John Paine as a wedding present. The giving of this present would presage one of the strangest episodes in Rhode Island’s history.
Paine was also a merchant, and lately came from New York. He soon became interested in Prudence Island and its possibilities, and he would be responsible for the Island’s short-lived existence as an independent republic. After the departure of the Dutch, the ambitious Paine had worked with the Crown-appointed governor, Francis Lovelace on the engineering and construction of Fort Adams at the mouth of the Hudson River, New York. In compensation, Paine received several grants of land from James, the Duke of York. As the loose boundaries of the colony of New York’s claims extended to outlying islands beyond Long Island Sound, Paine obtained a patent for the entirety of Prudence Island in 1672.
Under the grant, Paine received the Island as a free manor, over which he was to have complete jurisdiction as governor for life.9 Paine renamed the Island Sophy Manor after Lovelace’s wife and sat as a manorial lord over the six-mile long, one-mile-wide independent republic. Paine’s idea was that renters would pay him a percentage of their crops at each harvest time, and that he in turn would pay a token payment of “two barrells of cyder and six couple of capons” to the Duke of York each year.10
Probably a large part of the reason for this simple agreement was the distance that the Island lay from New York. Most importantly, as the island would later experience, was its vulnerability to attack in times of conflict. If Paine had little responsibility to the Duke, the Duke had none to Paine, as spelled out in the 1672 grant:
“…the said Island being so remote from any fortified Place within the Dukes Territoryes, soe that they cannot expect Suddaine Aid or Reliefe, but must depend upon their own Capacities, as well relating to Men as all other Warlike Provisions, for their Defence against Forraigne invasions or Disturbance by the Natives at home.”
Perhaps the Duke of Lovelace knew what was coming. Paine’s rule of Sophy Manor lasted about three months before he was arrested. As recorded in an obscure book entitled Minor Manors of New York,
“His grant was alleged to conflict with a previous one made by the celebrated chief Canonicus…” to Roger Williams and Governor Winthrop, and his effort to exercise authority aroused the spirit of the Colony. He was at once arrested and thrown into prison but released on bail. At the Court of Trials, he was indicted under the law of 1658 for attempting to bring in a foreign jurisdiction, or for “intrusion” for setting up a new government within the limits of a former one, without due authority.”11
Paine “surrendered his position and claim” and continued to live on and off the island. His deed to the lands given were approved in 1674 by the General Assembly, though the essay in Minor Manners states that he died a widower at sea in 1675, leaving four children. We know that his three daughters would inherit the property.12
Of the renters that settled on Prudence Island, one man and his family seem to be a good example of the people who inhabited the Island. William Allin came to the colony of Rhode Island and settled on Prudence Island around 1660. As he profited from Prudence, he purchased land on the north end, and as his family grew, came to own much of the north end of the Island as well as land in various towns around Narragansett Bay. Although only of average means, Allin soon had a very successful farm established to support himself and his family.
Religion was not a passion on Prudence Island, indeed the famous pulpit rock near Allin’s farm lay silent and forgotten, for Allin was not a religious man. Any religious influence seems to have been primarily Quaker, in that he and others only found it necessary to state their allegiance to God in their wills. There was no established church on the Island until the late 1800s. Perhaps a sort of Friends Meeting was held on Sunday in one of the prominent homes.
The ingenuity of William Allin and Prudence Islanders in general is exemplified in how Allin relocated part of his family to Swanzey (now West Barrington). His wife, Elizabeth, had tired of life on Prudence and wanted to return to the less isolated life of the mainland. Allin had recently purchased land in Swanzey and wished to settle his wife there. His opportunity came with the frigid winter of 1680. As descendant Devere Allen would write in a brief history of the family,
“The Winter of 1680 was so extremely cold that the ice on the bay between Providence and Newport froze to a thickness of 16 to 18 inches, and the ground was at the same time covered with several inches of snow…so Mr. Allin decided to take this opportunity to move his dwelling over the frozen bay to Swanzey…With the aid of several of the old settlers and a few Indian servants they set to work to hew down trees, which they used for blocking beneath the house. Two trees were well selected as runners…
The following day all available horses and oxen were brought into service, and Mr. Allin’s house slowly glided over the snow and onto the thickly frozen cove, where the chains and ropes were readjusted. The six horses and two oxen were led slowly across, drawing behind them the bulky mansion that Mr. Paine had so willingly built for his first neighbor, Mr. Allin. After a long and tiresome journey they reached the shore of Swanzey. Drawing the heavy building up the incline to its destination was an exceedingly difficult task, but by nightfall the tired neighbors and faithful animals had succeeded in the great undertaking.”
While his mansion house may have been moved to Swanzey, William Allin continued his holdings and livestock interests on the Island. He is listed on tax records along with Thomas Remington and Philip Sweet as being taxed “for one fourth part of Prudence Island and stock theron…”
Jeremiah and John Smith owned another fourth of the land and stock on the Island, with the other half being lots owned by William Browne, John Pierce Mason, Jonathan Hill, Thomas Scranton, James Sweet, John Remington, Daniel Briggs, Daniel Pierce, and Henry Hill.
In addition, there were many land leases out on William Browne’s land on the south as well as the Smith’s land on the north end. As any records of these leases no longer remain, there can be no exact number given as to how many settlers were on the Island. Considering the tax list, the land renters, and their respective families, we may estimate that this number was near one hundred.
As it had been from the first settlements, the livelihoods of the Island relied upon stock farming. Breeding sheep was the principal means of income as early as the 1660s when landholders such as William Allin and John Smith held flocks of 685 and 672 sheep, respectively. Lesser landholders or renters still had flocks of upwards of two hundred sheep.
Cattle were also an important stock on Prudence Island. No records indicate their numbers, but the size and extent of the herds led to the custom of using earmarks as a means of identifying the owner of a particular animal. This practice presaged the modern method of branding cattle.
The importance of this practice and the size of herds on the Island led to the election of cattle surveyors for Prudence Island by the town of Portsmouth in 1681. As recorded:
“Whereas at this meeting it hath been Represented thee want of Some Survaiors on the Island Prudence. It is ordered that for and until the next Electtion of officers in this town of, Portsmouth m. William Allin and John Pearce both inhabiting on Said Prudance Shall and have power as survayors to view and take a true account of all Cattell of what Sort Soever that shall be from the said Prudence Island Transported always provided they the said Allin and Pearce Shall be together in and at the view and Survay of all Cattell Transported.”
Other livestock such as oxen, horses, swine, and fowl roamed the farms of the Island. Subsistence farming was practiced, with crops including potatoes and other vegetables, particularly native corn, which was used as stock feed or ground for meal. Fruit orchards dotted the Island, including apple, pear, plum, and peach. Shellfish abounded in the waters offshore of the Island, and fish were caught for food and fertilizer.
It is estimated that by about 1730, there were more than twenty farms established on the Island, and those fields produced enough produce for trade that the “Island became somewhat of a market basket, exporting farm produce to other areas of the state, including Newport and Providence”.13 This early success in agriculture led to the “golden age of farming” on Prudence Island which lasted until the advent of the Revolutionary War. Today, the stone walls from sheep pens and closed in pastures remain as reminders of that era.
Labor then was at a premium on the Island. The men within the larger landholding families relied upon enslaved workers as well as Indigenous “servants.” 18th century census of the Island shows these numbers as peaking mid-century as with all of Rhode Island, mostly among the Allin and Pearce families. The descendants of these enslaved workers, likely born on the Island, would be among the defenders of the Island during the Revolutionary War. Indeed, as we will discover later, the enslaved of the Allin family both here and from Swanzey were likely among the first men of color to take up arms in the War of Independence.
The Indigenous cemetery in which these enslaved Indians were buried lies in the center of the Island. The sacred ground there is marked with simple stones that were still visible in the late twentieth century. The graveyard where most Prudence Islanders buried their dead is toward the north end, it’s use as a burial ground beginning before 1700, when it abutted the southern border of the Allin property. This public burial ground holds early grave markers as well as later carved slate stones with the names of Islanders through the 18th century. It is also believed that the Pearce family on the south end had a private burial plot, but the construction of the United States Naval base at the site in 1942 obliterated anything that may have remained.
Grave of an unknown British sailor on the west side of the island whose body washed ashore circa 1775.
Industry eventually came to Prudence Island as it did to much of Colonial America. The Allin family operated a grist mill on a small tributary that ran through their property in the center of the Island, known from then on, as “Mill Creek”. It was constructed around 1757 and was one of the few buildings to survive the Revolutionary War. Several old mill stones found on farms in the north end of the Island date back to the 18th century, and it is believed that another small grist mill was established on one of the small creeks in that area as well.
Sometime prior to the Revolutionary War, a pin factory was built on the south end by the Cory family, its proprietor likely being Daniel Cory. The factory was basically a blacksmith shop which made oxcart wheels, shoes for oxen, and the large, crude pins for horse blankets, as the name implies.
Both stock farming and industry required large amounts of water to sustain themselves. Wells were dug for the farms on the Island and public watering places were set up along the major streams. A windmill was also constructed on the north end, but did not survive a British raid during the war when it was burned to the ground.14
Travel on Prudence Island during this period was mostly by foot or oxcart. As no records have been found to suggest construction of roadways, the Island was likely ribboned with paths and oxcart trails that led from farm to farm and the grist mills.
Inhabitants could row or sail to and from the mainland in their private watercraft, but by 1740, the Islanders began efforts to establish a ferry service. In 1742, the following petition was placed before the State’s General Assembly:
“Whereas John Lawton and Barlow Greene, did by petition, set forth to this assembly, that the establishing a ferry from the landing place, in said Lawton’s farm at Portsmouth, in said colony, to the southerner part of Prudence Island, would be greatly serviceable to the colony…” 15
Following this petition, a ferry was set up to run from the Pearce farm on the southern part of the Island to the Lawton farm in Portsmouth. At the same time, a ferry system running from the north end of the Island to Warwick Neck and back was established. Known as the Nichols and Freeborn ferry, the line was part of the mail route between Providence and Newport. In this way, Prudence Islanders had the most reliable mail delivery in the colony.
Although most of the early settlers could not read or write, they understood the need of a proper education for future Islanders. Sometime in the 1730s, William Remington began teaching school at his farmhouse. By 1743, a schoolhouse had been constructed on the northern end of the Island near his home, and he was listed as the schoolmaster.16
By the 1774 census, Prudence Island was home to thirty-three families, and a population of 228 inhabitants. As tensions with Great Britain increased and war became imminent, the islanders once again felt their vulnerability.
Census of 1774 (June17)
families | males above 16 | males under 16 | females above 16 | females under 16 | slaves | total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Allen, Caleb | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 13 | |
Allen, Ebenezer | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 12 |
Allen, James | 3 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 16 | |
Allen, Thomas | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 11 | |
Allen, John | 2 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 15 | |
Allen, Ebenezer | 3 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 5 | 18 | |
Allen, James | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 10 | |
Allen, Jonathan | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 9 | ||
Chase, Paul | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 12 |
Chase, Aaron | 1 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 13 | |
Pearce, Samual, Jr | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 9 |
Pearce, Samual, Sr | 1 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 7 | ||
Remington, William | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 11 | |
Remington, Thomas | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 10 |
Remington, Joseph | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | ||
Sheldon, John | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 7 | ||
Tompkins, Samual | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 8 | ||
Thurston, Jonathan | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 10 |
Shreive, Thomas | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 14 | |
Cory, Daniel | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 13 | |
TOTAL | 33 | 60 | 44 | 60 | 40 | 16 | 222 |
no families | 3 males | 3 females | 6 | ||||
228 |
The Island maintained its own militia. Able-bodied men of the Island originally travelled to Portsmouth and trained with militia on the mainland. The difficulty of traveling to train however, caused men on the Island in 1757 to petition the General Assembly for the authority to form their own company:
“Whereas sundry inhabitants of Prudence Island in the county of Newport, preferred a petition, and represented unto this Assembly, that as they live upon an island in the township of Portsmouth, which lieth at a considerable distance from the said town of Portsmouth, whereby it hath oftentimes happened that the weather hath proved so tempestuous upon a training day, they have not been able to get unto Portsmouth, as their duty required, which subjected them to great difficulties; they pray to be erected or made into a trained band, and have proper officers to command them, in consideration thereof,
Be it enacted that the inhabitants of the said Prudence Island be, and they hereby are, created and made a company or trained band, to be distinguished and called the second company or trained band, of the town of Portsmouth, and for future shall be under proper officers.”17
”While it is well known that this faithful slave was in the service of the town and state during the war, I have not been able to locate the Co. or Reg.; died April 30, 1816, aged seventy years.”
The Second Company consisted of three officers and about sixty men at the start of the Revolution. The Island, as was the colony itself, was drastically short of troops for its defense.
In the wake of the Gaspee affair in Warwick, Rhode Island in 1772, British patrol boats had plied Narragansett Bay, occasionally holding coastal towns hostage under threat of cannon fire while residents scrambled to raise provisions to save the town from destruction.
Within two years, the British Naval Commander James Wallace had become the nemesis of Rhode Island merchant vessels. By the summer of 1774, Wallace patrolled the Rhode Island coastline in the HMS Rose, and with sister ships the HMS Glascow and HMS Swan, routinely raided and plundered coastal communities and islands offshore.
Detail of the Phoenix and the Rose engaged by the enemy’s fire ships and galleys on Aug. 16, 1776 (National Archives).
One such island that had caught Wallace’s attention was Prudence Island. On the first of several raids on August 24, 1775, Wallace landed two hundred men on the island and plundered the farm of John Allin, stealing twenty sheep, thirty turkeys, and bushels of corn as well as hay.
The following November, another raiding party stole clothing and furniture-even a large
mahogany desk-from several homes, as well as two horses and geese.18
On January 11, 1776, when the impudent Captain wrote to Governor John Wanton, demanding more goods from the island, Militia Captain Samuel Pearce of the 2nd Portsmouth Company decided the time had come to make a stand. He ordered all women and children off the island, until all that remained were thirty-two men under his command, among them eleven enslaved African Americans. These were taken into the company, given weapons, and taught to use them for the coming battle.
With their forces soon bolstered by men of the militia from Bristol and Tiverton, they faced off and fought the invaders in the fading afternoon light of January 12 in a grueling defense of the Island. The British Commander Wallace would report that the invading troops…beat them from fence to fence for four miles into their country, firing and wasting the country as we advanced…19
As night fell the Rhode Island forces retreated from the island. The Portsmouth companies were rowed to Warwick Neck for a brief respite. They set out again for the island before dawn, accompanied by men from the Kentish Guard. When the British returned the next morning, they burned nearly all the residences and outbuildings, sparing only the farm of Thomas Allin, whose wife and most of their children were blind. They were the only family to remain on the Island during the war.
This was an historic moment for Prudence Island and the colonies, being the first instance in the Rhode Island that enslaved men of color took up arms in defense of American soil. So, who were these patriots of color who fought with the citizen soldiers of Prudence Island?
The 1774 census shows sixteen enslaved people on the Island, but we cannot assume that all would have been men or able-bodied. Moreover, any domestic workers would likely have been removed with the women and children from the Island.
Most tellingly, the Allin family, who were to suffer a devastating loss, had the fewest enslaved people on the Island, though records indicate that half of Pearce’s company was composed of men from the Allin family. The census shows that John Allen (as the name is spelled in the census) had no enslaved men in his household in Portsmouth and thus, not on his property on Prudence Island. No other Allin’s on the island but Ebenezer Allin held an enslaved person among them, and he had but one in a household of twelve.
By contrast, Thomas and Matthew Allin in the town of Barrington were local militia officers who held five enslaved persons apiece in considerably smaller households in Barrington. The census does not list blacks by male or female as it does for whites, or even categorize them under an age group as it does for white families. But we do know they owned at least four able-bodied males between them: Prince, Jack, and Richard Allin, as well as Scipio Freeman.
Grave of Scipio Freeman photographed by Robert A. Geake.
Could it be then, that the enslaved of these militia commanders were sent to the farm on Prudence Island in preparation for the Island’s defense, and unknowingly became among the first enslaved men that were given arms for the first time in defense of the Colonies?
Indeed, as for those enslaved men of this branch of the Allin family, theirs is a fascinating story. Tucked away from the center of the town of Barrington lies the Allin family cemetery with a cluster of well-maintained monuments at one end and on the other end alone, early 19th century gravestone for Scipio Freeman, a long-recognized veteran of the revolution in the popular remembrance of the community.
Though he was known as an enslaved man belonging to the Allin family and was listed on the roll of able-bodied men above 16 to serve in the town militia, there is no evidence to support that he served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment or even in the town militia. Brig. General Thomas Allin and brother Captain Matthew Allin were both officers of the local militia but do not list him in muster rolls kept during the revolution. Even the native-born historian Thomas Bicknell who wrote the town’s history could only admit that
Somewhere among the fieldstones that lay buried around Scipio Freeman’s gravestone is the resting places of Prince Allin, who served in Capt. Thomas Allin’s Company of Col. Crary’s Regiment as the property of the Allin family.
Two other enslaved men of the family were later given bounties to enlist on May 17, 1777. Jack Allin was given a bounty of eighteen pounds from Levi Barnes and John Short Jr. Richard Allin received a bounty of fifteen pounds from Mathew Allin and George Salisbury.20 While these men were given monies for serving as a substitute, Thomas and Mathew Allin received forty-four pounds each in compensation “for their negroes” from the Town Council in June 1777.21
All these men show on the muster rolls under the spelling “Allen”. Prince is listed as serving as a private in Crary’s R.I state Regiment in 1776 and from May through October of 1778. Both Jack and Richard Allin would serve in Col. Thomas Cole’s Company. Jack was a private in Capt. Thomas Arnold’s detachment of the early “black regiment”, but died on May 18, 1778, before the Battle of Rhode Island would test the recruits’ mettle. Richard served in Capt. John S. Dexter’s company from 1778 until being honorably discharged on May 22, 1780.22
The threat to all Rhode Island coastal communities increased with the taking of Newport by the British in December, 1776. While the enemy occupied Newport, they continually raided Rhode Island’s shoreline communities and surrounding islands as far as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.23
With the desolation brought by the war, few families returned to the island when peace finally came. As many families had relatives or land holdings elsewhere, they had established themselves off the island and saw little reason to return after the war. Prudence Island’s existence as an isolated but well populated agricultural community was never to be the same. The Island did not regain the economic prosperity it had before the war until the late 1800’s, when it was developed as a small summer community.
Editors’ Notes:
This article was written by Jerry Cutter in 1977 as a member of the Prudence Historical Society. It resurfaced as an unpublished hardcopy earlier this year and Bob Geake did further research.
“From Fence to Fence: The Battles of Prudence Island” by Robert Grandchamp can be read at https://battleofrhodeisland.org/from-fence-to-fence/.
Resources:
(1) Alternatively spelled Chibachewesa, the indigenous place name also contained the smaller island nearby that Winthrop named Patience. See Rider, Sydney S. The Lands of Rhode Island: As They Were Known to Caunounicus and Miantunnomu when Roger Williams Came in 1636: An Indian Map of the Principal Locations Known to the Nahigansets, and Elaborate Historical Notes (Providence, 1904) p. 62
(2) Maytum, Charles Earliest Land Evidence on Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay (Rhode Island Historical Society, 1964) p. 1
(3) Bains, Joseph J. and Weber, Robin L.J. Human and Land-Use from the National Estuarine Research Reserve, An Ecological Profile of the Narragansett Bay, Chapter 3, p. 18
(4) Maytum would note Robberies were perpetrated on the whites and charges to the Indians. For Example, it was charged that the Indians stole 200 goats from Prudence Island. Investigation showed that the resident agent sold goats to the ship masters, pocketed the proceeds, and accounted for the missing stock by alleging its theft by the Indians. P. 2
(5) Ibid. p. 3
(6) As Williams and Winthrop would find out with Aquidneck Island and Block Island, just because the sachems to whom their people were subordinate had sold their lands, that did not mean that they intended to leave their homeland. The way in which indigenous people conceptualized the sale of lands compared to white settlers was the thorn on which any hopes for peaceful co-existence was perpetually snagged. The giving or sale of lands to whites with the subsequent loss of fishing, hunting and gathering rights at those long ancestral places was a key issue among those that led to the early wars in New England with the Indigenous peoples.
(7) Early Records of the Town of Portsmouth Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, Freeman & Sons, 1901) p. 91
(8) Maytum, Charles Paragraphs on Early Prudence Island Rhode Island Historical Society, 1964 p. 4
(9) Indeed, John Paine may have been inspired by the earlier efforts of William Coddington in 1651 to wrest the towns of Newport and Portsmouth from the “plantation towns” of Warwick and Providence, causing Williams once again to travel to England at great personal expense to clarify the 1639 charter from the Crown.
(10) Maytum, p. 25
(11) Livingston, John Henry Minor Manors of the State of New York Order of the Colonial Lords of Manors in America, New York Branch, 1923 pp. 6-9
(12) Ibid.
(13) Baines/Weber p. 19
(14) This raid, one of several by British forces from the HMS Rose under command of Captain James Wallace. Rev. Ezra Stiles would record the burning of house and other structures like the windmill which occurred January 12-13th 1776. “I saw the flames from the Top of my house. He [Wallace] is now inhumanely spreading Barbarity, Desolation, and Revenge there…” The fires set by the British were seen “for many a mile around”.
(15) Chapin, Anna & Charles, A History of Rhode Island Ferries 1640-1923 (Providence, The Oxford Press, 1925) p. 212
(16) Maytum, p. 125
(17) Bartlett, John R. Colonial Records of Rhode Island (Providence, Knowles, Anthony, & Co. 1861) Vol. 6, pp 58-59
(18) Grandchamp, Robert From Fence to Fence: The Battles of Prudence Island Journal of the American Revolution https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/10/fence-fence-battles-prudence-island/
(19) Ibid.
(20) Geake, Robert A. New England Citizen Soldiers: Minutemen and Mariners (Charleston, The History Press, 2019) p. 362
(21) Ibid., 365
(22) Popek, Daniel They Fought Bravely…But Were Unfortunate: The True story of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment and the Failure of Segregation in the Continental Line (Privately printed, 2016) pp. 658=659
(23) See Geake, Robert A. Timeline of the Formation and Service of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment https://battleofrhodeisland.org/timeline-of-the-formation-and-service-of-the-1st-rhode-island-regiment-part-1/
