They made their way through the streets of a residential neighborhood, houses looming up on either side of them. This was a good neighborhood, and these were houses almost none of these men could afford. At length, they reached their destination, an area of several acres’ worth of open, grassy ground. Their target, an arsenal and the weapons stockpiled within, stood out in the humid fog a short distance away. The men fanned out and took up their positions, and the cannon were wheeled into place, loaded and aimed.

With a nod from their leader, one man dashed across the open ground to bang on the building’s stout iron door, demanding the garrison’s surrender in the name of the governor. A moment later, he ran back across to the attackers, shaking his head as he went. They had their answer.

Barking final orders as his men scrambled chaotically, their leader—Governor Thomas Wilson Dorr, a Harvard-educated lawyer and member of one of the state’s oldest patrician families—must have wondered how it had come to this, how he had found himself leading a dead-of-night attack on an arsenal.

He turned to the cannon crew and gave the order to fire.

Roger Williams, a Puritan radical and the Rhode Island colony’s founder, had previously traveled to England to obtain a royal “patent” for his fledgling colony in the 1640s. Arriving during the chaos of the English Civil War, he was unable to meet with King Charles I, who was too busy losing to Oliver Cromwell, but he did manage to see the powerful Parliamentary commissioners for plantations. Williams’s friendships with such Puritan luminaries as John Milton and even Cromwell himself probably opened some doors that might have otherwise remained closed. The patent the commissioners granted served as official recognition of “Providence Plantation” as an English colony, guaranteeing colonists “full power and authority to rule themselves and such others as shall hereafter inhabit within part of the said tract of land, by such form of civil government as by voluntary consent of all or the greater part of them.” The king himself may not have issued the patent, but it was the next best thing.

Cromwell died in 1658. His Protectorate government collapsed, and the monarchy was restored when King Charles II took the throne on May 29, 1660, his thirtieth birthday. He and his new Cavalier Parliament quickly annulled the actions of the previous parliament, ordered the deaths of some of those who had deposed and executed his father, Charles I, and had Cromwell’s body exhumed, drawn and quartered just for good measure.

This caused some concern across the sea in Rhode Island. With Charles II backdating official documents to show he had been crowned in 1649, directly succeeding his father and ignoring a decade of history, it was uncertain whether the new king would recognize the validity of a colonial patent issued before that time. And even if no one in the colony was running around punishing corpses, there was enough strife to go around. Unfortunately, the patent had not clearly delineated the colony’s borders, leading to disputes with neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut, both greedily eyeing the little colony’s territory. It seemed wise to acquire a new document from Charles II, definitively establishing Rhode Island’s status.

Accordingly, Dr. John Clarke, the colony’s agent and advocate in England, was authorized to obtain a new charter.

While Roger Williams is generally and rightly hailed as the state’s founder, Clarke was no less important in Rhode Island’s early history. Born in Westhorpe, Suffolk, England, in 1609, he was educated at Cambridge and later studied medicine, probably at Holland’s University of Leyden, and was fluent in several languages by the time he arrived in the New World in 1637. Landing in Boston, he settled in Newport that winter, founding a Baptist church there in 1644 before returning to England with Williams to obtain the patent. Clarke stayed behind in London when Williams delivered the patent back to Providence.

Clarke’s new mission was more successful than anyone could have imagined. The new charter—much of which may have been written by Clarke himself—was in many ways a remarkable document for its time. It acknowledged the “humble petition of our trusty and well-beloved subject, John Clarke,” praised the “peaceable and loyal minds” and “serious and religious intentions” of the colonists and detailed a liberal and generous plan for “the free exercise and enjoyment of all their civil and religious rights.” It established religious freedom in a phrase engraved today on the marble façade of the statehouse and which may have been lifted from Clarke’s petition: “To hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing and civil state may stand and best be maintained—and that among our English subjects—with full liberty in religious concernments.” Such a startling declaration could get one hanged in the seventeenth century.

Local government was placed in the hands of twenty-six men, individually named and declared “a body corporate and politic, in fact and name, by the name of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America.” The charter went on to proclaim “that, for the better ordering and managing of the affairs and business of the said company, and their successors, there shall be one Governor, one Deputy-Governor, and ten Assistants, to be from time to time constituted, elected, and chosen, out of the Freemen of the said Company.” It also called for twice-yearly meetings of a General Assembly consisting of

The charter specified the rights granted to freemen of the company and set a yearly general election of a new governor and General Assembly on the first Wednesday in May. It also provided for the organization of a military and established the colony’s borders, among other brass tacks. It really was a very progressive document for its time.

The charter arrived in Newport in November 1663 and was greeted with ecstatic celebration. Indeed, the charter became a kind of venerated holy relic, a ritual object. Each year, at election time, the outgoing governor humbly turned the charter over to the new governor, and the entire document was solemnly read out word for word before the hushed throng of freemen. Rhode Islanders were so enamored of their charter that when Edmund Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, rampaged through the region in 1687, revoking royal charters as he went, Rhode Islanders hid their precious document from him and would not surrender it. Andros had to settle for breaking the state seal.

In 1664, the General Assembly passed an act limiting the right to vote on company and plantation business to the freemen, further stating that only property owners and the oldest sons of property owners were eligible for freeman status. Any adult white male over twenty-one years of age who owned at least £100 worth of real estate could apply for admittance to the company, which would vote on his application. If approved—and they seem to have always been approved—he and his eldest son were freemen and voters. In a time when most colonists owned land, this system offered most men the opportunity of entering the ranks of freemen—at least in theory.

Rhode Islanders held their charter in such high regard that it remained in effect into the 1840s, long after independence and by which time most other states of the union had adopted modern constitutions.

The charter’s growing number of opponents made several specific criticisms, chief among them being the limitation of voting rights to the freemen.

In seventeenth-century Rhode Island, land had been plentiful and easy enough to obtain, and most white men owned the requisite one hundred pounds of property. Even when the General Assembly raised the amount to £200, and then some years later raised it yet again to £400, this did not seem to present a serious obstacle to those wishing to become freemen. In 1762, the General Assembly magnanimously knocked off a zero, lowering the minimum requirement to £40. By the 1840s, when the tensions leading to the Dorr War were mounting, £40 pounds was equivalent to $134.

Samuel Slater opened his Pawtucket mill in 1793, sparking the Industrial Revolution and changing the Rhode Island economy forever. There had been attempts at working the land, but the thin rocky New England soil was poor, and most people either gave up attempts at farming altogether or moved west to try again somewhere else. Slater and his Arkwright machines put the final nail in the coffin of Rhode Island’s early farm-based economy as many rural inhabitants turned to millwork instead. The cities grew and grew as industrialization boomed, and the local economy moved from agrarian “plantation” to an urban, industrial one. By the 1840s, the state hummed with the sound of dozens of mills scattered across the landscape. The many mills required a seemingly endless supply of workers, and then—as now—recent immigrants proved to be a ready source of cheap labor.

The Irish began to arrive in large numbers in the 1830s, and the next decade would see a huge influx of new arrivals. Some sources claim that in the 1840s, half of all immigrants to the United States were Irish. Many came to New England, sought work in the mills and lived in near poverty in three-decker tenements in the cities. They were not landowners and so were denied the vote. It is estimated that in the 1840s, at the height of Irish immigration, some 60 percent of the adult white male population in Rhode Island could not vote because they failed to meet the property requirement. Some sources place the percentage even higher.

Voting was not the only civil right denied to non-freemen. Under the charter and according to later interpretations by the General Assembly, only freemen could sit on juries or bring a suit before a court of law. A non-freeman could not sue a freeman for legal wrongdoing, unless he could find another freeman to sponsor him. The case would then be heard by a jury made up entirely of other freemen—so much for a jury of one’s peers. The charter truly created a whole population of second-class citizens.

Critics of the charter also condemned the apportionment of representatives—the “deputies”—as originally laid down. While it may have been fair in 1663, it made no allowance for the growth of cities and towns. Newport had been the colony’s chief city, ranking with Boston, Philadelphia and New York in importance, and therefore the six deputies the charter called for had probably been warranted. But Newport never fully recovered from the ruinous British occupation during the Revolution, when most of the citizens had fled and the redcoats destroyed much of the city, tearing down houses for firewood. By 1840, Newport still sent six deputies (now called representatives) to the General Assembly, despite having a population of just over eight thousand. Providence, on the other hand, the state’s largest city with a population of over twenty-three thousand, was only allowed four representatives under the rules of the royal charter. This disproportionate representation proved to be another serious bone of contention with the old charter system.

Lastly, the near limitless power of the General Assembly was questioned. While the charter established the office of governor, it nowhere described the governor’s duties, rights and responsibilities. He was merely an officer of the General Assembly with no veto power, a figurehead enacting the assembly’s will. The assembly also appointed judges to the courts, and of course only those sympathetic to or connected with the assemblymen got the job. With an essentially powerless governor and a puppet judiciary, the system of checks and balances as laid out in the United States Constitution was nowhere to be found, with two of the branches squarely in the hands—or pocket—of the third. One assemblyman was heard to remark, “Sir, I conceive that this body has the same power over the nonfreeholders of this state that the Almighty has over the universe.”

As the charter contained no provisions for its own amendment and therefore could not be changed, many simply advocated that it be replaced with a new constitution entirely. There were a half dozen calls for constitutional conventions issued over the years; only two of them actually resulted in a convention being held to write a new constitution. The convention of 1824 drafted a constitution that, when placed before the freemen, was voted down two to one, and the constitutional convention of 1834 accomplished nothing before adjourning in ennui.

Unsurprisingly, the freeman oligarchy rolled its collective eyes at talk of framing a constitution. Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, sneered:

Wayland’s attitude was benign compared to that of Representative Benjamin Hazard, who issued what is known as Hazard’s Report to the State House of Representatives. Paying particular attention to the petitions advocating the expansion of suffrage, he wrote angrily and dismissively that his committee found “nothing…either in facts or of reasoning, which requires the attention of the house. If there is anything noticeable in them, it is the little sense of propriety manifested in the style in which they are drawn up.” Reserving a special ire for immigrants, he declared, “Their ancestors were not among ours. Their natural connexions are in other places; and their habits, attachments, and predilections have been formed before they came.” The report concluded shudderingly:

Many argued that extending suffrage would pave the way to rampant voter fraud. The logic is not very clear, and certainly fraud was unbridled anyway. For example, the powerful and wealthy Sprague family, owners of the Cranston Printworks, a mill company that employed thousands, often granted their male workers $134 of land via quitclaim deed and sent them out to vote as they were told. The deeds were then dutifully returned to the family the next day.

It should come as no surprise that the advocates and opponents of expanded suffrage were divided along social class, and therefore political party...