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Chapter 1
Beginnings
The actual, living majority of the day possess the true sovereignty of the country and has a right to investigate, revise and amend its political constitution.
TWD to William Bridges Adams, November 7, 1831
“My efforts from the beginning to the end of my public life have been uniformly for the extension of suffrage & a free constitution,” dictated a sick and lame Thomas Dorr in 1847. The bachelor Dorr, two years removed from a stint in the state penitentiary, was living in his father’s elegant home on Benefit Street in Providence. After his release from prison, Dorr frequently spent months in bed, suffering from severe “rheumatic troubles.” Only his hope in Jesus Christ, maintained the devout Episcopal, “sustained” him in his darkest hours.1 Dorr’s closest friend, Walter S. Burges, and his mother, Lydia, stood by taking notes as he rattled off the history of his public career. Just a few months shy of his forty-second birthday, Dorr offered his thoughts in the hopes that Burges or his mother would find a suitable biographer. He had been trying for two years to find an appropriate person to record the events of his life for posterity. Dorr had already arranged his correspondence, completing an index for the voluminous letters he had saved. Dorr clearly feared that the end was near; he said he was “dangerously ill.”2
Dorr hoped that Burges would share the intricate details of his life story with John O’Sullivan, editor of the famous Democratic Review, a heavily partisan, Democratic-leaning New York political and literary journal. Dorr and O’Sullivan first met each other in the 1830s, when Dorr was living in Brooklyn, frequently summering together in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.3 O’Sullivan was connected with a group of self-conscious literary nationalists collectively known as Young America. Writers such as O’Sullivan, William Jones, Jedediah Auld, and Russell Trevett, along with novelists Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, ensured Young America’s entrance into the literary canon. From its inception in 1837, the central hallmark of the Democratic Review, as historian Ted Widmer has argued, was “its unrelenting emphasis on youth.” The magazine “sounded this theme” at every turn, exhorting “young Americans” to take an active role in their country’s destiny. During the constitutional crisis in Rhode Island in 1842, one commentator proclaimed that as France was called “Young France” after 1830, so Rhode Island would now be known as “Young Rhode Island.”4 In 1853, Dorr helped to ingratiate O’Sullivan with the Young America President Franklin Pierce, who selected him as ambassador to Portugal. O’Sullivan informed Dorr shortly thereafter that he had three portraits hanging in his living room: Nathaniel Hawthorne; Narciso Lopez, the Venezuelan general whose invasion of Cuba in 1857 was supported by O’Sullivan; and Thomas Wilson Dorr.5
Even if he had the inclination to undertake a biography of Dorr, O’Sullivan would surely have been selective in discussing the various ways in which his old friend was, as Dorr put it, “devoted to matters of public utility and general improvement.”6 The Irish editor would have focused exclusively on the events of 1841–1842, ignoring or distorting the memory of Dorr’s wideranging reform efforts, especially his close connection to northern abolitionists in the 1830s. Dorr’s early life would have received the same cursory treatment O’Sullivan gave it in his July 1842 biographical portrait in the Democratic Review.7 O’Sullivan and his Young America cohorts were inspired by a messianic vision of democracy, principally westward expansion and manifest destiny. In article after article, O’Sullivan sounded the expansionist creed: “More, more, more will be the unresting cry, till our national destiny is fulfilled and the whole boundless continent is ours.”8 After witnessing the potentially dangerous effects of sectionalism at the 1844 Democratic convention, O’Sullivan and his allies poured their energy into smoothing tensions by promoting popular sovereignty as a panacea for the vexing question of the status of slavery in the western territories. Dorr’s reform efforts in the 1830s, especially his friendship with the noted abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and his antislavery activism, simply did not fit that agenda.
Thomas Wilson Dorr was born into a privileged social environment in Providence on November 5, 1805. The first families of Providence—including the Carringtons, Browns, Ives, Arnolds, Allens, and Dorrs—attached considerable importance to rank. The class consciousness that pervaded the city was not based on hereditary aristocracy alone, but also on property and material wealth. Birth and property combined to determine class structure. Thomas Dorr’s grandfather, Ebenezer Dorr, was a Roxbury, Massachusetts, leather dresser and successful merchant who took a leading role in the American Revolution, working with Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty. In the 1790s, Ebenezer sailed the globe, trading fur and sandalwood in China in exchange for tea, silk, and chinaware.9 As his trading empire expanded, it became necessary to have a family member stationed in China. The task fell to Ebenezer’s son, Sullivan, who moved to Canton in 1799. In Canton, Sullivan was joined by another prominent New England merchant, Edward Carrington, Sr., who served as U.S. consul and an agent for other American merchants. The two men amassed a sizeable fortune during their time in the Orient. After nearly four years of managing the overseas interests of the family, young Sullivan returned to New England and settled in the expanding town of Providence.10
In 1803, Sullivan married the tall and stately Lydia Allen, the daughter of Zachariah Allen, a prominent merchant and a member of one of Rhode Island’s oldest families. Lydia’s great-grandfather, Gabriel Bernon, was a prominent French merchant who fled that country in 1686 after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Bernon’s second wife, Mary Harris, was the daughter of one of the five men who accompanied Roger Williams to Rhode Island in 1636.11 Bernon founded King’s Episcopal Church (later renamed St. John’s) in 1722. Based on his family’s pedigree, Thomas Dorr was certainly “no interloper” in Rhode Island.12
In 1805, Sullivan Dorr netted an incredible profit of $100,000 after months of extensive trading in Europe, which enabled him to hire the prominent architect John Holden Greene to design and build a mansion in Providence that would signal his emergence as one of the state’s leading men.13 Sullivan and Lydia, along with their two young boys, Thomas (age four) and Allen (age two), moved into the stately home on Benefit Street in 1809. The house, which sat atop a commanding hill overlooking the Providence cove, was fittingly built on the original burial site of Roger Williams. In August 1836, Thomas Dorr was a fitting choice to give an oration celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of Rhode Island.14 The remaining Dorr children were all born and raised in the stately mansion, the inside of which was decorated by the renowned Italian artist Michele Cornè.15 The cosmopolitan Sullivan Dorr commissioned Cornè to paint a life-size fresco of the Bay of Naples in his parlor and front hallway.16
The Dorr children grew to adulthood in a society that was undergoing immense and wrenching change brought on by capitalist development, westward expansion, a transportation revolution, a rapidly transforming class structure, and massive immigration. The nation’s agrarian society was slowly being overshadowed by a more complex, progressive, and interconnected one in which considerations of the marketplace increasingly took precedence. In the North, the building of canals and the advent of steamboats, and later, railroads set in motion economic changes that created an integrated economy of commercial farms and growing urban centers. Concomitantly, state governments, particularly Rhode Island’s, built transportation networks that channeled this development. The first cotton mill in the United States was built by the English immigrant Samuel Slater in the North Providence mill village of Pawtucket in 1790. The Blackstone River quickly became one of the most heavily exploited streams in the northeast. Mills were built in the Blackstone River Valley and its tributaries from northwestern Rhode Island to Pawtucket, five miles from Providence.17
In the early nineteenth century, Providence was a low-lying city, dominated by the waterfront. The masts of sailing ships stood higher than anything else erected by man. In the decades before the American Revolution, Providence stood in the shadow of Newport, a coastal city with a deep protected harbor on the Atlantic Ocean. Newport was a bustling seaport and the home of some of the state–s leading merchants, including Abraham Redwood and Aaron Lopez. However, after the lengthy British occupation of the city during the Revolution, Providence merchants began to chip away at Newport’s hold on the state–s economic reins.
In the early nineteenth century, manufacturing slowly replaced maritime activity as the central element in Providence–s economy, and industry was now the principal outlet for capital investment and wealth accumulation. Following the establishment of Slater’s famous mill, industrialization transformed Providence and its outlying areas into a premier manufacturing center. The four Brown brothers—Nicholas, Moses, John, and Joseph—led the way in Providence with their candle and iron factories. Following the Brown brothers’ lead, Sullivan Dorr, like other wealthy businessmen, diversified his activities by entering into cotton and woolen manufacturing, insurance, and banking.
As Providence expanded into one of the most industrialized cities in the country, it acted as a magnet for foreign laborers seeking work and a better way of life. Providence grew to more than 12,000 inhabitants by the mid-1820s. A bridge connected the older east side, where the Dorr mansion sat, to the expanding west side, with banks and businesses lining a central market square, along with a fashionable shopping district known as Cheapside after London’s commercial strip. A massive granite arcade, modeled after a Greek temple, built in 1828 on Weybosset Neck symbolized the growing commercialism in the city and provided an alternative to the hustle and bustle of shopping on crowded city streets.18 In 1835, the railroad came to Providence, winding its way southward from Boston, while one from Stonington reached the west bank of the Providence River in 1837.19
According to the 1840 census, the number of mills in and around Providence rose from four to thirty, capital quadrupled, and the labor force expanded seventyfold. Providence, one of five rotating sites hosting the state–s capital, now claimed a population close to 24,000, double its number of two decades before, but the proportion of representatives for each town remained as it had been in the eighteenth century, when both population and wealth were concentrated in Newport and the southern regions of the state. Even though these areas were rapidly declining in population as the nineteenth century wore on, the 1663 Charter afforded them great political clout and, according to the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, allowed the “Rhode Island nobility” to continue “an oligarchy of white slaves.”20
Providence–s neighborhoods were structured by class and race, with working-class whites and blacks living in new kinds of housing, such as boardinghouses and tenements. Since fewer than 10 percent of the adult white males in the expanding metropolis had any say in political matters, unrest simmered just beneath the surface. Adding to the segmentation was the more geographically clustered and more assertive black community in the city, who established the African Union Meeting House in 1819. In October 1824, a white mob attacked the predominantly black neighborhood of Hard Scrabble in the northerly section of the city after a group of blacks refused to give way on the sidewalk to a group of whites. City authorities stood by and watched as a war of words turned violent. Though hearings were conducted, none of the rioters were ever punished.21
Sullivan Dorr’s successful economic ventures allowed him to educate his sons in a pastoral setting, secure from the physical and moral corruptions of the increasingly urbanized Providence. Thomas Dorr, who first attended the Providence Latin Grammar School, went to Phillips Exeter Academy in 1817. Dorr’s uncles, Crawford, Philip, and Zachariah Allen, Jr., were all Exeter graduates and likely influenced his parents’ decision to send their young boy to the New Hampshire boarding school, which had already developed a reputation as one of the top educational institutions in the country. All three Allen uncles would later attend Brown University and go on to become the foremost industrialists in Rhode Island, constructing mill villages in the northern part of the state and entering into a manufacturing partnership with Sullivan Dorr in 1832.22 Phillips Exeter Academy was incorporated in 1781 by the wealthy merchant John Phillips, whose nephew Samuel Phillips founded Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1780.23 Since dormitories were not built at Exeter until 1855, Thomas Dorr, and later his younger brother Allen, stayed with members of the community in homes that bordered the school’s property. The two brothers were members of the Golden Branch, a secret literary and debating society.24
The liberal arts education the Dorr brothers received at Exeter provided them with the genteel qualities required of societal leaders. As historian Gordon Wood has noted, this meant “being cosmopolitan, standing on elevated ground in order to have a large view of human affairs, being free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric, and having the ability to make disinterested judgments about the various contending interests in the society.”25 Headmaster Benjamin Abbot wrote to Sullivan Dorr in July 1818 to inform him that his oldest son was making good “progress” in “his studies & his general deportment [has] been quite satisfactory to his Instructors.” Dorr had qualified academically to graduate from Exeter in 1818, but the headmaster and his father agreed he should stay on another year to mature socially and to gain some additional learning.26 During his time at Exeter, Dorr proved himself both mentally and physically by heading a class of intelligent and talented young men. The faculty at Exeter ingrained in Dorr an understanding of the importance of service and working towards the repub...
