Providence 375 Essay Series

Revolutionary Wartime Providence

by Albert T. Klyberg,
L.H.D, Public Historian, served as Director of the Rhode Island Historical Society from 1969-1999

It goes without saying that history recounts what took place, not what didn't happen. The tensions of apprehension and anxiety faced by the citizens of Providence during the American Revolution have received scant notice.

During the years of the American Revolution, 1775 to 1783, Providence never repelled a British attack. Unlike Newport, which suffered three years behind enemy lines, Providence never was the target of cannon fire, never had its public buildings commandeered by enemy forces, never fired its own cannons mounted behind the dirt entrenchments which circled the harbor. Nonetheless, for nearly three years from December of 1776 until 1779, Providence had one eye on a formidable British army of 6,000 troops, fortified in Newport with the backing of a fleet ready to pounce, and another eye focused on being a crucial New England intersection for all manner of war-related supplies and manpower. Rhode Island wartime governors, Cooke and Greene with the aid of a small Council of War, divided their time between concerns for the lower bay towns of Newport, Jamestown, and Portsmouth and their duties to respond to the troop needs of George Washington's army. Rhode Island not only sent two regiments out of the state into the Continental service, but recruited thousands of other soldiers to guard at home. With colonial Newport the major depot during the 18th century engaged in making up of cargoes drawn from the Rhode Island hinterland, in a time of war, all of the ferry landings leading to Newport had to be guarded in the event of surge of British invaders into the Rhode Island mainland from Aquidneck Island.

Although mostly lost from today's view of the upper bay, and now obscured by the filling in of the Providence waterfront, in colonial times there was a horseshoe-shaped ridge of high sand dunes and bluffs running from Pawtuxet Neck to Rhode Island Hospital to Hayward Park (near the former Coro Building), across the Providence River to Fox Hill and India Point, across the Seekonk and down along the East Providence shoreline to Crescent Park and Bullocks Point. Old postcards and the 19th century watercolor views of Providence harbor by painter Edward Lewis Peckham capture these natural defenses of the water approach to Providence. Beginning in 1775, fortifications were erected at Pawtuxet, Fort Independence at Field's Point, Robin Hill Fort near Sassafras Point (west bank of the Providence River), Fox Point, Prospect Hill (near Brown University), Fort Hill and Kettle Point, both in present East Providence (at the time of the Revolution, Rehoboth, Massachusetts). Although nearly all remnants of the forts are gone, the homes of Signer, Stephen Hopkins, and his brother Esek, our country's first Admiral, survive.

The fact that these fortified natural barriers were never needed to repel a British raid did not make life in Providence during these war years any easier for those who lived here. The threat of invasion was real. The British had many reasons to occupy Providence; it had been a thorn in the Crown's side for many years. Providence merchants like the out-spoken John Brown hatched the plot to burn the Gaspee in 1772. It's scurrilous 'scribblers,' like Silas Downer and Stephen Hopkins, had written telling and compelling popular pamphlets about the rights of the colonists. Providence provided an alternate Old State House for the colonial assembly to meet when Newport was captured, and it is where the oft -misunderstood Renunciation of Allegiance to the King of May 4th 1776 was voted. It can be visited today (on 150 Benefit Street). Providence had its own newspaper, The Providence Gazette to keep the ideas of revolution alive. Two of the Continental frigates, Warren and Providence were built in the harbor during 1776 and 1777, and Providence was a logical staging ground for attacks on Aquidneck Island. The Hayward Park site, at Broad, Foster, Chestnut, and Friendship Streets, just recently demolished as part of the removal of the last vestiges of the Interstate, 195, was once Fort Sullivan, a marshalling yard for the 1778 attack on Newport and the Battle of Rhode Island.

The British choke hold on the passages of the lower bay meant that Providence shipping was bottled up for most of the war, causing frequent food and supply shortages for its inhabitants. But that was about the worst of the actual British threat to the town at the head of Narragansett Bay. It was relatively minor compared to examples of devastation dealt to the Rhode Island towns of Newport and Jamestown, Portsmouth, Bristol and Warren. Nonetheless, the bombardments and scavenging raids leveled at these coastal communities served as grim warnings to Providence and kept its residents on edge.

Providence could not let its guard down against the possibility of such a strike. In the meantime its Council of War, meeting in the Old State House on Benefit Street, was hard at work raising loans to pay militia, supporting its two regiments in the Continental Army, and arranging for transport all manner of goods. Wagon roads stretched out to Boston and Cape Cod to the east and Norwich, Hartford, eventually to New York and Philadelphia, to the west.

Towards the end of the War University Hall, at Brown, became an infirmary for wounded soldiers, and the ridge of nearby Camp Street became a bivouac for the 5,000 man French army preparing for their march south to Yorktown.

The war literally flowed through Providence; sometimes there were two to three thousand troops in town. Most of the War there were 1000. From sending relief to the citizens of captured Boston in 1775 and 1776 until the final campaign at Yorktown, Providence was a busy back room in America's war for independence.