No Love for Rhode Island

 

In the 1780s it was fair to describe York, Pennsylvania as a Federalist town. On Independence Day of 1788, the community’s notables celebrated with a parade honoring the states that had sent delegates to the previous year’s Federal Convention. They selected from the York Academy twelve white children, all prospective members of the American elite, to carry flags with the represented states’ names. The inherent message was clear: the proper inheritors of the Revolution, and guardians of the republic’s future, were the citizens, well-to-do and otherwise, who supported the federal Constitution.

Political cartoon, celebrating New Hampshire's ratification, 6.21.1788

That document's future still remained in some doubt. As of July 1788 ten states, including Pennsylvania, had ratified the Constitution, but New York had not yet done so and was in the middle of a contentious state convention. North Carolina's convention had not yet met, and when it did so it voted to defer rather than approve ratification. The York parade's organizers still believed, apparently, that these two states would ratify and sent representatives to the new Congress. They turned their fears for the Federalist movement's future into anger at one state which had not even sent delegates to Philadelphia: Rhode Island.

“Rogue’s Island” had earlier angered elite proponents of a stronger national Union by vetoing a tariff amendment to the Articles of Confederation, and by passing a paper money law perceived as unfavorable to creditors in other states. York’s leaders denigrated the Ocean State with a black flag, carried behind the other states' flags by an African-American boy "in crepe." On the banner were sewn or painted these words:

 

I will divide her among the nations

I will take away her name

For her iniquity hath abounded

Her unrighteousness hath vexed the land.

 

Strong words, adapted from Scripture (though your author has not yet been able to locate the book, chapter, or verse). Rhode Islanders, as far as these Pennsylvania Federalists were concerned, could not consider themselves part of the chosen people. Indeed, God would surely cast them down for separating themselves from the rest of the Elect, for worshiping the false idol of paper currency, and for failing to pay their tithe to the national regime. When in 1790 the new U.S. government voted to embargo trade with Rhode Island unless it ratified the Constitution, York's leaders doubtless supported this act of coercion. One could only negotiate with the unrighteous for so long.

Modern readers like myself are struck, of course, by the cruel detail of the young Black flag-bearer. The implicit message in his placement within the parade was that African Americans, too, belonged with the nameless and despoliated peoples who had defied God's word. At best the parade organizers intended the child, who may have been enslaved,* to play the role of a jester, a comic outsider employed to deride those his masters also considered their inferiors. Probably the parents of the twelve young pupils who marched in the ranks of the righteous thought that associating Rhode Island with a bondsman or outsider was funny. Some people get their laughs from punching down.

***

Source: Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2020), 75.

 

 *Pennsylvania's legislature passed a gradual emancipation act in 1780, but slavery remained legal in the state for several more decade.