People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [127]
Sporadic farmer resistance to the collection of back rents continued into the 1860s. As late as 1869, bands of “Indians” were still assembling to thwart sheriffs acting for a rich valley landowner named Walter Church. In the early 1880s a deputy sheriff trying to dispossess a farmer on behalf of Church was killed by shotgun fire. By this time most leases had passed into the hands of the farmers. In three of the main Anti-Rent counties, of twelve thousand farmers, only two thousand remained under lease.
The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the system stabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poor intact. It was a common sequence in American history.
Around the time of the Anti-Renter movement in New York, there was excitement in Rhode Island over Dorr’s Rebellion. As Marvin Gettleman points out in The Dorr Rebellion, it was both a movement for electoral reform and an example of radical insurgency. It was prompted by the Rhode Island charter’s rule that only owners of land could vote.
As more people left the farm for the city, as immigrants came to work in the mills, the disfranchised grew. Seth Luther, self-educated carpenter in Providence and spokesman for working people, wrote in 1833 the “Address on the Right of Free Suffrage,” denouncing the monopoly of political power by “the mushroom lordlings, sprigs of nobility . . . small potato aristocrats” of Rhode Island. He urged non-cooperation with the government, refusing to pay taxes or to serve in the militia. Why, he asked, should twelve thousand working people in Rhode Island without the vote submit to five thousand who had land and could vote?
Thomas Dorr, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, became a leader of the suffrage movement. Working people formed the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, and in the spring of 1841 thousands paraded in Providence carrying banners and signs for electoral reform. Going outside the legal system, they organized their own “People’s Convention” and drafted a new constitution without property qualifications for voting.
In early 1842, they invited votes on the constitution; fourteen thousand voted for it, including about five thousand with property—therefore a majority even of those legally entitled to vote by the charter. In April they held an unofficial election, in which Dorr ran unopposed for governor, and six thousand people voted for him. The governor of Rhode Island in the meantime got the promise of President John Tyler that in the case of rebellion federal troops would be sent. There was a clause in the U.S. Constitution to meet just that kind of situation, providing for federal intervention to quell local insurrections on request of a state government.
Ignoring this, on May 3, 1842, the Dorr forces held an inauguration with a great parade of artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics, and militia marching through Providence. The newly elected People’s Legislature was convened. Dorr led a fiasco of an attack on the state arsenal, his cannon misfiring. Dorr’s arrest was ordered by the regular governor, and he went into hiding outside the state, trying to raise military support.
Despite the protests of Dorr and a few others, the “People’s Constitution” kept the word “white” in its clause designating voters. Angry Rhode Island blacks now joined the militia units of the Law and Order coalition, which promised that a new constitutional convention would give them the right to vote.
When Dorr returned to Rhode Island, he found several hundred of his followers, mostly working people, willing to fight for the People’s Constitution, but there were thousands in the regular militia on the side of the state. The rebellion disintegrated and Dorr again fled Rhode Island.
Martial law was declared. One rebel soldier, captured, was blindfolded and put before