surfaced, and the interdependent network was strained beyond endurance."[4] Crane's claim is well-founded. There is copious documentary evidence to suggest that Newport's society was torn apart by the religiously-motivated political divisions that formed in the movement towards Revolution. Her conclusions are primarily based on economic data, however, and she fails to show how the growing political tension affected the religiously diverse social network which had grown up around the commercial economy. [5]
The colony of Rhode Island, unlike its neighbors Massachusetts and Connecticut, never had an official religion. Rhode Island's founders, made up of Baptists, Quakers, and others fleeing persecution in neighboring colonies, specifically intended the new colony to be a shelter “for persons of distressed conscience.” [6] In 1647, the General Court, which represented a central administration over the four separately founded towns of Providence, Warwick, Portsmouth, and Newport, laid out a body of laws, which concluded with the statement “all men may walk as their consciences perswade them, every one in the name of his God." [7]
The clear separation between church and state left room for another force to take the central place in Rhode Island life: commerce. Rhode Island had almost no hinterland, but it did have an abundance of well-formed harbors. It did not take long for Rhode Islanders to realize that if the colony was to be economically viable in the long term, it would need to rely on what the sea could provide.[8] Fortunately, many of the Quakers and Jews who had fled from Europe to Newport in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had strong connections with other Jewish and Quaker refugees in the Caribbean. Rhode Island's colonial economy was founded upon these pre-existing networks. [9]