A Crisis of Charter and Right: Piracy and Colonial Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Rhode Island

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the colony of Rhode Island's role in Red Sea piracy was so marked as to bring on a political crisis with the English Crown resulting in an attempt to revoke its charter in 1702. This article examines the crisis both as an expression of an independent colonial legal identity and a precedent to ultimate dissolution in 1776. Specifically, through examination of colonial records and court documents, it demonstrates that Rhode Island colonists came to rely on the pirate trade as a crucial source of income, and carved out an exception for local pirates within their laws and governance. Governors granted dubious privateering commissions and convened prize courts under their assumed role as vice-admirals, a role that was first tacitly recognized then ultimately rejected by the Crown. By the end of the seventeenth century, this colonial lassitude ultimately came into conflict with an emergent English bureaucracy determined to stamp out the perceived pirate menace. By this time, however, piracy had become so entrenched within Rhode Island society that any attempt at criminalization by the Crown was perceived as an attack on the sacred rights and liberties granted the colony by its charter. Faced with possible reincorporation under direct rule, colonists still chose to defend their rights to commission pirates under admiralty jurisdiction. The success of this defense is a telling statement on the limitations of English prerogative in the American colonies.