The taming of Rogue Island.(Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero )

In 1787, a rhymester at Connecticut Magazine saluted his eastern neighbors:

 
   Hail, realm of rogues, renowned for 
      fraud and guile, 
   All hail, ye knaveries of you little isle.... 
   The wiser race, the snares of law to 
      shun, 
   Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode 
      Island run. 

Okay, so it's not "My Old Kentucky Home," but you get the point: Rhode Island, or "Rogue Island" as she was known, marched to her own drummer. The Rhode Islanders' credo, according to one nineteenth-century historian, was "To mind their own business and to insist none others should mind it for them"

Consecrated to religious liberty, awash in paper money issued by its populist politicians, deeply suspicious of centralized power, Rhode Island refused even to send delegates to the Philadelphia convention that, during the summer of 1787, drew up the U.S. Constitution. The Rhode Island General Assembly was satisfied with the decentralized system of the Articles of Confederation.

Most Founders viewed Rhode Island as wayward and headstrong, if not quite a pariah. George Washington deplored its "impolitic, unjust, and one might add without much impropriety, scandalous conduct." lames Madison wrote, "Rhode Island alone refuses her concurrence.... Being conscious of the wickedness of the measures they are pursuing, they are afraid of everything that may become a control on them."

Historians have not been kind to Rhode Island, but she had her reasons. The General Assembly explained to Congress that it was acting upon "that great principle which hath ever been the characteristic of this state, the love of true Constitutional liberty, and the fear we have of making innovations on the rights and liberties of the citizens at large." Declaring itself "diffident of power," the assembly preferred the rebel Spirit of '76 to the responsible Spirit of '87.

When the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, Rhode Island was not impressed. Her dominant anti-federalists protested that the Constitution protected the slave trade, promised onerous taxes, granted excessive ...