The twenty-year period from 1846 to 1865 was characterized by modernization, political and social friction, and conflict. The Mexican War, which a majority of Rhode Islanders opposed as an act of aggression, began the era, and the Civil War, which a majority of Rhode islanders tried vigorously to avert, brought this turbulent age to a close.
The theme of modernization is apparent in the extent of technological and institutional change. Several major public works projects were instituted to meet the demands of rapid demographic and economic growth. The most important of these was railroad construction. In 1847 the first train ran over the Providence and Worcester line. This railroad (which is still a major factor in the state's economy) built a massive Providence terminal in 1848, the Union Passenger Depot, to service its operations.
In the 1850s other railroads traversed the state. The Hartford, Providence, and Fishkill line was completed in 1854, connecting Rhode Island with the Hudson River. In the following year the Providence, Warren, and Bristol line provided transportation for the East Bay region, an area whose dimensions were altered in 1862 when the Massachusetts towns of Pawtucket (east of the Blackstone) and East Providence were acquired in exchange for the Rhode Island town of Fall River (north of Tiverton).
Internal routes of travel were also improved. In 1847 the Providence Gas Company was incorporated. Its initial project was the lighting of streets. Mains were laid first in the principal downtown thoroughfares, and gradually gas superceded whale oil for highway illumination throughout Providence and in other urban areas of Rhode Island.
Waterborne transport also improved when the United States Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the Providence River in 1853 prior to dredging a channel south of Fox Point to a depth of ten and a width of one hundred feet. This improvement allowed the Port of Providence to accommodate most of the new and larger vessels used in the coastal trade.
Apart from transportation and public works, another development that loomed large in this era was the establishment of institutions for the care or treatment of the unfortunate. For the mentally ill, the innovative Butler Hospital was opened in a pastoral setting overlooking the Seekonk River in 1847, and the General Assembly in 1851 offered a blueprint for reform by promulgating a report by Thomas Hazard on the status and treatment of the poor and insane.
For wayward children, the Providence Reform School was organized in 1850, housed in spacious Tockwotton Mansion near India Point. It became the forerunner of the state reform school for juvenile offenders. Orphaned and neglected children also became an important social concern. To supplement the work of the Children's Friend Society (established in 1835), the Association for the Benefit of Colored Children (organized in 1838) constructed a Providence facility, called The Shelter, in 1849. Two years later the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy established St. Aloysius Home in their convent on Claverick Street near the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul. By 1862 this orphanage -- the oldest continuous social welfare agency in the diocese -- occupied a spacious, modern building on Prairie Avenue. Providence Catholics also established a local branch of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a lay organization dedicated to aiding the destitute. The cathedral unit (founded in 1853) was the first of many parish chapters throughout the state.
To care for the elderly, the Providence Home for Aged Women was organized in 1856. Its present building at Front and East streets, overlooking the harbor, was opened in 1864. Elderly men waited ten years longer for a comparable facility.
These activities were humanitarian responses to the increasingly impersonal nature of an emerging urban-industrial society. They were commendable attempts by civic-minded reformers to deal with victims of the rapid change, growth, and modernization that affected what had become the nation's most urbanized, industrial state.
One notable departure from contemporary humanitarian sentiment (other than the weakness of local abolitionism) was the incidence of nativism in the 1850s. Prejudice towards Irish Catholic immigrants, fanned by the Providence Journal, used as its vehicle the American, or "Know-Nothing" party, a secret organization that swept town, city, and state elections in the mid-fifties. Its candidate, William W. Hoppin, captured the governorship in 1855. Some of the party's more zealous adherents even planned a raid on St. Xavier's Convent, home of the "female Jesuits" (the Sisters of Mercy), but the angry mob dispersed when confronted by Bishop Bernard O'Reilly and an equally militant crowd of armed Irishmen.
Fortunately, this virulent strain of nativism subsided as quickly as it had reared its evil head. By 1860 bigotry again became subtle rather than overt as Rhode Island and the nation braced to face yet another challenge -- the specter of disunion. By the time that challenge came, the state had experienced a significant political realignment, one which might be called the development of the third (and present) party system. By 1854 the Whig Party -- split nationally over the issue of slavery into Cotton and Conscience Whigs -- disintegrated locally. Those who considered the spread of slavery the country's greatest evil embraced the newly formed Republican party, while those who saw Catholic immigration as the main menace joined the American (Know-Nothing) party.
Rhode Island Democrats also divided. Reform-oriented followers of Thomas Dorr and his uncle and ally Governor Philip Alien (1851-1854) maintained their party allegiance, but many rural Democrats who had supported the cause of Law and Order during the Dorr Rebellion affiliated with the Know-Nothings. When that one-issue party also declined after 1856, both these rural Democrats and nativist Whigs gravitated toward the rapidly growing Republican party, bringing with them their anti-Irish Catholic attitudes. From this decade until the 193Os, the Democrats were Rhode Island's minority party.
Rhode Island, like every state in America, keenly felt the impact of the Civil War. This conflict many Rhode Islanders hoped to avoid. Yankee businessmen, especially those producing cotton textiles, had economic ties with the South, ties which war would (and did) disrupt. As some critics remarked, there seemed to be an unholy alliance between the "lords of the loom" (the cotton textile manufacturers) and the "lords of the lash," as the slaveholders were called. In addition, many foreign-born Irishmen, resentful that they needed land to vote while blacks were subjected to no such discrimination, had little sympathy for freeing those who could become their rivals for jobs on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Consequently, when the Rhode Island Republican party nominated Seth Padelford for governor in 1860 -- a man whose antislavery views were extreme -- a split occurred in the party ranks. Supporters of other Republican aspirants and Republican moderates of the Lincoln variety joined with Democrats (who were softer on slavery) to nominate and elect a fusion candidate on the "Conservative" ticket. Their choice was twenty-nine-year- old William Sprague of Cranston, the heir to a vast cotton textile empire and a martial man who had attained the rank of colonel in the Providence Marine Corps of Artillery. Sprague outpolled Padelford 12,278 to 10,740 -- a victory celebrated as a rebuke to abolitionism by the citizens of faraway Savannah, Georgia, who fired a one-hundred-gun salute in Sprague's honor.
But if Rhode Island and Sprague were soft on slavery, they were still strong on Union. After the Confederate attack of April 12, 1861,on Fort Sumter, the local citizenry rallied behind their once conciliatory governor and rushed to the defense of Washington. President Lincoln issued his call for volunteers on April 15. Just three days later the "Flying Artillery" left Providence for the front, and on April 20 Colonel Ambrose Burnside and Sprague himself led 530 men of the First Regiment, Rhode Island Detached Militia, from Exchange Place to their fateful encounter with the rebels at Bull Run.
During the war there were eight calls for troops, with Rhode Island exceeding its requisition in all but one. Though the state's total quota was only 18,898, it furnished 25,236 fighting men, of whom 1,685 died of wounds or disease and 16 earned the Medal of Honor. During the conflict Melville in Portsmouth became the site of a military hospital while nearby Newport became the home of the United States Naval Academy, relocated from Annapolis for security reasons. The academy occupied a hotel known as Atlantic House, which stood at the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Pelham Street, and it also had training ships and instructional facilities on Goat Island.
The state's contribution to the Union victory went beyond mere military and naval manpower. Some historians have claimed that the productive capacity of Northern industry was the decisive element in the outcome of the Civil War. Here again Rhode Island was prominent. Its woolen mills, especially Atlantic and Wanskuck, supplied federal troops with thousands of uniforms, overcoats, and blankets, fashioned on sewing machines made by Brown and Sharpe, while metals factories such as Providence Tool, Nicholson and Brownell, and the Burnside Rifle Company provided guns, sabers, and musket parts. Builders Iron Foundry (established in 1822 and still operating in West Warwick) manufactured large numbers of cannons; the Providence Steam Engine Company built the engines for two Union sloops of war; and Congdon and Carpenter (established in 1792) supplied the military with such hardware as iron bars, bands, hoops, and horseshoes.
On the home front, the Civil War decade was a lime of continued growth and modernization, especially for Providence. The city's most important and dynamic mayor Thomas A. Dovle began a nineteen-year reign in 1864. He promptly reorganized the police department into an efficient, modern force and converted the historic Market House into a municipal office building. City health and sanitation programs, under the capable direction of Dr. Edwin M. Snow, were models for other municipalities to emulate. Elsewhere in the field of medicine, the urgings of Dr. Usher Parsons combined with the philanthropy or Thomas Poynton Ives to establish Rhode Island Hospital, giving the state a first-class medical facility at last.
In education, business and commercial schools such as Scholfield's and Bryant and Stratton flourished as they provided a growing white-collar work force with the office skills needed to administer the affairs of Rhode Island's burgeoning industries. And in the public schools a momentous event, inspired by the outcome of the war, occurred in 1866: racial segregation was abolished throughout the state.
It was during the Civil War decade that urban mass transit came to Providence. Its vehicle was the horse car, a mode of travel over the streets of the city that combined the old (actual horsepower) and the new (iron rails). The horse car lines, extending from the Union Depot in Market Square over the surface of every major thoroughfare, where essential factors in the growth and settlement of the city's "streetcar suburbs'' -- the outlying neighborhoods of Providence. With the war a partial stimulus, industrial Rhode Island began to scale its greatest heights, pulled from above by its wealthy Yankee entrepreneurs and investors, pushed from below by a growing immigrant work force that now began to include migrants from Germany, Sweden, England, and especially, French Canada. As the war clouds lifted, the state's Golden Age of economic and social prominence was about to begin.
