Please contact your representatives to keep them from changing the name of our state!!! Some misguided and misinformed people think that the "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" has something to do with slavery! It does not. There were no black people here when Roger Williams named the state in 1636! The use of the word plantation at the time was as follows:
Origin: 1645
It was not new to call a colonial settlement a
plantation. That was the term used for the earliest English colonies, both in Virginia and in New England. But as the Planters (1619) prospered,
plantation took on a new American meaning, "an individual homestead or farm." This is mentioned in a Connecticut notice of 1645 regulating the purchase of "any plantation or land." For the most part, however, northerners preferred to speak of
farms.
Not so in the South, where individually owned plantations of tobacco, sugar cane, rice, and cotton grew grand and
opulent through slave labor. Starting in the eighteenth century,
plantation came to mean just such a place, the focus of Southern wealth, culture, and mythology until the time of the Civil War, as opposed to the cities of the industrial and mercantile North. Thus, leading Southern political figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had plantations, while northerners Ben Franklin and John Adams did not.
So please, help stop the history revisionistas!!!!!!!!
VIVA the Independant Man!
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Rhode Islanders- AWAKE!
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