CityState: Reporter l by Ellen Liberman
What’s in a Name?
In this column from our archives, Ellen Liberman considers the last failed
attempt to remove “Providence Plantations” from the official state name, an
issue that’s back on the ballot this November.
Leaning in the farthest corner of Prince’s Hill Cemetery is an
uncut chunk of quartz, its rough white face bearing a plaque inscribed
with the thanks of a grateful town: “In memory of the slaves and
their descendants who faithfully served Barrington’s families.” The
memorial was erected in 1906 by Thomas W. Bicknell, whose antecedents
lie before it in straight rows of polished gray granite.
The Bicknells were among New England’s earliest European
immigrants, first settling in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1635.
Thomas Bicknell, of the Barrington branch, was an eighth generation
American and a celebrated son. An educator, lecturer, publisher,
historian and relentless organizer of societies and organizations,
Thomas Williams Bicknell was the type of nineteenth-century man
for whom the term “indefatigable” was coined. As a twenty-something
Brown University junior, he was elected state representative. Bicknell
went on to become Rhode Island’s commissioner of public education,
to found the New England Journal of Education and to head the
ILLUSTRATION BY DOREEN CHISNELL AND MEAGHAN SUSI / GETTY IMAGES
National Education Association. (These are slender slices of a career
of civic hyperactivity.)
When Bicknell was born in 1834, slaves were still counted in the
state census. His ninety-one years of life spanned the Civil War, and
his family had once owned slaves. But Bicknell himself was a
reformer. His first speech before the General Assembly urged the
abolition of segregated schools. He launched Booker T. Washington’s
speaking career by inviting him to address the NEA in 1884. And
yet, Bicknell’s chronicles of Rhode Island slavery are fantastical, to
say the least: “The Narragansett country was the slave paradise of
the Northern colonies,” he wrote in his five-volume opus of Rhode
Island history. “Every farm had its quota, and the family life of the
slaves was recognized and protected. Labor indoors or out was not
excessive, the relation of master to slave was kind and humane, and
punishments for offenses were usually mild and corrective. The
social and convivial life of the masters, mistresses and young people
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