Country Party (Rhode Island)

The party "was suspicious of the power and the cost of a government too far removed from the grass-roots level, and so it declined to dispatch delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which drafted the United States Constitution.

Effectively, this requirement represented nine of 12, as Rhode Island had already earned a reputation for poor cooperation in the Congress of the Confederation and had declined to participate in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

[3] By the end of July 1788, Virginia and New York had ratified, bringing the total to 11, excluding only North Carolina and Rhode Island and making universal ratification subject to adoption of a Bill of Rights virtually inevitable.

Anti-Federalist opinion in Rhode Island, which retained wide popular support and for which the Country Party was the vehicle, clearly had helped ensure a Bill of Rights.

However, by the spring of 1790, months after a finalized Bill of Rights was approved by a smoothly functioning Congress from which only Rhode Island remained awkwardly absent, resistance to ratification seemed absurd rather than principled.

Rhode Island resembled not a confidently self-governing republic choosing its own sustainable political and economic destiny, but a state making an inexplicably negative choice to be unrepresented in its own Federal union by stubbornly ignoring it.

Exerting informal leverage amid a measure of national public ridicule of the state,[5] the new Federal Government pressured "Rogue Island" to conform, but also welcomed its eventual accession.

After passage of the Constitution, some Country Party leaders were left bankrupt, such as William West, because the Federal Government refused to recognize the state's paper money as legal tender.

Arthur Fenner, an anti-federalist, served as Governor for 15 years