Rhode Island Colony
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40 free Rhode Island Colony trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rhode Island was the smallest of the thirteen colonies and the most stubborn. It began when a banished minister, Roger Williams, walked into the wilderness and started a settlement where government had no say over anyone's conscience. Dissenters of every kind followed him, and the colony's neighbours never quite forgave it. This quiz collects the fun facts people look for about the Rhode Island colony: how its towns were founded and named, who granted its charters, what its merchants shipped, how it dealt with its Native neighbours, and why it so often went its own way before and during the American Revolution. It suits students revising the thirteen colonies, teachers who want a ready-made classroom round, and anyone who likes colonial history with a few surprises. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Which Puritan colony banished Roger Williams in 1635, leading him to found Providence the next year?
Massachusetts Bay
Massachusetts Bay cast him out for attacking its land charters and its church rule. The settlement he started took in other outcasts and grew into a haven for dissenters.
Q 02Which British customs ship did Rhode Islanders burn in 1772, over a year before the Boston Tea Party?
HMS Gaspee
HMS Gaspee ran aground while chasing a local packet boat, and colonists rowed out that night, shot its commander and burned the schooner to the waterline.
Q 03Rhode Island was the only one of the thirteen states to send no delegates to which 1787 gathering?
Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention met without Rhode Island, which feared a strong central government and held out until 1790, the last of the thirteen states to ratify.
Q 04When Roger Williams's grave was opened in 1860, what had grown into the rough shape of his body?
An apple tree root
An apple tree root had followed the line of his spine, split at the hips and bent at the knees. The Rhode Island Historical Society has looked after it ever since.
Q 05Roger Williams of Rhode Island taught Dutch to which great English poet of the 1600s?
John Milton
John Milton, who went on to write Paradise Lost, traded lessons with him: Williams taught Dutch and got refresher lessons in Hebrew and Greek in return.
Q 06The first governor under Rhode Island's 1663 charter shared his name with which traitorous great-grandson?
Benedict Arnold
Benedict Arnold the governor was said to be the wealthiest man in the colony. He died in 1678, long before his namesake switched sides to fight for the British.
Q 07Rhode Island distillers turned Caribbean molasses into which spirit for the triangular trade?
Rum
Rum made Rhode Island's merchants rich: it was shipped to Africa as a trade good, and the ships came home from the West Indies loaded with more molasses.
Q 08Newport's Touro building of 1763 is the oldest surviving American example of which house of worship?
A synagogue
A synagogue rose in Newport because the colony's promise of religious liberty had drawn a small Jewish community there by 1658, a century before it was built.
Q 09Until voters shortened it in 2020, Rhode Island's official name ended "and Providence" plus which word?
Plantations
Plantations was an old word for settlements, and the full name dated from colonial times. Voters had chosen to keep it by 78% to 22% just ten years earlier.
Q 10Which one-word motto sits above the anchor on Rhode Island's seal, as it has since colonial times?
Hope
Hope sits over an anchor that has stood for Rhode Island since its first colonial seal, probably echoing a Bible verse that calls hope an anchor of the soul.
Q 11Which woman, tried and banished by Boston's Puritans, helped found Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1638?
Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson had angered the ministers by holding popular religious meetings in her own home. Her supporters settled Portsmouth with encouragement from Roger Williams.
Q 12Which English king, newly restored to the throne, granted Rhode Island its Royal Charter in 1663?
Charles II
Charles II approved a charter that let the colonists elect their own governor and promised that nobody would be punished for differences of opinion in religion.
Q 13Two months before the Declaration of Independence, Rhode Island became the first colony to do what?
Q 21Which Wampanoag sachem, an ally of the Pilgrims, sheltered Roger Williams through the winter of 1636?
Massasoit
Massasoit hosted Williams for three months until spring, then sold him land for a first settlement before Williams moved on to found Providence.
Q 22Samuel Gorton renamed his Rhode Island settlement of Shawomet in gratitude to which English nobleman?
Earl of Warwick
The Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, ordered the colony's Puritan neighbours to stop molesting Gorton's people, and the grateful settlers took his title as their town's name.
Q 23Which uprising over voting rights finally pushed Rhode Island to replace its 1663 colonial charter?
The Dorr Rebellion
Renounce allegiance to the Crown
Rhode Island's assembly voted to renounce allegiance to the Crown on May 4, 1776, by a nearly unanimous vote, well ahead of the Congress meeting in Philadelphia.
Q 14Roger Williams founded America's first congregation of which denomination in Providence in 1638?
Baptist
Baptist only briefly himself, Williams soon moved on, yet the congregation he gathered still meets in Providence as the First Baptist Church in America.
Q 15Which Ivy League university began in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island?
Brown
Brown was the first American college to write into its rules that students would be admitted and taught equally, whatever their religious affiliation.
Q 16Which 1675–76 conflict saw Providence burned, although Rhode Island had tried to stay neutral?
King Philip's War
King Philip's War reached Providence in March 1676. Roger Williams, who had known the opposing leaders since they were children, helped train the town's recruits.
Q 17Mary Dyer, a Rhode Island settler hanged in Boston in 1660, belonged to which persecuted group?
Quakers
Quakers were banned from Boston under Puritan law. Dyer, whose home was in tolerant Rhode Island, kept going back to defy the ban and was hanged for it.
Q 18In 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in the American colonies that tried to ban which practice?
Slavery
Slavery stayed widespread anyway: there is no evidence the 1652 law was ever enforced, and the assembly made the practice legal across the colony in 1703.
Q 19Which Narragansett name is still used for the island of Newport, officially called Rhode Island?
Aquidneck
Aquidneck is what residents still call it, mostly to avoid confusion with the state, which took its own name from this one island.
Q 20The name Rhode Island may come from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block describing an island as which colour?
Red
Red, or reddish, is how he described it in a 1625 account. A rival theory credits an Italian explorer who likened an island near the bay to Rhodes in Greece.
The Dorr Rebellion failed and its leader went to prison, but it ended a rule, kept since the royal charter, that only men who owned land could vote.
Q 24Which Rhode Island signer of the Declaration of Independence steadied his shaking right hand with his left?
Stephen Hopkins
Stephen Hopkins had palsy in his hands and remarked that his hand trembled but his heart did not. He had already spent nine years as the colony's governor.
Q 25Which Rhode Island-born general, who walked with a limp, took over the American army in the South in late 1780?
Nathanael Greene
Nathanael Greene was passed over as a militia officer because of that limp, yet his campaign through the Carolinas wore down British control of the region.
Q 26Newport's round stone tower, once claimed to be Viking-built, was most likely put up in the 1600s as what?
A windmill
A windmill is the likeliest origin: the colonial governor who owned the land mentioned his stone-built wind mill in a will of 1677.
Q 27In 1723, colonial Newport hanged 26 men at Gravelly Point on a single day for which crime?
Piracy
Piracy trials came to Newport after a British warship captured 36 men at sea; colonial leaders were rounding up pirates in the 1720s under pressure from the British government.
Q 28In 1775, Rhode Island's assembly made the first formal call for Congress to create which fighting force?
A navy
A navy mattered to Rhode Island's merchants, whose shipping was being policed by British warships. One delegate in Congress called the plan the maddest idea in the world.
Q 29Newport's Redwood building, completed in 1750, was the first in America to be purpose-built as what?
A library
A library was the aim of Abraham Redwood and 45 fellow colonists, who founded it in 1747. Its original room still holds most of the books first bought for it in London.
Q 30Which royal governor ruled Rhode Island after it was absorbed into the Dominion of New England?
Edmund Andros
Edmund Andros was so unpopular that Boston's leaders had him arrested in 1689. The Dominion collapsed and Rhode Island resumed its old charter government.