Six primary documents from forty years of Rhode Island public life. The 1764 pamphlet. The anti-slave trade law. The signature on the parchment. The self-made career that started on a farm and ended as founding-era history.
Stephen Hopkins was born on March 7, 1707, in Providence, Rhode Island. He received no formal schooling beyond the basics, but educated himself through reading. He grew up farming in the agricultural community of Scituate, learned surveying, and married at nineteen. By thirty he was justice of the peace. By forty-five he was Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. By fifty-eight he had served as Governor nine times and Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.
There is no other career in the founding era that better documents what self-education could produce in colonial New England. Hopkins attained every office the colony offered, starting from a farm, with no formal education, before the Revolution changed anything.
In 1764, Parliament announced its intention to impose new taxes on the American colonies through the Sugar Act. Hopkins, then Governor of Rhode Island, traveled personally to London carrying a petition from Rhode Island merchants protesting the measure. On his return, he published a pamphlet: The Rights of Colonies Examined. It appeared on November 30, 1764, more than a year before the Stamp Act crisis, more than eleven years before Common Sense.
The Rights of Colonies Examined established the argument that would define colonial opposition: that those taxed without consent were reduced to the condition of slaves. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote that it was "conceived in a higher strain than any that were sent out by other colonies." The pamphlet was reprinted throughout the colonies and in London.
British subjects are governed only agreeable to laws to which themselves have some way consented, and are not to be compelled to part with their property but as it is called for by the authority of such laws. The greatest and most important right of a British subject is, that he shall be ruled by no laws but those to which he either in person, or by his representative, hath given his consent.
In 1774, Hopkins helped secure passage of a law in Rhode Island prohibiting the importation of enslaved persons into the colony, one of the earliest such laws in the American colonies. This was passed two years before the Declaration of Independence. The Rhode Island colonial legislative record documents its passage. Hopkins was a complex figure: he had himself enslaved people, and began freeing some of them in later years. The law and the biography hold both facts.
Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, at age sixty-nine. He was the second-oldest signer after Franklin. He suffered from palsy, a neurological condition that caused trembling in his hands, and his signature on the parchment is visibly unsteady. The parchment itself is the primary record. A remark attributed to him upon signing, "My hand trembles, but my heart does not", is cited as traditional in the National Park Service's own biographical sketch and has no confirmed contemporary source. The parchment, which is, speaks without it.
Illness forced Hopkins to retire from Congress in September 1776, a month after he signed the Declaration. He returned to Rhode Island and served in the state legislature for a time, but withdrew from public life around 1780. He died in Providence on July 13, 1785, at age seventy-eight, and was buried at the North Burial Ground. He had served Rhode Island in public office for more than forty years, from justice of the peace to signer.
His papers are at the Rhode Island Historical Society. His gravestone, which survives, describes him as "great in council, from sagacity of mind; magnanimous in sentiment, firm in purpose, and good, as great, from benevolence of heart; he stood in the front rank of statesmen and patriots; self-educated, yet among the most learned of men."