Nehemiah Rice Knight

The day was March 11, the year 1840. Nehemiah Rice Knight from Rhode Island rose to deliver a speech before the U.S. Senate. With the papers that rustled in his hands, he scorned an egregious oversight that the American government had made. 

A law created in 1833 that repealed all taxes on “bleached and unbleached linens, table linens, linen napkins, and line cambrics, and worsted stuffed goods, shawls and other manufactures of silk, except sewing silk, shall NOT be so construed as to include umbrellas and parasols,” he said. 

Knight was a man of details. Every duty and tariff decreed on every item was crucial to his country’s economy, and he wanted to be sure that the Senate got it right. 

He and his colleagues would restore the duty on umbrellas and parasols, if he had anything to do about it. 

Even at the age of 60, Knight was still tirelessly serving Rhode Island, as he had been for nearly 40 years. Over the years before becoming a U.S. Senator, he had been a state representative from Cranston, clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Providence County, clerk of the Circuit Court for the District of Rhode Island, governor of Rhode Island, and Collector of Internal Revenue during the War of 1812. 

And in 1843 -- two years after his official retirement from public service -- the people of Providence called upon Knight to represent them in a convention that would form the state’s constitution. When he died of consumption in 1854, there was no living man who had devoted himself to public life for so long a time. All the while, he held another job in the private sector – president of the Roger Williams Bank – from 1817 until his death. 

As a governor and a senator, Knight was an undying advocate for education in Rhode Island. He worked to establish a public school system throughout the state; he said that Rhode Island needed schools which children could attend for free. At the time, this was a novel and almost unheard of idea. His persistence paid off when the School Act of 1828 mandated free public schools.

Knight’s career was as exciting as it was long. President Madison appointed him Collector of Internal Revenue out of the blue and without Knight’s knowledge. He resigned from this position only after he won the governorship in Rhode Island by 71 votes in 1817. Knight was a member of the Anti-Federalist Party at the time, and his victory ended the Federalist Party’s long reign of power. Knight was re-elected the following term by 616 votes, and ran unopposed his third and fourth terms. 

He became U.S. senator in 1821 only because the late Senator James Burrill died; the Legislature unanimously appointed Knight to take his place. He was re-elected three more times, one of which was won by exactly one vote, another by three. 

A political scandal surrounded the end of Knight’s career as a Senator involving a conspiracy within his party, the Whigs. Thomas Wilson Dorr, the author of Political Frauds Exposed: or a narrative of the proceeding of “The Junto in Providence,” concerning the Senatorial Question, begins the complex tale with “Some years ago a conspiracy was formed, to control the Whig Party in Rhode Island…”

In 1834, U.S. Representative Tristam Burges was to be the next Whig Party candidate for Senate. Knight had told him that he was going to retire and not run for re-election. A small group of Whig Party members, however, had something else in mind. They didn’t want Burges.

This group of conspirators was later named “The Junto.” They spread rumors at the Whig Party caucus to make sure Burges didn’t get enough votes to be nominated. At the end of all the confusion, Knight ended up on the ticket without wanting to be.

The next day, party member Stephen Randal, Jr. said, “The next morning, I met Governor Knight in front of the Court House, he said to me of his own accord and without any question by me, that he was very much surprised that his name had been made use of, the evening before, in the caucus, that he did not expect it; that he was not a candidate for the office, and he seemed very much to regret that his name was used at all.” 

Knight had his heart set on retirement, but it seemed that would be somewhat difficult. Members of his party didn’t want to let him go.

Knight visited Burges’s home on Planet Street in Providence to set the record straight. Knight told Burges that he never intended to continue as Senator. He also sent letters to the press explaining that he had intended to resign. 

He remained in the Senate until 1841. During his career, Knight ran on a variety of tickets besides the Whig Party’s; he ran as an Anti-Federalist, and as a National Republican. He lauded presidents James Madison and James Monroe, and was a personal friend to John Quincy Adams and John Calhoun. The one politician he hated, however, was Andrew Jackson. 

Knight disagreed with Jackson on many issues, but the one he was most passionate about was what was called at the time the “Indian Question.” Knight said, “These laws [protecting Native Americans] have been duly observed and executed by all the Presidents except General Jackson – he alone refuses.” 

When Jac n decided to drive the Native Americans off their land, Knight stood up for them. He was appalled by Jackson’s lack of respect for Native Americans, and said that Jefferson was a superior president when he dealt with the Cherokee Nation because he told them that he did not want them to sell their land unless they were willing. 

“This was the language of Mr. Jefferson, this was his rule, and by this rule I would be governed,” Knight said. In a speech he gave in 1832, Knight showed contempt for Jackson when he said, “The Eagle’s talons should grasp him that willfully invades their rights.”

In that speech, Knight defended the Native Americans, saying, “Many of these Indians are not savages, the head men of their tribes are gentlemen of education, and vie with us in civilization, they no longer follow the chase, but cultivate the earth, and raise cotton, cattle, horses and swine for market; their children are taught in schools, and the sound of the loom is heard in their dwelling. Several of them I know personally,” Knight said. 

Knight supported duties on foreign productions, such as the umbrella tariff he petitioned for in the Senate on that day in 1840. Knight did not like the idea, however, of entangling his nation in the affairs of others unnecessarily. He hated Jackson’s West India trade policy, saying that it would create a situation in which American business could no longer compete with that of the British. 

But most of all, Knight loved his home state, and lobbied against the way representatives in Congress were apportioned, saying that it posed a disadvantage to small states such as Rhode Island. 

Knight took an intimate, matter-of-fact tone with his constituents in speeches. He carefully explained every issue concerning the state and the nation to them. And he was never afraid of admitting his mistakes; he even published addendums to his speeches after he gave them to correct errors or to clarify confusing statements. 

Knight was also known as a politician who was above petty partisan disputes. One of his campaign fliers read, “No demagogues!! No office hunters!!!,” which meant that he wasn’t running for himself, he was running to do a service for the people of Rhode Island. 

He had humble beginnings; one might even call him a farm boy. He was born in Knightsville, Cranston, and grew up in a red house as the seventh of 10 children on the 70 acres that his grandfather, Jeremiah Knight, bought in 1774. (The Cranston Police Department’s headquarters stands on the site today.) 

The village was called Monkeytown then, until its inhabitants decided to name it after Governor Knight’s father, Nehemiah Knight, who was, like his son would be, a representative from Cranston. 

Nehemiah Sr. and his father, Jeremiah Knight, kept a tavern there. The Town Council preferred meeting at the Knights’ tavern instead of its designated meetinghouse on Phenix Avenue. Nehemiah Sr. grew up around these meetings, and decided to become a politician because of them. 

Jeremiah Knight, though still a farmer, donated a piece of his estate to the town for a dog pound; he henceforth became the pound keeper until 1797. His son, Nehemiah Sr., became the Town Clerk of Cranston, and was elected a member of U.S. Congress in 1803. 

Nehemiah R. Knight never forgot his agricultural roots, and in fact used them to connect with Providence’s rural community in an address he made to the farmers of Rhode Island in 1832. “I was born among you, and educated with you, to follow the plough and cultivate the soil was my occupation from boyhood to several years in manhood, and however exalted or better you may esteem the condition of those engaged in other pursuits, I look back on those days of industry and rural felicity as the happiest of my life,” he said. 

Despite his common education, Knight was said to have been an intellectual match for any other statesman, as evidenced by the sophisticated rhetoric of his speeches. 

Knight lost his wife of over 50 years, Lydia Waterman of Johnston, RI, to an internal tumor in 1850. The couple had no children. Lydia was a distant descendent of Richard Waterman, one of Rhode Island’s original landowners. 

The couple moved to what was known as High Street (now Broad Street) in Providence from Cranston at the beginning of Knight’s political career. Lydia continued to live in the High Street house until her death December 4, 1850. She is buried with her husband in Grace Church