Rev. Robert W. Hayman, Ph.D. ” Rhode Island’s Struggle to Redeem Its Promise to Its Irish Civil War Volunteers”
While the rest of the states of the Union in the 1820s and 30s were moving toward universal manhood suffrage, conservative-dominated Rhode Island chose to preserve the state’s once liberal tradition of a suffrage limited to those who possessed $134 of taxable property. When in the 1830s Irish immigrants, particularly the Catholic Irish, began to