Rhode Island was the first colony to renounce allegiance to King George III during the American Revolution.
On May 4, 1776, the colony adopted an Act of Renunciation that ended its allegiance to the British Crown. This occurred two months before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence and made Rhode Island an early example of a colony asserting separate political authority.
Rhode Island had a strong tradition of self-government and religious liberty. Its resistance to imperial authority had already appeared in the 1772 Gaspee Affair, when colonists attacked and burned a British customs schooner in Narragansett Bay.
The colony's revolutionary independence did not make it an immediate supporter of every later national institution. Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen former colonies to ratify the United States Constitution, doing so in 1790. Its early break with the Crown and later reluctance toward the Constitution illustrate the colony's persistent emphasis on local autonomy.