"Providence Plantations" and Memory of Anti-Slavery Efforts

Josh Marshall has a fascinating post about the problem he sees with eliminating the "Providence Plantations" from the official name of "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations":

There's a proposition on the ballot this year to change the name of Rhode Island from "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" to simply "Rhode Island." The idea is that the appendage "Providence Plantations" is redolent of slavery and should go. I can't get too crazy up in arms about it. But it'll be an unfortunate change and I'll be sorry to see it go....The first and probably the most important point is that the "plantations" in Providence Plantations has nothing to do with slavery....That's a meaning of the word that only became current maybe a century or more after Roger Williams named his little colony in the early-mid 17th century...Yet that isn't the end of the story. Not by a long shot. Because Rhode Island is probably the most important slave state outside of the Old South, not only because it had a reasonably large slave population for New England but because of the pivotal role its merchant community played in sustaining the slave trade.... [B]y the 18th century there was significant plantation slavery (in the more familiar, modern meaning of the term) in Southern Rhode Island and the Rhode Island transatlantic merchant were the dominant players in the North American slave trade. 

But here's the catch. Catch or irony, take your pick. Rhode Island started as two colonies. One was Providence Plantations, the settlement Roger Williams established in modern Providence along with a couple other small towns in what is now Northern Rhode Island....The other was Rhode Island, the folks living on Aquidneck Island, the main Island in Narragansett Bay. The folks in 'Providence Plantations' were among the first principled opponents of slavery anywhere in the Americas, certainly in New England and by most measures everywhere in North America. Folks like Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton and a bunch of other guys who died more than three centuries ago whose letters and records I spent way too much time reading in my 20s. It's a fascinating legacy... But it seems unambiguously true to me that purging "Providence Plantations" from the state's name, in addition to being a strike against the state's history, would have the perverse effect of silencing the legacy of the people who were anti-slavery long, long before many people in the Western World even recognized it as a moral question. I get the reasons for trying to change the name. In modern English, 'plantation' means a southern estate with black slaves picking cotton. And the state is for the its living residents and citizens, not what someone who's got some relatively obscure historical knowledge about what these ancient names mean. Still, for all the reasons I've stated, if they trim the state's name down to just "Rhode Island" I think it will be a big mistake.