That Rhode Island changed its name last year and didn't think to inform me, and not to the name I wanted, Little Rhody the Ornery State. (Sadly a more prosaic The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations to The State of Rhode Island, thus depriving me of a bit of dull trivia.)
Just had a gander at the Providence Plantations bit on Wiki. These settlers were good at falling out and going off in a huff, weren't they?
Honestly, had the Brits not been so beastly, that was the only thing the thirteen colonies agreed on. All the various strands of puritanism viewed each other as being suspiciously tolerant (Rhode Island's willingness to accept the more dilutely religious earned it the sobriquet's 'Rogue's Island' and the 'Sewer of New England') and there was no border they could agree upon (originally, Massachusett and Connecticut charters gave them a state-height stripe all the way to the Pacific (eh? - a Native American). In reality, that meant Connecticut 'owned' the top bit of Pennsylvania and a chunk of modern-day Ohio (the Connecticut Western Reserve, it was marooned when Pennsylvania got greenlighted, a curious enclave of New England in Ohio, still remembered in the names, such as Case Western Reserve University). Mass was still bickering quite late with New York over a chunk of Erie shoreline. Et cetera.
Rhode Island was the first colony to declare independence (two months before the other laggards) and last to ratify the constitution, of course (they didn't bother to send anyone to the meeting to rehash the Articles of Confederation, where they inadvertently wrote the Constitution instead, a rather sneaky bit of sneak by the Federalists). Even then they only signed because the other twelve states threatened them with taxes and tariffs.
The plantations bit was never to do with slavery, it was a generic term for the agricultural colony, but the modern-day attribution seems to have pushed them over the edge for the name change (Rhode Island was the first state to formally abolish slavery, though it must be said they mostly ignored the fact they had for the following century).