The Rhode Island Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States was chartered in 2001.
Rhode Island veterans were of course no less active than their counterparts in other states in participating in veterans’ activities. Rhode Islanders participated robustly in encampments and other commemorations of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Additional impulses, such as publishing War Papers, that in other states 
were published by respective Loyal Legion commanderies, were pursued instead in Rhode Island through an independent organization, the Rhode Island Soldiers and Sailors Historical Society (RISSHS). That society sponsored the publication of Personal Narratives of Events in the War of the Rebellion, comprising one hundred fascicles of narratives published in seven series between 1878 and 1915. These publications now constitute a major resource for those interested in the role Rhode Island played in the War of the Rebellion. The published Rhode Island war papers, now all in the public domain and available online at Hathitrust and elsewhere, may be read through an index on this website.
Unlike Loyal Legion commanderies, however, the independent Rhode Island Soldiers and Sailors Historical Society did not become a descendant organization, and therefore did not survive beyond the generation of veterans of 1861-1865. Upon the dissolution of that Society, its manuscript records and library were given to the Providence Public Library. Records of the RISSHS are now divided between the Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society Library. (Finding aids for the RISSHS papers in both institutions are linked here.)
The eclipse of the RISSHS left Rhode Island without a descendant organization to parallel the Loyal Legion commanderies in other states. To redress this omission, the Rhode Island Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States was founded in 2001 by eleven charter companions and chartered into the national Order. We remain a small commandery of companions dedicated to the support of the Union and to the commemoration of our ancestors’ role therein.