Rhode Island slave trade
Transatlantic slave-trading network centered in colonial and early national Rhode Island
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Rhode Island slave trade was the network of maritime commerce, financial activity, and human trafficking through which merchants in the Colony and State of Rhode Island became the leading mainland North American participants in the Atlantic slave trade. Between roughly 1709 and 1807, Rhode Island merchants sponsored at least 934 slaving voyages to the coast of Africa and transported an estimated 106,544 enslaved Africans to the Americas.[1] Despite being the smallest of the original thirteen colonies, Rhode Island dispatched the great majority of slave ships leaving British North America; in some years its vessels accounted for more than 90 percent of all such voyages from the mainland.[2][3]
| Part of the Atlantic slave trade | |
Map of the Atlantic triangular trade routes, of which Rhode Island was a key node | |
| Date | c. 1700–1820 |
|---|---|
| Location | Colony and State of Rhode Island, especially Newport, Providence, and Bristol |
| Type | Transatlantic slave trade and related commerce |
| Participants | Rhode Island merchants, ship captains, distillers, investors, enslaved Africans |
| Outcome | Rhode Island became the leading North American center for the transatlantic slave trade; gradual abolition of slavery within the state; illegal voyages continued after state and federal bans |
 Advertisement in the Newport Mercury (1763) promoting a slave voyage backed by Newport merchants William and Samuel Vernon. | |
| Period | |
|---|---|
| Active | Early 18th century to 1807 (with illegal voyages into the 1810s) |
| Location | |
| Principal ports | Newport, Bristol, Providence |
| Region | Atlantic World |
| Participants | |
| Colony and state | Colony and State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations |
| Trade goods | Rum, foodstuffs, livestock, manufactured goods, enslaved Africans, sugar, molasses, cotton |
| Scale | |
| Estimated slaving voyages | About 934 to 1,000 voyages from 1709 to 1807 |
| Africans transported | Roughly 90,000 to more than 100,000 captives |
The trade operated through the Atlantic triangular trade: slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean were shipped to Rhode Island and distilled into rum, the rum was carried to West Africa and exchanged for captives, and those captives were sold in the Caribbean and mainland colonies, completing the cycle.[1] A parallel provisioning trade, in which Rhode Island ships supplied Caribbean plantations with food, livestock, lumber, and manufactured goods, was equally important to the colony's economy.[4]
Background
Early slavery in Rhode Island
In 1652, the towns of Providence and Warwick enacted a statute limiting the terms of servitude of both Black and white servants, a measure often cited as the first anti-slavery law in English North America.[5] In practice, the law was never enforced.[1] By the end of the 17th century, Rhode Island had become the only New England colony to use enslaved people for both labor and trade.[6] In 1703, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed new laws codifying the enslavement of African and Native people, effectively overturning the 1652 statute.[7]
The first recorded arrival of an African slave ship at Newport was on May 30, 1696, when 14 captive Africans were purchased from the ship Seaflower for "betwixt 30 and 35 pounds."[3] The first recorded departure of a Newport slave ship was in 1709, and regular voyages to Africa began by 1725.[8]
Narragansett plantation society
In southern Rhode Island, a distinctive plantation society developed in what was known as the Narragansett Country. By the mid-18th century, 20 to 30 families had established farms there and acquired enslaved workers, generally from 5 to 40 per household.[3] By 1740, the area had the highest concentration of enslaved people in the colony; by 1755, one in three residents of the Narragansett region was enslaved.[3] These plantations produced foodstuffs, raised livestock, and were especially prolific in cheese production for export to the Caribbean plantation colonies.[3][9]
Rise of the trade
Rhode Islanders entered the direct African trade in the early 18th century, and within a generation the colony, and Newport in particular, came to dominate the North American slave trade.[3] Historian Jay Coughtry argued that "the Rhode Island slave trade and the American slave trade were virtually synonymous" and that "only in Rhode Island was there anything that can properly be termed a slave trade."[3]
The rum trade
In 1713, Rhode Island slave traders introduced a new export into the Atlantic trading system: rum.[3] Rhode Island distillers produced a particularly potent spirit known as "Guinea rum," which quickly displaced French brandy as the preferred medium of exchange in the West African slave trade; Rhode Island slavers became known as "rum men."[8] By the mid-18th century, the colony possessed nearly 30 rum distilleries, with 22 in Newport alone.[8] Over the course of the trade, Rhode Island ships carried nearly 11 million gallons of rum to Africa.[8] From 1732 to 1764, the colony sent approximately 18 ships annually bearing 1,800 hogsheads of rum to Africa to trade for captives.[1]
Economic breadth
The slave trade permeated the Rhode Island economy far beyond the merchant class. Even with gaps in the documentary record, it is possible to identify by name approximately 700 Rhode Islanders who owned or captained slave ships.[4] Ordinary shopkeepers and tradesmen purchased shares in slaving voyages, much as later Americans would buy shares in corporations.[4] Ship carpenters, blacksmiths, blockmakers, caulkers, sail lofts, ropewalks, coopers, distillers, foundries, candle makers, and farmers all supplied goods and services to the trade.[4] Historian Rachel Chernos Lin characterized the Rhode Island slave trade as the business of "the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker."[4]
In addition to the direct African trade, the bilateral provisioning trade with the Caribbean may have been even more economically significant. Caribbean plantation owners, too occupied with sugar cultivation to grow their own food, depended heavily on Rhode Island imports of beef, pork, flour, onions, cheese, horses, lumber, and barrel staves.[4][9] Governor Richard Ward told the British Board of Trade in 1740 that plantation owners "reaped great advantage from our trade, by being supplied with lumber of all sorts, suitable for building houses, sugar works and making casks."[8] Revenue from duties on imported enslaved people literally paved the streets of Newport.[4]
Ports and merchants
Newport
Newport was the principal slave-trading port in mainland North America during the colonial period.[3][2] The town's merchants who participated in the trade included many of its leading families: Malbone, Banister, Gardner, Wanton, Brenton, Collins, Vernon, Channing, Champlin, and Lopez.[3] William and Samuel Vernon, who later earned a place in American history for their role in financing the creation of the United States Navy, sponsored more than 30 African slaving ventures.[4] Between 1705 and 1805, Newport merchants alone accounted for over 600 of the more than 900 slave voyages launched from Rhode Island.[10]
The Newport merchant Aaron Lopez, a Sephardic Jewish immigrant from Portugal, and his father-in-law Jacob Rodriguez Rivera, sent 14 slave ships to the west coast of Africa between 1761 and 1774. Their first voyage carried flour from Philadelphia, beef from New York, and 15,281 gallons of rum from Newport distilleries. Over this period, their ships carried an estimated 1,100 captives from West Africa to the West Indies and the southern colonies.[3]
Several Rhode Island merchants controlled not only slaving ships but also Caribbean sugar plantations. Abraham Redwood, who inherited a sugar plantation in Antigua worked by over 200 enslaved people, used the profits from his plantation and trading activities to establish the Redwood Library in Newport, America's oldest existing lending library.[1] When the Quaker meeting in Newport asked Redwood to either leave the African trade or leave the church, he left the church.[1]
Providence and the Brown family
![](#/media/File:"Slavery_Memorial"_Brown.jpeg)
Providence played a smaller but significant role in the trade, accounting for about 55 slaving voyages, or roughly 14 percent of the Rhode Island total.[11] The most prominent Providence trading family was the Brown family, whose members were instrumental in founding Brown University in 1764.
In 1736, James Brown sent the Mary to Africa, the first slave ship to sail from Providence.[4] His brother Obadiah served as supercargo on the voyage.[4] In 1759, Obadiah, Nicholas, and John Brown, along with smaller investors, dispatched the schooner Wheel of Fortune to Africa; the ship was captured by a French privateer.[4]
Voyage of the Sally
The most notorious episode in the Brown family's involvement in the slave trade was the 1764–1765 voyage of the brigantine Sally. Owned by Nicholas Brown and Company and captained by Esek Hopkins, the Sally carried over 17,000 gallons of rum, 30 boxes of spermaceti candles, 1,800 bunches of onions, and instruments of restraint including 40 handcuffs and 40 shackles.[4][12] Of the 196 Africans Hopkins acquired during nine months on the coast, at least 109 perished, some during a failed insurrection on August 28, 1765, and others by suicide, starvation, and disease.[12] Hopkins reported that after the revolt, the captives became "so Desperited" that "Some Drowned them Selves Some Starved and Others Sickened & Dyed."[13]
In the wake of the Sally disaster, three of the four Brown brothers – Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses – never again directly participated in the transatlantic slave trade, a decision apparently motivated less by moral objections than by financial calculation.[14] The fourth brother, John Brown, continued to engage in the trade and was later prosecuted under federal law.[14]
Bristol and the DeWolf family
After the American Revolution, Bristol emerged as a major center of the slave trade. The DeWolf family of Bristol became the largest slave-trading family in North American history. Over three generations, from 1769 to 1820, the DeWolfs brought approximately 12,000 enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage.[15]
The most prominent member of the family, James DeWolf (1764–1837), went to sea during the American Revolution and began slave trading in his twenties. He financed at least 25 additional slaving voyages, usually with family members.[15] DeWolf also owned a rum distillery for the African trade, and with his brothers and nephews founded the Bank of Bristol and the Mount Hope Insurance Company, which together financed and insured their slave ships; from 1805 to 1807 alone, the insurance company underwrote 50 slaving voyages.[15] A family member established a slave auction house in Charleston, South Carolina, and the family owned sugar and coffee plantations in Cuba.[15] The DeWolfs financed 88 slaving voyages from 1784 to 1807, roughly a quarter of all Rhode Island slave trips during that period, and nearly 60 percent of all African voyages originating from Bristol.[16]
In 1791, James DeWolf was indicted for murder after allegedly ordering an enslaved woman afflicted with smallpox to be thrown overboard from the ship Polly during a 1789 voyage.[15] Chief Justice John Jay reported the case to President George Washington, who ordered DeWolf's immediate arrest.[17] DeWolf fled to the West Indies, and by 1795 the charges were dropped.[17] He later served in the Rhode Island General Assembly for nearly 25 years and represented Rhode Island in the United States Senate from 1821 to 1825.[15] At the time of his death in 1837, he was reportedly the second-richest person in the United States.[15]
Captains and crew
Slaving captains received a monthly wage, a 5 percent commission on every enslaved person sold, and a bonus known as a "privilege" of four or more captives per 104 Africans aboard, which they were free to sell or keep.[8] Many captains joined the Fellowship Club, a mutual aid society established in Newport in 1752. When the club received its charter from the Rhode Island legislature, 17 of its 88 members had made at least one voyage to Africa; by the death of prominent captain Pollipus Hammond, slaving captains formed a third of the society's membership.[8]
African heritage seamen also served aboard Rhode Island ships. Historian Jay Coughtry estimated that African heritage sailors comprised up to 21 percent of Newport crews engaged in Caribbean, European, and African voyages.[10] On slave ships, African crew members served as translators, provided knowledge of coastal locations, and were valued for their resistance to tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.[10] The 130-ton brigantine Prince George, which sailed from Newport in 1758, carried six African heritage crew members on a voyage that transported 151 enslaved people from the Gold Coast to Barbados.[10]
Abolition and illegal continuation
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Early prohibitions
On June 13, 1774, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed an act prohibiting the further importation of enslaved people into the colony, one of the earliest such laws in North America. Stephen Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and himself a slave owner, introduced the bill.[1]
In February 1784, the legislature passed a gradual emancipation act providing that all children born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1784, would be legally free, though required to serve as apprentices: girls until age 18 and boys until age 21.[5] The law did not free people already held in bondage, and slavery within Rhode Island effectively continued until the late 1830s.[9]
The 1787 ban and evasion
In 1787, Rhode Island made it illegal for any of its residents to participate in the African slave trade anywhere.[18] In 1789, abolitionists led by Moses Brown and others organized the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to press for enforcement and bring prosecutions against violators.[19]
Despite the 1787 ban and subsequent federal legislation in 1794, 1800, and 1807, the trade continued. Nearly half of the slave ships that sailed to Africa from Rhode Island did so after 1787.[8] The DeWolf family was especially effective at circumventing the law. They arranged a political favor with President Thomas Jefferson to split the federal customs district based in Newport, allowing the appointment of Charles Collins, the brother-in-law of James DeWolf, as customs inspector for Bristol; Collins conveniently ignored the slave ships moving in and out of harbor.[15][20] James DeWolf also exploited a loophole by routing captives through Georgia, the only state that still permitted slave imports, before reshipping them to Cuba where they commanded higher prices.[21]
George DeWolf, James's nephew, continued the trade illegally until 1820, when Congress made slave trading a capital offense.[20] The family's complicity in slavery continued afterward through their Cuban sugar plantations and James DeWolf's investments in textile mills that processed slave-grown cotton.[20]
Enslaved population within Rhode Island
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By 1755, 11.5 percent of all Rhode Islanders, approximately 4,700 people, were Black, and nearly all of them were enslaved.[8] Rhode Island had the highest percentage of enslaved people of any New England colony.[7] Enslaved people worked on small farms, in domestic service, in shipyards, ropewalks, sail lofts, and even chocolate mills.[5] As early as 1708, enslaved workers outnumbered white indentured servants in the colony by a ratio of nearly 8 to 1.[1]
In Newport, enslaved Africans and their descendants constituted about a quarter of the population by the mid-18th century, the second-highest proportion of Black residents in any city in British North America.[2] The Free African Union Society, founded in Newport in 1780, was the first African benevolent organization in the United States.[5]
Rhode Island's 1843 constitution finally declared: "Slavery shall not be permitted in this state."[5]
Legacy and historiography
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Rhode Island's central role in the slave trade was minimized in public memory. Modern scholarship has reestablished this history. Jay Coughtry's The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (1981) provided the first comprehensive study of the trade.[19] Christy Clark-Pujara's Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (2016) examined how slavery permeated every aspect of the colony's social and economic life.[7]
Black resistance and antislavery activism
Enslaved and free Black Rhode Islanders resisted bondage and discrimination in numerous ways. Some ran away from their owners, taking advantage of busy ports and maritime networks to blend into urban communities or ship out as sailors.[22][23][22]
White and Black abolitionists within the state, including Quakers such as Moses Brown and clergy like Samuel Hopkins of Newport, preached against slavery, organized abolition societies and lobbied for legislative change.[24][25][26]
Racial violence and segregation
Despite legal emancipation, Black Rhode Islanders in the early republic faced entrenched prejudice, economic marginalization and episodic racial violence. In 1824 the Hardscrabble neighborhood of Providence, a largely Black district outside the old town center, was attacked and destroyed by a white mob, in what contemporaries and later scholars have described as the city's first major race riot. A similar assault on the Snow Town neighborhood followed in 1831.[27] These events underscored the persistence of anti‑Black racism in a state that had formally banned the slave trade and slavery.
Public history and commemoration
In 2003 Brown University established a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate the university's historical ties to slavery and the slave trade, culminating in the publication of the Slavery and Justice report in 2006. The report and its associated exhibits, including a traveling show on the voyage of the slave ship Sally, helped catalyze broader public discussion of Rhode Island's connections to slavery.[28][25]
The Rhode Island Historical Society and the Newport Historical Society have mounted exhibits such as "Rhode Island and the Business of Slavery" and have digitized primary sources including account books, ship logs and proceedings of the African Union Society.[29][24] The documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North (2008) followed descendants of the DeWolf family as they retraced their ancestors' slave trading routes between Bristol, Ghana and Cuba, bringing national attention to Rhode Island's involvement.[30]
Community based projects have also played a significant role. The Rhode Island Slave History Medallions program installs bronze plaques at sites associated with slavery and the slave trade, accompanied by interpretive materials accessible by smartphone.[31] Medallion sites include wharves in Newport once used to outfit slave ships, plantations and burial grounds, and historic houses linked to slave‑owning merchants. Municipal and state agencies, including the City of Providence, have commissioned reports and exhibits such as "A Matter of Truth" that seek to integrate the history of slavery and the slave trade into broader narratives of Rhode Island's past.[27]
In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which in 2006 published a landmark report documenting the university's entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade.[32] Brown was among the first institutions of higher education in the United States to publicly catalogue its ties to racial slavery, and the report inspired similar investigations at more than 100 other colleges and universities.[33] A second edition was released in 2021.[33]
The 2008 documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, directed by Katrina Browne, a DeWolf descendant, followed ten family members as they retraced the steps of their ancestors through the triangle trade.[15]
In 2020, Governor Gina Raimondo announced that the state's official name, "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," would no longer appear on state documents, a move linked to the state's reckoning with its history of slavery.[7] In 2021, Governor Dan McKee signed a law requiring Rhode Island school curricula to include teachings on the state's African heritage history.[2]
Archival collections
The history of Rhode Island's slave trade is unusually well documented. The Rhode Island Historical Society holds collections relating to the Brown family, the DeWolf family, the Vernon family, and numerous other slave-trading merchants.[19] The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University preserves the records of the Sally voyage.[12] The National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian holds the DeWolf family papers, including ship manifests, daily logs, and correspondence from multiple countries.[17] The Rhode Island State Archives holds copies of colonial-era legislation pertaining to slavery.[5]