Repairing Injustice: The Contradictions of Forgiveness and The Ivory Tower

Newport’s dirty little (perhaps not so “little”) secret is that it was the apex of the so-called triangle trade.¹ Sugar and molasses, produced by slaves on plantations in the Caribbean, were distilled into rum in Rhode Island so that it could then be shipped to West Africa and bartered for slaves who would in turn be sent across the Atlantic to continue the evil cycle. In the mid-1700s Rhode Island boasted thirty rum distilleries, twenty-two of these located in Newport. During the eighteenth century, Rhode Islanders carried out at least a thousand slave-trading voyages, resulting in the capture and transport of more than one hundred thousand Africans. Approximately 60 percent of slaving voyages from North America started from Rhode Island, many from Bristol farther north, home of the notorious D’Wolf family, the most active slavetrading family in America, but most of them from Newport and all carrying goods manufactured there. Although the trade was abolished in the United States in 1807, illegal slave voyages left Newport as late as 1819, fewer than forty years before the James family first moved there in 1858 during Henry’s teens.

The involvement of Rhode Islanders in the slave trade was broad and pervasive. In addition to the hundreds of Rhode Islanders whom historians have identified as owners and operators of slave ships, thousands more bought shares in voyages, a practice as common in the eighteenth century as buying a lottery ticket is today (and often as risky a venture). Those who were not direct participants depended on the trade for the business it generated—merchants, farmers, and craftsmen who supplied, serviced, built, and repaired the slave ships. Many Rhode Islanders (including James Manning, the first president of Brown University) also owned slaves—indeed, the tax on slave imports was an important revenue source for the town of Newport (it paid for the cobblestones on which tourists still walk in Old Town)—but the colony’s involvement in the trade was so extensive that it touched nearly everyone, whether their participation was direct or indirect.

These disturbing facts came to my attention a few years ago when I served on a committee charged with investigating the legacy of slavery in the founding of Brown University. Rumors had circulated for many years about the Brown family’s participation in the trade. John Brown, long-serving treasurer of the University Corporation who laid the cornerstone of college’s first building, was a notorious slaver who continued to outfit voyages even after state and federal statutes made this illegal (he was brought to trial in 1795 for violating a federal law against transporting slaves to foreign countries but was acquitted by a sympathetic Newport jury). His Quaker brother Moses Brown was a fierce abolitionist (although cynics noted that his conversion followed economic reversals from failed slave voyages in which he had invested). The third brother, Nicholas, whose son’s gift of $5,000 to endow a professor of rhetoric caused the College of Rhode Island to change its name, was less prominently involved in the trade, but he owned slaves and, like his brothers, owed his fortune to slavery-related enterprises.² Some of these facts were known before the committee started its work, but what surprised us—even the historians in the group—was the pervasiveness of slavery in the economy of Rhode Island and in the history of the university. Nearly all institutions in the colony had some connection with the trade.

Archival research soon made clear that the legacy of slavery at Brown was not a matter of the guilty practices of a few individuals. The breadth and depth of Rhode Island’s involvement in slavery had been erased from collective memory. An editorial entitled “The Reparations Scam” in the Providence Journal in 2002 objected to the establishment of this committee because slavery was not Rhode Island’s problem: “Clearly, the North outstripped the South economically because its economy was based on freedom and innovation, not slavery.” A different view was expressed by an anti-slavery pastor in the Providence Gazette...