Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island by Christy Clark-Pujara (review)

Christy Clark-Pujara’s Dark Work explains how New England’s smallest state held the region’s biggest interest in slavery and how African- descended Rhode Islanders navigated the rough waters of enslavement and emancipation. The book is a braided history of African-descended Rhode Islanders from the colonial period through U.S. Emancipation framed by the business strategies that brought them and their ancestors to Rhode Island and developed the colony’s and then the state’s economic interests in American slavery. From the margins of the Atlantic system, Rhode Island’s colonial business community exploited a niche early in the eighteenth century.

Rhode Island was strategically located to enter the trans-Atlantic slave trade after the Royal Africa Company’s monopoly expired in 1696. Its early participation provisioning West Indies sugar islands led to advantages in the slave trade such as a distilling industry that added value to molasses, mostly imported from the French Caribbean. Since rum was a trade good that bought captives on the West African coast, Rhode Island merchants were able to use locally processed goods as currency in a lucrative captive trade averaging a 5 to 6 percent return on slave-trading voyages (20). Other local industries contributed to Rhode Island’s advantages in that grisly business, including maritime trades and the knowledge economy of a cadre of local merchants who became adept at directing trans-Atlantic slaving voyages. Records of voyages confirm this. Between 1726 and 1750, Rhode Island shippers undertook nearly three times the number of slaving voyages of the rest of the British North American colonies combined, shipping nearly three times as many captives. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Clark-Pujara contends, Rhode Islanders launched nearly two and a half times the number of trans-Atlantic slaving voyages of all other British North Americans combined and were responsible for nearly three times the number of captives shipped west across the Atlantic. Amplifying the contentions of other historians, Clark-Pujara argues that “the North American trade in slaves was essentially the Rhode Island slave trade” (17) Following the American Revolution, Rhode Island shippers were the first Americans to return to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in 1783. The state outlawed slave trading from Rhode Island in 1787, but the law was unevenly enforced. Shifting from Newport to Bristol, “the slave trade grew by 30 percent in the state” between 1789 and 1793, and in 1795 a record thirty-two slave ships sailed (82). Merchants’ knowledge economy now included ways of subverting laws.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the slavery business was shifting to provisioning domestic enslavers by clothing bondspersons. Enslavers in the rapidly expanding cotton zone in the U.S. South became customers of New England cloth. In place of voyages from Bristol or Newport, the mills of Narragansett County revved up production of “‘negro cloth,’” a cotton-wool blend called kersey made to clothe enslaved people (90). Between 1800 and 1860, more than eighty such mills operated in Rhode Island, more than in any other state. Led by the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, the sector became a leading state industry. Peace Dale’s owner, Rowland G. Hazard, vocally opposed U.S. slavery, yet his business was reliant on the custom of enslavers. And that seeming contradiction maps onto another apparent Rhode Island anomaly that Clark-Pujara deftly unravels.

The business of slavery gave enslavers an interest in human property that they reluctantly relinquished while drawing a color line more tenacious than the institution that produced it. “By 1750,” Clark-Pujara argues, “10 percent of Rhode Island’s population was enslaved—double the northern average,” with most bondspersons clustered in Newport, Providence, and Narragansett County, performing a variety of work, often in solitude (12). The state’s gradual abolition law of 1784 manumitted some while keeping others enslaved, and the legacy of slavery included what amounted to...