USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the end of the century : a history, Volume 2 > Part 39
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68
Gov. Stephen Hopkins, in his memorial to the Lords of Trade in 1764, reported that "for the past year there were 184 foreign clear- ances to Europe, Africa and the West Indies, and 352 vessels engaged in the coast trade and fisheries, employing an aggregate of 2,200 sea- men".3 The report said further: "Of the foreign vessels, 150 are annually employed in the West India trade, which import into this colony about 14,000 hogsheads of molasses, whereof a quantity not less than 2,500 hogsheads is from English islands. It is this quantity of molasses which serves as one engine in the hands of the merchants to effect the great purpose of paying for British manufactures, for a part of it is exported to the Massachusetts Bay, to New York and Pennsylvania to pay for British goods, for provisions, and many arti- cles which compose our West India cargoes ; and part to other colonies southward of these last mentioned, for such commodities as serve for a remittance immediately to Europe, such as rice, naval stores, etc., or such as are necessary to enable us to carry on our commerce. The remainder (besides what is consumed by the inhabitants) is distilled into rum and exported to Africa."
This great development in commerce culminated at the time of the Revolution. Newport was the chief port in the colony, had more than twice the population of Providence, and the larger part of the com-
1 Arnold's History of Rhode Island, vol. 2, p. 106.
2 Idem, vol. 2, p. 130.
3 Idem, vol. 2, p. 248.
398
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.
merce was carried on by the Newport merchants. Although Providence was slowly gaining in importance as a port, it had always in relation to Newport been a center of the "planter" or farming interests. At the height of its prosperity, about 1769, Newport had a population of over 11,000; manufactories of oil, candles, sugar, rum and hemp were car- ried on ; nearly 200 vessels were engaged in foreign commerce; there were between three and four hundred coasting vessels sailing from the port and a line of packets traded direct to London.
This was a wonderful growth and is not surpassed by the record of any of the other colonies in America. In 1680 there was "no ship- ping, but only a few sloops." By 1708 a direct trade to the West Indies had grown up; the shipping had in twenty years increased six- fold ; the exports to England through Boston were £20,000, while ship- building had greatly increased so that eighty-four vessels had been launched in eleven years. When 1721 arrived the amount of shipping had been doubled ; in 1731 it was three times greater than in 1708, the West India trade had largely increased and a direct trade with Eng- land and Holland had been started. Along these lines the progress continued up to the time of the Revolution, and both the foreign and coastwise trade constantly increased. Providence and Newport be- came busy seaports, and in their retail shops during the middle years of the eighteenth century could be found goods of every description from nearly every part of the globe, brought into the ports by their own vessels.
This commercial growth was very largely accelerated by the practice of privateering, which grew out of the frequent wars waged by Eng- land against France, Spain and Holland. In fact, privateering at times was almost the most important, as it was frequently the most profitable, of the ventures of the colonial merchants, and in the light of the times and circumstances it was legitimate "business", no more reprehensible to our ancestors than some of our "financial" operations are to us. Its effect on the evolution of commerce was very important, and the development of fair and equitable trade cannot be fully ex- plained without taking this legalized robbery, with its attendant piracy, into consideration.
Another influence that exerted great force on the growth and direc- tion of the colonial trade and commerce was the navigation laws. These were intended for the protection and benefit of English trade, but the hardy, self-willed, aggressive and independent colonists evaded and ignored them to a great extent. The governmental history of the later colonial period is largely a record of attempts to coerce the colo-
399
THE SEA TRADE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.
nist by all sorts of measures to obey these laws. While trade was by this operation obstructed in a measure, it is a question whether the colonists were not thereby given a training that resulted greatly to their advantage in the struggle for independence which followed.
During this same period-from the beginning of the eighteenth century until near its close-the importation of blacks from Africa, to be sold as slaves in America, was considered as legitimate as any other kind of trading and was participated in by Christian nations and humane merchants. The foundations of many great family for- tunes, both in Europe and America, were laid by means of the slave trade. It was only after the inhumanity of the traffic, as exemplified by the horrors of the "middle passage", had been observed and com- mented upon, that the consciences of men were aroused so that in quite recent times the traffic was abolished. During the period of the eighteenth century preceding the Revolution, the slave trade gradually became one of the chief branches of the commerce of the colonies on Narragansett Bay, and the vessels sailing from Providence, Bristol, Warwick or Newport to the West Indies often brought back slaves as part of their return cargo. Rhode Island vessels also traded direct with the coast of Africa, and disposed of their human freight in the West Indies or the Southern colonies.
The building of ships was begun on Rhode Island within a very few years after the settlement had been made. Although no definite records prove that any considerable amount of shipbuilding was done previous to 1700, yet the probabilities are that such small craft, sloops chiefly, as were used in the local trade with the Dutch and with the neighbor- ing English colonies were built on Rhode Island and at Providence. In Governor Cranston's reply to the Board of Trade in 1708 the state- ment is made that in the eleven years previous to that date, eighty-four vessels of all sizes had been built in the colony, and of these the larger part evidently had been built for other colonies, as only twenty-nine were then owned in this colony. The business of shipbuilding un- doubtedly kept pace with the growth of shipping, and the people on Narragansett Bay not only built their own vessels, but they supplied their neighbors.
References in town records show that on many of the coves and har- bors on the bay vessels were built during the early and middle years of the eighteenth century. At Providence, in 1711, Nathaniel Brown, who had been building vessels at Bullock's Cove, was granted, by vote of the town meeting, two half acres of ground on Weybosset Neck "so long as he shall use it for building vessels". This location is now in
400
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.
the most eentral part of the eity of Providenee, on part of the space fronting on Washington Row, Exchange Place and Exeliange Street. "The vessels built here were sloops and sehooners, the largest of which were of some sixty tons burthen. They earried the colonial exports to the West Indies and the Spanish main, and even to the coast of Afriea".1 The sehooner was a new rig, an Ameriean invention, and the first one is said to have been launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1714. In the middle years of the century at Providenee the most of the ship building was done on the Mosshassuek River above the present Smith street. "Ships, brigs and schooners were built here to serve in the foreign commerce of Providenee and as privateers in the Spanish war".2 At this same period there was also a shipyard at Fox Hill. About 1750 Sylvester Bowers, a ship carpenter from Somerset, Mass., where he had probably earried on his industry on the Taunton River, located at Pawtucket and began the building of ships on the east side of the river a short distance below the falls. He was the builder of the Providence, one of two frigates built in Providenee in 1776, by order of the Continental Congress, and Benjamin Tallman was the master carpenter of the other one, the Warren. Whether Sylvester Bowers built the Providenee at his own yard in Pawtucket or in one of the Providence yards is not known. He, however, in his Pawtucket yard must have built many of the privateers and vessels engaged in the foreign trade of the colony. A brigantine, to be used as a slave trader, was built at Warren in 1747.
The first importation of slaves into Rhode Island was in 1696, when the brigantine Seaflower, Thomas Windsor master, brought forty-seven negroes from Africa, of whom fourteen were sold in the colony at £30 to £35 apieee, and the others were carried by land to Boston, where the owners of the vessel lived. In 1700 three slavers, a ship and two sloops, sailed from Newport for Afriea. The ship was eommanded by Edwin Carter, who was part owner in the three vessels, and two Bar- badoes merehants, Thomas Bruster and John Bates, who were likewise owners, sailed with the expedition. No negro slaves arrived in Rhode Island from Afriea between 1698 and Deeember 25, 1707. At this time the slaves received in the colony were brought in from Barba- does to the number of from twenty to thirty annually, and were sold at from £30 to £40 each. The General Assembly, in February, 1707-8, imposed a duty of £3 on each negro imported in the colony. This law
1Providence Plantations, p. 50.
? Idem. p. 54.
401
THE SEA TRADE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.
was successively amended in 1712 and 1715. The revenue from this source must have been considerable, as, in 1717, £100 was appropriated for paving Newport's streets, while in 1729 one-half went toward that same purpose and the remainder to repairing bridges on the main- land. By order of the king, because it interfered with the success of the trade, this law was repealed by the Assembly in May, 1732.
In the early years of the eighteenth century nearly every vessel returning to Newport from the West Indies brought a few slaves, who were either disposed of at home, or sold and sent to other colonies. The vessels engaged in the traffic were sloops, brigantines, schooners and snows, of forty or fifty tons burthen, the largest of which were about sixty feet beam, ten feet deep in the hold and three feet ten inches between decks. In these restricted quarters the slaves were confined, and because of the unsanitary conditions resulting, the mortality was great on extended voyages. In later years, when the trade was at its height, this space was in many of the slavers not above three feet three inches and the horrors of the voyages were intensified for the captives.
From the time of the repeal of the duty on imported slaves, in 1732, Rhode Island seems to have sent ships directly to Africa after negroes. Gov. Stephen Hopkins stated "that for more than thirty years prior to 1764, Rhode Island sent to the coast [Africa] annually, eighteen ves- sels, carrying 1,800 hogsheads of rum. The commerce in rum and slaves afforded about £40,000 per annum for remittance from Rhode Island to Great Britain".1 The rum was manufactured in New Eng- land in all the principal places, and Newport in 1739 was largely en- gaged in its distillation.
The traffic in rum and slaves was, it may be said, carried on along a triangular course. The rum was shipped from New England and exchanged for slaves and gold dust on the Guinea coast in Africa ; the slaves were sold in the West Indies and in the Southern colonies and the vessels returned with a cargo of molasses, which was converted into rum that in turn was used to buy slaves. In these transactions enormous profits were made. Newport, in 1769, had twenty-two dis- tilleries, and is said to have been the principal slave port and mart in New England, both in the middle and the latter part of the eighteenth century ; forty or fifty vessels were engaged in the traffic and nearly all her merchants were interested. "During this period Bristol also became noted as a slave port, and Capt. Simeon Potter, one of her
1Rhode Island Col. Rec. vi, 380.
26
402
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.
famous slave traders, flourished about 1764; but before this, by 1755, the trade to Rhode Island had begun to fail."1
The demand for rum by the slavers was so great that sometimes they could not be supplied. In 1752 Capt. Isaac Freeman wanted to get a cargo of rum and molasses at Newport to ship on a coasting sloop, within five weeks, but his correspondent wrote that he could not be supplied in three months, as "there are so many vessels loading for Guinea we can't get one hogshead of rum for the cash". The slavers that went thus equipped to the African coast were known as "rum vessels". No other commodity was accepted so readily in exchange for negroes, and some traders who had taken dry goods found it diffi- cult to secure slaves in return for such wares.
The African Slave Trade had been a monopoly of the Royal African Company previous to 1698, but in that year it was thrown open to all British merchants for a term of fourteen years. At the expiration of this time, in 1712, on the demands of the merchants the trade was allowed to continue open. At the close of Queen Anne's War, in 1713, "The Assiento, a contract with the old French Guinea Company for furnishing Spanish-America with negro slaves, which had been in operation for eleven years, was conveyed to the English by the treaty of Utrecht and consigned to the South Sea Company, who thereby agreed to land 4,800 slaves annually for thirty years, or 144,000 Afri- cans in the New World. By this treaty England became the great slave trader of Christendom, and from the spoils of African humanity perpetuated the system of bondage over both Americas".2 Under this contract during the thirty years about 30,000 negroes were taken from Africa annually as against 15,000 annually for the previous twenty years by the Spaniards. Probably during these thirty years from 1713 to 1743, the number of Africans imported into the Spanish and English colonies in America by the South Sea Company, as well as by the Brit- ish and colonial merchants, must have amounted to about two millions. In this traffic the ships and merchants of the Narragansett Bay colonies took a leading part, and great wealth was thereby secured.
"At the time of this treaty London and Bristol were the slave-ship ports of England and Newport was the chief one in America.''3
When the colonists were agitating for their own liberties, a feeling arose that the importation of slaves was inconsistent with their aspira-
1Slavery in Rhode Island by William D. Johnston, R. I. Historical Society Quarterly, July, 1894, p. 125.
2 Arnold's History of Rhode Island, vol. 2, p. 48.
3The American Slave Trade, p. 17.
403
THE SEA TRADE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.
tions for freedom. In deference to this feeling a bill was introduced in the General Assembly, in 1770, which proposed to prohibit the bringing of slaves into the colony, but it failed to pass. A similar bill was enacted into law in 1774; but while it probably greatly lessened the general importation of slaves into the colony, it did not wholly prevent the local slave trade, for it expressly permitted slaves brought from the West Indies to be exported within one year. The Rhode Island merchants still continued to employ their vessels in the traffic and sold their cargoes in the West Indies and the Southern ports, where the demand was good and constantly increasing. That the importation of slaves into the State had never wholly ceased is made evident by the fact that the law against slavery and the slave trade, passed by the General Assembly in 1784, stated that "the introduction of slaves for sale, upon any pretext whatever, was forbidden".
While the slave trade was thus finally banished from Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the capital of the merchants of the State and their vessels continued to be actively engaged in the traffic until 1808, when the United States Congress prohibited the importation of slaves. The Continental Congress, in 1774, had recommended the abolition of the slave trade, but nothing definite was done until after the adoption of the constitution. As a result of the growing abolition sentiment, the first national law against the slave trade was passed March 22, 1794. This was a very inefficient enactment, and in the opinion of a well-known authority on the subject, "it never injured the slavers to the extent of a dollar". A more stringent law was passed in 1800. During the course of the debate preceding the passage of this law, John Brown, of Providence, then a congressman from this State, said: "We want money ; we want a navy ; we ought therefore to use the means to obtain it. . Why should we see Great Brit- ain getting all the slave trade to themselves-why may not our country be enriched by that lucrative traffic ?"1 These sentiments from a lead- ing merchant undoubtedly represented the opinions held by his con- stituents.
The establishing of the cotton manufacture in England and New England, and the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, had given a great impetus to cotton planting in the Southern States, had created a great demand for slave labor, and had made it very profit- able. On the other hand, under the economic conditions at the north, slave labor could not there be employed to advantage. Consequently
1The American Slave Trade, p. 116.
404
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.
the attitude of mind in each section grew primarily out of the respec- tive self-interest of the two sections. The Northern States gradually abolished slavery ; the Southern States just as steadily encouraged it. In order to provide labor for the cotton fields, South Carolina repealed a law on her statute book prohibiting the importation of slaves and opened her ports to the traffic in 1804. "They remained open four years and during that period 202 vessels with nearly 40,000 negroes on board entered the harbor of Charleston". A great many slaves were also smuggled into the Southern States by the New England traders.
The extent to which the Rhode Island merchants were engaged in the slave trade during the early years of the nineteenth century was curiously brought out in a debate in the United States Senate in 1820. By that time the sentiment against slavery had become especially active in the North, and the Missouri Compromise passed by Congress was, as its title indicated, a veritable compromise between the opposing sentiments of the North and South. Judge Smith, senator from South Carolina, in a speech delivered before the Senate in that year, said that the anti-slavery opinions expressed by the Northern senators and representatives could not be the sentiments of the Rhode Island people, as they had just elected James De Wolf as a senator, and "he had made an immense fortune by the slave trade". Of the 202 vessels that brought slaves into Charleston between 1804 and 1808 ten and
their cargoes belonged to James De Wolf. According to Judge Smith's figures, in these four years, of the 202 vessels, 59 belonged in Rhode Island, and of the consignees of the slavers, "88 were natives of Rhode Island, 13 of Charleston, 10 of France and 91 of Great Brit- ain". The total number of slaves imported by the Rhode Island ves- sels was 8,238, of which Bristol was credited with 3,914, Newport 3,488, Providence 556, and Warren 280.
Slave trading, as has thus been shown, was from the beginning of that traffic one of the most important branches of the commerce of Rhode Island. In fact, Newport was the leading slave port and mart during the eighteenth century, and she disposed of the slaves chiefly in the West Indies, where they were employed on the plantations. After the Revolution Newport did not retain the same rank in the trade, but her merchants still employed their ships and capital therein, disposing of the slaves in the southern ports. Bristol likewise engaged in the business, and under the direction of James De Wolf outstripped Newport. Evidently Providence never was very active in this trade; some of her ships werc, in the colonial period, engaged in it, as well as
405
THE SEA TRADE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.
afterward, but the particulars are not known, and the existence of the traffic is only proved by such sidelights as that thrown by Senator Smith's statistics and by circumstantial evidence.
Although somewhat out of its chronological sequence, Rhode Island's connection with the slave trade has here been presented con- secutively in order to give a clear view, if possible, of its influence on the general commercial development. While her merchants took part in this trade when it was considered legitimate commerce, there is no evidence that Rhode Island ships or capital were engaged in it when it became an outlawed traffic, and when the enormities that are usually associated in the minds of men with the slave trade became possible. In connection with this subject the following quotation is especially appropriate :
"In 1808 the African slave trade was prohibited by law, and very shortly after that time the leading nations of the world united to suppress it. But because it immediately became more profitable than it ever had been before, men still continued to engage in it. Then came the 'horrors of the middle passage,' the recital of which even now curdles the blood. The old, easy going and comparatively comfortable vessels of former years were abandoned because unsuited to the changed conditions of the business. Ships built only for speed took their place. Into their shallow holds hundreds of human beings were remorselessly thrust, and over the stifling mass inhuman owners did not hesitate to shut the hatches whenever the dreaded men of war came in sight.''1
The influence of privateering on the development of commerce has already been alluded to. The first instance of this form of enter- prise, which afterwards became one of the most important of the col- ony's maritime activities, occurred during the war with the Dutch, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Arnold says that in 1683 "privateers began to infest the seas, and often resorted to the Ameri- can coast, where the laxity in regard to the acts of trade favored their unlawful operations." These vessels were in reality pirates, but some of them held commissions from English colonies, while others claimed to sail under such authority. The Island of Jamaica was then the headquarters of these proceedings, but the Rhode Island colonies were undoubtedly sympathetic, as was manifest when, in that year, Governor Coddington refused to aid the deputy collector of customs who had come from Boston to Newport to make a prize of a privateer which had there arrived from Jamaica. As the home government
1Munro's History of Bristol, p. 351-3.
406
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS.
was not then at war with any of the other European powers, there was no justification for fitting out privatcers in the colonies. Accordingly an order in council was sent from England to Jamaica and the New England colonies, directing them to pass laws against privateering and piracy. Such an act was passed by the Assembly at Newport in 1684. This act made it a "felony to serve under any foreign prince against any power at peace with England, without special license".1 Evidently some of the citizens of the colony had been engaged- probably in foreign vessels-in these enterprises, which might either be designated as privateering or piratical. Governor Sanford had replied to the inquiries of the Board of Trade, in 1680, "that our coast is little frequented, and not at all at this time by privateers or pi- rates ", but judging from Arnold's statement and from this law, passed four years later, the conditions had changed.
During King William's war between England and France, from 1689 to 1697, privateering increased greatly. In fact, it was the im- petus given to a seafaring activity at this period that enabled the Nar- ragansett colonies to get a good start on their career of commercial development. In 1690 seven French privateers captured Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Block Island, and committed many acts of cruelty and depredation at other points along the coast. Two sloops, with about ninety men under command of Capt. Thomas Paine, with Capt. John Godfrey as second in authority, were sent out from New- port against the French, and in a battle at Block Island with five of the French vessels, won a signal victory. The Rhode Island men lost only one man killed and six wounded, while the French, who num- bered 200, lost about half their force. This is said to have been "the- first victory of Rhode Island upon the open ocean", and it certainly gave the citizens of Newport a confidence in their own prowess that. induced them to engage in the profitable warlike pursuit of privateer- ing. A Rhode Island privateer, in 1696, captured, off the banks of Newfoundland, a vessel which had two years previously been the Peli- can, a Boston vessel bound to London, but had been captured and fitted out by the French as a privateer.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.