About this time Moses Brown joined the Quakers and followed that injunction. In the following years Moses became a militant abolition- ist, writing and engaging ...
Slave Trading in a New World The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition LEONARDO MARQUES
In 1791, James D’Wolf, one of the most prolific slave traders in the history of the United States, was brought to trial in Newport, Rhode Island, for murdering a slave. On a slave voyage from the Gold Coast to Cuba, Captain D’Wolf had allegedly thrown an African woman overboard. During the trial, one of his sailors described to the jury what had happened during the voyage. The slave had fallen ill, most likely a victim of smallpox. After isolating her for two days, D’Wolf warned his sailors that if the woman stayed on board he risked losing the majority of his slaves. Afterward, he asked John Cranston—the sailor who testified—if he could do the job. Cranston refused, and D’Wolf, with the help of another sailor, threw her into the sea. After being indicted for murder, he immediately left on a voyage to avoid the charges. Four years later he was acquitted in an arranged deposition at St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies. The judge argued in his decision that ‘‘this act of James De Wolfe was morally evil, but at the same time physically good and beneficial to a number of beings.’’ He was absolved based on the assumption that had he not thrown the slave overboard, the smallpox would have spread to the crew and cargo.1 Leonardo Marques is a graduate student in history at Emory University. 1. ‘‘John Cranston’s testimony to the Grand Jury, June 15, 1791,’’ Box 43, Folder 24, Newport Historical Society, Newport, RI. Also cf. Jay Coughtry, ed., Papers of the American Slave Trade (Bethesda, MD, 1996); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2008), 343–47; and Isidor Paiewonsky, Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the Danish West Indies: Also Graphic Tales of Other Slave Happenings on Ships and Plantations (New York, 1989). The name D’Wolf appears in the documentation with different spellings such as D’Wolf, de Journal of the Early Republic, 32 (Summer 2012) Copyright 䉷 2012 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.
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Notwithstanding the outcome of the case, it is clear that a major shift in attitudes and sensibilities toward the slave trade and slavery was taking place. Since the late seventeenth century, merchants based on the North American mainland had been continuously engaged in the slave trade without any major questioning of the legitimacy of their business. It is unlikely that a slave captain would have been charged for the murder of an African slave during the seventeenth or most of the eighteenth century. However, the forty years after the American Revolution were marked by a rapid transformation in the English-speaking Atlantic in attitudes toward human trafficking. The shift led to the abolition of the slave trade by both Britain and the United States in March, 1807. Antislavery ideas had previously circulated in the Atlantic world for decades, but a broader transformation had to occur for the development and success of an abolitionist movement. Scholars have been exploring the emergence of humanitarianism and its connections to abolition as a key element in this process.2 The intellectual reaction of proslavery forces is well known, thanks to the works of David Brion Davis and others. Ideological justifications of the slave trade and slavery drew upon the same sources of enlightenment ideas as abolitionism, exemplifying what Davis referred to as the ‘‘ambivalence of rationalism.’’ However, the impact of these shifting attitudes and the tensions they generated on a broader level are less clear. How did people cope with these new values? How did they affect the daily practices of those directly involved in the trade and the people around them, who were connected by commercial, political, kinship, family, and friendship ties?3 Tensions generated by these conflicting world views marked the postRevolutionary northern United States. When the Revolution began, Rhode Island was the largest slave-trading colony in British America as
Wolf, and DWolf. I chose to use D’Wolf, which was the most common form used in the documents. 2. The emphasis on shifting sensibilities can be traced back to David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), and Davis’s subsequent debates with Thomas Haskell; see Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA, 1992). 3. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 391–421.
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well as the home of one of the earliest Quaker abolitionist movements. In the decades following the American Revolution, the scale of ventures (as well as the existing sources documenting them) improved. Between the decades 1766–1775 and 1801–1810, the number of slaves embarked per vessel increased 20 percent. The number of people involved in the slave-trading business also increased between 1765 and 1807, which is exactly what one would expect of a U.S. slave trade whose mean annual volume was three times larger in 1804 than in the last decade before the Revolution (1766–1775). In fact 1804–1807 saw the highest annual average number of slaves ever carried off on vessels from Rhode Island. The need for a new investigation of the impact of changing attitudes in the state is all the more pressing since recent findings point to a widening base of participation in the slave trade prior to abolition despite a changing legal environment that restricted slave trading to specific parts of Rhode Island. Moreover, the share of Rhode Island vessels in the overall U.S. slave trade declined over time. In the period between the Revolution and 1800, Rhode Island vessels were responsible for around two-thirds of all the U.S. slave trade. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, this share dropped to 42 percent. In the following decade, participation virtually ceased altogether.4 This context of an expanding demand for slaves alongside new sensibilities and antislavery laws generated tensions that pervaded both public and private life in Rhode Island. They were particularly marked in the history of the Brown family from Providence. Nicholas, Joseph, Moses, and John were partners in various trading ventures, including the trade in Africans in the years preceding the American Revolution. It was also before the Revolution that the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Rhode Island, started to question their members’ participation in the slave trade as well as their ownership of slaves. In 1773, the Society officially urged its members to manumit their own slaves and completely withdraw from the trade. About this time Moses Brown joined the Quakers and followed that injunction. In the following years Moses became a militant abolitionist, writing and engaging in political debates over antislavery legislation. 4. Rachel Chernos Lin, ‘‘The Rhode Island Slave-Traders: Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick-Makers,’’ Slavery & Abolition (Dec. 2002), 21–38. On the numbers of the U.S. involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, see David Eltis, ‘‘The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644–1867: An Assessment,’’ Civil War History 54 (Dec. 2008), 347–78.
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His brother John, on the other hand, continued to finance a few slavetrading ventures until the end of the century, becoming one of the most outspoken defenders of the business. Through the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Moses and John engaged in heated debates that assumed a public dimension in newspapers, political disputes, and legal cases.5 The present essay investigates how these tensions shaped the activities and strategies of the D’Wolfs, the most active slave-trading family in U.S. history. The interest in families such as the Browns of Providence or the D’Wolfs of Bristol is part of a broader scholarly and public awareness of the history of slavery and the slave trade in the northern United States. In Rhode Island, the 2003 appointment of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to study the university’s historical connection to slavery and the slave trade stimulated great public interest. In the Committee’s final report, the D’Wolfs, not the Browns, were described as ‘‘the largest slave trading family in all of North America, mounting more than eighty transatlantic voyages.’’ Notwithstanding this increasing interest in the family, many aspects of the D’Wolfs’ operations are still unknown, and even now no accurate assessment of their total participation in the Atlantic slave trade exists.6 The broader objective of the present article is to investigate how the development of new values in the larger society influenced the behavior of the largest slave traders in U.S. history from just prior to the Revolutionary era, when the business was accepted as legitimate, to well into the nineteenth century, when it clearly was not. Although avoiding the dramatic public debates of the Browns, the D’Wolf family also split over the issue. Levi D’Wolf became involved with the Quaker society and their abolitionist activities while his brothers emerged as the main slave
5. On the Brown brothers, see Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006). 6. The longest treatments of the family so far have been George Locke Howe, Mount Hope: a New England Chronicle (New York, 1959) and Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia, 1981). Also important are the recent works by D’Wolf descendants. See Thomas Norman DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (Boston, 2008) and the documentary film Traces of the Trade a Story from the Deep North, directed by Alla Kovgan (San Francisco, CA, 2008).
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traders in U.S. history, occasionally working with the aforementioned John Brown. To this family tension we could add the changing public environment, reflected in the testimony of the sailor in James D’Wolf ’s court case and in the activities of public officials such as William Ellery. It is indeed striking that a powerful individual like James D’Wolf could be charged with the murder of a slave in the mid Atlantic. It is more striking still when we consider that after evading a conviction D’Wolf was able to continue his activities for many more years, ultimately becoming a U.S. senator and building one of the largest fortunes in New England. But business did not continue as before. Rhode Islanders’ slaving activities became increasingly concentrated in Bristol in the early nineteenth century. And as the pressure on the D’Wolfs and other slavers increased, they adapted to the new system of values. By the 1830s, when James D’Wolf wrote his will, he was functioning in two different worlds—the northern United States, where slave labor and the trade that sustained it were in the process of disappearing, and Cuba, where slavery continued to thrive.7
When Mark Antony D’Wolf entered the slave trade in the mid eighteenth century, the business was an integral and legitimate part of trade in the British Empire. Born in Guadeloupe, the head of the D’Wolf family joined the world of seafaring, and ultimately the slave trade, through Simeon Potter, an important Rhode Island merchant. Mark Antony had thirteen children, and many of them became involved with the slave trade at some point in their lives. Figure 1 shows the main slave traders in the family. The family tree, assembled by the Reverend Calbraith Perry in 1901, mentions other members of the family who died at sea and had connections to the slave trade as well. Simon D’Wolf, Jr., for instance, apparently killed himself on the Slave Coast.8 From 1787 to 1807, the D’Wolfs financed at least ninety-six voyages, bringing over 10,000 slaves to the Americas. James D’Wolf was the main slave trader in the family. He financed, in sole or joint adventures, thirty-
7. James D’Wolf captained, at least, one voyage for John Brown around 1785. Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 303. This voyage is listed on Voyages: The TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces? yearFrom⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&anycaptain⳱&voyageid⳱36532 8. Howe, Mount Hope, 186–87.
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Figure 1: The D’Wolf slave traders’ family tree. Only members of the family referred in the present article are in this family tree, which was compiled with information from George Locke Howe, Mount Hope: A New England Chronicle (New York, 1959), 186–87.
six voyages out of the ninety-six. Table 1 shows the ten most active American slave traders calculated through the number of voyages in which they had at least a partial share and the number of slaves those vessels disembarked in the Americas. Besides James D’Wolf, three other members of the family figure among the top slave traders of the country. It is important to note that these voyages were usually joint ventures. For the 517 voyages made under the U.S. flag for which evidence of ownership exists, 299, or 58 percent, were joint ventures, with the remainder having individual owners. It is reasonable to infer, however, that many others were also jointly owned and that only the name of the principal owner has survived. Given the high risks involved in the slave trade, sharing the costs of these voyages was an important strategy. As Rachel Chernos Lin has shown, it opened the opportunity for many occasional investors who were not necessarily local elites.9 9. Lin, ‘‘The Rhode Island Slave-Traders.’’
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Table 1: Largest U.S. slave traders by number of voyages and slaves disembarked Name D’Wolf, James Gardner, Caleb Vernon, William D’Wolf, John D’Wolf, George D’Wolf, William Clarke, Peleg Brown, Samuel Lopez, Aaron Sterry, Cyprian
Voyages
Slaves Disembarked
Main Port of Departure
36 22 16 17 13 20 9 14 13 17
3,414 2,523 2,375 2,283 2,135 2,096 2,057 1,775 1,580 1,543
Bristol Newport Newport Bristol Bristol Bristol Newport R.I. (port unspecified) Newport R.I. (port unspecified)
Information used to compile this table came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
The American Revolution dealt one of the first blows to North American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Its initial impact was the interruption of the trade. In 1776, eight vessels under the British flag brought 1,354 slaves to the mainland. But there is absolutely no evidence of any vessel delivering slaves to the North American mainland under any flag over the next five years. After Mark Antony’s last slave voyage in 1774, the D’Wolfs would return to the trade again only in 1787.10 When the D’Wolfs rejoined the slave trade, it was a very different world from the one in which they had operated before the Revolution. The American Revolution had profoundly transformed the structure of the slave trade. First, the major outlet for North American slave traders— the British Caribbean—was now closed. From 1645 to 1776, merchants in British America carried 126,000 slaves to the Americas. The British Caribbean received 56 percent of these, with only 35 percent landing on the American mainland. As is well known, the old imperial connections between the mainland and the British Caribbean encompassed much more than the slave trade; all commerce from the mainland was completely reconfigured after the Revolution as the British now excluded the vessels of the newly independent nation from their ports. British Caribbean planters could not get access to subsistence goods from the main10. All statistics and information on specific voyages were taken from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, unless otherwise noted.
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land, and Americans could not sell them the slaves they brought from Africa.11 Antislavery legislation was another new feature of the post-Revolution world. Opposition to the slave trade in the United States certainly existed before the American Revolution, but after the Revolution the slave trade became a political issue at both the state and national levels. When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, the slave trade was among the delegates’ most central subjects for discussion. The final outcome was section nine of the first article of the new U.S. Constitution, which limited the power of Congress to regulate the slave trade until the year 1808. The Constitution did not make any reference to the involvement of American merchants in the slave trade to foreign territories. It dealt exclusively with the importation of slaves to U.S. ports, ‘‘which implicitly confirmed federal regulatory power while explicitly suspending it until 1808.’’12 It was at the state level that legislation forbidding all involvement in the slave trade first appeared. In 1779, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, Rhode Island prohibited the selling of slaves out of the state. In 1784, an act to gradually abolish slavery was also passed and, in 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, participation in the slave trade for citizens of Rhode Island was forbidden. A penalty of one hundred pounds for every slave transported and one thousand pounds for every vessel involved in the trade was instituted.13 This legislation had an immediate impact on Rhode Island merchants. In 1788, only four slave voyages departed Rhode Island for Africa. The D’Wolfs, who had organized one voyage in 1787, remained out of the business until 1791. But thereafter, Rhode Island-based slave voyages increased significantly. It seems that, in spite of some initial apprehension in the late 1780s, the law came to be ignored, and the D’Wolfs and
11. See ‘‘Assessing the Slave Trade: Estimates,’’ http://slavevoyages.org/tast/ assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom⳱1501&yearTo⳱1776&flag⳱5; Franklin W. Knight, ‘‘The American Revolution and the Caribbean,’’ in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, VA, 1983). 12. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 136. 13. Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1930–35), 344.
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other Rhode Island merchants organized slave voyages on a regular basis. Slave trade activity, however, did remain below pre-1776 levels during the first years of the new republic. If Congress was prohibited from legislating against the importation of slaves to U.S. ports, it still had the power to prevent U.S. citizens carrying slaves from Africa to foreign territories. In 1794 the Act to Prohibit the Carrying on of the Slave Trade From the United States to any Foreign Place or Country specified a fine of two thousand dollars for any captured vessel involved in the trade and two hundred dollars for every slave taken aboard. Further federal legislation in 1800 strengthened the federal restrictions of the 1794 Act.14 These acts were not completely ineffective, and the authorities made some effort to enforce them. In 1800 two slave ships were brought into Philadelphia, and the slaves were liberated. In Rhode Island, from 1794 to 1804 there were twenty-four known legal prosecutions against slave traders. The pressure on the D’Wolfs became greater with the efforts of Newport customs collector, William Ellery. Ellery, an abolitionist, served as the first customs collector for Newport from the ratification of the Constitution until his death in 1820. In 1799, he confiscated the slave schooner Lucy, property of Charles D’Wolf and, in a court-ordered auction, sent his deputy to bid on the vessel. John Brown, Charles D’Wolf, and his brother, James D’Wolf, attempted to convince the deputy to abandon the auction and, after a negative answer, organized his kidnapping so the schooner could go back to the D’Wolfs without problems. According to the deputy, ‘‘I was forcibly seized & carried on Board of a small sail Boat, lying close by the Street. [I] struggled, resisted & exclaimed for Help but in vain; there were several people in sight at the Time, . . . but . . . afforded me no assistence.’’ While Ellery and other abolitionists attempted to restrict the actions of the slave trading community of Rhode Island, individuals such as the D’Wolfs managed to continue their activities within certain geographic limits, more specifically, the limits of the town of Bristol. In this case, as the letter written by the deputy shows, the kidnapping took place under the eyes of other individuals, who did not attempt to interfere. The D’Wolfs were power-
14. An Act to Prohibit the Carrying on the Slave Trade from the United States to any Foreign Place or Country, 3d Cong. 1, 1st sess., Act of Mar. 22, Chap. 11, Stat, 347-349, (1794).
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ful within their town, but their state was nevertheless going through important changes, as the actions by Ellery and others demonstrated.15 Paradoxically, pressure against the trade developed just as commercial barriers in the wider Atlantic were being dismantled. Freer trade formed a new feature of the world in which the second-generation D’Wolfs found themselves operating. The British may have closed their Caribbean ports to U.S. merchants, but Spanish America, as well as Danish and Swedish enclaves in the Caribbean, did just the opposite. Moreover, within a decade of independence, the end of British colonial restrictions stimulated the growth of manufacturing and, especially, long-distance trade in the United States. To paraphrase Joyce Appleby, the D’Wolfs and other U.S. slave traders should be seen as ‘‘inheritors of the Revolution,’’ entrepreneurs who launched ventures in many different directions, including the slave trade. The successful entrance of U.S. merchants into the slave trade was part of the emergence of a stronger maritime trade sector in the republic. Ironically, the efficiency of Adam Smith’s free-market environment became evident in U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade.16 Cuba constituted one of the major new opportunities for American merchants. To this point the island had always been a marginal market for slaves. Although Cuba had great strategic importance, it had little productive importance within the Spanish Empire, producing some tobacco with very little slave labor. By the 1750s the production of sugar on the island had increased, but it still lagged well behind the levels of the neighboring British and French Caribbean islands. The main change was brought on by the Seven Years’ War and the British occupation of the island in 1762. Spain’s recovery of Cuba under the terms of the Peace of Paris in the aftermath of the war, argues John Elliott, ‘‘made
15. The two captured vessels can be found in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. For the Prudent see Voyages Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/ database/search.faces?yearFrom⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&anycaptain⳱&voyageid ⳱36707. For the Phoebe, see http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces ?yearFrom⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&anycaptain⳱&voyageid⳱Ⳮ36992. On the conflicts between James D’Wolf and William Ellery, see Peter J. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790–1860 (Providence, RI, 1963). 16. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 58; Eltis, ‘‘The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade,’’ 371.
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Cuba an ideal laboratory for trying out a programme of comprehensive reform.’’ Thus, from the 1760s on, restrictions on slave imports were gradually loosened as part of the Bourbon reforms. As ties with the British Caribbean withered, Cuba emerged as one of the most promising markets for U.S. merchants.17 The D’Wolfs’ slave-trading business responded flexibly to these developments. The Rhode Island–Gold Coast–Cuba connection quickly emerged as the trade route accounting for the bulk of the family’s slavetrading business. Links between specific regions in Africa and regions in the Americas formed a major feature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a whole. Tastes for particular products, along with winds and ocean currents, all helped create such links. It is possible to track the port of African embarkation of about half of the 11,455 slaves carried off from Africa by the D’Wolfs. Of this portion, as Table 2 shows, more than half of the captives were purchased on the Gold Coast. This resembled the broader pattern of the Rhode Island participation in the slave trade at this time. The main ports in the region, Anomabu and the Cape Coast Castle, together accounted for over 95 percent of all North American trade on the Gold Coast.18 Despite the centrality of the Gold Coast, the D’Wolfs and other Rhode Islanders had important connections with other parts of Africa. The Upper Guinea regions formed the second most important source of their slaves. The Gold Coast and Senegambia—and West Africa as a whole— were located in a privileged position to serve North American slave markets given the clockwise North Atlantic gyre.19 Products also forged trans-Atlantic connections, as much as did winds and ocean currents. The historical connection, for instance, between Rio de Janeiro and Angola or Bahia and the Bight of Benin, relied heavily on specific products of these regions. Rum was the Rhode Island counterpart to Bahian tobacco or Rio’s geribita. The ‘‘rum-men,’’ as New Englanders came to be known on the African coast, developed important 17. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT, 2006), 303. 18. Voyages Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?year From⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&ptdepimp⳱20100. 19. Daniel Domingues da Silva, ‘‘The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhao, 1684–1846: Volume, Routes and Organization,’’ Slavery and Abolition 29 (Dec. 2008), 477–501.
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228 228 4
80 129 451 660 13
Sierra Leone
151 446 597 11
Windward Coast
112 306 188 1,151 2,907 56
180 211 35 156 374 120 74
Gold Coast
290 6
290
Bight of Benin
330 6
330
West Central Africa
205 4
205
Southeast Africa
Information used to compile this table came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
1791 1792 1793 1795 1796 1797 1801 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 Totals %
Senegambia
5,017 -
No Data
180 211 325 156 374 120 74 330 317 386 468 2,276 6,438 100
Totals
•
Table 2: Number of slaves purchased by D’Wolfs by region of embarkation
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ties based on heavy exportation of the product starting in the 1730s. The governor-in-chief of Cape Coast Castle told his London associates that ‘‘West India[n] rum never will sell here while there is any Americans here.’’ The outbreak of the Revolution meant no more Rhode Island rum on the Gold Coast, which generated anxiety for English slave traders on the coast. When American merchants eventually reentered the trade, they found a ready market on which to reestablish their own triangular trade and gain access to the forts dominated by Europeans. It was during this period that James D’Wolf married the daughter of William Bradford, owner of one of the largest rum distilleries in Bristol.20 Notwithstanding the role of winds, ocean currents, and the demand for rum that made possible a strong network connecting Rhode Island to the Gold Coast, the D’Wolfs and other Rhode Island slave traders did venture into the South Atlantic both in Africa and the Americas. The third most important region of purchase for Rhode Island slave traders in the period was southeast Africa. From 1782 to 1807 there is evidence of at least nine voyages organized by U.S. slave traders to Mozambique and one to Quilimane, carrying over 2,000 slaves to the Americas. Around nine hundred of these captives disembarked in Cuba, 217 in the Dutch Caribbean, and 548 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Indeed, American slave traders carried around 11 percent of all trans-Atlantic slaves disembarked in Montevideo in these years. This unusual connection, which straddled North and South Atlantic gyres, was the result of the aggressive expansion of Rhode Island merchants into long-distance maritime trade in combination with the opening of ports to foreign vessels throughout Spanish America. Here, too, James D’Wolf had a presence. His vessel Ann disembarked 95 slaves in Montevideo in 1805.21 20. The geribita was a Brazilian type of rum used by Luso-Brazilian merchants in the slave trade in Central Africa. On the role of geribita in the Rio de JaneiroAngola trade cf. Roquinaldo Ferreira, ‘‘Dinaˆmica do come´rcio intra-colonial see Geribita, panos asia´ticos e guerra no tra´fico angolano de escravos,’’ in Joa˜o Fragoso e Maria Fernanda Bicalho, eds., Antigo Regime nos Tro´picos: a Dinaˆmica Imperial Portuguesa, Se´culos XVI–XVIII (Rio de Janeiro, 2001), 339–78. On the Bahia–Bight of Benin connection, see Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to 19th century (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1976); Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle, 114–15. 21. Voyages Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?year From⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&ptdepimp⳱10000.20000.30000.40000.50000 .60000.80000&mjbyptimp⳱60000.8000 0&mjslptimp⳱42002.
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This strong connection with foreign ports was one of the peculiarities of U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. There are many examples of traders from specific empires trading in foreign territory, but after 1783 a larger share of the U.S. slave fleet served foreign markets than was the case for any other national flag in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The absence of sugar production on the North American mainland before the Louisiana sugar sector developed is one reason, but by the second half of the eighteenth century the demand for slaves in tobacco, rice, and indigo production had significantly increased and was further boosted by the beginnings of cotton production in the first years of the nineteenth century. The heavy influx of slaves into South Carolina after 1803, followed by the emergence of a major internal slave trade from the Old South to the expanding western frontier with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, indicates the overwhelming demand for slaves. In the absence of antislave trade legislation the number of slaves brought into the U.S. would very likely have grown enormously. Thus, the heavy involvement of U.S. slave traders with foreign slave markets was not only the product of an efficient U.S. maritime fleet freed from mercantilist restrictions, but also an adaptation to antislave trade legislation and pressure. Yet, in spite of these far-flung markets, it was the Bristol—Anomabu or Cape Coast—Havana connections that played the pivotal role for the D’Wolfs.22
While the D’Wolfs continued their engagement with the slave trade after the Revolution, it was clearly not business as usual. Initially they fought the new pressures from within the system. Most visibly, James D’Wolf ’s murder indictment dragged on for three years until in 1796 he arranged for two members of the crew of the Polly to testify in St. Thomas, a slave-trading port in the West Indies. They endorsed Cranston’s account of the murder of the slave, but emphasized the lack of choices left to Captain D’Wolf. The case was not pursued. The greatest direct threat to the D’Wolfs’ involvement in the trade, however, came from the legislation that made it illegal. For this, the most effective counterattack was
22. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1991), 29–34; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, WI, 1989).
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Table 3: Number of Rhode Island slave voyages and slaves disembarked in the Americas by home port of vessel Port of Departure Newport Bristol (RI) Providence Warren Total
Voyages
% Voyages
Slaves Disembarked
% of Slaves Disembarked
99 69 8 7 183
54.1 37.7 4.37 3.83 100
9,195 7,319 801 608 17,923
51.3 40.84 4.47 3.39 100
There is no information about the specific port of departure for the majority of voyages departing from Rhode Island. Two hundred thirty-one voyages had an unspecified of departure in Rhode Island. Information used to compile this table came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
their request for a federal statute creating an independent customs collectorship for Bristol, hitherto subject to the Newport office. This strategy might be seen as a Rhode Island defense against the 1800 bill that put teeth into the earlier prohibitions of the U.S. foreign slave trade. But the request for the statute was only the first step. The officer that John Adams appointed to the new collectorship in 1800, Jonathan Russel, actually sought to enforce the legislation. Not until 1804 were the D’Wolfs able to obtain the position for their own nominee, Charles Collins. The appointment was nicely timed to coincide with the emergence of the booming slave markets of Cuba and South Carolina. According to Coleman, so long as Collins—a slave trader himself—was in charge of the office, the D’Wolfs ‘‘posted good conduct bonds without question and changed ship registries at will. Armed with powers of attorney, D’Wolf captains made nominal sales of vessels and cargoes to Spanish interests and thus operated with relative impunity. Collins, it seemed, was more the employee of the D’Wolfs than of the United States.’’23 The history of Bristol as an important port of departure for slaving voyages is, therefore, to a large extent, the history of the D’Wolfs. If Newport can still be considered the main slave-trading port in Rhode Island for the whole period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, accounting for 54 percent of all voyages for which we know the port of departure, Bristol is not far behind. Overall, as Table 3 shows, 69 voyages are recorded as clearing from Bristol. But the role of the port expanded rapidly after 1804 with Collins as customs collector. By 1807, Bristol 23. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 55–56.
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Figure 2: Number of slaves disembarked in the Americas by vessels departing Bristol and Newport. Information used to compile this diagram came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages .org.
had surpassed Newport as the main port of departure for slave vessels in Rhode Island. The Bristol Insurance Company, which the D’Wolfs founded in February of 1800, grew rapidly in these years.24 Figure 2 shows Bristol becoming the main port for the organization of slave-trading ventures in Rhode Island. Slave traders from neighboring towns transferred their activities to Bristol and made use of both the new insurance company and, from 1804, the compliant customs collector. From Bristol, the D’Wolfs and their associates were able to continue their trade with Cuba and successfully enter into the Charleston slave market after 1803. From that year until 1807, Charleston and Havana became the two main ports of disembarkation for U.S. vessels, with the final 24. Edward Field, State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History (Boston, 1902), 275.
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decision being made according to the prices for slaves in both markets at the moment of arrival. The main factor determining the reemergence of Charleston as an important entry point for slaves was the reopening of the slave trade to South Carolina in 1803. By the end of that year, ‘‘the demands of King Cotton, amplified by the opening of Louisiana, finally took precedence over fear of insurrection’’ and the South Carolina legislature decided to resume the Atlantic slave trade into the state, which had been legally prohibited since 1787. During the following four years, around 47,000 slaves entered the state through Charleston. The reopening also temporarily catapulted South Carolina ahead of Rhode Island as the state that dispatched the most slaving voyages. On the other hand, while such activity was legal in South Carolina, it was patently illegal in Rhode Island.25 The D’Wolfs engaged in the South Carolina market from the very beginning. The family sent Henry D’Wolf—William D’Wolf ’s son—to Charleston to start a commission house responsible for the family cargoes. He partnered with a Charleston merchant, Charles Christian, and used newspaper advertisements to sell the slaves brought into the port by the D’Wolfs and other Rhode Islanders. Especially during the year of 1807, the company advertised the arrivals of vessels bringing ‘‘Prime Windward Coast Slaves.’’ After 1807 the partnership tried to shift its focus from the Atlantic slave trade to the domestic slave trade, announcing vessels departing Charleston to New Orleans. But they were not as successful with the internal slave trade as they had been with the transAtlantic business, and Henry D’Wolf returned to Rhode Island in 1808.26 The main slave market for the voyages organized by the D’Wolfs continued to be Havana. The D’Wolfs’ and Rhode Island’s involvement in the supply of slaves to South Carolina was merely the expansion of an existing pattern. Indeed it makes sense to see the Charleston market as an extension of the well-established Rhode Island–Gold Coast–Havana route. As Table 4 shows, of the 10,000 slaves introduced on D’Wolf
25. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 121. 26. See, for example, ‘‘sloop Baltimore with 60 slaves,’’ Charleston Courier (SC), July 13, 1807; ‘‘brig Three Sisters with 122 slaves,’’ City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), July 25, 1807; ‘‘brig Betsy & Polly with 106 slaves,’’ Charleston Courier (SC), Aug. 25, 1807.
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112 169 401 1,413 2,161
66
536
248
253
35
Savannah
Charleston
208 208
Louisiana
Gulf Coast
176 203 345 237 288 216 442 190 360 402 180 216 125 160 1,101 655 158 5,464
Havana
Cuba
94
94
Matanzas
95
95
Montevideo
Rio de la Plata
211 675
76
104 105
71
Other Ports
Information used to compile this table came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
1787 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 Totals
Georgia
1131
No Data
71 176 307 485 237 288 469 442 284 360 456 246 216 373 272 1,365 1,066 1,990 10,234
Totals
•
South Carolina
Table 4: Main ports of slaves disembarkation for D’Wolf voyages
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Figure 3: Main regions of slave disembarkation for slaves carried on U.S. vessels. Information used to compile this diagram came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
vessels, 5,558 were disembarked in Cuba, 2,161 in Charleston, and smaller numbers in other ports. Here too the pattern of voyages financed by the D’Wolfs mirrored the slave trade of Rhode Island as a whole. During the two decades before 1803, Cuba had been the most important region of disembarkation for slave voyages organized by all U.S. merchants, as Figure 3 shows, with Savannah a distant second. Excluded from the British Caribbean, with slavery destroyed in St. Domingue, and with U.S. markets officially closed (except for 1804–1807), it is no surprise that Cuba emerged as the major destination for slaves carried on U.S. ships. In light of this fact, just how important were Africa and Cuba to Bristol in this period?27 27. It is important to note that, as a whole, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was responsible for a very small share of the total external commerce of the United States. Eltis, ‘‘The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade,’’ 66.
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Table 5: Amounts insured by the Bristol Insurance Company by voyage itinerary Voyage
U.S.–Cuba Africa Europe Asia Caribbean South America Total
1800–1801
1804–1806
Total Insured
Percentage
Total Insured
Percentage
130,030 51,280 57,718 14,000 88,930 9,000 350,958
37.1 14.6 16.4 4.0 25.3 2.6 100.0
162,875 156,344 73,700 32,000 49,190 6,000 480,109
33.9 32.6 15.4 6.7 10.2 1.2 100.0
Information used to compile this table came from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
We can address this question by drawing on the insurance books of the D’Wolfs’ Bristol Insurance Company, which give us a picture of all of Bristol’s long-distance trade. Vessels departed from Bristol to many different parts of the world, from China to Montevideo, indicating just how successful New Englanders were in the international long-distance maritime trade in the pre-steam era. Table 5, which distributes insured values by the destinations of the insured vessels, shows the relative importance of the African trade, especially after the reopening of the South Carolina market in 1803. In the two years after the company opened for business in 1800, the route from Rhode Island to Havana and back was the most important branch of trade, accounting for almost 40 percent of the value of all insured voyages. Voyages to Africa, on the other hand, took up only 15 percent of insured values. The reopening of the South Carolina slave trade together with the change in the port’s administration meant that the percentage of all voyages represented by round trips to Africa doubled their share of voyages insured in Bristol. For a time nearly one-third of all Bristol-insured long-distance trade comprised slave voyages—a ratio that was probably higher than that of any other port in the Atlantic from which slave voyages set out. In Liverpool, England, in the 1790s, slave-trading voyages accounted for only 3 percent of departures.
The strong Cuban connection revealed in the insurance books allowed the D’Wolfs to deal with market variations and maintain connections with the slave trade as abolitionist pressure mounted. These ties assumed
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a more solid form with direct investment in Cuban plantations. ‘‘If the market at Havana slumped, and the Revenue Marine, as the Coast Guard was then called, made it risky to smuggle into American ports,’’ argues George Howe, then James D’Wolf ‘‘could afford to wait. He owned three plantations in Cuba—the Mary Ann, the Mount Hope, and the Esperanza—where he could hold his stock until prices rose again, as they always did, sooner or later.’’28 Depending on slave prices, slave traders would go to either Havana or Charleston between 1804 and 1807. John Sabins, a slave captain who worked for the D’Wolfs and started a plantation in Cuba, was warned by his partner in the Cuban enterprise in late 1806 that ‘‘negroes are much cheaper at Charleston than here. It would be well if you had a friend or correspondence in that place, that you authorize & give him your orders to have the negroes purchased & remitted me immediately by some trusty person.’’29 Investment in Cuba, therefore, was more than a strategy to deal with the emerging obstructions to the slave trade. ‘‘Should they arrive here as the time mentioned,’’ Sabins’s partner insisted, ‘‘I shall certainly be able to plant next year from 40 to 50 thousand coffee trees, for which number the land will then be prepared.’’ The increasing demand for coffee, sugar, and other products in the world market certainly stimulated the establishment of these plantations. The first foreigners to perceive the promising prospects of Cuba were probably the Saint Domingue refugees, about 18,000 of whom had already chosen Cuba as their new home by 1804. As Gabriel Debie´n argued, the refugees stayed in Cuba ‘‘primarily because they found there something better than shelter; they found a chance to build a new colonial homeland.’’ By 1807, more than one hundred Cuban plantations owned by Saint Domingue refugees were producing coffee and sugar.30 Sabins and other North American plantation owners relied heavily on Saint Domingue refugees to coordinate the production of their new 28. Howe, Mount Hope, 123. 29. John Catalogne to John Sabins, Havana, Dec. 18, 1806, Wilsons’ Papers, Bristol Historical and Preservation Society, Rhode Island (hereafter cited as BHPS). 30. Gabriel Debien, ‘‘The Saint-Domingue Refugees in Cuba, 1793–1815,’’ in The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809, ed. Carl Brasseaux and Glenn Conrad (Lafayette, LA, 1992), 33.
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plantations. The partner of John Sabins mentioned above, J. Catalogne, was probably one of these refugees. While the partner was taking care of the new land, Sabins was responsible for supplying the necessary slaves, a task he had been performing for years. By December, Catalogne had obtained some land and made preparations for the coming year. He had ‘‘already agreed with a very intelligent frenchman to take care of & direct our plantation.’’ Refugees who did not have the capital to start their own plantations, such as this Frenchman, put their expertise to work in other properties. The literature on the French refugees in Cuba shows that the migrants played a central role in the development of coffee and sugar production in the island.31 For refugees fleeing the Saint Domingue revolution, U.S. slave traders were an immediate solution for the provision of African slaves and capital since, according to Debien, Saint Domingue refugees constantly complained about the lack of manpower in the island. North American and British merchants were the main slave traders in the island until they pulled out in the years after 1807. Spanish traders eventually took their place but in the first decade of the nineteenth century, U.S. merchants disembarked around 25,000 slaves in the island, closely followed by the British with 20,000. Together these merchants accounted for more than four out of five slaves disembarked in the Spanish colony during this period. The D’Wolfs and a few other U.S. merchants, for their part, improved their investment opportunities by calling on French expertise in agricultural production and French business networks.32 By the early years of the nineteenth century, therefore, the D’Wolfs and their associates had set up a sophisticated structure connecting northern credit, rum and cotton production, long-distance maritime trade (including its slave variant), and slave plantations in Cuba producing sugar and coffee for the world market. But new legislation abolishing the slave trade dramatically changed the nature of New England’s involvement in the slave trade. In 1807, both houses of the U.S. Con31. John Catalogne to John Sabins, Havana, Dec. 18, 1806, Wilsons’ Papers, BHPS; Moreno Fraginals observes that Frenchmen were responsible for building eight out of the ten largest sugar mills in the island around 1804. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: El complejo economico social cubano del azucar (Havana, 1964, 1978). 32. See ‘‘Assessing the Slave Trade: Estimates,’’ http://slavevoyages.org/tast/as sessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom⳱1800&yearTo⳱1809&disembarkation⳱701.
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gress ‘‘as the climax of a sustained congressional attack on the slave trade that had begun in 1790’’ voted for a law prohibiting the import of any African into American territory effective on the first day of January, 1808. Most historians now agree that this legislation actually had a profound impact on the slave trade to United States territory. The effectiveness of the second section of the key article in the statute, which prohibited the participation of U.S. citizens in the foreign slave trade, is still controversial. The people involved in these illegal activities tried to keep them as secret as possible, while abolitionists worked in the opposite direction.33 A few D’Wolfs continued their involvement with the slave trade after 1807. In the Bristol Insurance Company Book of 1810–1812 (William D’Wolf was then company president), the Spanish ship Francisco de Assis was insured for its voyage from Norfolk to Africa, and thence to Havana. The insurance covered ‘‘the danger of the seas, of fire, enemies’’ but had ‘‘mortality of slaves excepted.’’ It is important to note that this was the only voyage to Africa clearly identified in this book. Another case appears in receipts sent to John D’Wolf by his agents Hernandez and Chaviteau in Cuba in 1812 describing his share of the sales of the cargo of the ship Arrogancia Castellana. What exactly constituted the cargo was not mentioned, but it is very likely that the Arrogancia Castellana was the vessel that disembarked 255 slaves in Havana that same year under the name Arrogancia. The captain, named Munro, was probably John or William Munro, both of whom were from Bristol and had experience in the pre-1808 slave trade. No doubt other such voyages exist in the new Voyages database under the Spanish flag where the North American connection is now lost.34 In 1815, William Ellery, the Newport customs collector who had been fighting the illegal slave trade in Newport since the late eighteenth century, wrote to the Secretary of State denouncing possible illegal activities still taking place at Bristol. According to Ellery, ‘‘the Hermaphrodite 33. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 136. 34. Record of Policy Mt Hope Insurance Co—1810–1812 for ships, John D’Wolf Papers, BHPS; ‘‘Voyages Database,’’ http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/ search.faces?yearFrom⳱1514&yearTo⳱1866&anycaptain⳱&anyowner⳱&voy ageid⳱14586. It is interesting to note that D’Wolf ’s agent Chaviteau is the same person who helped Sabins and Catalogne establish their plantation in 1806, as discussed earlier. It seems to indicate the strength of their network over time.
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Brig formerly called the McDonnough of Bristol was made a Spanish Bottom, but was still the property of certain merchants of that town, and would soon sail for the coast of Africa with an intention to purchase slaves there.’’ He describes the investigation and a conversation with the surveyor of the Bristol port, who said that ‘‘three or four vessels had sailed from that port and that he had heard that the smallest of them had arrived at Havana with upwards of two hundred slaves, that as no complaint had been made he had taken no bonds.’’ The main figure behind the operation, according to the officer, was James D’Wolf.35 It seems likely that the D’Wolfs’ involvement in the trade diminished significantly after abolition without ceasing altogether. The aforementioned documents clearly show their involvement in the early 1810s. James D’Wolf ’s plantations continued to grow in the following years, and these occasional illegal ventures could have supplied his own needs. But the D’Wolfs no doubt reallocated their resources to other sectors of the international trade and in addition invested in other activities, such as textile factories in New England, sugar and coffee plantations in Cuba, and privateering. Adjustment to the new legislative and ideological realities was obviously much easier when a wealthy family’s portfolio was so widely diversified, but it is clear that most of the D’Wolfs were reluctant to abandon, and indeed found ways to hold on to, their interests in slavery and the slave trade. This involvement in slave-trading activities, however, could not be sustained for long, and their disappearance from the documents after the late 1810s seems to indicate their complete withdrawal from the business. The gradual abandonment by the D’Wolfs did not mean an end to U.S. involvement in the slave trade. Slave ships flying the U.S. flag became common again in the period between 1835 and 1862. This pattern, however, was apparently not linked to the earlier North American involvement in the slave trade to Cuba. Slave vessels were built in the United States, and British and North American merchants supplied slave traders with merchandise, often on credit. Many slave vessels had North American captains and crews while U.S. consuls in Cuba and Brazil facilitated the issuance of official papers that were used by Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian slave traders. Evidence of direct investment and
35. Letter from William Ellery, Dec. 1815, Sedgwick Papers, Stockbridge Library, Stockbridge, MA.
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ownership of slave vessels by U.S. citizens, however, is scarce. Rhode Island does not appear as a region of departure for slave vessels after the 1820s. Between 1820 and 1840, there are no hard data on slave voyages departing the North American mainland. The only New England state from which slave vessels left after 1840 was Massachusetts while the bulk of departures was from New York and New Orleans, which together accounted for more than 75 percent of all slaves disembarked from vessels leaving North American ports between 1844 and the ending of the slave trade in 1867.36 The main connection of Rhode Islanders with Cuba after the 1820s became the legal trade and the direct investments in slave plantations on the island. The North American plantations in Cuba, as with their French-owned counterparts, prospered as international demand for their products grew strongly. When the New Englander Mary Gardner Lowell traveled to Cuba in 1831, she visited Nathaniel Fellows, who had inherited the properties of his uncle, a deceased Boston merchant. By the time of Lowell’s visit, Fellows owned three plantations and rented a fourth, with 406 slaves distributed throughout them. According to Lowell’s description, coffee was the main crop produced at those plantations.37 James D’Wolf ’s plantation Mary Ann was also mostly dedicated to coffee. By 1818, James D’Wolf had 103 slaves working on this property, with 97 of them brought from Africa. The structure built in the early years of the nineteenth century with the help of Saint Domingue refugees endured and expanded during the ensuing decades. By 1823, there were at least fifty plantations valued at three million dollars owned by North Americans in Matanzas. The reasons for this Cuba and New England connection are not entirely clear, but might include cheap access to slaves in the Spanish colony and the connection between Cuban molasses and Rhode Island rum production. In the D’Wolfs’ case, their long experience with the Atlantic slave trade was undoubtedly key to their decision to establish plantations in the island. By the 1830s, when Cuba became the third most important trading partner of the United States (with the total value of exports and imports only exceeded by Britain
36. See Voyages Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces ?yearFrom⳱1807&yearTo⳱1866&ptdepimp⳱20000. 37. Karen Robert, ed., New Year in Cuba: Mary Gardner Lowell’s Travel Diary, 1831–1832 (Boston, 2003), 102–107.
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and France) based on the exchange of Cuban sugar and coffee for U.S. foodstuffs, lumber, and manufactured products, many New Englanders were on both sides of this trade.38
In 1821, when James D’Wolf started his term at the Senate, the Missouri Debates had already been raging for two years. One of his first actions as a senator was to vote against the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. His vote immediately generated an angry response from Senator William Smith, from South Carolina. Smith argued that the ‘‘people of Rhode Island have lately shown bitterness against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri. This, however, cannot, I believe, be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James deWolf as a member of this House, as he has accumulated an immense fortune in the slave trade.’’ Senator Smith could also have reminded everyone of the fact that the Rhode Island senator owned hundreds of slaves himself. Along with a few other New Englanders, he was directly implicated in the continuation of slavery overseas, with his aforementioned Cuban plantations and all their slaves, coffee, and sugar. His vote against the incorporation of Missouri could hardly be justified on a humanitarian basis.39 It is a mistake, however, to believe, as Senator William Smith did, that James D’Wolf ’s election to the Senate and his activities as a slave trader took place in an environment of total complacency and cynicism. In 1821, James D’Wolf wrote to his brother John ‘‘brother Levi’s Quaker policy I do not think will do him any good.’’ Concerned with accusations made by a Providence Quaker, James D’Wolf made clear that his ‘‘elec-
38. Louis A. Perez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens, GA, 1990), 24. Some examples can be found in Roland T. Ely, ‘‘The Old Cuba Trade: Highlights and Case Studies of Cuban-American Interdependence during the Nineteenth Century,’’ The Business History Review 38 (Winter 1964), 456–78. Information on the Mary Ann and other plantations owned by the D’Wolfs in Cuba can be found in Coughtry, Papers of the American Slave Trade, Part 2, Series A. 39. Annals of the Congress of the United States, Sixteenth Congress, Second Session; Comprising the Period from November 13, 1820 to March 3, 1821, Inclusive (Washington, DC, 1855), 72 ; James D’Wolf last will and testament, Bristol, 1836, Bristol Town Hall, Bristol, RI.
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tion to the Senate speaks the popular feeling of R.I. [Rhode Island],’’ even though, he continued, ‘‘the quakers & abolition society made use of any means & exaction in their power to prevent my election.’’ The D’Wolfs, and the Browns, for that matter, experienced this pressure from within their very families. Both Moses Brown and Levi D’Wolf abandoned the slave trade after their first voyages to Africa and became part of the Rhode Island Quaker society.40 While it is important to keep in mind that antislavery thought did not always translate into action, those moments in which it did played an important role in the history of the slave trade in the region. The main slave trader of Providence, Cyprian Sterry, ceased his activities in face of the pressure from the Providence Abolition Society, which threatened to sue him unless he signed a document promising to never engage in the African slave trade again.41 Such pressures increasingly shaped the entire history of the slave trade in Rhode Island after the American Revolution. By the mid nineteenth century, slave vessels built in Baltimore were flying the U.S. flag across the Atlantic with U.S. citizens as captains and crew members. Yet there is no evidence of the participation of Rhode Island slave traders in these voyages. The slave-trading activities of James D’Wolf and his associates decreased dramatically after 1807 and completely disappeared after the late 1810s. The withdrawal of the Rhode Island merchant community from slave trading marked a shift in the nature of U.S. participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with the direct financing of slave-trading ventures by U.S. citizens becoming an exception. Much more common in New England after the 1810s were the indirect forms of involvement with Atlantic slavery. Despite being an outspoken critic of the Atlantic slave trade, Moses Brown owned a cotton mill in Rhode Island and, as with most mill owners in the United States, he depended on the cotton grown by African slaves in the American South. Participation in the slave trade and slavery can be represented as a broad continuum ranging from the direct participation in the buying and selling 40. James D’Wolf to John D’Wolf, Washington DC, Dec. 21, 1821, BHPS. 41. John Brown to Moses Brown, Nov. 17, 1797, Moses Brown Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI. An important distinction between thought and action in the evaluation of northern abolitionism in the early republic can be found in Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 4–5.
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of slaves to more indirect forms of association such as the consumption of goods produced by slaves, as was the case for most people living in the western hemisphere. During most of the nineteenth century throughout the Atlantic world, including abolitionist Britain and the northern United States, consumers, financiers, governments, and industrialists continued to benefit from slavery. Nevertheless, slavery and slave trading were under attack. These shifting values coexisted with the persistence of racism and slavery in New England, but for the slave-trading community of Rhode Island, they ultimately prevailed.
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