Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part X

Lopez was a founder of Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest synagogue in America and a site on the National Historic Register.

The Wanton family produced four colonial governors and also launched slave voyages. Two of Newport's most active traders, the Vernon brothers, Samuel and William, found a steady customer in Henry Laurens, the leading slave merchant in Charleston, S.C. During the Revolution, Laurens was a president of the Continental Congress.

Rich Newport traders rarely sailed slave ships: they owned or bankrolled them; slave ships were very risky investments, but a successful voyage could bring ten times the profit of an ordinary New England trading voyage to the West Indies.

Interestingly, the Newport slave traders didn't traffic only in Africans. Successful merchants always diversify their wares and Rhode Islanders became closely identified with one other product in particular: rum. At slave depots on the African coast, the R.I. vessels were known and welcomed as "rum-men".

Just before the Revolution, when the Newport trade first reached a peak, its vessels were carrying 200,000 gallons a year to Africa, where ship captains bartered for slaves by the barrel. An African man in his prime could be bought for about 150 gallons.

Two dozen distilleries operated in Newport alone and in 1772, merchants who owned slave vessels , who traded in molasses and rum, or who operated distilleries occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport's tax rolls. Some, like the Malbone brothers, Evan and Francis, did all three.

In those pre-Revolution years, Newport launched 70% of all American slave voyages, and ushered the town into its first golden age. The rich and famous from distant colonies spent summers there; prosperous ship captains formed the charitable Fellowship Club that had rules against cursing, gambling, and drunkenness. On Sundays, when not on voyages, many of these captains sat in pews at Trinity Church. The elite Anglican Malbones and Wantons welcomed the up and coming captains into their church, and, by marriage, into their families, such as the 3 Wanton sisters who married slave captains.

Orders that Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez gave to one of their slave captains as he embarked in 1772 suggest the businesslike attitude with which Newporters conducted their perilous trade: "Lying any considerable time on the (African) coast is not only attended with very heavy expense, but also great risk of the slaves you have on board. We therefore would recommend to you dispatch, even if you are obliged to give a few gallons more or less on each slave," they wrote.

Also they advised the captain to brand one lot of 40 slaves already acquired to keep them separate from the slaves still to be purchased. "To these slaves we desire you'll put some particular mark that may distinguish them from those of the cargo, so that their sales in the West Indies may be kept by itself, for the insurance on these is not blended with the cargo."

Rhode Island, however, on this side of the Atlantic, had no rival. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, R.I. controlled two thirds or more of the colonies' slave trade with Africa and after the Revolution R.I. seized a virtual monopoly, shipping nearly 50,000 new slaves in less than 20 years.

But perhaps more than anything else, R.Island's deep, direct involvement ranks as one of the cruelest forced migrations in history and shows the extent to which slavery penetrated the New World. Although R.I.'s neighbors and R.I.itself found ways to profit by trading first with the slave plantations of the West Indies, then later with the South's cotton plantations, this smallest state went further: she competed with European powers in the slave trade itself. Isolated as she was, R.I. transported more slaves than any other of the original 13 states----North or South!

There are always two sides to every story and the "South and Slavery" has, in my opinion, dominated every forum. The only things I have seen on many of the forums I've been on about the North is that they built ships that brought the slaves. For some reason no one has thought it worthwhile to mention that by the American Revolution, slavery was already a vital part of the entire national economy.

Before the signing of the D. of Independence there were tens of thousands of slaves in the Northern United States, and although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, in 1760 there were at least 41,000 African slaves in the North, which includes New England, the Middle Atlantic States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

As I've probably stated before, after we'd won our independence from Great Britain, slave numbers in the North dropped; Washington had freed many Africans who'd fought for America simply because Britain had promised freedom to blacks who joined the Loyalist cause. But in the 1790s Connecticut and Rhode Island together had more than 6,000 slaves; Pennsylvania had 3,700 and New York had more than 20,000. (However I see a slight discrepancy here: The First U.S. Census shows Conn. and R.I. with a combined slave population of 3,500, but Penn. still with 3,700 and N.Y. still with more than 20,000 black slaves; free and enslaved blacks make up more than 19 % of the U.S. population.)

No matter the numbers it didn't take long for an idealized notion of Northern slavery to take shape and soon become accepted as FACT, that Northern slavery was benign, more a mutually agreed upon indenture. Two centuries of human enslavement was re-cast as a paternalistic, "family-style" arrangement, good for both slave and owner. Forgotten was the fact that owners had the power of life and death over their "property".

In Connecticut, the colony's public records first mention a slave (Louis Berbice) killed by a Hartford man.(1639). Historian Bernard Steiner, late in the 19th century, wrote however "Connecticut had little to apologize for in her treatment of the Negro," a statement most Northerners echoed comfortably.

Closer to the truth were actual experiences of slaves such as Cato, Newport, and Adam, who, in 1758, were sentenced by Jonathan Trumbull, future governor of Connecticut, to be "publicly whipped on the naked body for nightwalking after nine in the evening without an order from their masters." Or:
1765: N.Y. couple (husband and wife) sold by their master for having too many children.
1760: An 11 yr. old boy put up for sale in New London County, Connecticut, by the family of the odious Benedict Arnold. The ad for the sale said he was accustomed to hard work.

Bottom line was this: Slaves in the North, like those in the South, served at the whim of their owners and could be sold/traded. They were housed in unheated attics and basements, in outbuildings and barns, they often slept on the floor, wrapped in coarse blankets and lived under harsh "black codes" which controlled their movements, prohibited their education and limited their social contacts. (In the South they had "row houses", shanties with dirt floors, usually a table of sorts and a small fireplace to cook over. They slept on whatever kind of pallets they could put together out of straw, etc. Some were allowed to grow a small garden. )

Many have read/listened to the Slave narratives of the South. If you have not read of Northern slavery the life story of Venture Smith is a good place to start. I encourage you to do so. Published in 1798 in New London, Connecticut, it's one of only a handful of surviving black narratives telling of life in Africa and colonial enslavement and the 31 page document is horrifying. I found it on line here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h5.html

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum