Rhode Island and the Slave Trade

Newport, Rhode Island was, for a stretch of the eighteenth century, the busiest slave-trading port in British North America. That fact sits alongside the state's reputation as a refuge of conscience and religious liberty, and the tension between those two truths is not something that can be smoothed over. The arithmetic is documented.

Of all the slave voyages originating in British North American ports before the trade was banned, roughly two thirds departed from Rhode Island harbors. Between seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred, Rhode Island merchants sent at least five hundred and fourteen documented voyages to the coast of West Africa. The rest of the colonies combined sent fewer than two hundred.

The trade ran on a distinctive logic. Rhode Island lacked large agricultural estates. It could not compete with Virginia tobacco or Carolina rice.

But it had shipyards, skilled mariners, and a well-organized merchant class. It also had a surplus of molasses from Caribbean sugar plantations worked by enslaved people. Rhode Island distilleries converted that molasses into rum.

Rhode Island ships carried the rum to West Africa and exchanged it for captives. Those captives were sold in the Caribbean and the Southern colonies, completing a circuit that made a small number of Newport and Bristol merchants extraordinarily wealthy. By the seventeen fifties, enslaved Africans and their descendants made up roughly a quarter of Newport's population.

The second-highest proportion of any city in British North America. The DeWolf family of Bristol was among the largest slave-trading dynasties in American history, responsible for an estimated ten thousand to twelve thousand deportations across three generations. Rhode Island passed an act in seventeen eighty-four enabling gradual emancipation.

It was one of the first states to do so. It also passed an act in seventeen eighty-eight prohibiting Rhode Island residents from participating in the slave trade, and enforced it only sporadically. The DeWolfs continued their voyages for decades after that.

The full accounting is still being written.