Sons of Providence

The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution

Charles Rappleye

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780743289146
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des débuts de l'Amérique

In 1774, as the new world simmered with tensions that would lead to the violent birth of a new nation, two Rhode Island brothers were heading toward their own war over the issue that haunts America to this day: slavery. Set against a colonial backdrop teeming with radicals and reactionaries, visionaries, spies, and salty sea captains, Sons of Providence is the biography of John and Moses Brown, two classic American archetypes bound by blood yet divided by the specter of more than half a million Africans enslaved throughout the colonies. John is a profit-driven robber baron running slave galleys from his wharf on the Providence waterfront; his younger brother Moses is an idealist, a conscientious Quaker hungry for social reform who -- with blood on his own hands -- strikes out against the hypocrisy of slavery in a land of liberty. Their story spans a century, from John's birth in 1736, through the Revolution, to Moses' death in 1836. The brothers were partners in business and politics and in founding the university that bears their name. They joined in the struggle against England, attending secret sessions of the Sons of Liberty and, in John's case, leading a midnight pirate raid against a British revenue cutter. But for the Browns as for the nation, the institution of slavery was the one question that admitted no middle ground. Moses became an early abolitionist while John defended the slave trade and broke the laws written to stop it. The brothers' dispute takes the reader from the sweltering decks of the slave ships to the taverns and town halls of the colonies and shows just how close America came to ending slavery eighty years before the conflagration of civil war. This dual biography is drawn from voluminous family papers and other primary sources and is a dramatic story of an epic struggle for primacy between two very different brothers. It also provides a fresh and panoramic view of the founding era. Samuel Adams and Nathanael Greene take turns here, as do Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island's great revolutionary leader and theorist, and his brother Esek, first commodore of the United States Navy. We meet the Philadelphia abolitionists Anthony Benezet and James Pemberton, and Providence printer John Carter, one of the pioneers of the American press. For all the chronicles of America's primary patriarch, none documents, as this book does, George Washington's sole public performance in opposition to the slave trade. Charles Rappleye brings the skills of an investigative journalist to mine this time and place for vivid detail and introduce the reader to fascinating new characters from the members of our founding generation. Raised in a culture of freedom and self-expression, Moses and John devoted their lives to the pursuit of their own visions of individual liberty. In so doing, each emerges as an American archetype -- Moses as the social reformer, driven by conscience and dedicated to an enlightened sense of justice; John as the unfettered capitalist, defiant of any effort to constrain his will. The story of their collaboration and their conflict has a startlingly contemporary feel. And like any good yarn, the story of the Browns tells us something about ourselves.

1

James Brown Puts Out to Sea

DURING THE MONTHS of April and May in 1736, as the winter snows melted off the rocky hillsides of New England, the sloop Mary lay careened on the marshy west bank of the Great Salt River in the tiny British colony of Rhode Island. Her masts were taken down and laid alongside, and the graceful lines of her oaken hull exposed to be scraped of barnacles and rot and then sheathed in copper. Daytimes found the little ship swarmed by workers clad in leather breeches and homespun cotton shirts, the teams supervised by shipwright John Barnes and, occasionally, by James Brown, owner of the Mary, registered freeman of the town of Providence, and an entrepreneur of restless, seemingly limitless energy.

From his vantage above Barnes’s shipyard on Weybosset Neck, James was able at once to watch the progress on the Mary and to survey the domain of his youth and enterprise. On the point where he stood there were just a handful of farm buildings, and a dirt track that ran south and west across lowlands and tidal flats to the banks of the Pawtuxet River. To the north, past a broad, shallow cove, meadows and rolling hills stretched another fifteen miles to the border of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. To the east, across the brackish tidal flow, Prospect Hill rose sharply to an elevation of just under two hundred feet, crowned by great stands of old oak and cedar. Arrayed at its foot, running along a single lane, lay Providence itself, its taverns and proud new homes facing the street; below them, leading down to the water, stood a row of warehouses, and back of those, a dozen tarry wharves jutting into the river, one of them belonging to James. Directly south, in a vast expanse that opened until it occupied half the horizon, lay Narragansett Bay, a small inland sea of two hundred square miles fed by the streams of the Woonasquatucket and the Pawtuxet, and the surging Seekonk River. Fifty miles farther, past the busy and prosperous harbor at Newport, Narragansett Bay opened onto the chill waters of the Atlantic.

The town of Providence had been founded a century before by Roger Williams, a religious visionary banished for heresy by the rigid Puritans of Salem. For generations, the residents of Williams’s bayside settlement lived simply, raising livestock and orchards and devoting themselves to a range of religious doctrines, including Baptist, Congregationalist, and Quaker. It was a new model for a community based on the Enlightenment ideals of religious freedom and political democracy, and protected by grace of a royal charter that endorsed a “lively experiment” in “religious concernments.”

Now that close and simple world was changing. The more ambitious men of the colony were turning their backs to the gloomy hinterland and looking to the Atlantic for opportunity. Lacking the craftsmen of Massachusetts and the fertile soil of the southern colonies, Rhode Island produced little that could find a market back in England. But her wood and livestock were mainstays for the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. In addition, the head of the Narragansett Bay provided a convenient depot for the farmers of Connecticut and western Massachusetts. More and more, the sons of Providence farmers grew up in the maritime trade.

The first shipyard in Providence commenced business in 1711, building small, shallow-draft sloops to move cargoes down the bay to Newport, where they were loaded onto heavier craft for shipment to the other ports along the eastern seaboard, from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, or farther, to the British, French, and Dutch colonies of the West Indies. Before long, the ship captains of Providence were making those voyages themselves, taking great barrels of pork and beef and cheese, along with loads of board and shingles and barrel staves, and returning with the fruits of the British empire—coffee, salt, rice, flour, milled fabrics, pewter and stoneware, silk, guns and gunpowder, and, especially from the Caribbean, sugar, molasses, and rum.

James Brown was among the earliest of these seafaring entrepreneurs. His first recorded voyage past the bluffs of Point Judith, at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, took him to Martinique, in 1727. Thereafter he’d made a score of such journeys, supplying himself enough merchandise to open a store on the main street in Providence, and enough molasses to supply two stills, where he converted the sticky brown syrup into rum. Nine years later, at the age of thirty-eight, James was all but retired from the sea, but he owned outright or in partnerships with the town’s other leading merchants a dozen ships, and he managed their affairs, commissioning captains, issuing sailing orders, and distributing the cargoes.

With the Mary, recently returned from the West Indies, James was taking the next great step, for himself and for his hometown. Once she was overhauled and sheathed to endure the long duration and heavy beating of a transatlantic voyage, James was sending her to the coast of Africa, there to secure a cargo of slaves for sale to the British and French plantation owners in the Caribbean. The slave trade was at once the most hazardous and the most lucrative business of the time, and had served as the foundation for the great fortunes of Newport, a city twice the size of Providence, which rivaled Boston as the commercial center of New England. The Mary represented James’s bid to join their ranks; the vessel would be the first slaver ever to put out from Providence.

Making his way back to town, James passed over the Weybosset Bridge—or, more prosaically, Muddy Bridge—a sturdy expanse eighteen feet wide with a creaking draw in the middle that was the town’s first public enterprise, operated for a time by Roger Williams himself. It served mainly to carry droves of cattle and hogs that farmers brought to town for slaughter. Directly across the bridge at the foot of Prospect Hill stood Market Square, an open common crowded during the day with carts, loose livestock, and shoppers seeking produce. Stalls lined the “cheapside,” where artisans and tinkers sold housewares and handicrafts.

There were four churches in town, but no spires, a mark of the piety of the populace and a measure of their still-meager resources. The largest buildings were inns, of which there were half a dozen, but the tallest entities were the great spreading elms that shaded the yards in front of several popular taverns. The population of Providence had doubled between 1708 and 1730, to nearly four thousand people, but the sale of home lots was restricted to other townsmen, and if there were occasional strangers on the street, the place retained its air of sober industry and religious zeal. People carried names like Mercy and Toleration, Pardon and Resolved. Local ordinances barred any sports, hunting, or common labor on Sundays, and drinking on the Sabbath was restricted to “no more than necessity requireth.”

As well as James Brown knew the town, the people of Providence knew James. Stocky and powerfully built, his various pursuits engaged him in every facet of community life. Beyond his shipping interests and his stills, James ran a slaughterhouse and a retail store. He also loaned money at interest, and rented out draft animals and space on his wharf or in his warehouse. His customers often included friends and family, whose debts he carried for months and sometimes years before calling them in.

Crossing the market, running north to south, ran Towne Street; below the market it was called Water Street, but it was all the same avenue, and the only one in Providence until the middle of the century. The street was bordered for more than a mile on both sides by third-generation houses, shops, and inns. Gone were the rude, single-story houses of the early settlement, now replaced by capacious two- and three-story homes, built around massive stone fireplaces that served as kitchen, hearth, and center of family life. Some were painted in bright colors; others were clad in raw, weathered wood. Steps of stone or wood led up from the mire of the unpaved road, and served as a perch in the late afternoons for old men who puffed tobacco from long-stemmed clay pipes.

Close by the market, “amid heaps of stones and rubbish,” according to one description, stood the town whipping post, employed for the punishment of thieves and misdemeanants through the middle of the next century. This stern sentinel carried special meaning for James, recalling a seminal chapter from the family annals. That was the story of Obadiah Holmes, the father of James’s great-grandmother and among the most fervent of the religious dissidents to reject Puritan orthodoxy and establish a haven in Rhode Island. Holmes returned to Massachusetts in 1651, traveling with two acolytes to defy official edict and preach an optimistic doctrine of baptismal redemption.

Once Holmes commenced services, two local constables arrived, produced a warrant, and arrested the three schismatics. At trial a week later, presided over by the colonial governor, a verdict of heresy was found and fines assessed. Holmes’s tiny Baptist congregation quickly raised the funds to secure their leaders’ release, but Holmes stood on principle and forbade that his fine be paid. In forfeit, he was sentenced to a public flogging. The punishment was meted out at the whipping post on Boston Common, where Holmes endured thirty heavy strokes from a three-tailed whip across his bare back. According to legend, Holmes stayed silent through the beating until he was cut down from the whipping post, whereupon he turned to the magistrate-witnesses and declared, “You have struck me as with roses.” Thereafter he remained in Newport, where he presided over his church for another thirty years.

Holmes’s counterpart in Providence was Chad Brown, one of the town’s original settlers and the first pastor of the first Baptist church in America. Like Roger Williams, Chad had been exiled from Massachusetts “for conscience’ sake,” as his gravestone recorded. Chad’s only son, John, followed his father as a Baptist pastor; John’s union with the daughter of Obadiah Holmes, then, was a match of ecclesiastic moment. The Browns were a family steeped in the sort of conviction that led the Pilgrims to leave Europe and risk their lives in a strange new wilderness. In Rhode Island that ideal was taken to its extreme; the colony was distinguished in all the world as the first place to guarantee religious freedom, welcoming a freewheeling mix of antinomians, Congregationalists, Sabbatarians, and Quakers—dissidents all. Its neighbors dubbed the little colony Rogue’s Island, the “island of errors,” but those who lived there made freedom of conscience a point of pride.

Heading south from the market, James would pass two doors down to arrive at his own home. It was a busy and comfortable household, maintained by his wife, Hope, and occupied by a growing brood. The oldest, James, was then twelve years of age, followed by Nicholas, six; Mary, five; Joseph, three; and John, born January 27, 1736, and still in his crib. The family enjoyed the best furnishings the times might offer: they slept in feather beds and ate from pewter and stoneware at a table spread with linen. Leaded glass windows admitted light, and in the cold winter months, even a little warmth. In addition, like most of the established men of Providence, James owned four black slaves. At least one lived at home and worked in the kitchen; the others labored in the warehouse and other enterprises.

Little is known about Hope save for her ancestry, but that fragment of lore speaks volumes about the young family and its progeny. She was the eldest daughter of Col. Nicholas Power, who earned his rank in the colonial militia, sported a silver-hilted sword and an ivory-topped cane, and boasted the first home in Providence to feature its own dining room. The colonel was the leading Providence merchant of his time and proprietor of the town’s first still. It was Colonel Power who underwrote James’s first voyage to the West Indies, at the helm of a forty-five-foot sloop, in 1723.

Toward the end of his life, James’s father, the last of the family to take the pulpit at the First Baptist Church, grew concerned that the strict principles that guided his forebears were beginning to lose sway. In one of his final sermons, Elder James exhorted his congregation to “refuse Eror and Chuse Truth”—“Truth” residing in “the man of God” who “laboreth under a promise of salvation,” and “Eror” embodied in “the marchant man.” The admonishment might well have been addressed to his own son, by then a captain sailing for Nicholas Power. James gave a clear response in his decision to marry Hope. He would follow in the path blazed by Hope’s father, and not the one laid down by his own.

Nor was he alone. Among James’s several partners in the African venture was his brother Obadiah, namesake of their courageous ancestor. Fourteen years younger than James, the eighth of Elder James’s ten children, Obadiah had shipped out to sea under his brother’s charge, and served as captain on the Mary’s late trip to the Caribbean. Obadiah would not take the helm on the voyage across the Atlantic, but he was commissioned as supercargo, in charge of the ship’s commercial transactions. Obadiah would buy the slaves in Africa and sell them at auction in the West Indies.

In outfitting a ship to make the voyage to Africa, James was joining a vast mercantile system that united four continents in a single great economic endeavor. The logic of slavery was simple: of all the peoples of the world, Africans had proven the best suited to withstand the heat, disease, and back-breaking toil required to raise and process cane sugar in the American tropics. White men and indigenous Indians had been put to the test, but they died in such numbers that their impressment was abandoned. Africans succumbed as well—as many as a third died during the first two years on a plantation, a phenomenon known as “seasoning”—but most survived, and the African trade thrived as a result. Slaves were used to raise coffee, tobacco, indigo, and other plantation staples, but most—as many as 90 percent in the period before 1820—were employed exclusively in growing and processing sugar.

By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery and the products of slave labor comprised the single largest economic enterprise on earth. Over the course of more than two hundred years, European carriers—British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese—had shipped more than 2 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains. But that was just the beginning. Spurred by an exploding European demand for sugar, traffic in slaves surged, and in the eighteenth century alone more than 6 million Africans were taken from their homeland to plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean, and, to a much smaller extent, British North America.

The increase in demand wrought fundamental changes in the trade. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, most of the slaves were carried on ships owned by monopolies operating under royal charters. Beginning in 1698, however, in a bid for still greater volume, the British opened the trade to private carriers. The French followed suit in 1725, and by 1730, most of the trade was being conducted by private enterprise. And while most of the slave ships continued to sail from European ports, mariners from Britain’s North American colonies answered the call as well.

At the outset, the nascent North American slave trade sprung up at all the major colonial ports. Ships put out for the Guinea Coast, as the slave-trading region of West Africa was known, from Boston, New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia, as well as from Newport. But Rhode Island soon emerged as the dominant player on this side of the Atlantic, due in large part to its isolation. For the merchants and sea captains of Rhode Island, ever hampered by the limited range of exports they could offer, the opening of the slave trade represented a crucial new opportunity. If they could raise the capital to finance the twelve-thousand-mile voyage, they might realize dramatic profits, gains far surpassing the single-digit margins produced by even the most successful coasting run. Moreover, the African trade prized the single export that Rhode Islanders had so far learned to manufacture: rum.

In the first centuries of the slave trade, African and European middlemen on the western coast of Africa had narrowed the list of commodities that they would barter for slaves to guns, gold, and spirits—primarily French brandy. Around 1700, interlopers from the West Indies introduced rum, and the stronger stuff quickly supplanted brandy as the preferred libation. By 1725, British traders at Sierra Leone reported to their home office that there was “no trade to be made without rum.”

This development accrued to the benefit of Rhode Island, as craftsmen there had learned to distill their spirits at a higher proof and consistently better quality. African chiefs and their European trading partners quickly learned to tell the difference, which led the governor of one British trading fort to acknowledge, in 1775, that “West India rum never will sell here while there is any Americans here.” Consequently, almost from the time they entered the trade, New England slavers specialized in rum—the Rhode Island captains came to be known as Rum Men—and their merchandise took precedence in the slave markets of Africa. Rum became the practical currency on the coast and at the European forts, with prices for slaves denominated in gallons of rum as well as ounces of gold.

Rhode Island rum first appeared in quantity on the African coast in 1725, when three slaving voyages sailed from Newport. Over the course of the next ten years, Newport merchants sent twenty-five ships to Africa, where they traded barrels of rum for an estimated four thousand slaves. Once their cargo was loaded, they sailed a southerly route to reach the Caribbean, where they disp...