The Negro Motorist’s Green Book enabled African-Americans to travel during the pre-Civil Rights era by offering information on safe places to eat, stay, and vacation.
Dr. Catherine Zipf
Dr. Catherine Zipf will identify and discuss Newport’s “GreenBook” sites with an eye towards augmenting our understanding of how African Americans overcame the legacy of slavery.
The 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act, signed into law January 8, 2018 by the United States Congress, established a 15-member commission to coordinate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies. The Commission’s purpose is to plan, develop, and carry out programs and activities throughout the United States
Joanne Pope Melish, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of History Emerita, University of Kentucky Peter Fay, R.I. Public Historian Thurs. May 9, 2019, 6 PM, Salve Regina Univ., O’Hare Academic Center, Room 260
Slave population by town – 1755 (Copyright Peter Fay)
In eighteenth-century Rhode Island a Newport blacksmith, a Warwick sailor, a Scituate iron miner, a Glocester farmhand and a Providence spinner of yarn were all connected by a common thread. This commonality set them apart from most other residents. Their uniqueness was not their skills, the products of their labor, their hopes, nor their dreams. All inhabitants shared these. Rather they shared, unwillingly, participation in an economic web in the business of slavery engulfing much of the Rhode Island economy of the 18th century. These were all enslaved workers.
Caesar Sambo of Warwick manned a privateering ship in Britain’s battle against foreign powers in the French and Indian war – yet did so as an enslaved sailor. Sharper Gorton dug iron ore in Scituate, supplying Moses Brown’s furnace in order to forge cannons to break the bond of Britain’s possession. But Sharper was himself a possession of his master. Yockway Fenner of Glocester was a farmhand, yet was also a wanted man, having escaped his master during the War of Independence. And a decade after America finally won freedom from Britain, Ephraim Bowen of Providence, instead of freeing his wool-spinning ‘maid’, sought to sell her anew into slavery.
From every town across Rhode Island commodities were produced, investments made, and humans traded in an economy tied deeply to the booming slave economies in the south and the West Indies. Rhode Island, initially dependent upon maritime commerce, supplied those slave societies. Meat, lumber, livestock, grain, manufactured goods, and newly enslaved Africans were sent by sea to the vast plantations. Yet at the same time, Rhode Island turned the system of slavery inward as well, until every town practiced slavery, and produced slave-crafted commodities for two centuries.
Hear the stories of these Rhode Island individuals and their lives of labor, and struggles for freedom at this public event, “A Rhode Island Diaspora: The Breadth and Depth of RI Slavery”.
Newport Mayor Harry Winthrop and Victoria Johnson, chairwoman of the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Committee, unveiled a sign at the future site of the Newport Slave Trade Memorial in Liberty Square, Farewell and Marlborough streets.
Mayor Harry Winthrop and Victoria Johnson of Newport Middle Passage Project. At left are City Council members Lynne Underwood Ceglie, Susan Taylor and Marco Camacho. At right are Project members Benedict Leca, Patricia Petit and Peter Fay.
At left are City Council members Lynne Underwood Ceglie, Susan Taylor and Marco Camacho. The planned historical monument will honor and memorialize Africans who lost their lives on slave ships as well as the survivors and their descendants. The local project is part of a national effort to research and identify all 48 port sites in the present United States that were ports of entry for Africans during the 300-plus years of the trans-Atlantic human trade. Local communities have been encouraged to hold remembrance ceremonies at each port and place some type of marker. City officials, community leaders, committee members and many others gathered Thursday to commemorate the future site of the Newport Slave Trade Memorial in Liberty Square.
At a recent Newport Middle Passage Project event, Dr. Akeia Benard noted that in Newport, as in most cities, ‘history is written by the victors’. This truism is evidenced in public space and institutional culture that projects to visitors the world view of the wealthiest elite of society, enshrining it in monuments, historic buildings and even tourism. In this idolatry of the detritus of wealth, Newport is no better nor worse than any other American city. But beneath the visible veneer of venerated colonial and gilded age society, and the monuments to heroes of the many wars of conquest, lurks a far different story than any other American city – an untold “rest of the story”. How does one reclaim this story, and shed light on the memories of those lost and never acknowledged? How does one “un-erase” the lives and heritage of those forgotten – whether they be unconsciously forgotten or willfully suppressed?
While there are many stories to tell, we may at least begin with the most forgotten of the forgotten.
There were those who both perished and survived the voyages of bondage and the hardships thereafter – we have a small number of their stories and will recount them. And later, we have the stories of the carpenters, masons, weavers, sailors, painters, pastry chefs like Duchess Quamino, musicians like Newport Gardiner, sachems like Quanapen, abolitionists like Isaac Rice. These more documented legacies broaden and deepen our understanding of today’s Newport.
But to begin, let us start at the beginning:
The 934 slave ships launched from Rhode Island in the 18th and early 19th century.
The 106,544 slaves carried on Rhode Island ships from their homeland in Africa to the Americas.[1]
We know Newport was not simply a participant in, but dominated, the American slave trade. Rev. Samuel Hopkins said in 1787, “This trade in the human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended… at the expense of the blood, the liberty and happiness of the poor Africans.”[2]
But we also know that this “wheel of commerce” was not forced upon us from Europe or Africa, but rather was born in Rhode Island. In 1676 the first victims of the Rhode Island slave trade were two shiploads of Native American war captives sent to Newport and sold into slavery by Rhode Island founder Roger Williams and the town fathers of Providence. These founders listed some of their captives names in town records, recorded for posterity:
“Awauscug and the woman and children”
“Kwashinnit, his wife and three children, his father in law”
“The old man Mamanawant Titus, his father in Law and the old Crooked Woman”
These captives were sent to Newport on a ship captained by Roger Williams Jr. and then purchased by wealthy merchants:
“Three Indians sold to Peter Easton.”
“Two Indians paid with eighty pounds of wool.”
“John Nixen bought seven Indians for one Suit of clothes, linen cloth, shirts and drawers.”[3]
While enslavement of Native Americans institutionalized the practice of slavery in Rhode Island, within only a few years the importation of African slaves from the West Indies, and ultimately directly from Africa, grew from a trickle to a torrent.
Gov. Samuel Cranston answered inquiries from the British Board of Trade on slave trading in Rhode Island: “In 1696, arrived 47 Negroes, fourteen of which we disposed of in this colony [of Newport] for between 30 and 35 pounds sterling per head.”[4]
Then followed decades of advertisements in local newspapers for sales of Africans shipped directly to Newport:
1729: Newport Merchant Godfrey Malbone, owner of the brigatine Charming Betty, announced, “Just arrived from the Coast of Guinea, a parcel of fine young Negro Slaves, to be sold for ready money or credit upon security, on reasonable terms by Godfrey Malbone, Merchant at his Wharf in Newport, where the said Slaves may be seen”.
1740: “Just imported, directly from Guinea, a fine parcel of Gold Cost Slaves, men, Women, Boys and Girls, to be sold by Godfrey Malbone, Esq.”
1743: The Snow Jolly Bachelor, a ship owned by Peter Faneuil, builder of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and the target of controversy today in Boston left Newport and later returned with 22 men, women and children from Sierra Leone appraised August 31 at the Admiralty Court in the Colony House, Newport: “a boy Joba £75 sterling, a woman Burrah £100, girls Yalah, Morandah £85, men Pattoe £100, and Fassiah £50. They were purchased by the merchants Samuel Vernon, John Tweedy, Mr. Isaacs, Mr. Chaning, Mr. Brinley, Col. Cranston, Sailes Carr, Mr. Harte and others.[5]
1750: “From Africa, a Parcel of likely Negro Men, Women, Boys and Girls, to be sold by Channing and Chaloner, cheap for ready money or short credit.”
1758: “To be sold reasonably by Thomas & Samuel Freebody… Negro Men, Women, Boys and Girls”
1763: “Arrived from the coast of Africa, the Brig Royal Charlotte… extremely fine, healthy, well limb’d Gold Coast Slaves, Men, Women, Boys and Girls – to be seen at Taylor’s Wharf – apply to Samuel and William Vernon.”
1766: “To be sold at Public Vendue… at the Wharf of Mr. Aaron Lopez… a likely young Negro Girl, lately come from the Coast of Africa.”
By 1776, Rhode Island merchants chose to separate from Britain, calling its treatment of the American colony, “slavery”. But unsurprisingly, the freedom and independence sought by the American ruling class never intended to end the slave trade, but rather to expand it. The peak of the Newport slave trade was in fact thirty years after Independence.[6]
In 1779, Rose Gozeman fled to British lines, escaping her owner, John Easton.
So while the War of Independence raged and Newport merchants famously followed their own self-interests, splitting allegiances equally between Tories and Rebels, their slaves followed their own self-interests. Rose Gozeman fled slavery in Newport during the revolution, escaping to the so-called “British occupiers of Newport” for her freedom. She journeyed with them to New York and later to Nova Scotia. The British recorded her as “24 years, stout wench… Formerly slave to John Easton… left him about 4 years ago”. And her child, Fanney Gozeman, “5 months old… Born free within British lines”. She won freedom for her child by fleeing, yet her owner still pursued her. Sometimes escaping Newport and America was the only path to freedom.[7]
Later, the descendants of the enslaved of Newport, such as George W. Easton, turned the tables on slavery during the Civil War joining the 11th Regiment, U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery to fight the southern slave-owning secessionists. George was the grandchild of Cato Easton, whose family is thought to have been enslaved by the white Easton family – the same intertwined family, founders of Newport, who in the 1600s had purchased the three Indians from Roger Williams, in the 1700s sought their slave Rose Gozeman who escaped to freedom, and in 1824 were the last in Rhode Island to free their slave. As the descendant of slaves George W. Easton prepared with his 11th Colored Regiment to ship out to the battlefield in 1864, he attended a sending-off ceremony addressed by the well-known African-American George Downing. Downing would later go on to desegregate Rhode Island schools.[8]
1824 – Jeremiah Easton finally freed four decades after “Gradual Abolition”.
Without these people, many of whose memories have been “erased”, there would be no Newport. Without their memory Newport would be greatly diminished. It is time to bring back this heritage and their memory starting today.
[1] David Eltis. “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”. Accessed Aug. 25, 2018. www.slavevoyages.org .
[2] Anonymous (known to be Rev. Samuel Hopkins) , “Letter to the Editor”, Providence Gazette and Country Journal, October 6, 1787, p. 1.
[3] Horatio Rogers and Edward Field, The early records of the town of Providence, Volume XIV (Providence: Snow & Farnham City Printers, 1899), 152-158. Peter Easton was Attorney General of Rhode Island in 1676 – see John Osborne Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (Albany: J. Munsell’s Sons, 1887). 292. Also, Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015), 170-172.
[4] John Russell Bartlett, Records of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, Vol. IV, “Answer to the Board of Trade from Governor Cranston, April 17, 1708” (Providence : A.C. Greene, 1859), 54.
[5] Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America: Volume III: New England and the Middle Colonies (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930), 64-65.
[6] “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”, Voyages embarking from Rhode Island.
[7] Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester: Papers, National Archives, Kew (PRO 30/55/100) 10427, p. 150.
[8] For George W. Easton and George Downing, see William H. Chenery, The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored) in the War to Preserve the Union, 1861-1865 (Providence, Snow & Farnham, 1898) 38, 177. For his father Alexander and grandfather Cato, see “United States Census, 1810, 1850, 1860.” Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 26 June 2018. Citing NARA microfilm publication M432. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. and “Rhode Island Deaths and Burials, 1802-1950,” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F861-447 : 10 February 2018), Cato Easton in entry for Alexander Easton, 24 May 1872; citing Newport, Newport, Rhode Island, reference p 158; FHL microfilm 2,188,896. For Jeremiah Easton, Daniel C. Littlefield, Revolutionary Citizens: African Americans 1776-1804 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65.
Newport Middle Passage Project invites Dr. Akeia Benard, Curator of Social History at New Bedford Whaling Museum, to Newport to discuss her research on the lives and culture of African-Americans in colonial Newport, and their later journey from bondage to freedom. She will be speaking at Newport Historical Society, 82 Touro Street on Wednesday, August 22nd at 6 pm.
Through research that combines oral history, analysis of documents, and archaeological excavation/analysis of artifacts and material culture, a database has been created of approximately 1,000 names of African Americans who lived in Newport between 1774 and 1826, thus attempting to understand the earliest African American community in Newport.
A noted example of life in early Newport is Occramar Marycoo, also known as Newport Gardner. Captured in Ghana as a teenager and purchased by merchant and slave trader Caleb Gardner, Newport Gardner eventually purchased his own freedom. Later as secretary of the African Union Society of Newport, he contributed to the mutual aid and advancement of his community, leaving a long historical trail of documents illustrating life of African-Americans in Newport.
Newport Gardner’s notes from the African Union Society dated December 4, 1794 (courtesy of Newport Historical Society)
At the end of his life, Newport Gardner chose to return to Africa aboard the brig Vine in 1826:
One aged black was among the number, who seemed to be filled with almost youthful enthusiasm for the cause. “I go,” he exclaimed, “to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years; it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.”
Christine Mitchell, interpreter at Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, S.C.
Christine Mitchell is a historic interpreter at the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. She will reveal her research on the buying and selling of people of African descent in South Carolina and display many original documents found during her research. Many describe the relationship between Rhode Islanders and the southern slave markets. Peter Fay of the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project will introduce her, noting Rhode Island’s large role in the Charleston slave trade.
Ms. Mitchell is also affiliated with the Slave Dwelling Project (http://slavedwellingproject.org/). Mitchell moved from Atlanta to Charleston in 2012 to be near family, and is a third-generation descendant of slaves who lived in the community. “To be here, and to help educate people who are coming here from all over the world, I am giving honor to the ones that never had a voice,” she says.
Rhode Island Ties to Charleston, S.C.
Beginning in the 1720’s, Rhode Island dominated the American slave trade, carrying over 110,000 Africans across the Atlantic to the British Islands in the Caribbean, and to the mainland, mostly South Carolina and Georgia. After the War of Independence, Rhode Island slavers reached their peak, rushing to cash in on the trade before it was outlawed in 1808.
While no longer landing the enslaved in Rhode Island (except for some illegal landings in Bristol), Rhode Island slavers in Newport, Bristol, Providence, and Warren deepened their ties to the southern slavocracy, both in trading slaves, investing in southern ports, and extending family ties to southern plantations. Every sector of the state’s economy supported, supplied, or benefited from the slave trade.
In his historic study, The Notorious Triangle, Jay Coughtry revealed that almost half of all Rhode Island slave ships delivered their U.S. slaves to Charleston.1)The Notorious Triangle, Jay Coughtry, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1981, p.167.
Newport Brig “Industry”, lands in Charleston; slaves are sold locally by Bristol, R.I. native Nathaniel Russell
As part of this trade, Rhode Islanders also placed family members in Charleston to extend their role to all aspects of the business of slave sales. Nathaniel Russell of Bristol, Rhode Island, became the largest purveyor of slaves in Charleston, managing sales to local buyers. Henry DeWolf of Bristol, the nephew of the largest slave trader in America, James DeWolf, also moved to Charleston to cash in on the local slave sale business. According on one historian,
“In 1806 Henry DeWolf formed a partnership with Charles Christian, primarily to enter the lucrative business of supplying slaves to the Charleston, South Carolina, market. Between 1803 and 1807 Bristol firms delivered almost four thousand slaves, and DeWolf and Christian, acting as the family commission agents, handled more than $600,000 worth of business.”2)Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900, Peter J. Coleman, Beard Books, Washington D.C., 1999, p.100.
Firm of Christian & DeWolf advertising sale of 100 “Gold Coast Slaves”, City Gazette And Daily Advertiser. (Charleston, South Carolina), May 5, 1807
Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900, Peter J. Coleman, Beard Books, Washington D.C., 1999, p.100.
The sale of human beings was commonplace to Rhode Islanders from the very inception of the colony, but Africans were not the only ones enslaved. In fact, enslavement of Native Americans in Rhode Island preceded the African slave trade by decades. Capture and enslavement of Native Americans was widespread.
Today, four centuries later, the casualties and survivors of the Atlantic slave trade are finally being memorialized by the Newport Middle Passage Project. As part of this movement, the Newport Middle Passage Project is also opening a discussion of the trade of enslaved Native Americans in Rhode Island.
Michael J. Simpson, an adjunct faculty member at both Becker College and Bristol Community College, will discuss Native American enslavement in Rhode Island at Newport Public Library Tuesday, November 14th at 6:30 pm. Mr. Simpson is a past research fellow and Visiting Curator of Native American History at the Newport Historical Society and has also worked for both the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan and also at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut.
Panelists (from left) Michael Simpson, Tall Oak Weeden, Linda Coombs, Lorén Spears, and Sheena Lee at a conference on Native American history at Bristol Community College, April 2017.
The Atlantic slave trade dominated every facet of the Americas and the British West Indies in the 17th century. As part of the British Atlantic empire, Rhode Island’s nascent commerce and growth was launched by this same trade from its earliest days.
In August of 1637, in the aftermath of the Pequot War in Eastern Connecticut and Narragansett country, Pequot men, women and children were captured by the United Colonies to be distributed among the victors. More that two-hundred fifty Native American captives were sent to Connecticut and Massachusetts authorities in the summer of 1637 and were sold at auction. Though in public Roger Williams questioned the merit of Native American slavery, the Rhode Island founder privately wrote to John Winthrop of Massachusetts to request a specific enslaved Native American child, one of 50 Pequots captured near Fairfield, Connecticut, the caravan, “another miserable drove of Adam’s degenerate seed, and our brethren by nature” he wrote.1
Four decades later, following King Philip’s War in 1676, Native American captives were again gathered, this time in Rhode Island by Roger Williams and the leaders of Providence, “under a Tree by ye Water side”. One prisoner of war, Chuff, “a ring leader all ye War”, was hastily condemned by a tribunal and “he was shot to Death, to ye great satisfacjon of ye Towne”.2
Remaining men, women and children captives were then transported to Newport and sold at a public auction, overseen by Roger Williams’ son, Providence Williams. Well-established Newport families purchased slaves and took them home to work as in-house servants. The Quaker Peter Easton of Newport, son of the Governor, and Attorney General of Rhode Island at the time, purchased three Indian slaves, including a young boy ‘Tom’ and a man ‘Simeon’ and a woman, ‘Sue.’ Newport’s elite bequeathed Native American men, women and children in their wills, alongside their cattle, bed linen and cutlery. The Eastons passed Native American slaves down as inherited property across more than three generations in their family, and Quaker Walter Easton only freed his last slaves in 1796 – one-hundred thirty years later.
The lasting impact of Native American enslavement can be seen in the many runaway slave adds taken out in Rhode Island newspapers in the 18th century. One poignant advertisement for three runaways in the Newport Mercury of 1765, on the verge of the American Revolution, alerts readers to “two Negro Men, and one Indian Man, Slaves, all born in Tiverton… Whoever shall secure one or more of said Slaves, so that his or their Master or Masters may [secure] him or them again, shall be well rewarded.” Ironically, the banner page of the issue notes the Governors’ proclamation of the 28th of November as “a Day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God”, that “our invaluable Rights, Liberties, and Privileges, civil and religious, may be precious in His Sight”, and on this Thanksgiving, “I do strictly inhibit and forbid any servile Labour to be done thereon”.3
Another runaway ad in 1771, only four years before the outbreak of war, request of any who see “an indented [indentured] Indian Boy… pretty light colour’d”, to “apprehend said Runaway, and deliver him to his Master, or confine him in any of his Majesty’s Gaols [jails], so that his Master may have him again.” Also, “all Masters of Vessels, and other, are hereby forewarned carrying off or harbouring said Boy, as they would answer the same on their Perril.”4
The “master” appears to be none other than John Northup of North Kingstown, a co-signer of the “Protest against Enlisting Slaves to Serve in the Army” in 1778.5 This petition to the Rhode Island Assembly opposed formation of what became the black and Indian companies of the First Rhode Island Regiment in the War of Independence because other states would find it a “contemptible point of view” and “not equal to [their] troops”, and invite “the same kind of ridicule we so liberally bestowed upon [the British] on account of Dunmore’s regiment of blacks; or possibly might suggest to them the idea of employing black regiments against us”.6
Public warnings from “patriot” slaveholders such as Northup (who was a member of the revolutionary Rhode Island “Committee of Safety”7) doubting the worthiness of black and Native American soldiers, and fearing their rising against whites, was in the end belied by the later conduct of these same troops during battle. These deprecations of the character of enslaved nonetheless did not prevent John Northup’s father, Immanuel, from selling two of his slaves to the state for a handsome sum to fulfill the Rhode Island quota of troops promised the Continental Congress.8
Even long after the independence of the United States from Britain had been obtained, and a after gradual emancipation of slaves enacted in Rhode Island, forced labor of Native Americans did not end. A full fifteen years after the 1784 Gradual Emancipation Act, abolitionist and Quaker Moses Brown placed an ad in a Providence newspaper calling for the capture and return to his master of a runaway 16-year-old indentured boy, “his Mother an Indian”. A five dollar reward was offered.9
Quaker and abolitionist Moses Brown publishes add for the capture and return of an indentured Indian servant fifteen years after passage of his “Gradual Emancipation Act” in Rhode Island.
While most Native Americans were free in early Rhode Island, some still intermarried with enslaved Africans, and some with free Africans. Race did not seem to dominate tribes the way it did life for whites. Non-natives were brought into Native American tribes and traditions and found refuge and community there. Native heritage survived the centuries of assaults on native culture in an often inhospitable world. 10 But in the end, the culture and heritage not only survived, but thrived. And this is evident throughout Rhode Island today.
Many dozens across Rhode Island braved gale-force winds from tropical storm Jose to attend a presentation by Dr. Marcus Nevius on enslaved Virginians escaping to the Great Dismal Swamp in the 19th century. The event was sponsored by the Newport Middle Passage Project and Channing Church of Newport.
Dr. Nevius discusses his soon-to-be release book on the enslaved seeking refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, Virginia.
Dr. Marcus Nevius of the University of Rhode Island previewed his upcoming book, “City of Refuge” which details the daily lives of numerous men who lived hidden in the swamp. While escaping their owners, they still participated in economic activities alongside other enslaved laborers in work camps harvesting lumber, staves, and producing other goods for the regional economy. This allowed themselves to exchange labor for critical commodities required for survival in a wet, inhospitable environment.
With the advent of the civil war and emancipation, the swamp ceased to be a destination for those seeking self-determination. Yet family folklore and legend continued to live on about the role of the swamp.
Following the presentation, many black participants discussed their family’s emigration from post-civil war Virginia to Newport, Rhode Island, seeking opportunity and employment in the hospitality industry, and small businesses. This community of ex-Viriginians has established a long continuous history of contributions to Newport’s economy, education and in civil rights movements through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Racial relations are deeply rooted in every pore of our four-hundred-year history, both nationally and locally. Three hundred people were enslaved in North Kingstown, and by the turn of the 19th century newly free people of color faced a crossroad. Two woolen mills producing “Negro cloth” would diverge on racial preferences – one hiring skilled black spinners and weavers, the other excluding them.
The debate over integration and equality of labor had life-long consequences for all involved and had repercussions far beyond N.K. The racial choices mill owners made two centuries ago continue to echo in today’s Rhode Island.
“Slave Economy and Petit Marronage in VA and NC from 1790 to 1860.”
Dr. Marcus Nevius
History and Africana Studies at URI
Wednesday, September 20, 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Newport Public Library
Free and open to the public; simple refreshments will be served
Dr. Nevius will speak about his upcoming book on the “hidden” but thriving communities of escaped slaves and others in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia. This program is offered in conjunction with The Newport Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Marker Project.
Painting: “Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia” by David Edward Cronin, 1888
Dr. Nevius new book is under contract with the University of Georgia Press’s Race in the Atlantic World 1700-1900 series. It is a story of petit marronage, a clandestine slave’s economy, and the construction of internal improvements in Virginia and North Carolina during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Petit marronage describes a type of escape in which enslaved people repudiated legal and cultural enslavement by taking flight to remote swamps and forests throughout the Americas. The slave’s economy describes the various clandestine exchanges of goods and provisions that sustained maroon colonies.
In examining these themes in the Great Dismal, “city of refuge” engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism, highlighting each as they unfolded within the Dismal’s extractive economy. What emerges in “city of refuge” is a close study of the ways that American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped, by the complex historical problems of race and economic development in the Early American Republic. This is a story based in primary sources including runaway advertisements; planters’ and merchants’ records, inventories, letterbooks and correspondence; colonial, provincial and state records; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; slave narratives; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies.
