Newport Middle Passage Lecture Series
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
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”.
