 I'm very pleased to, my name is Bernard Freeman, and I'm a new member of the faculty here and I'm very pleased to offer the first of three guest speakers to the race and the foundation of American law course and others who are here. There are a number of faculty and administrators here, as well as some people from the Bristol, the slave trade, the commemoration of slave trade committee, and some other people as well. We're pleased today to listen to an award-winning architectural historian, Catherine Zipp. She is the executive director of the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society. She has been involved in a number of projects, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, a book that examined Wright's career before the construction of Falling Water, and also the architecture of Negro Traveler's Green Book, a book about the Green Book sites. I think some of you may have seen that movie on the Green Book. She has done quite a bit of work in history in a variety of ways, but most recently her current projects examined the gilded aged women who built houses in Newport, Rhode Island, and enslaved people who lived in Bristol, and Cuban sugar plantations owned by prominent Bistoleans during the 19th century. She's an expert on the slave trade and slavery in Bristol and Newport, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce her. Thank you, Bernard. Welcome everybody. Hello. For those of you who are on Zoom, you will be tickled pink to know that in typical student fashion, everybody is sitting in the back and the sides. Nobody is sitting in the middle. Well, a few people. Very comfortable for me. Well, I wanted to start this talk by asking you, maybe we should do this by a show of hands, who knows about the triangle trade? Who has ever heard of the triangle trade? Just stick your hand in the air. All right. That's awesome. And again, because we have to do this a little bit with Zoom, would anybody like to tell me a couple of things? Like, what are the points of the triangle? So stick your hand in the air. Oh my God. All right. In the back. Okay. Excellent. Okay. So for those of you on Zoom, that was New England, Africa, and off the coast of Latin America, specifically the West Indies. And I have given you this very helpful, just read it off the slide, view to begin with. And I think this is a good place to start because this is what most of us have learned about in school. And what I'd like to do today is take this triangle, and I'd like to complicate it with more facts that I hope will flesh out your understanding of what happened during the triangle trade. How did it work? What was the business like? This was very much a business. And then to really come home to the complicity of Newport and Bristol specifically, but Rhode Island a little bit more generally. Everybody is, I think, very kind to New England to share the wealth amongst Philadelphia, New York, Charleston and Boston, but Rhode Island has its own unique window into the slave trade. So for starters, let's begin. We're going to begin in New England. We're going to travel the triangle in a way, if you will. And I want to begin in New England. What's helpful about this particular graphic is that it starts to talk about what's really going on here, which is the flow of commodities. So since this is a circular process, you have to kind of start somewhere, bear with me with my just sort of arbitrarily picking a point on the triangle. We are going to start here in Rhode Island where you see the, these up here, pink if you're on Zoom, whale oil, lumber furs, rice, silk, indigo, tobacco, leaving the United States colonies going to England. Again, this is a flow of goods going lots of different places. Manufactured goods are coming out of England, heading back to the colonies. That's this over here. Yellow if you're looking on Zoom. And again, commodities going everywhere. So today I'd like to start with the blue line right here. So rum, iron, gunpowder, cloth, and tools. And this is, I think, the first place where I'd like to complicate this story of the triangle. When you are taught the triangle, and you may be taught the triangle, middle school, high school, sometimes around here they get it in elementary school, you are taught that it's rum. And it's not rum exclusively. And you'll see why that is important down the road. So it really is a wide range of commodities. Rum, iron, gunpowder, cloth, which is actually not made here in the colonies. It's made in England. So this initial flow up here is very important. And tools. And all of these are packed up onto boats, sailed to Africa, exchanged for enslaved people in Africa. And then, again, we'll travel this leg. This is the leg I want to focus on first. And then we'll get to this leg right here. And then we'll get to that leg. So stay with me. All right. So how important is Rhode Island to the slave trade? Some initial statistics. There are approximately 930 slave voyages that left from Rhode Island, 600 just from Newport. And that's a lot, just to put that in context. All of the top 10 slave traders in the United States of all time lived in Rhode Island. So there are other slave traders that live elsewhere, but none of them broke the top 10, and those that did live in Rhode Island. And the DeWolf family alone, of Bristol, we're going to come back to the DeWolf family. They alone brought an approximately 11,000 enslaved people out of Africa. Again, just that family, and that's a lot. So as you're looking at this chart, one of the things that's always a little bit of a wild card for me when I'm giving a talk is how close you guys are going to be to the screen. So I appreciate that maybe this is not super easy to see, but you're looking at the red lines along the bottom. And those are slave voyages that leave Rhode Island, specifically Newport, right? So these are largely red along the bottom. We get a little break right here. That would be this little thing called the American Revolution. And then after the revolution, again, Newport is still sending out slave voyages not merely in the numbers that they were before, but, oh, look, here's the little blue of Bristol and the yellow of some other ports, which would include Providence and a few other places. So Newport is really a very important port of call for slave trading prior to the American Revolution. And then it does come back, but not very strongly. And we'll see more about that in a minute. So Newport Key Center. Newport has a lot of slave traders, and I have to tell you as I was putting this talk together, I found it incredibly difficult to find information on them. So if anybody would like a research project, I would be happy to set you going on that. I thought I would introduce three for your knowledge in general. We're going to begin with Godfrey Malbone, who was born in Virginia on a plantation. In about 1725, again, I couldn't find a particular year, he moved to Newport, Rhode Island. Between 1729 and 1741, he sends at least seven slaving voyages to Africa. We know this because those slaving voyages are documented in a database called slave voyages.org, and he appears as the owner of seven slaving voyages. With the money that he generates from his proceeds from the slave trade, in 1744, he purchases a substantial amount of land outside of Newport. You can see it on the map with the red arrow. It's basically this right here. He constructs a lavish house gardens. It was renowned in Newport, and it burned to the ground in 1766. Just as a side bar, it's a little bit of a good story. He was having dinner. For his friends that evening, the house caught on fire, and he simply decided to let the house burn, but to move the dinner outside. Why ruin a good dinner and watch his house burn? There it goes. He died three years later in 1769. First character. Second character, I should mention because it's going to be relevant for Aaron Lopez here. Godfrey Malbone served on the vestry of Trinity Church. All of these men were community leaders, very, very strong, important, big names in Newport. Aaron Lopez, born 1731 in Lisbon, Portugal, to a family of conversos. For those of you who don't know what a converso family is, that is a Jewish family that has been forced to convert to Christianity, at least in public life privately. What they do is a whole other matter. That is born out of Isabella expelling the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492 in the same breath that she sends Columbus on his way. Lopez immigrates in 1751 to Newport, Rhode Island, and at that time he reclaims his Jewish heritage. He changes his name from Duarte to Aaron, along with his family. He sends, starting in 1761, which is only 10 years after he arrives, he sends at least seven slaving voyages. That's what I could document again at slavevoyages.org. Other sources have suggested more, and that's certainly possible. Aaron Lopez was another big, prominent community member for Newport. Amongst other things, he's involved in the creation of the Redwood Library in the 1750s and the construction of Toro Synagogue in the 1760s. Again, prominent man in the community, and he dies in 1782. A last quick guy to look at, Stephen Aireld, born in 1709 in East Grenett, Rhode Island, also moves to Newport. He sends his first voyage to Africa in 1736 under the command of John Cahoon. His last documented voyage was sent in 1774, or only two years before the American Revolution. The number of voyages in between was quite murky. Again, if you're looking for a project, I'd love to have somebody work on this. And then he dies in 1794. So I want you to absorb a couple of things about these short little biographies. One is how early all of this begins. Malbone is born in 1695. The Europeans have barely been on the continent for a century. And these aren't even the earliest that are documented. This is just Newport jumping into the fray. So we are well before the American Revolution with all of these men. And the second thing I'd like you to absorb about it is that these men are merchants. So they are sitting and running their slaving operations from the comfort of Newport. They are employing captains to go to Africa for them. So the letter that you're looking at here, right here, is a letter sent from Captain Whitting back to Stephen Aireld. This is for the voyage in 1774. And he's giving him an update on how things are going on the voyage. So Aireld is back in Newport. He is receiving this information. This, of course, would be a whole host of letters that would be arriving to Aireld. And this would be how he would be managing his operations. So the Newport guys, by and large, are sitting in the comfort of Newport. And the captains are going. And I mention these things because, of course, over the course of time, that will change. All right. So we have our three candidate merchants sitting in Newport loading up their boats. Rhode Island had one of the reasons that Rhode Island became a, many reasons why Rhode Island became a center of the slave trade, was because both Bristol and Newport were deep water ports, and I think that you could harbor large boats right up next to the coastline as opposed to parking them out in the bay and shuttling goods in, which is how other ports might do it. Newport's got a deep water port, and that was particularly attractive. But there is another asset to Rhode Island's slave trade, and that is that the ships themselves were smaller. Rhode Island's slave trade generally tended to take place in much smaller boats. They were therefore more maneuverable. They could get there faster. So there's a certain competitive advantage against all of the other slave traders. They can get there faster. And they can just move around the triangle much more quickly. They also require fewer personnel to run. Bigger boats need more people. Smaller boats need fewer people. So this is a very helpful asset to Rhode Island. The flip side is that you're not going to be able to carry back quite as many enslaved people as other ships. So some ships tip in at close to 700, 650, 700 enslaved people. Bristol and Newport's boats brought them back in more like groups of 300, 400. And the last thing is that there's an accommodation to the rum that we're going to talk about in just a second. So smaller ships. All right, so what goes on them? And here is what you're looking at is the manifest for the slave ship Sally, which was owned by the Brown Brothers in Providence and provisioned by ESAC Hopkins. If you are from Providence, that would be a familiar name to you. He is the captain of the boat. And you can look and see here's a helpful list of what's on the boat. So first of all, 15 people, right? We have Hopkins himself, the master, Sam Ward, the for-the-master, basically the assistant master, James York, the mate, Abraham Hawkins Carpenter, Edward Abbey, who was an enslaved person on the ship. We absorb that. Good, okay. There are enslaved people on the slaving ships. Okay. Robert Bell, a sailmaker, Joshua Smith, a caulker. The caulker is the guy who patches up the leaks in the boat, which is an ongoing process. And William Cookie, a cheater. Again, that's another boat technicality that helps make things run. And then the rest of the 15 are sailors. Now, if you're going to be out at sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you can't just hop over to the quickie mart, so you're going to need some food. So they have 30 casks of bread, one large iron pot. That's what they're going to cook in. 1,800 onions. What on earth do you need onions for? Does anybody know? Vitamin C, very good. I heard it. Excellent. So scurvy is a big problem, and it is nasty. You should drink your orange juice or eat your onions, either way. And at the time, they did not know why eating onions prevented scurvy, but they knew that it did, and so they packed onions. Onions also, as you might know, they're shelf stable. They go nicely on a boat. They're not going to really go bad unless something very bad happens. So that is basically your vegetable. 40 barrels of flour at approximately 200 pounds each. 24 barrels of that's beef-preserved beef. So think beef jerky. 90 pounds of cod, 96 pounds of coffee. 7 swivel guns in case you need to shoot anybody, like the British, who might be coming after you, and medical supplies. So while you are on this voyage to the African coast, what you're eating is bread, onions, beef, and coffee. Every day, three meals a day. Lucky you. All right, and then there are the trade items. The thing that they are going to exchange for the enslaved persons once they get there. 185 barrels of rum, 10 hogs heads of tobacco at approximately 1,000 pounds each. 51 loaves of sugar. A loaf of sugar is reasonably large. 30 boxes of whale wax candles. Sorry, I should have put a little line break in there. 25 casks of rice. 40 handcuffs and 40 shackles. I don't know what that's for. And 300 iron hoops. Now, about those 185 barrels of rum. Remember that our boats are pretty small. And as an accommodation for the rum, we'll talk more about rum and rum distilling in just a second, but one of the accommodations for a smaller boat that Rhode Island captains and owners do is they boil the rum down. They distill it down so that it is extremely potent. It is like 110 proof. And the captains are given instruction when they get to the coast how far to water the rum down to get it to be reasonably safe to drink. So that's just another asset. Rhode Island rum was particularly strong. It fits on the short boat. Okay, so this is what is on our boat. And as you will find, so the slave ship Sally was a reasonably early boat. We will find a few other things as we go along here that are on the boats are going over, but here we go sailing to Africa. All right, now we are in Africa. Now, again, sometimes I think you have to, you just sort of apply some logic. I imagine that this is not something that you have really given much thought to. But you show up on the coast of Guinea. Here you are in your ship, the slave ship Sally shows up and here's Issa Hopkins. And he wants to buy, say, 300 enslaved people. Well, it's not like they're sitting there on the coast. And even the slave castles don't necessarily have what he needs. Because Issa Hopkins has been sent to Africa with a list. He does not just go get 300 people. He has been instructed by the Brown Brothers to pick up, say, 100 men, 50 boys, 25 girls. He has an order that he's trying to fill. And in fact, when they get to the coast of Africa, what they actually do is sail up and down the coast, making bargains more often with individual people on the coast away from the slave castles because that's where the price gets higher. You contract for them individually one at a time and in small groups. So you are off the coast of Africa for months, accumulating your list of people. For some people, this is wonderful. Africa is an adventure and it's great. For other people, it is a lot of tremendously difficult work. For Africans, of course, this is awful. If you are one of the first broad on board, you're one of the first purchased, you're going to be staying on that boat until the boat is ready to go, be that three months, four months, five months, six months. There is a certain pressure to get this going so you can catch the winds back to the West Indies. But again, this is a long period of time. And there's all sorts of things that you are exposed to with this juncture. For Africans, it's European diseases. For Europeans, it's African diseases. There is spoiled food. There is dysentery. There is all sorts of hazards right at this juncture. For all sides. So this is a critical moment and you need a really sharp captain who understands what they're doing. And again, we'll talk more about that in a minute. So what you're looking at are three snippets from the logbook for the Charlotte. These are a little bit later, but this is where I found what they paid in the logbook for one man. This is the one on the left, and you'll have to take my word for it, I think, because it's just incredibly difficult to read right now. One barrel of rum, one something that myself, my curator, and my historian couldn't read. Two guns, one bolt of corduroy fabric, which came from England originally, one cotton, again bolt of fabric, one chintz, again bolt of fabric, one glass dome, two law-forward cottons, which would be printed cottons, again made in England, 17 oranges, and 10 head of tobacco. So for the Charlotte in about 1805, that is what one enslaved man was worth off the coast of Africa. Take a minute with that. For a boy, one barrel of rum, 50 head of tobacco, one cotton bolt of fabric, one chintz bolt of fabric, one glass dome, 10 oranges, one looking glass. The last one is a sail that seems not to have preceded because he crossed it out. I think I always, personally, I need a minute with this because what we're talking about is the sale and the value of a human being. So we have, let's imagine we get our carbon together and we load them onto the ship. So on the left is the Juno, which was owned by the DeWolf family, and on the right is actually, it's not the Juno, it's actually a reasonably standard depiction of how a slave ship was loaded with enslaved people, very tight, very uncomfortable, shackled together, spooned, right, so that you can fit the maximum number of people. Again, I always need a minute with this. The ship you're looking at on the right is smaller than the Juno would have been, but the Juno would have been packed in the same way. So we get on our ship, and now, having made our trades, we're going to go through and embark on the middle passage. That is here from Africa, over most of the time to the West Indies, is the destination. It's difficult, it's windy, it's choppy, and that's the best case scenario because the worst case scenario is when there isn't any wind at all. So on the middle passage, you have terrible discomfort at the best, death at the worst. If you are lucky, you do not get smallpox on the boat, you do not get cholera on the boat. For those who do not know, cholera is born through human waste. You do not get dysentery. You might get some food, and you're going to have to fight your neighbors off for it, and it isn't going to be very good food. It might be rotten. It is choppy, so many people are nauseous. This is the first time most of the enslaved Africans in the hold have been on the ocean. They are terrified. They do not know if they are going home. In fact, they know they're not. They think they're going to die, which many of them will when they get to the West Indies, and a few will along the way. So this is arguably the worst of the whole extravaganza, the whole slaving voyage. This is the worst of it. And this is where, to me, I come back to the captains, Esa Hopkins, because remember, most of our Newport guys, they're back in the comfort of their living rooms in Newport. We have our team of captains in the boats here. And I wonder what kind of men they were. I really do. We do have records of people who took one slave voyage, and that was it. But Esa Hopkins sailed over and over and over again. And you also, I think, have to wonder what Lopez and Malbone and Eirult would have thought if they had really endured this. Would they have continued to do it? Because really, why are they doing it? It's profit. You are going to make thousands of percent over what you have invested. So profit is really the only reason to do this. And the Newport merchants and the Bristol merchants as well are making money hand over fist. One slave voyage can set you up for life. And these guys do it over and over and over again. All right, so we arrive in the West Indies. Here is sugar plantation. I think in Barbados it was a little unclear. Barbados is one of the first stops, earliest ports of call in the West Indies. It is an island pretty much entirely dedicated to sugar production. And might look somewhat romantic here. We have, right, master's house, master's house, slave owner's house, enslaved, are living over on the right here. We will have, this is where the sugar production will happen. This is the cane growing out in the field. And of course, most of the people that you were looking at are enslaved people. Sugar cane is a grass. So think, you know, what's in your lawn, except it grows much, much bigger. Sugar cane, what you get out of it, you harvest it. What you're looking for out of the harvest is the juice of the cane. So you cut the stalk. There you go, cut the stalk. How this will work is you will cut the stalk, you will put it on a wagon, and you will tote it up to the boiler house. In the boiler house, the stalk will be crushed, squeezed for the juice, the juice will be collected, and then boiled down, like if you've done maple sugaring, somewhat similarly to that, until you get a crystal sugar, which will then, that's the end product. So you get a lot of by-products. So this is what the vast majority of Africans who are being transported out of, captured, enslaved, and transported out of Africa, this is where they are going. Sugar is an incredibly hot commodity all around the world, including Russia, South America, England for sure, United States, everybody wants sugar. And this is how it is being produced. You have to cut the sugar with machete. The sugar cane itself is pretty thick. Machetes are sharp. You also have to cut the sugar very quickly. This is another thing. Our world, you can get strawberries any time of year, but in fact, actually, the entire strawberry crop comes ripe at one time. Same thing about sugar, right? So when you are harvesting sugar, first of all, you are harvesting acres and acres and acres. Look how much sugar there is in this background picture here. All at once, because if the sugar goes bad, the juice is bad, and you can't harvest it. So the enslaved people are harvesting round of the clock with a type of grass that is incredibly hard on your hands with machetes. They are tired. They are under deep pressure to get it done. And accidents happen. People get sick. People die. People lose limbs. Accidents happen. You might ask, are so many enslaved people needed in the West Indies? It's because the average lifespan of an enslaved person on a West Indian sugar plantation is five years. So when a colleague friend of mine described it as the agro-industrial graveyard, that's what it was, without a doubt. All right, so a couple of other parts about sugar. And again, this is largely to complicate your understanding of how this works, right? Sugar cane is processed. It is brought to the boiler house, upper left, boiler house, lower left, and here is on the upper right. That is squeezing the cane, grinding up the cane another place that is rife with industrial accidents. If you can see the two bars right here, the photo on the right here, those will be pushed and pulled by horses. Another commodity that American colonies are providing, it's called the Narragansett Pacer. It's a small horse, particularly well suited to this type of work. If you can imagine horses put on a ship, sail to the West Indies, where they will also help to process the cane. If you can see the cane, the sugar, the juice is ground out. It's running down this little trough. This is the boiler house, pulled down into small cones. Those will be set out to dry, and that is the final product. Sugar cones will go back to the American colonies. Again, the boiler house, a place rife for industrial accidents. This is what's happening in the West Indies. We go now from the West Indies right here. We're going to go back to New England. We have loaded our boat back up. If we are lucky, we have not lost too many enslaved people along the way, and we are bringing our captain back in Newport a good profit. We have along the way been sending letters, just like Stephen A. Rolte receives. We have been sending lots of letters, so hopefully our arrival is known expected, and the results of the voyage are expected, hopefully. If not, however, this is a fraught moment, right? It happens that huge numbers of enslaved people die during the Middle Passage, and you are returning home from the West Indies with nothing. That does happen. But more often than not, you are bringing back sugar, which we've worked so hard to process. Molasses, which is a byproduct of sugar, and we're going to use the molasses to distill rum when we get back to New England. We're going to start our cycle all over again. And we're bringing one more commodity with us, which is a handful of enslaved people. They will return with us from the West Indies to New England. Now, when I told you that James DeWolf brought 11,000 enslaved people out of Africa, 99% of them went to the West Indies. Very few enslaved people, and this is relatively speaking, came back to New England. Who came back? Number one, enslaved people who are simply too sick to sell, they will be brought back to New England in hopes of recovery and then later sale. Another type of enslaved person will also come back. People like the DeWolves took orders for enslaved people. So if you lived in Bristol, go to James DeWolf and you could say, you know, I really need 11-year-old boy, somebody who maybe fits this uniform that I have here. Could you get one for me? And they will also come back. Special orders will come back to New England. And here, and so now we're going to shift our focus from Newport to Bristol, and the boats arrive. So if you are thinking that there were huge numbers of enslaved people here in Rhode Island, there were not. And this is one of, I think, the most difficult nuances of this history to understand. So much of this happened offshore. It was easy to overlook, right? If you are not seeing what it is like when you unload a slave ship in the West Indies, you're like, oh yeah, this is all good, it's all profit, right? Everybody's fine. You don't see the worst of it. It all happens off site. When we get around to what happens after slavery and slave trading become illegal, you can see how easy it is to say, well, what was the problem? Right? But of course it was. So people arrive, the shits, again, we're back on our boat, we've arrived here. We're now in Bristol. Just to orient you, this is the bottom of State Street right here. So Bristol Bagel right down the bottom. Rogers Free Library right over here. We have a couple of, we're looking at Bristol in the mid-century, too dissimilar from how it was a little bit earlier. We have a few things that we might not have had earlier in the late 1700s, but we do have a few things. So first, we have a sugar refinery. Oh look, we're going to refine our sugar even further. So what's brought back from the West Indies is more like a brown sugar. We're going to refine it a little bit further into a whey sugar and sell it yet again. We have a cotton mill. Remember those bolts of fabric we used to exchange for enslaved people, right? So we now have a cotton mill. That is part of Stone Harbor. It's in the name of Cotton Mill, part of Stone Harbor today. The sugar refinery is no more. If you're familiar, it's where the pool is for Stone Harbor right near Cuedos. We have the DeWolf Wharf, which I'm going to feature in just a second, but we have other wharves just to point out. Babbit's Wharf, Peck's Wharf, Church's Wharf, right? And these are the wharves of the traders. So here is the DeWolf Wharf right here with a bunch of buildings on it that I'm going to show you in just a second. And just to orient you, Linden Place up here. And then down at the bottom, we have an ironworks, which is again gone, now State Street Wharf. But again, ironworks. What do we need the iron for? Making the shackles. Exactly. All right. So we have a whole business. And while we're on that topic, right, what are you going to put the rum in? Barrels. So we're going to need a cooper, right? Who's going to grow the onions? So we're going to need a farmer, right? Who's going to tend the beef? Grow the flour? So this is an industry, right? Not to mention build the boat, right? Keep the sales, all of it, right? Today, we absolutely see this as complicity. The entire towns of Bristol and Newport, their economy was wrapped up in the slave trade. At the time, they may not have seen it that way. But today, we do, and we should. All right. So this is the DeWolf Tavern. Again, I just want to shift our attention to the DeWolf family for a second, because they really take this, again, we're looking to complicate our understanding of the triangular trade. When the DeWolf, the Juno, right, we're now parked at our dock, originally there was a slip next to this. The wharf has been built out. So if you're over getting ice cream at the ice cream place there at Grays, that was kind of where there was an empty slip. You would sail the boat up. Remember, we have a deep water port here so we can get our boat right on the dock. We can unload it directly into the warehouse. So what's going into the warehouse? There are molasses. A handful, like three, of enslaved people. And maybe a few other things that we've picked up along the way. We might pick up some tropical fruit. We might make a detour to Charleston to pick up some products from Charleston. We might make a detour to Philadelphia. We might have some products there. How would we know to do that? Because while we have been sending letters back to our master in Rhode Island, our master has been sending letters back to us. So while you are in the West Indies, you might get a letter from Stephen Arnold or James Wolf saying, you know, the price of rice is really good in Charleston right now. I need you to swing by Charleston and pick up some rice and we're going to sell it up here in Newport. So what are the merchants doing in Newport, besides counting cash? They're monitoring the price of everything. And they are figuring out what's a bargain, what's not a bargain. There's a lot of correspondence going back and forth. And in the case of the DeWolf family, there are agents, right? That's a great thing about the DeWolf family. And it's actually, it's a terrible thing because it makes pulling them apart impossible. They are an enormous family, huge family. They have, oh my God, brothers and uncles and cousins and in-laws, and they're all named the same darn thing. It's very frustrating. And they have agents and it's all within the family. So it's not, I don't think it would be out of bounds to make an analogy between the DeWolf family and the mob. Same sort of thing. So this is the warehouse still exists. DeWolf tavern today. That is, I know it's a black and white picture, but it's actually a recent picture. Now we've got our sugar in our warehouse, diagonally across the street. So we have right here on this photo, we're looking at the empty lot at the corner of State and Thames. We have our back to Empire Tea and Coffee. That was the DeWolf distillery. And the DeWolves set this up initially. So initially there was a distillery on the DeWolf wharf. That is where they made most of their rum, but over time they expanded the operation. There were, by the way, 22 distilleries in Newport and six that we've documented in Bristol. There may have been more. Distilleries, as you're about to find out, are a rare archaeological find. So what you're actually looking at is the Pierce Distillery. The Pierces were the second owners of the distillery on this site. The DeWolves sold it in the 1830s, sparing you some gory details that you can feel free to ask me about later. They ran out of money and they were hoping to liquidate the Pierce Distillery in order to raise funds. So they sell it to Pierce. This is what the archaeological site looks like. See the square vats. That's these right here on the drawing. Rum is made using yeast from the air. What you basically do is you make sugar water and you have a recipe for how much sugar, how much water. You put it in a vat. The vats go into the ground. So they dug out into the ground with a clay or a wood liner, very tightly done so that nothing seeps out. And they are left there to evaporate for a very long time. So when you're looking for a distillery site, you're not really looking for a building. You're looking for square holes in the ground. And that's what this is right here. This was a total serendipitous find. The vats are various sizes. This was actually a very large distillery. And then, again, when enough has evaporated, enough has fermented, we have enough alcohol. We take it over to the operation up here in the upper corner of our site. That's what's going on here. That's the boiler. And you will distill the rum down into your cask and, again, load it back on the ship. Some you'll sell locally, but others you'll save and put back in the warehouse until you're ready to provision the next ship. Just as an aside, because the archaeology was really cool, this was found when the Belvedere was constructed. He was required to do a survey of archaeology. They found remains, something that was what's called test pits. They discovered there were remains there. They dug them up and lo, it was the distillery. It is now, it is directly under, I know it's really hard to see, but there's that parking structure there on Thames Street. That is exactly where the distillery was. So parking structure right there. And the good news about that is that because he was going to obliterate the archaeology site, the state historical preservation and heritage commission required him to dig the whole thing up. So I do have this incredibly cool archaeological report on the pier's distillery. You're welcome to ask me for it, because it's really quite fabulous. All right, so we have rum. And we are also bringing back enslaved people. And I want to turn our attention very quickly to the enslaved people in Bristol who are coming back here. While we are talking about the DeWolves, and the DeWolves really, the heyday of the DeWolves is really after the revolution, I'd like to stress that there are enslaved people here in Bristol as early as 1689. And that's only nine years after the town was founded. So very early on, I pulled out, this is the will of Nathaniel Byfield. If you know Bristol history, you know he is one of the four founders of the town. Bristol is a planned community. Prior to this, the land was occupied. It served as the political seat of power of Metacom, who was the political leader of the Poconochets. After King Philip's war, during which he was murdered, the land was confiscated by Plymouth Colony and sold to the four town founders, of which Nathaniel Byfield was one. And he and his partners laid out the town, in case you've ever wondered why Bristol is the only town in Rhode Island that has a direct linear plan. At least the early towns, that's one of them. So you're looking at the will of Nathaniel Byfield, and I just want to read the part that I highlighted. I find myself obliged to take the case of my Negro servant named Rose into my most serious consideration. She was bought for me in the West Indies, arrived in Bristol early in the spring, 1817, in a very weak and hazardous condition, was then judged to be about 13 years of age. She proved a faithful servant. She hath with great pains and diligence, learned to read and attained considerable knowledge in religion concerning whom I am persuaded, concerning whom Rose. I am persuaded to believe that she truly fears God, which obliges me to set her free from the servitude she stands obliged to me, both by purchase and by custom. So first, Rose was 13 years old when she arrived in Bristol, and very ill. Over time she learned to read. This is a great accomplishment for Rose, but also for Nathaniel for allowing it. Most enslaved people were not allowed to read. She becomes a Christian, and that's key for Nathaniel, because as a Christian he feels he can't enslave her any further, even though it is his right to do so by both purchase, the fact that he has bought her, and by custom. She's an African, she gets to be owned. That's the custom. But he does it anyway. And what he actually does is after his death, Rose is freed. He dies in 1837. She is freed in 1837. And she gets married and moves to Boston, and then disappears from the record, because most enslaved people, once they were freed, many enslaved people changed their names, and so it's almost impossible to find them after that. But here is Rose very early in Bristol and owned by a town father. All right, just a second example, a runaway slave advertisement for a young boy named, we call him Bristol Reynolds, ran away from his master, Mr. Joseph Reynolds, of Bristol, the 20th last instant. Mulatto Boy, about 15 years of age. He had on when he went away, because how else will you identify an enslaved person but by his clothing? A home spun jacket of a light color with a mixture of black, a pair of linen breeches, a felt hat, a linen shirt, and a pair of dark gray stockings. Whoever shall take up said run away and bring him to Mr. Jeremiah Belknap, a Bolton, sorry, Boston, mistyped, or to his said master in Bristol shall have five pounds of old tenor reward and all necessary charges paid. Joseph Reynolds owned the Reynolds House, which is Bristol's only house that's on the national landmark. It's a national landmark which is the highest level of national register. We have a lot of lower level national register houses, but the Reynolds House is our highest level. So when you drive by that house, it's a pink house, just remember that is where Bristol Reynolds lived along with four other enslaved people. This is the will of Elizabeth Davis, July 10th, 1730. Elizabeth Davis was the grandmother of Elizabeth McIntosh, who married Isaac Royal Jr., the founder of your illustrious competitor, Harvard Law School. This is her will in which she had nine Negro men and one boy valued at seven pounds, 60 shillings. Six Negro women valued at three pounds, 70 shillings. Five Negro children valued at 15 shillings, two Negro infants, 10 shillings. No names. They are simply commodities. And they appear in the will, by the way, right after the animals. There's a logic to an inventory. And this is it. So the proceeds of this business build houses like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and so on. One more. Right? So Bristol is built from this industry. All of it. Every last little bit. All right, now I have to talk a little bit more about Bristol and the DeWolf family, because, again, I want to complicate our triangular trade and make things clear, because I want to talk about the DeWolf family. What makes them so different from everybody else? Well, okay, so the DeWolf family begins with Mark Anthony. He's not, I'm sorry, I should clarify. 1769 is the first slave voyage that Mark Anthony takes. The first documented. Mark Anthony is the progenitor of this enormous family. There are thousands of DeWolf descendants and those are just the white ones. There are, by the way, black DeWolf descendants as well. Mark Anthony is the first of the family to arrive in Bristol. 1769 he arrives on the first he takes what we get. This is the first one that we can document. Doesn't mean it's the first one, but it's the first one we can document. He has some 16 children and among them are his sons, James, William Henry Charles and John and they expand the empire. You've probably heard of James DeWolf. James DeWolf was a business genius. He is the mastermind behind this whole thing. Without a doubt, although we can't quite document after 1798, James, William Henry Charles and John are all slave trading. By 1812 to 1815 they are privateering during the war which is basically piracy, legitimate piracy. They are repurposing their boats. So they have the slave ships, they repurpose them for the war of 1812, and then after the war of 1812 they repurpose them back for the slave trade. To the best of our knowledge, when the records get very murky, 1820 is about the time when they stop slave trading and that's when slave trading really becomes really dicey. The English Navy is patrolling the seas. It just becomes harder to get away with. 1837 is the death of James DeWolf and really the end of the DeWolf empire just because he is a mastermind. It carries on, there's legacies, but really that's largely the end of it. So, what is different about the DeWolves? Number one thing, they are on the boats. James DeWolf captains many of the slaving voyages. And he writes back and forth to William Henry and to Charles. Charles also has been known to take slaving voyages. And the correspondence is within the family. So instead of writing back to each other, we are writing within the family and they are on the boats. If you've seen Amistad and there's the anecdote of the woman tied to the chair who gets smallpox and he throws it overboard, the captain throws it overboard, that is James DeWolf. That incident happened. It happened in 1795. His crew ratted him out when he got to shore and he was indicted for that because that was a crime. Again, it's bearing you gory details that you can please feel free to ask me about later. He gets off, but he is on the boats. We're looking at the Juno owned by the DeWolves specifically. They own a number of boats including the Charlotte which I showed you earlier. And again, it's all within the family. So it starts to get a little murky on the edges. Is this a DeWolf voyage? Is this not a DeWolf voyage? It's sometimes a little hard to tell. But they are on the boats. They also think about this in more than just get on the boat and go to Africa. Slaving voyages are very risky business. So the DeWolves start an insurance company. Right? Why not? You lose your profits, you pay yourself from your insurance company. Sounds great, right? You have a whole lot of money. What do you do? How about a bank? Gotta put the money in something. Let's create a bank, loan it out, make money that way. So we're looking at this is the counting house. That is really the heart of their own little empire. I always imagine Ebenezer Scrooge and then this is the Bank of Bristol, which I have to say I think is a little taller. Parts of this were wiped out by the 1938 hurricane. So I think the original was not quite so big. But that was the bank building. It was the second private bank in the United States. And by the way, they have all sorts of other agents. So they install people in other places. There are DeWolf agents in New York. There are DeWolf agents in Charleston. They're all over. It's super nice when you have six sisters and they all marry guys. You can ship them off places. Here is the other thing that the DeWolfs do that is just really in a lot of ways, diabolical genius. They buy the plantations in Cuba. So there are at least five plantations in Cuba that were owned by the DeWolfs or members of James, Charles, and other members of the DeWolf family. So what you're looking at on the left here, this is an image drawn by George Howe. George, this is the what you're looking at is the New Hope Plantations. So here's the cane. Here's the mill that's going to mill the cane. The New Hope Plantation was owned by James and his nephew, Mark Anthony, and they shipped their other nephew, George Howe, their sister Abby's son, over to be the manager. George Howe had a young family. He had five daughters. He left them in Bristol to spend what for him he did not like running the plantation. And so he spent a miserable two years trying desperately to get out. He's the agent on the scene. He writes to James DeWolf there are letters in his diary saying, dude, you got to get down here. You know, it's all going to hell in handbasket. But this is the other piece. Again, keep it all in the family. And the image on the right is to depict what happens to the Cuban plantations in the 1820s and 30s, which is that technology arrives, right? We have railroads that help bring the cane to the market. We have steam engines that can help with the boiling and the grinding. And so while you would think this will save labor, what it actually does is increase the possibility of profit because now you transporting more cane from farther away is even easier. Grinding it up is even easier. So you can purchase more land, grow more sugar and off you go profits increase. As a point of fact, by the way, what you don't grow on a Cuban plantation is food. You ship that in because sugar is so profitable. You don't want to give up the land to growing food that you're going to eat. That's actually something George how complains about bitterlies. We have no food. You need to send us food. Right now, the DeWolfs also have enslaved people. They have a lot of them, although, again, they keep it in perspective. The rather most famous of them are Polydor and Agua. They were brought over in about 1802 as children. And so we have this is this is a Polydor having himself been the slave of Captain James DeWolf. It's actually one of the few places where that's written down, which is really amazing. And then the headstone for Agua DeWolf, which is over in the DeWolf Cemetery off Woodlawn. So they are here and there are others. And again, feel free to ask me. All right, so the legacy, right? Right now, we grapple with this. It is not easy. In fact, it's one of the hardest things I think I've ever had the privilege to do. There are a number of projects that are grappling with this history specifically. You're looking at the Rhode Island slave history medallions. There are two medallions, one at DeWolf Tavern and one at Linden Place. This is the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project. This is their proposed memorial to the Newport Middle Passage. It's slated to people in Newport during the Middle Passage. This is Brown's Monument to Slavery, which they called Slavery Memorial. I'm not so sure how I feel about that. And then the last thing is something that the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society has been working on. And that's the timeline of enslavement in Bristol, which I brought today. That is what is stretched out here in front of you. I hope that if you're interested, you might take a minute to peruse it. What you're looking at is about 700 names of people that we've been able to recover from the primary source documents. It is 50 feet long, so it does continue all the way down there. And we displayed it on our building for about two months over the summer. It was up in the Rogers Free Library as well. And again, I'm happy to bring it out if anybody wants to see it. We also have a virtual copy on our website, which is bhpsri.org. So maybe we need a minute. Maybe we're all feeling a little achy. I always do when I talk about this. But I'm happy to answer any questions and I want to thank you for letting me complicate this history for you. It's important. Thank you for your attention. We're a little over time, but if there are a few questions we could probably take one or two. There's a reception downstairs or somewhere right out here that you'll be able to go to. I have, on behalf of Roger Williams University, a token of our appreciation. I think it's better if you have please take a look at this timeline that she's put out here on the front of First Row. And I think it's better if you have questions from Mrs. Zip, you can ask her in the reception. Thank you very much. Thank you.