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The News Service |
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Revised July 2001
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A Special Report
Slavery, the Brown Family of Providence and Brown University The histories of Brown University and the Brown family of Providence are complex and firmly intertwined. The family included both ardent abolitionists like Moses Brown and Nicholas Brown Jr. (after whom the University is named) and unapologetic slave traders like John Brown. The following special report draws on primary and secondary sources from University and Brown family archives. It was researched and written by Ricardo Howell. |
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Introduction |
Introduction To what extent does Brown University, founded as Rhode Island College in 1764, have historical ties to slavery and the slave trade? The answer is more complex than might be expected from the vantage-point of the twenty-first century. Invariably, such an inquiry focuses on the University’s ties to its namesake, the prominent and prosperous Brown family of Providence, with whose history Brown’s roots are firmly intertwined. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Rhode Island, various Browns were among the original signatories of the College’s charter, served on the inaugural Corporation, were instrumental in organizing the move to Providence, and worked as both faculty and administrators. The family’s lasting legacy was secured by a gift from Nicholas Brown Jr. in 1804, which caused the Corporation to change the college’s name to Brown University. Through the Browns, the University had ties of varying degrees to the eighteenth-century slave trade. Slavery was an integral part of the developing economy of colonial and post-Revolutionary Rhode Island. In the early and middle 1700s, members of the Brown family participated in the slave trade while simultaneously developing other enterprises. Slaves were employed at the family’s spermaceti candle works and iron foundry, among other businesses, and almost certainly were used for farm work and household labor. In addition, while managing the 1770 construction of the College Edifice (later renamed University Hall), Nicholas Brown & Company apparently utilized some slave labor. In addition, at one time or another ships owned by Browns engaged in the triangle trade that brought slaves to the Caribbean and to America. Interestingly, surviving family correspondence reveals that a dramatic philosophical split developed among the Browns. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, John Brown was still a proponent of and participant in the slave trade, while Moses Brown and Nicholas Brown Jr. had joined the abolitionist movement. This document attempts to address recurring questions about Brown and slavery, and to suggest a social and historical context for further discussion of these important issues. Drawing from a variety of relevant primary and secondary materials, it provides an overview of the early history of Brown University and the family whose name it bears, as well as an examination of slavery and the slave trade in Rhode Island. |
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Introduction |
Questions and Answers Who founded Brown University? In 1763 Baptist minister James Manning was sent by the Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches to Rhode Island for the purpose of establishing a college to be principally under the direction of the Baptists. At the same time, members of the Rhode Island community led by Ezra Stiles, a Congregationalist clergyman of Newport, had been fostering similar ideas. The charter of Rhode Island College was filed on March 3, 1764, and was drawn up based on James Manning’s draft, although it considerably reflected Stiles’s prose.[1] The College’s mission, much resembling the University’s contemporary mission statement, was to prepare “a Succession of Men duly qualify’d for discharging the Offices of Life with usefulness and reputation” through instruction in “the Vernacular Learned Languages, and in the liberal Arts and Sciences.”[2] More than sixty signatories are registered on the charter, including the Reverends Manning and Stiles, John and Nicholas Brown of the Providence merchant family, and several former or future governors of the colony.[3] The Corporation held its first meeting in Newport in September of 1764. At this meeting, twenty-four of the original incorporators were sworn in as members. Stephen Hopkins, an original signatory and later a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was elected chancellor. At the Corporation’s second meeting a year later, James Manning was named the College’s first president and its professor of modern languages.[4] How did Rhode Island College become Brown University? The Browns – John and Nicholas and their brothers Joseph and Moses, as well as Nicholas Brown Jr. and his progeny – occupy a prominent place in the development of the College. The four brothers proved to be heavily influential in the College’s move from Warren to Providence; their firm, Nicholas Brown & Co, managed the construction of the College Edifice (now University Hall). In addition, Joseph Brown, who contributed toward the architectural design and planning of the College Edifice, donated a reflecting telescope to the College in 1769 and was appointed professor of experimental philosophy in 1784, teaching the natural sciences of astronomy and physics.[5] The merchant John Brown would serve as treasurer of the College from 1775 to 1796, offering in 1783 to pay half the sum (£700) necessary to buy “a compleat Philosophical Apparatus & Library.”[6] It is often suggested that the University was established by and named for John Brown, who centuries later attained modest notoriety for his involvement in and support of the African slave trade. However, Rhode Island College was renamed Brown University some forty years after its founding and a year after John’s death, and the renaming honored John Brown’s nephew, Nicholas Brown Jr., a 1786 alumnus of the College. In September of 1804, Nicholas Brown Jr. contributed five thousand dollars ($5,000) toward the endowment of a professorship at the College. In recognition of his gift, the Corporation voted that henceforth the College would be known as Brown University. In making his gift, Nicholas was no doubt expressing his own attachment to the College and honoring the wish of his uncle John, who, prior to his own death in 1803, had submitted a letter to the Corporation desiring that it “may find means ... to establish a Professorship of English Oratory.”[7] Nicholas Brown Jr. would succeed John Brown as treasurer of the College, serving from 1796 until 1825. Over the course of his lifetime, Nicholas Brown’s donations to the University would total near $160,000. His bequests would include Hope College, constructed in 1822, and Manning Hall, built in 1834. In addition, before his death in 1841 Nicholas Brown donated land and capital toward the building of Rhode Island Hall in 1840. Did the College or the University own slaves or employ slave labor? Though the short answer to this question is “no,” there are nuances to consider. James Manning, first president of the College, freed his one slave in late 1770.[8] In addition, the Corporation’s Committee for Erecting the College Edifice (now University Hall), for which Nicholas Brown & Company served as fiscal agents, utilized a variety of different laborers during the 1770 to 1772 construction period. Listed on the expenditure records are at least four “Negro” slaves – “Mingo, Pero and two unnamed individuals – hired out by the Committee (or) by their respective Providence masters and mistresses.”[9] |
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Introduction |
The Founding of the College Within a month of the College’s incorporation in 1764, James Manning, recently settled in Rhode Island, opened a Latin school in Warren, Rhode Island, a town east and south of Providence. In November of that year, Manning also founded and became the first pastor of the Warren Baptist Church. Manning’s parsonage in Warren became the first home of Rhode Island College.[10] At the time, Rhode Island College had no funds, no building, no students, and no faculty.[11] Though the College managed to graduate its first class in September 1769, it had found no solid source of fund-raising. Instead, James Manning had authorized several ministers to seek out “subscriptions” – monetary pledges – toward the institution’s operation. At the first Commencement, the Corporation decided to permanently house the College in Bristol County on the east side of Narragansett Bay, where Warren was located. The Corporation quickly reconsidered, however, upon learning that Kent County (which borders Narragansett Bay on the west) was subscribing money for the endowment of the College. At a meeting in November, Providence and Newport also entered into the equation. Though the continuing contest and the financial pledges seemed to favor the more established Newport, James Manning sided with the entrants from the northern part of the state. Manning confidentially suggested that the Providence contingent, which included Stephen Hopkins and the Brown family, could sway the Corporation by offering to cheaply build the College edifice with materials already at hand. Owing to the importance of Providence as a Baptist stronghold and the “variety and persistence” of the efforts of Providence’s leading men, the town won the final victory.[12] Of the final subscription amount of £4,175, John, Joseph, Moses, and Nicholas Brown would together pledge £760 out of their own finances.[13] |
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Introduction |
The Browns of Providence By 1764 the Brown family had been active in Providence business for more than forty years. Whereas previous generations of the family were farmers, pastors, and surveyors, Nicholas’s father, James, initiated the turn to trade and commerce, opening a small shop in the early 1720s. Brown family historian James Hedges notes that the economy of the eighteenth century was such that specialization had not yet become the mode of business. In Hedges’ words, “During his comparatively short life[James] became a money lender, proprietor of distilleries, owner of a slaughterhouse, shopkeeper, and shipowner...(He), like many another colonial businessman, turned his hand to many things.”[14] Before his death in 1739, Captain James Brown would also initiate the Brown family’s foray into the slave trade. After James’s death, Obadiah served as business mentor to four of his nephews. John, Joseph, Moses and Nicholas would all actively associate with their uncle’s company throughout the 1750s. The tenor of family business remained as James had conducted it. Obadiah Brown & Company maintained its mercantile trade out of Providence, shipping salt, lumber, meat, bricks, flour, tobacco, staves, and hoops, among other products, to the colonies, the West Indies, and Britain. In return, the Browns’ vessels would often return with molasses, sugars, and rum.[15] On the home shores, Obadiah’s ventures included building a “chocklit” mill, insuring his and other ships, and, by 1752, laying the groundwork for what would be one of the Browns’ most successful and significant ventures – manufacturing and selling spermaceti candles.[16] Upon Obadiah’s death in 1762, John, Joseph, Moses, and Nicholas incorporated their own business union, Nicholas Brown & Company. By 1763 the company was well recognized as the leading manufacturer of candles made from the oil of sperm whales.[17] In 1765 the brothers also undertook iron-making, founding the Hope Furnace in Scituate, Rhode Island. From this point until the American Revolution, these two manufacturing enterprises – spermaceti candles and pig iron – would furnish the majority of the Browns’ wealth. While the Revolutionary War against Britain was disruptive, the Browns emerged from it undiminished. Nicholas Brown & Company had dispersed in 1774, but during the war Nicholas and John Brown continued to be both separately involved and conjoined in the European trade, often by way of the West Indies, that provided America with gunpowder and munitions useful in the war effort.[18] In addition, the Browns invested in the interstate sea trade, procuring staple commodities such as salt, flour, pork, beef, wheat, cheese, and oats.[19] The Browns’ manufacturing facilities became a source of wartime income; by 1776 they had converted the Hope Furnace for the making of cannon. In the same year, Nicholas and John also engaged in the practice of privateering, licensing their ships in piracy to attack enemy vessels.[20] In the period after the peace of 1783 the Browns continued their West Indies trade, although their commerce with the islands became “increasingly adjunct to trade with Virginia and the Carolinas,” where the Browns procured tobacco, rice, and indigo for their European trade.[21] Shortly after, they would direct their attentions to banking, insurance, and manufacture on a more elaborate scale.[22] From 1786 until 1793, Brown and Benson, in which Nicholas Brown was a partner, pursued the trade for molasses in Surinam – molasses to be utilized in Brown and Benson’s Providence rum distillery.[23] John Brown’s business association, Brown and Francis, operated a gin distillery from 1790, presumably until his death in 1803.[24] By 1790, Nicholas (who died in 1791) and John had also turned to the China, East India, and Baltic trades, and Moses Brown of Almy and Brown had convinced Samuel Slater to come to Rhode Island to start cotton manufacturing in the United States. In the fall of 1791, John and Moses Brown served as the main instigators for the formation of the Providence Bank. John would serve as the bank’s first president, while Moses and Nicholas Brown Jr. would join him among the nine original bank directors.[25] |
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On Slave-Trading Among his varied enterprises, Captain James Brown made one attempt at the slave trade in 1736. The slave trade in Rhode Island had started forty years earlier. In 1696 a Boston-owned ship arrived at Newport with a cargo of forty-seven slaves, and sold fourteen; in 1700 three slaving vessels from Newport sailed to Africa and took slaves to Barbados.[26] Slave-trading began to play a larger role after 1720. New estimates reflect that throughout the eighteenth century, Rhode Island merchants controlled about half of all the American trade in African slaves.[27] Newport reigned as the unrivaled leader of the Rhode Island slave trade up until and directly after the American Revolution.[28] The trade subsided entirely during the Revolution, resuming in the 1780s. From 1790 on, Bristol became the state’s leading slave-trade port until the ostensible end of the American slave trade in the early 19th century. Viewed against a contemporary yardstick, Rhode Island ships transported 106,000 slaves during a period when Great Britain, one of the “big three” slave-exporting nations (alongside Portugal and Spain), purchased and sold an estimated 2.5 million African slaves.[29] Though legislation made the slave trade illegal in Rhode Island in 1787, and it became federally outlawed by 1794 and 1807 statutes, these measures were enforced lightly, if at all. Historian Jay Coughtry notes that the volume of the trade in Bristol rose to its highest level on the eve of the trade’s anticipated end. Moreover, some Bristol traders continued the Rhode Island slave trade illegally after 1807. Despite Rhode Island’s involvement in the African slave trade, some historians conclude that molasses and rum fueled the profit-making engine that built the fortunes of Rhode Island merchants in the eighteenth century.[30] In this respect, Rhode Island’s position in the slave trade was determined more by imports of rum to Africa than by exports of slaves from the continent.[31] Since the state had no exportable native products of its own, its trade with Africa hinged on the prospects for realizing larger profits. The triangular nature of the slave trade with Africa, then, was an expansion of an extant commerce with the West Indies. Merchants like Captain James Brown delivered livestock and food to the islands and returned with molasses, which, distilled into rum, gave Rhode Island merchants a staple product that could be sold in both the coastal trade and the nascent African trade.[32] In 1736, James Brown launched the sloop Mary, the first slave-trading vessel to sail from the port of Providence. Mary encountered a precarious market when she arrived on the African coast. James’s brother, Obadiah, who was in charge of the voyage’s commercial concerns, lamented that the rum they had brought to trade for slaves met a surplus, while slaves were in scarce supply. Nevertheless, slaves that the vessel did collect purchased a substantial cargo of “coffee, Osnaburgs, duck, cordage, and salt” when sold in the West Indies.[33] The first African voyage of the Brown family was neither a failure nor a particular success.[34] Captain James Brown died within three years of the Mary’s voyage; it was not until 1759 that the Browns launched another slave vessel. While the voyage of James’s Mary was not notably successful, the 1759 voyage of Wheel of Fortune, owned by John, Nicholas, and Obadiah Brown, seems to have been marked by outright failure. Although the vessel arrived safely on the “Windward Coast of Africa,” the only subsequent mention of Wheel of Fortune, found in Obadiah’s insurance book, remarks that she was “Taken.”[35] Most likely, Wheel of Fortune was captured by French privateers. In any event, Obadiah, like James, died before the Brown family would attempt another slaving voyage. If Wheel of Fortune was a failure, the 1764 and 1765 passage of Nicholas Brown & Company’s Sally was a tragedy. Remarkably complete records of the voyage indicate that 109 of the 196 slaves on board died during the passage from Guinea to the West Indies. While twenty-four of the survivors were sold as slaves, thirty-eight remained unaccounted for.[36] This would mark the last slaving voyage organized by Nicholas Brown & Company. Historical records provide no ready explanation – whether moral or financial – as to why the four brothers together were no longer involved in the slave trade after 1765. It is known, however, that the brothers were not of one mind regarding slavery. John Brown became a staunch advocate of the slave trade, while his brother Moses would take an opposite stance. Historian Jay Coughtry’s The Notorious Triangle, a survey of Rhode Island’s involvement in the African slave trade from 1700 to 1807, notes John Brown’s interest in eight additional slaving voyages between 1769 and 1796. These voyages were not necessarily profitable for John, who, perhaps desiring to expand the entirety of the family’s interests, had withdrawn from Nicholas Brown & Company in 1771.[37] (The Brown company dissolved in 1774, ending an era of the four brothers’ close association in business.) Writing in a 1786 correspondence to Moses, John admitted that he had “Lost & that very Graitly in allmost Every Voyage to Guiney,” though this factor did not decisively end John’s involvement in slave-trading.[38] At the other extreme was Moses Brown, who, after the death of his wife Anna in 1773, viewed himself as punished by God for his part in the slave trade. That year he, too, withdrew from Nicholas Brown & Company, freeing the six slaves that he owned outright and divesting his fractional responsibility to four slaves who were employed at the candle works.[39] He attempted to distance himself from business and began to associate with a number of Quaker ministers, eventually becoming a Quaker himself. In 1789, Moses Brown, with the assistance of several friends, organized the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery when it appeared that the 1787 slave trade law would go unenforced. The group was instrumental in achieving the passage of the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794. This act prohibited ships destined to transport slaves to any foreign country from outfitting in American ports. Owing to Moses Brown’s efforts, John Brown, who deemed it improper to prevent Americans citizens “the benefits of a trade permitted by all the European nations,” was the first Rhode Islander tried under the 1794 legislation, and he subsequently suffered the forfeiture of the ship Hope in 1797.[40] Brown family historian James Hedges notes the irony that accompanied Moses Brown’s 1790 introduction of cotton manufacture into the United States. While Moses hoped that cotton manufacture would provide his fellow Quakers with much-needed employment, cotton manufacture – once firmly established – would, by its demand for raw cotton, give chattel slavery, which Moses opposed strongly, a new lease on life.[41] |
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Introduction |
On Slave Labor In Rhode Island, the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1784 declared that children born of slave mothers after March 1 of that year would be free. However, as was to be the case with the slave-trade legislation enacted in 1787 and 1794, this act would prove to be equally ineffectual. Some slaveholders sold their slaves out of state; some held purportedly freed slaves in forced servitude; some simply ignored the legislation. Historian Joanne Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England 1780-1860, notes that, in addition, some slaves were transformed into “slaves of the community,” indentured municipally by local town councils. Because of this resistance to emancipation, it is difficult to suggest how many slaves were actually manumitted by the 1784 act. Likewise, there is no succinct assessment of how slave labor operated in and benefited the eighteenth-century New England economy. Slaves served differing functions in colonial Rhode Island depending on the setting: they worked as house servants in Newport, worked the Narragansett plantations in southern Rhode Island, and served a variety of functions in Providence, including as shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, seamen, and house servants. At times colonial-era slaves were able to hire themselves out to work for employers other than their masters, earning money perhaps toward securing their own freedom.[42] There was some blurring of the lines between lower-class free workers, white and black, and those, white or black, who remained in bondage, whether indentured or enslaved. Ultimately, as was the case in other slaveholding families, the Brown family’s ownership of slaves and use of slave labor were inextricable from the industries that slavery affected and was affected by – rum distilleries, candle factories, iron foundries, and cotton mills. The Browns were not uniform in their attitudes or their actions regarding slavery. Moses Brown, the exemplar in this respect, was the first to take an anti-slavery initiative, as noted above. Successive generations of the other Brown families continued to utilize slave labor in their households and enterprises. Obadiah Brown’s Spermaceti Works candle manufactory at Tockwotton in Providence, likely operational by 1753, was flourishing by the late 1750s and early 1760s, when it was taken over by the four brothers. The limited information that exists as to the labor practices of the Spermaceti Works provides a view into the factory. A 1763 bill submitted to Moses Brown by factory seamstresses charges Brown for “checked shirts for Negros,” among other items. The bill also lists shirts sewn for Boston, Buckley, Newport, and Tom – presumably four slaves.[43] And a 1776 agreement signed by the four brothers agrees to the usage of slaves “only to get the stock out of necessity,” notwithstanding Moses’s 1773 manumission.[44] Nicholas Brown & Company’s Iron Furnace in Scituate also employed slave labor, although to what extent is likewise unclear. A 1767 letter from slave owner William Burton, serving as “overseer of the Blacks” at the ore beds in the factory, contended that it was “ill usage” to use Negroes to uncover the iron ore and then allow white men to dig it.[45] Burton’s letter points to a tension over the division of labor at the furnace. Three population censuses taken after 1770 reflect the complicated images of the Providence community. The pre-Revolutionary census of 1774 indicates that each of the Brown brothers had “Blacks” living in their households: John, two; Joseph, four, Moses, six; and Nicholas, two.[46] Although Moses freed his slaves one year earlier, they were likely still living in his household and functioning as servants. Black people counted in the households of John, Joseph, and Nicholas were presumably still slaves. In 1774, less than 20 percent of blacks in Providence lived in black-headed households.[47] The census of 1782 continues to document this still-resolving image: four “Blacks” were recorded in John Brown’s household, five in Joseph’s, two in Moses’s, and four in Nicholas’s.[48] By 1790 the percentage of blacks living in black-headed households had accordingly risen to nearly 27 percent of the black population.[49] The first federal census, taken in that year, which included the category “slave,” lists none in the households of John, Moses, and Nicholas.[50] (Joseph had died in 1785.) |
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Introduction |
In Summary While the slave trade may not have been directly profitable to merchants like John Brown, slavery itself constituted an integral part of the social fabric and provided a spur to the developing economy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England. As Joanne Melish relates, slavery afforded white slave owners an opportunity to participate unobstructed in commerce, thus, in her words, “easing the transition from a household-based to a market-based economy.”[51] Owing to still-developing research examining the historical documents of the era, images of Rhode Island and New England continue to emerge. While the Brown family papers are considered to be one of the most complete surviving records of colonial and post-colonial business, archivists and researchers are still exploring them. The early- and middle-eighteenth century contain several efforts by the Brown family – including Obadiah and James Brown and John’s sons John, Joseph, Moses, and Nicholas – to engage in the slave trade while simultaneously developing other enterprises. During this period, slaves formed a practical labor force, utilized in various functions and locations: at the spermaceti candle works and the iron foundry among others, and, as narrative evidence suggests, in farm and household labor.[52] In addition, as stewards of the 1770 construction of the College Edifice, later University Hall, Nicholas Brown & Company, which the four brothers comprised, contracted some slave labor. Correspondence from the ensuing period relates that John and Moses Brown came to their own divergent conclusions regarding slavery and the slave trade. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, while John was still an active proponent and participant in the slave trade, Moses Brown and Nicholas Brown Jr. became personally involved, as agitator and patron respectively, in continuing abolition efforts. In 1804, Nicholas Brown Jr.’s gift provided the impetus for Rhode Island College’s name change to Brown University. However, the Brown family was already indispensable in the development of the College by this time: standing among the original signatories of the College’s charter, serving on the inaugural Corporation, leading and administrating the move to Providence and serving as both faculty and administration. Appendix Primary sources: Rhode Island state censuses of 1774, 1782 Federal census of 1790 The papers of John Brown, Joseph Brown, Moses Brown, Nicholas Brown, and Nicholas Brown Jr. at the John Carter Brown Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society Secondary sources: Bronson, Walter C., The History of Brown University 1764-1914. Providence : Brown University Press, 1914 (Boston : D.B. Updike, The Merrymount Press) Coughtry, Jay, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1981 Cottrol, Robert J., The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982 Cottrol, Robert J. (editor), From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Angebellum New England. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Eltis, David, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” in William and Mary Quarterly. Williamsburg, VA: OIEAHC, 2001, VLVII, No. 1. Hedges, James, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years. Providence, Brown University Press, 1968 Hedges, James, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Nineteenth Century. Providence, Brown University Press, 1968. Lemons, J. Stanley, “Rhode Island and the Slave Trade,” paper delivered at the Rhode Island Historical Society, March 2001. Melish, Joanne, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Mitchell, Martha, Encyclopedia Brunoniana, Providence, Brown University Library, 1993. [Available on the Brown Web site.] Phillips, Janet M., Brown University: A Short History, Providence, Brown University of Public Affairs and University Relations, 2000. [Available on the Brown Web site.] Wroth, Lawrence C., The Construction of the College Edifice, 1770–1772: A Study in the History of Brown University and Providence, Rhode Island. (unpublished; available at John Hay Library), circa 1964. Endnotes [1] Mitchell – Encylopedia Brunoniana, p. 359; Phillips – Brown University: A Short History, p. 10. [2] Bronson, Walter C. – The History of Brown University, 1764-1914, p. 500. [3] Bronson, pp. 500-507. [4] James Hedges – The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years p. 194. [5] Mitchell, p. 42; Bronson,, p. 199. [6] Ibid and Bronson, p. 81. [7] Bronson, p. 156. [8] Lemons, J. Stanley – “Rhode Island and the Slave Trade”. Paper delivered at the RIHS, winter 2001, p. 3. [9] Wroth, Lawrence C. – The Construction of the College Edifice, 1770-1772:A Study in the History of Brown University and Providence, Rhode Island, (unpublished; available at John Hay Library) pp. 9,10. [10] Hedges, p. 194. [11] Phillips, p. 15. [12] Hedges, p. 197. [13] Ibid. [14] James Hedges – The Browns of Providence Plantations, p. 3. [15] Hedges, p. 23. [16] Hedges, pp. 9, 10. [17] Hedges, p. 89. [18] Hedges, p. 217. [19] Hedges, p. 267. [20] Hedges, p. 284. [21] Hedges, p. 306. [22] Hedges, p. 328. [23] Hedges – The Browns of Providence Plantation, Volume 2, pp. 4-6. [24] Hedges, Volume 2, pp. 12,13. [25] Hedges, Volume 2, pp. 189, 190. [26] Jay Coughtry – The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1981, p. 6 [27] David Eltis – “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly. OIEAHC, 2001, VLVII, No. 1, p. 22. [28] Coughtry, p. 6. [29] Lemons, p. 6. [30] Lemons, p. 13. [31] Coughtry, p. 6. [32] Coughtry, pp. 20, 21. [33] Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, p. 71 [34] Ibid. [35] Hedges, p. 72. [36] Hedges, p. 80. [37] Hedges, pp. 16,17. [38] Correspondence between John and Moses Brown, November 27, 1786, Moses Brown Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society. [39] Ibid. [40] Hedges, p. 84. [41] Hedges, p. 165. [42] Cottrol, Robert J. – The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1982, pp. 16,17. [43] Account between Spermaceti Works and Mary Power, 1763-1766. Nicholas Brown Papers, Box 1, folder 8, Rhode Island Historical Society. [44] Spermaceti Candle Works, United Company of Spermaceti Manufacturers. The Records of John, Joseph, Moses and Nicholas Brown, 1772-1776, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. [45] James Hedges – The Browns of Providence Plantations, p. 142. [46] Rhode Island census, 1774 [47] Cottrol, Robert J. – The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1982, p. 48. [48] Rhode Island census, 1782 [49] Cottrol, p. 48. [50] U.S. census, 1790 [51] Melish, p. 8. [52] See The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I. with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island in From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England, Robert J. Cottrol (ed.) Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe Press, 1998. pp. 79, 80. ###### |
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