Rhode Island

By: Paul Finkelman, David Quigley

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Rhode Island

Rhode Island is generally considered to have been an exception to typical patterns of colonial development in New England. The colony's founding—and, in particular, Roger Williams's commitment to religious liberty—stood in stark contrast to neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut, with their established theocratic state structures. Economically, however, Rhode Island shared with its neighbors a deep investment in the Atlantic slave trade throughout the colonial period.

Records indicate that Rhode Island merchants were involved in the slave trade as early as 1649. Both local Native Americans and West African blacks were sold by Rhode Island merchants; leading local families made great fortunes in the triangular trade linking North America with the Caribbean, West Africa, and Great Britain. The involvement of merchants from Rhode Island in the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade was unequalled by the business class of any other American colony or state. Newport emerged as New England's preeminent slaveholding center and a particularly important node in the triangular trade.

No other New England colony's population included such a high percentage of enslaved blacks. The 1755 census lists nearly five thousand slaves, accounting for almost 12 percent of the colony's population. In the years before the American Revolution the black population of Newport hovered near 15 percent. The other primary area of slave population in Rhode Island was the colony's agrarian southwest. While certain coastal towns relied heavily upon the slave labor force, however, other communities resisted the spread of the institution. Warwick and Providence in particular sought to prevent the establishment of hereditary African slavery in the colony.

Quakers in Rhode Island actively campaigned against the colony's slave system throughout the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, Quaker manumission efforts had resulted in a substantial decline in local slaveholding across Rhode Island; the 1774 census listed fewer than four thousand slaves, who now accounted for barely 6 percent of the colony's population. That year also brought the passage of a law banning the importation of slaves into Rhode Island. Local merchants found ways to get around the law, however, as they persisted in bringing slaves through nearby states. Into the early nineteenth century Rhode Islanders continued to hold leading positions in the Atlantic slave trade, with Bristol displacing Newport as the state's leading slave-trading community.

In the course of the American Revolution leading white Rhode Islanders rallied to the cause of emancipation. The state assembly organized a black regiment—the Rhode Island Regiment—emancipating over one hundred men and compensating slave owners for their property. They were joined by more than one hundred free blacks. General Washington considered this to be one of his finest units and at Yorktown chose the First Rhode Island for a critical attack on a British redoubt. Washington placed his favorite junior officer, Alexander Hamilton, in command of this critical charge. The attack was successful, with only minimal losses. Revolutionary ideals inspired local antislavery activists, who helped achieve passage of the state's gradual emancipation law of 1784. Unlike neighboring Massachusetts, which opted for immediate emancipation, Rhode Island's legislature took a more conservative approach. The act decreed all slaves born after 1 March 1784 free, though it mandated that these children would remain under the control of their mothers' owners until their twenty-first birthday. Further, the 1784 law maintained slave status for all those born enslaved before March of that year. Under this system of gradual emancipation, the state went from over 900 slaves in 1790 to 107 by 1810 and only 48 by 1820. In 1840 the census found five slaves in the state. The free black population meanwhile fluctuated between about 3,600 (in 1800) and about 3,900 (1860). As a percentage of the total state population blacks declined from 6.3 percent in 1790 to only 2.3 percent in 1860.

Despite the conservative nature of emancipation in the state, Stephen Hopkins, the state's most prominent opponent of slavery, reported that following the gradual abolition law, voters in Newport elected opponents of emancipation and black rights to the legislature. Hopkins also noted hostility to providing public education for blacks and feared the new legislature might try to reverse the trend to freedom, but this did not happen.

In 1789 Moses Brown and other prominent Rhode Islanders organized the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade. The Brown brothers of Providence—Nicholas, John, and Moses—had made their fortunes as leading slave traders. Moses broke with his brothers and condemned slavery, taking a leadership role in the new state's antislavery movement. Brown and other group leaders targeted local merchants involved in the slave trade and sought to educate free blacks. Decades-long gradual emancipation witnessed the continuation, if not the intensification, of cultural and economic forms of antiblack discrimination in Rhode Island. Many black men were involved in the maritime industry, serving on ships sailing out of Providence from the colonial period to the Civil War. At least 25 percent of them shipped out on vessels with entirely black crews, though led, as custom and economics dictated, by white officers. In the early national and Jacksonian period these “black jacks” were able to avoid this growing racism, which led to black disfranchisement in 1822 and violent riots in Providence in 1824 and 1831.

The state's black community emerged to gain greater political and social rights in the decades before the Civil War. One of the earliest slave narratives by a woman, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (Providence, 1838), came out of this period. From 1840 to 1842 blacks participated in the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, a white-dominated organization dedicated to eliminating property requirements for voting. The leader of this movement, Thomas Dorr, was a committed abolitionist, but his rank-and-file members were hostile to black suffrage. The suffrage movement led to the “Dorr War,” which was put down with minimal violence by state and volunteer militia companies, including the African Greys. In the aftermath of the Dorr War Rhode Island wrote its first constitution, which was adopted in 1843. This document ended all slavery in the state, freeing the handful of aged slaves who had been born in Rhode Island before 1784. A year later the legislature required that former masters of all ex-slaves provide for their subsistence if they could not support themselves. Under the 1843 constitution African Americans in Rhode Island regained the right to vote that they had lost in 1822. In subsequent elections the black vote became critical, as supporters of Dorr rallied to the Democratic Party and his opponents merged with the Whig Party. In 1843 the Whig candidate for mayor of Providence won by about 150 votes, and it is estimated that over 300 blacks cast their ballot for him. Elections up through the mid-1850s were often just as close, with the African American vote remaining a significant factor. Blacks now had not only the franchise but also actual political clout. They supported Whigs throughout this period, ignoring the call of more radical white abolitionists to move to the Free Soil Party or the Liberty Party. In the mid-1850s virtually every African American in the state became a Republican. In 1857 Thomas Howland was elected to a minor office (election warden) and served for a year as one of the first black elected officials in the nation. Black participation in politics, as well as strong antislavery sentiment in the state, led to an 1848 law prohibiting any state official from aiding in the return of fugitive slaves. In 1854 the legislature extended this law to prohibit officials from helping to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

In the 1850s some blacks in Providence worked for an end to segregated education in the city and the state. However, a bill died in the legislature in 1859, in part because a number of leading African Americans believed integration would hurt them. In 1866 Rhode Island would finally ban segregated education. Meanwhile, the economic status of many African Americans was improving. In 1834 blacks in Providence owned $18,400 worth of real estate and $1,200 worth of personal property. By 1860 they held over $61,600 worth of real estate and personal property valued at more than $10,600.

During the Civil War black Rhode Islanders fought in various military units, including the famed Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment. The state organized the 14th Rhode Island Colored Heavy Artillery. In April 1864 it was renamed the 8th Regiment U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, but six weeks later, on 21 May 1864, the unit was designated the 11th Regiment U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. The regiment was assigned to New Orleans, where it was ultimately disbanded and its soldiers assigned to other units in Louisiana, where they served until October 1865.

In 1866, a year after the war ended, Rhode Island banned segregated schools. In the 1880s the state repealed its ban on integrated schools. Meanwhile the state's African American population, after stagnating from the Revolution to the Civil War, began to grow, going from 3,952 in 1860 to 4,980 in 1870, despite the loss of men in the war. It grew to 6,400 in 1880 and to just over 9,000 by 1900. Despite the increase in numbers, the percentage of African Americans in the state dropped from 2.3 in 1860 to 2.1 by 1890, where it remained for the rest of the century.

See also Abolitionism; American Revolution; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Emancipation; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Laws and Legislation; Massachusetts; Religion; Slave Trade; Slavery; and Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans.

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