Welcome everyone to Portsmouth, on Rhode Island and welcome to all of you who have traveled from Providence and its plantations to join us here today. I want to offer my sincere appreciation to the Newport County Chapter NAACP and particularly former Newport Mayor Paul Gaines for their tireless leadership in support of this site and the preservation of African American history and civil rights in our state.
It is impossible to understand and truly value Rhode Island’s complex economic, religious and social history without fully understanding the unique role African and African Americans played in shaping it.
The history I would like to share with you today will not simply recount the Battle of Rhode Island and the well documented brave actions of the First Rhode Island Regiment. Instead, I would like to start with a history of Africans in Rhode Island which would lead up to that historic battle on a hot summer day in August 1778. I would also like to provide you an opportunity to come to know these African soldiers and those many others living as slave and free throughout early Rhode Island not simply as ghost of the past, but flesh and blood humans with vibrant lives who, even though arriving to Rhode Island as ‘forced immigrants,’ would contribute greatly to the economic, social and religious well-being of our great state.
The first slaves arrived in Rhode Island sometime around 1652, and the first documented slave ship was the “Sea Flower” arriving in Newport in 1696. As early as 1708 African slaves outnumbered indentured servants in Rhode Island eight to one. In fact, between 1705 and 1805, Rhode Island merchants sponsored at least 1,000 slaving voyages to West Africa and carried over 100,000 slaves back to America. More slave ships would leave Colonial Newport than any other American port of that time. By 1770, one out of every three Newport families owned at least one slave.
Most of the slaves would come from what is today Ghana, but many others would also hail from Sierra Leone and Guinea. One of the historical legacies these Africans have left us today is their West African tradition of naming their children after the day of the week they were born. So when you read the inscriptions of names on the wall behind me of members of the First Rhode Island Regiment, also understand that names in West African tradition such as KOFI are boys born on Friday which we see as CUFFEE or CUFF. KOJO are boys born on Tuesday which is CUDGO. Also KWASI is for boys born on Sunday which we see as QASH or QUASHI. Even today, these African names can be found throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Well before the American Revolution Africans were the integral labor force that ran the Rhode Island economy. 19th century Newport historian George Champlin Mason recounted in his Reminisces of Newport that “At one point in the colonial history of Newport, nearly or quite all the domestic servants were slaves, bound to their masters. In the eyes of an old Newport elder, who on the Sunday following the arrival of a Slaver from the (African ) Coast, thanked God that another cargo of benighted beings had been brought to the land where they could have the benefit of a Gospel dispensation.”
By 1774, Rhode Island was operating over three dozen rum distilling factories with twenty-two operating along the Newport waterfront. Rhode Island would produce over 80% of the “English Guinea Rum.” The rum was distilled from sugar and molasses harvested by African slaves in the West Indies and transported to Rhode Island. Once the molasses was boiled and distilled into rum, the product was shipped from Rhode Island ports to West Africa in hogshead barrels for trade and sale for further African slaves to be shipped back to the West Indies and America. Today, we call this peculiar trading route the “Triangle Trade.” Newport’s widespread economic success from African slave labor in rum making was best described by leading 19th Century American Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson when he stated, “The sugar they raised was excellent; nobody tasted blood in it."
Several Rhode Island merchants not only distilled and sold rum, but also controlled large sugar plantations – men like Abraham Redwood of Newport who inherited from his father a large sugar plantation in Antigua that consisted of over 200 slaves. Redwood would use the profits from his plantation and slave trading activities to underwrite the founding of Redwood Library in Newport, America’s oldest existing library. At one point the Quaker Church in Newport asked Redwood to either leave the African trade or leave the church. He left the church.
What also sets Rhode Island apart from the conventional understanding of American slavery is the fact that many Africans who would arrive in Rhode Island, particularly in Newport and Bristol, were young children. While many slaves toiled in the plantations of Narragansett, Kingston and even here in Portsmouth, many more would become the skilled artisans in the port towns of Newport, Providence and Bristol. Extensive historical records of the time reveal a Newport and Bristol maritime trade economy that was nearly completely dependent upon the skilled work of Negro, Indian and Mulatto servants (slaves). By bringing an African child to Rhode Island, the Master had five to six years to train that child to become a skilled worker in one of many trades including rope making, coopers, stonemasons, carpenters, furniture makers, rum making, candle making and silversmiths. For example, in 1769, a Newport slave named Prince Updike is listed as an “Master Chocolate Grinder,” grinding several thousand pounds of sugar and cocoa into chocolate for shipment to the European markets. This skilled trade priority within the slave economies of New England in general and Rhode Island in particular would create a distinct difference between slavery in Colonial Rhode Island as compared to the American South and West Indies.
Today, several of Rhode Island’s most historically significant Colonial structures were constructed using skilled slave labor. In Newport alone, these existing historic buildings include Touro Synagogue, Redwood Library, Brick Market, and the Old Colony House. The John Brown House in Providence includes at least two builders listed as Negros. Most importantly, this Rhode Island slave economy would provide slaves with unprecedented access to education, work training and artisan skills that would later create the superior quality soldier that comprised the First RI Regiment.
There is no denying the undisputable fact that Rhode Island owes much of its economic success during the critical settlement and revolutionary periods to the use of African slave labor and trading. William Ellery, one of the two Rhode Island signers of the Declaration of Independence stated in 1791, “An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade as that in slaves for the slow profit of any manufactory.”
What Ellery was conveying then, which must be clearly recognized today, is Rhode Island’s early economic existence was integrally tied to African men, women and children slave labor. These slaves would contribute greatly to the building of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, their arrival to these shores as “forced immigrants” did not offer them the opportunity to be justly compensated for their immense contributions.
By 1784, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed the Negro Emancipation Act, decreeing that all children of slaves born after March 1, 1784 remain as slaves as children, but would be free after attaining the age of twenty-one for boys and eighteen for girls. All slaves born before 1784 would remain slaves for life. In the 1790 federal census there were still over 260 slaves in Newport households.
This gradual emancipation was due in large part to the performance of slave and free African members of the First Rhode Island Regiment who had distinguished themselves with great honor during the American Revolution. But there was also a larger public demand for the ending of African servitude by those that challenged the very notion in Rhode Island that the fight for independence from Great Britain could only be truly righteous when Rhode Island ended its involvement with African slavery. At the height of this debate, the Newport Mercury newspaper in January, 1768 offered the compelling editorial statement to its readers demanding, “If Newport had the right to enslave Negroes, then Great Britain has the right toenslave the Colonists.”
One event during the most difficult days of the American Revolution would have great bearing on African freedom in Rhode Island. On a hot August day in 1778, for the first time in American history, African soldiers slave and free organized as a fighting company, would stand side by side with white soldiers as part of the First Rhode Island Regiment. This regiment participated in the Battle of Rhode Island, one of the largest land battles in the entire American Revolution. Side by side, white and black they would fight and die equally for the defense of a new nation. This battle, in which the African soldiers greatly distinguished themselves, would create an unambiguous fact that Africans did fight for the rights of both freedom and equality.
What is most remarkable about the African soldiers of the First RI Regiment is not their sheer bravery and willingness to die for their fledgling country, but it was their ability on August 27, 1778 to take equal responsibility during a time when nearly all of their white countrymen would not recognize their human worth simply because of the color of their skin. Despite the all-encompassing bigotry of the time, the African members of the First RI Regiment seized an opportunity to defend our right to exist as a free country. I want to ask each and every one of you here today to reflect on this question; What was it like for the men of color of the First RI Regiment to be able to willingly defend and possibly give one’s life for a country that refused to embrace them as full citizens? If there is a defining definition of what it takes to be an American Patriot, it must include the actions of these soldiers of color valiantly fighting and dying for a demeaning state and country during our war for independence. These patriots created their own opportunities to be free and eventually in generations to come - equal by sacrificing their very lives during times of greatest peril. Ironically, it would take a bloody civil war over eighty years later for the rest of the nation to catch up.
Let me conclude my remarks by offering a hope that some day, Rhode Island citizens of African decent will boast with pride that their American ancestors arrived to this great state and country not on the Mayflower, but the Seaflower. And that our early African settlers also contributed greatly to the economic, religious and cultural building of our great state and nation. Please join me in remembering the precious gifts of American freedom, patriotism and equality that was fought for us all on that August Day in 1778, not by historical ghosts of the past, but by once living men with the African names such as Cuff Arnold, Sambo Brown, Mingo Bentley, Edward Quam, Negro Pampa, Quarko Chadwick, or Cudjo Brown.
To honor these brave Africans of early Rhode Island is to remember them and the vital role that African and African Americans played in Rhode Island and American history.
The purpose of today’s ceremony is to tell the spirit of each and every one of the Africans of early Rhode Island, we remember.
Thank you. |