What did southern Rhode Island’s Colonial economy look like?

 

The Narragansett Planters: Founders of a Plantation Economy

The area of Rhode Island today called Washington County (or “South County” locally) is part of the ancestral lands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Between the 1650s through the 1690s, a group of about a dozen English colonists from Newport and Massachusetts colonies acquired this land and gradually began establishing farms there. During the last decade of the 17th century, agricultural operations grew into a larger scale to produce crops and goods for export.

An excerpt from the inventory of Rowland Robinson’s estate, 1712/13 from South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The wills of plantation owners are some of the few forms of direct documentation of slavery in southern Rhode Island. Salve Regina University’s digitization project, Documenting Slavery, has made these documents available online. Town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

The owners of these larger farms became known as “Narragansett Planters,” referencing southern Rhode Island’s nickname at the time, “Narragansett Country.” Through their connections to the Atlantic slave trade, these men began to buy enslaved African people from colonies in the Caribbean (and eventually directly from Africa) to work on their farms and increase production of goods for export. At the height of the Narragansett Planter’s operations in the mid-18th century, there were 25 – 30 large plantations, and it is estimated that between 15% and 25% of Washington County’s population was enslaved. The plantations in southern Rhode Island were very profitable. Their owners were some of the wealthiest people in the colony of Rhode Island, allowing them to develop a leisurely lifestyle that mirrored that of the upper classes in England.

Goods sold for export from southern Rhode Island went to other colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, Europe, and colonies in the Caribbean. These goods included cheese, beef, pork, wheat, corn, candles, molasses, rum, wool, and horses. Rum, one of the primary forms of currency in the Atlantic slave trade, was distilled and often smuggled along the coast of Rhode Island. Stable food stuffs, such as cheese, salted meat, and grains, were exported to the West Indies in particular to feed enslaved people working on sugar plantations. Horses bred in southern Rhode Island were also exported to the Caribbean to support sugar cultivation and processing.

The Lives and Labor of Enslaved People

An ell of the former Hazard Hoxie House, once part of the Sheffield Farm in Charlestown, Rhode Island, that served as sleeping quarters for enslaved people and as a cheese storage house. Unlike in Southern colonies, enslaved people in southern Rhode Island had sleeping quarters in kitchens, attics, and other areas within plantation houses. This structure was still standing when Baker visited Rhode Island. From “Old Houses in the South County of Rhode Island,” 1932, South County History Center Collection.

In addition to laboring on plantations, enslaved people worked throughout households in southern Rhode Island and were skilled in a wide variety of professions and crafts, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and masonry. Because of the variety of skills enslaved people possessed, plantation owners would often send them to work for other households as a form of barter payment; enslaved people were rarely, if ever, paid themselves for this type of arrangement. Enslaved people lived under strict codes controlling their behavior and ability to travel, and the penalties for violation were fines or corporal punishments such as whipping and branding. Slave owners often sold enslaved people, sometimes as a form of punishment; they sold away enslaved people’s children, spouses, and extended family members, separating their families. Unsurprisingly, enslaved people frequently tried to flee the plantations and colonies.

Despite the demands on their time and restrictions on movement, enslaved people found time to socialize, relax, and share and build cultural practices with one another. The biggest event where this was possible was an annual summer festival. Later referred to as “Negro Election Day” in historical sources, this event was also attended by Indigenous and free people of color, and a governor or king was elected to preside of several days of music, dancing, meals, and other ceremonies.

The Dissolution of the Plantation Economy

Through the use of enslaved people’s labor and extensive participation in the Atlantic trade system, the Narragansett Planters amassed a significant amount of wealth and power in the colony of Rhode Island. These trade relations were disrupted during the American Revolutionary War, and the system of governance, taxation, and trade relations that arose from the new United States government fundamentally altered the economic conditions in which Planter society operated. As a result, plantations were broken up into smaller agricultural enterprises through inheritance and as market demands shifted. These changes, along with pressure from local abolitionists, led to gradual dismantling of the system of plantation slavery. The status of enslavement was hereditary until 1784 when it was abolished by gradual emancipation legislation, and slavery effectively ended in Rhode Island around the end of the 1830s.

The Glebe, the main house on a large farm once belonging to the Reverend James MacSparran, who enslaved several people. Macsparran’s diary is one of the few firsthand accounts of slavery in southern Rhode Island. From “Old Houses in the South County of Rhode Island,” 1932, South County History Center Collection.

Two Centuries of Storytelling: How We Understand Rhode Island Slavery

Our knowledge of the Narragansett Planter society and slavery in Rhode Island has changed greatly over the last 200 years. Initially, the history of the Narragansett Planters and enslaved people was romanticized and embellished, emphasizing the great wealth and luxury of the Planter class, exaggerating the number of enslaved people the Planters held, and often mischaracterizing the nature of slavery in Rhode Island as “mild” and even unprofitable to the slave holders. These first histories were written between the 1840s and 1880s primarily by residents of southern Rhode Island and descendants of the Narragansett Planter class. They relied heavily on passed down stories and local lore with little examination of primary sources. At the beginning of the 20th century, a more scholarly approach to studying the history of southern Rhode Island emerged. Through decades of work by scholars and historians who closely examined primary sources like slave codes and laws, will documents, newspapers, diaries, and trading reports, we have established a far more accurate picture of how the early 18th century economy worked, the number of enslaved people, and the experiences and culture of people enslaved in southern Rhode Island.

Baker’s Historical Resources

To understand the scene that Ernest Hamlin Baker painted, it is helpful to consider what he saw, heard, and read about the Narragansett Planter society on visits to Rhode Island. There were many written sources Baker would have had access to, spanning the early 1840s to the 1930s, from authors including Elisha R. Potter, Jr., Wilkins Updike, Thomas Hazard (“Shepherd Tom”), Caroline Hazard, Esther Bernon Carpenter, Edward Channing, and William Davis Miller.

 

the narragansett Planters by william davis miller, published as an individual volume in 1935. Miller’s work would have been the most current work that baker read to learn about the history of slavery in rhode island. reprinted from the proceedings of the American antiquarian society, 1935.

An illustration of the Dockray House from the Johnny-cake Papers, the collected writings of Thomas Robinson Hazard (“Shepherd Tom”), which was a popular work about local history of South Kingstown. Illustration by Rudolph Ruzicka, 1915.

 

The most popular written local history at the time would likely have been the collected writings of Thomas Hazard, compiled by Caroline Hazard, known as the “Johnny-Cake Papers.” This work contains nearly all of the well-known (and not necessarily true) southern Rhode Island stories and many descriptions of the Narragansett Planter society. More recent and more scholarly works available to Baker would have been “The Narragansett Planters: a study of causes” by Edward Channing (1886) and “The Narragansett Planters” by William Davis Miller (1934) who, at the time of Baker’s visits, was president of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Channing and Miller’s works cited primary sources and focused on the broader economic, social, and political forces acting on the Narragansett Planter society. They featured very few, if any, of the anecdotal stories and histories of individuals presented in previous works. Channing and Miller’s work, compared with the scholarship that came later in the 20th century, give relatively accurate statistical information, and describe the structure of the 18th century economy in a way that matches what we understand today. Baker’s first sketches relied on both the personal histories and broader descriptions of the Planter economy to shape what he depicted in the mural. But, as he narrowed his focus, he concentrated on the major economic drivers of southern Rhode Island’s economy and the power relationships that were essential to upholding the structure of that economy.

Henry Johnson, a formerly enslaved man, interviewed and photographed for the Slave Narrative WPA Writer’s Project in 1936. Johnson was born in Virginia in 1834; after emancipation, he moved north to New York, then eventually settled in Burrillville, Rhode Island, where this picture was taken. WPA writers interviewed thousands of formerly enslaved people, creating an invaluable document of first hand experiences of enslavement in the United States. wpa slave narrative writers project, library of congress.

It is also worth noting that Baker may have also interacted with formerly enslaved people himself.  Throughout Baker’s life, there were formerly enslaved people living throughout the United States; Baker’s years living in New York City also coincided with the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration.  Indeed, his colleagues at the WPA were interested in documenting the stories of formerly enslaved individuals and launched the Slave Narrative WPA Writer’s Project in 1936. The project marked a major contribution to scholarship of American slavery and African American history, which greatly expanded during the 20th century.

20th Century Scholarship of Northern Slavery

The study of the history of slavery in New England that has taken place since the Great Depression has given us a far more detailed, accurate, complex, and nuanced view of that time period, furthering our ability to understand slavery from the perspective of the enslaved, rather than from the perspective of the slave-holding class. The most comprehensive and reflective knowledge on slavery in New England and Rhode Island specifically have come from works such as Lorenzo Greene’s The Negro in Colonial New England (1942), Irving Bartlett’s From Slave to Citizen (1954), William Dillon Pierson’s Black Yankees (1988), Robert Fitts’ Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise (1995), Joanne Pope Melish’s Disowning Slavery (1998), and Christy Clark-Pujara’s Dark Work: the Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (2016), among many other works. These works not only give a more detailed account of slavery in Rhode Island, but also explore the development of social norms, ideas, and laws associated with race, as well as demonstrate the intricate connections that Rhode Island’s economy had to the Atlantic slave trade and the broader story of colonization in the Americas.

Banner Image: Baker’s mural as published in LIFE Magazine, January 27, 1941



This exhibit is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. The Council seeds, supports, and strengthens public history, cultural heritage, civic education, and community engagement by and for all Rhode Islanders.