-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Mount Hope George Howe©1958,1959 The Viking Press New York, NY LCCN 59-5643 312 pps. – First edition – Out-of-print --[2a]-- 4. The Slave Trade AT THE end of the Revolution, American shipping revived quickly. The richest years of the New England seaports lasted from the peace treaty of 1784 to the election of Jackson in 1828. For half a century any port with adventurous merchants and a channel of twenty feet could harvest all the oceans of the world. During these years the fortunes of Boston and Providence were made in the China trade, those of Salem in the East Indies, and those of New Bedford and Nantucket in the whale fishery. Bristol, almost alone among the seaports, owed its wealth in this golden age to the slave trade and privateering—which is only a politer name for piracy—and soon became poor again when the two professions were at last outlawed. Simeon Potter had dabbled in both, but what wealth he left was in farmland. Mark Antony deWolf, the clerk whom he married to his sister Abigail, never made a fortune himself, but he sired a generation which did. Although "Wolf" is a translation of the French loup, his curious name has nothing to do with the islands of Guadeloupe where his brother-in-law found him. There is record of an Abraham deWolf who in 1661 cornered the market for salt in New Amsterdam, before it became New York, and of a Balthasar deWolf who, at the end of the seventeenth century, was haled to court in Lyme, Connecticut, for smoking in public. As soon as he had paid his fine he lit up his pipe again, right in the courtroom. Some historians think the family is Swedish, some Russian, some German, and some Jewish. Another school, pointing to Abraham, claims it is Dutch, and that the "de" is not the French prefix of nobility at all but the Dutch word for "the"; so that the surname properly means "the wolf." It suits more than one of the family. Some of its members have signed themselves Dwolf and even Dolph. The earliest spelling was d'Wolf. The actor deWolf Hopper stabilized the present orthography because, he said, it looked impressive on a billboard. In the presidency of Hayes, Bishop Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe—the present writer's gran dfather—added the capital D and the final "e" for tone. In Benjamin Harrison's, the poetess Theodora Coujaud deWolf Colt hired heraldic experts to trace the origin of the name, and their fee was small for the delight they gave her. They reported that in 1369 King Charles "the Wise" of France, while hunting in the forest, was attacked by a she-wolf. One of his courtiers, at the risk of his own life, killed the beast. Charles ennobled him on the spot, with the title of deWolf, though it isn't clear why he didn't give the critter her French name. For good measure, the experts threw in a coat of arms with this impressive legend: Or, three wolves' heads erased sable, borne on the crest of an im-perial double-headed eagle, sable-beaked. Or, a coronet of Baron of the Empire. Crest: out of a ducal coronet a demi-wolf gules, holding in dexter paw a fleur-de-lys or. Motto: Vincit Qui Patitur-He Conquers Who Endures. No one could ask for more. Even the non-deWolfs of Bristol are proud of the family. The old lady who did their sewing told me proudly, "They was handsome, dashing and reckless, but for morals something fierce." And an aged Negress, so long ago that she may herself have been a slave, peeked through the counting-room window when two of Mark Antony's sons divided the profits of a voyage to the Slave Coast, weighing out gold dust, Spanish doubloons, and Portuguese joes on a green baize table. "Them was famous times," she sighed. "I looked through the window and seen them heap it up." In 1956 a hundred and forty-six of Mark Antony's descendants gathered at the family's remaining mansion on the Fourth of July. The old seamstress was right: they was handsome—most of them dark and slim, with Roman noses and periwinkle eyes, but a few fairhaired. Their morals were invisible. Their other great houses have vanished, but no one was ashamed, and some hardly knew, that they had all been built from the profits of the slave trade, of privateering, smuggling, and piracy. The deWolfs had even outlived their arrogance. Only lately a Portuguese laundress was overheard to say of her employer, "She's sweet. Her name is deWolf, but she speaks to me." The face of Abigail Potter deWolf, potato-brown and wise with many motherhoods, gazes down the centuries beneath her mob-cap. Mark Antony's nose almost meets his chin; he suggests a benevolent Mr. Punch. But he was a hard man, as sea-captains had to be: when one of his crew failed to answer the muster on sailing day, he had him bound in chains and carried aboard by the Bristol constable. Mark Antony stayed with the sea long after Simeon Potter had left it-had to, for he was perpetually in debt to support his growing family. On his voyages he carried a folio Bible in his sea chest; when he reached home, he would enter on the blank leaves at the back the names and birthdays of his children. One entry reads: Monday morning 25 minutes after 2 o'clock Deer. 19th 1762 william was Born. He owned a share in Potter's privateer Ranger in 1777 and in the eighteen-ton sloop Speedwell in 1779, but they never got past the British blockade; in the thirty-ton sloop Molly in 1783, and a schooner of the same name in 1785, when he was fifty-nine. His vessels were all small, and he never owned them outright. It is possible that Potter gave him the shares in lieu of wages, for after the British burned his house in 1778 he seems to have had no money of his own at all. By then he was too old for the rigors of the sea. When age forced him ashore, he moved out to Swansea with Potter, since he had no home of his own. He would walk the ten miles to Bristol to sell a pailful of huckleberries. He would stop in for a meal with one of his daughters, and get her to sew up his straw hat. He became so shiftless that he once traded a good milker for a copy of Scott's Commentaries on the Bible. He turned his eyes to the hereafter. On the eve of the French Revolution he wrote to his son John, in Paris on the family slave business: I would advise you to make all despatch possible from that savadge country, as the world is in great commotion. We no not what difficulties may turn up; we hear there's sivel war in France, for independence. We are all passing through this life to a world of spirits. God grant we may all be ready at that hour. His sons revered him even so. One old account-book of his son Jim's lists "a scarlet coat for my honor'd father M. A. deWolf." At last they raised $150 to build him a house on the Neck, across from Lafayette's old camp, and there, in 1793, he died insolvent. The Town Clerk's diagnosis of his last illness was "a nervous fever." Between voyages he had sired fifteen children. Thirty-two of his immediate descendants, during New England's golden age, are listed on the Treasury records as owners or masters, or both, of sailing ships. Three of his daughters died at birth; the four who lived married husbands as poor as himself. Three of his sons died at sea, but five survived. All of his children, even the girls, had a little salt water in their blood. His daughter Nancy Kinnicutt, for instance, long after she had moved out West, did not forget the language of the sea. She wrote one of her brothers this exhortation: Eternity's vast ocean lies before us; be ready; give thy mind searoom; keep it wide of earth, that rock of souls. Weigh anchor; spread thy sails; call every wind. Improve each breath of the spirit's eye, thy great Pole Star. Make the land of life, and look to Jesus. His countenance dispels the gloom of death, and guides thee through the darksome reef to everlasting day. The five surviving brothers, for various lengths of time, engaged in the slave trade. The wealth they amassed depended on their acumen and the toughness of their conscience. Levi, the youngest, quit the trade in disgust after a single voyage, and spent the rest of his life with his Bible and his o nion sets. The upland where he knelt in prayer each day has become juniper Hill, the most beautiful of cemeteries.* His brothers, with affectionate contempt, called him "Quakerish." John, after several lucrative years in the traffic, became a farmer too, the best in the state, and the scribe and counselor of his brothers. His passport describes him as "34 years of age, with dark complexion, blue eyes, slim make and 5'10" tall." That is almost a composite picture of the brothers, except for the homely Levi.[ * A vandal has scratched on the slate of Elkanah Waldron, "To Hell with death if you can die here," and Little Scamp has a headstone of his own between the Codman sisters, under a giant elm. His paws are carved in relief on its top, as if he were climbing up it from below.] Charles, the eldest, was the most avaricious. He once invited Parson Wight of the Congregational church down to his counting-house. "Parson," he told him, "I've always wanted to roll in gold." He lay down among the canvas sacks and wallowed, while the impecunious man of God looked on. William was one of the few chubby deWolfs. Under his short curls, his smile is genial; but his kindliness did not keep him out of the trade in human flesh. After amassing a competence from the quarterdeck, he retired as owner of a dozen slavers and became the head of the company which insured Bristol vessels against shipwreck, piracy, and the penalties of the law. James, who became the richest of the five, was the handsomest, with florid cheeks, a blunt nose, gray eyes, an upper lip as sheer as a carpenter's plane, and big capable sailor's hands. At fifteen he shipped aboard a privateer belonging to John Brown of Providence. The ship ran the Newport blockade, but Jim was captured by the British off Bermuda and imprisoned. He escaped, and they caught him again. At twenty-five he served aboard Brown's slaver Providence, with a share in her profits. At twenty-six he owned his own: the brig Little Watt. That year—1790—he came ashore to marry sharp-tongued, button-nosed Nancy Bradford, the daughter of Washington's honored friend. She brought him as much money as he had made himself, and a respectability which was beyond the reach of his immigrant father or his low-born disreputable uncle Potter. James had the touch of Midas. As early as 1799 he contracted to build for the infant Navy, at a shipyard in neighboring Warren, the 624-ton ship-of-war General Greene. By 1800, next to the Brown brothers of Providence, he was probably the richest man in the state. His partnership with his own brothers was modeled on that of the Browns—James and Josey, Nick and Mosey, as Providence called them—and just as Moses Brown, even before the others, abandoned the slave trade for conscience' sake, the deWolfs had a maverick in the person of the Quakerish Levi. If John had the intellect of the family, and Charles its meanness, and William its gentleness, and James its comeliness, what piety the deWolfs inherit comes from Levi and the girls. In 1814, when Congress imposed a direct tax to prosecute the war with England, the brothers' possessions were valued as follows: Levi $ 7,500 John 18,800 Charles 25,500 William 43,500 James 91,500 II Slave labor was never profitable in Rhode Island. As early as 1708 Governor Cranston wrote of the general dislike our planters have of them [slaves], by reason of their turbulent and unruly tempers. The inclination of our people in general is to employ white servants before negroes. In 1784, when most families of substance had bought or inherited one or two slaves, the Bristol stock was only 73, or 5 per cent in a population of 1195. Oddly enough, none belonged to the deWolfs, though Widow Burt the schoolmistress, poor as she was, owned four. In the same year, Parson Wight's census reports 122 white bondservants and 25 free Negroes, besides two surviving Indians. Though there were 600,000 slaves in the whole country, fewer than 900 were owned in the state. Byfield kept ten bonded whites and one slave. The carrying trade was a different matter. Its history runs from 16ig, when a Dutch ship sold six Africans in Virginia, to 1820, when it became a hanging crime. The first native American traders of record are two elders of Boston who in 1645 imported a pair of slaves aboard the ship Rainbow, only to be forced by the horrified governor to ship them home again. The first Rhode Islander was one Edwin Carter of Newport: in 1700 he sailed for Africa with two sloops in company, and returned with full cargoes. By a treaty with Spain in 1713 called the Assiento, Great Britain was granted a monop[o]ly on supplying slaves for the Spanish colonies of the Western Hemisphere, and bound herself to ship at least 4800 a year. This treaty, under successive names, lasted through the colonial century; most of its beneficiaries were English merchants, but those of the American colonies profited from it as well. Most New England seaports shunned the traffic, but the little colony of Rhode Island, and especially the ports of Bristol and Newport, became the chief suppliers of the great consumers to the south. In 1770 a hundred and fifty Rhode Island vessels, outnumbering those of all the other colonies together, engaged in the slave trade, and thirty distilleries man[u]factured the rum which was its currency. Since the early registers are lost, it is unknown which of the slavers hailed from Bristol. The first dealer on record is Simeon Potter, for whose account Captain Charles deWolf, in 1775, sold a few slaves in Jamaica for £42/6 from an unnamed vessel. But Potter was a casual trader; the first recorded voyage from Bristol to Africa for the specific purpose of buying slaves was made by Shearjashub Bourn's tiny schooner Nancy, of twenty tons. She cleared September 24, 1789, with John deWolf in command. An act of 1774 prohibited the importation of slaves to the colony, but excepted those brought from the West Indies in Rhode Island bottoms. Another, in 1784, granted freedom after ten years of servitude to any slaves imported thereafter. In 1787, after the Revolution, the Assembly forbade all participation in the foreign slave trade, under a penalty of £100 per slave and £1000 per ship. Even then, as the Nancy's voyage shows, the law was not enforced. The framers of the Constitution would have abolished the trade altogether, except that Georgia and South Carolina threatened to secede if they did. To keep the two states in the Union, the document contains this compromise: The importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, in which the only consolation for the trade's opponents was the fact that slaves were described as Persons, and that the legislatures of every state except Georgia had in fact forbidden their importation. Yet the trade had always been a little disreputable, even when it was legal. After the act of 1787, merchants at least became less inclined to boast of it, and John Brown of Providence wrote apologetically to his Quaker brother Moses in that year: I have it in mind to fit the ship General Washington to the East Indies, in which case I shall not be any more concerned in the Guinea trade. By 1788 enough of the former colonies had ratified the Constitution to form a new nation. Although Rhode Island had declared her independence two months before the rest of them, now, contrary as always, she refused, for almost two years after President Washington's election, to join the Union. It was only when Congress threatened to lay tarilfs against her shipping that she yielded. The Assembly wrote the President in 1789, "We are induced to hope that we shall not be altogether considered as foreigners," but when he would not relent, they capitulated. In 1790, last of the thirteen original states, Rhode Island ratified. The following year Washington appointed his old friend William Ellery as Collector of the Port for the Newport district, which included Bristol. Ellery had signed the Declaration of Independence. Like the other signers, he had done so at the risk of his life. He was a straight-gazing patriot, scholarly, energetic, and incorruptible. Now sixty-three, he wore his hair to the shoulder in the new-fashioned way, and mounted steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose. He had nothing against the village of Bristol—in fact, he had lived there in his youth. Widow Burt was his sister. His own father had dealt in slaves, while the trade was still legal. But he was sworn to protect the government's revenue, nine-tenths of which was derived from tonnage and import duties at the seaports. He regarded smuggling, and especially the smuggling of slaves, as nothing short of treason. Except for foreign envoys, the Cabinet, and the Supreme judiciary, Collectors of the Port held the most honored and lucrative posts in the President's gift. There were twenty-two collection districts in Massachusetts (which still included Maine), one in New Hampshire, four in Connecticut, and two—Providence and Newport—in Rhode Island. Ellery's district promised to give more trouble than any of the rest. He had no doubt that the deWolf brothers of Bristol—Charles, William, John, and James—with the help of their uncle Simeon Potter, were violating both state and federal law, and defrauding the Treasury of customs duties, by fitting ships to Africa for the slave trade and selling their human freight in Havana, far out of his reach, or, still worse, in the southern ports of the United States. But this was not the only illicit conduct charged to them. Since a slaver's insurance covered mortality only in excess of 20 per cent, it was a natural temptation to throw a sick slave overboard rather than let him infect the others. In 1791 the federal grand jury, in its first session for Rhode Island, returned an indictment of murder against James deWolf for jettisoning a female slave who had caught the smallpox on the Middle Passage aboard a bark of which he was master. The ship registers are missing for the years from 1786 to 1791, so we do not know the name of the vessel or her owner. We do not know which citizen was brave enough to prefer the charge against Captain Jim, but Collector Ellery would be a good guess. The faded indictment, still buried in the files of the Department of justice, charges that . . . James deWolf, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil . . . did feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought, with his hands clinch and seize in and upon the body of said Negro woman . . . and did push, cast and throw her from out of said vessel into the Sea and waters of the Ocean, whereby and whereupon she then and there instantly sank, drowned and died. Though President Washington, through Attorney General Jay, issued a capias for Captain Jim's arrest, and though Bristol is almost within sight of Newport, the federal marshal, for the next four years, reported semi-annually to the court that "he could not by me be found," until, in 1795, a more lenient district attorney nol-prossed the case. A story was long extant in town that the young captain of the deWolf slaver Su key, had thrown several slaves overboard, and, when they clung to the taffrail, had cut off their hands at the wrist. There may be some truth in this tale, though Captain Jim. was a humane man, for the broad-minded John Brown wrote to a friend, just before the election of 1802: I wish it may properly be introduced to Mr. James deWolf that it already begins to be talked of in our streets that if he don't conduct himself within the bounds of reason, the statement of his murdering his negroes in the smallpox to preserve the other part of his cargo in his passage from Africa will be echoed through the papers of the various states. . . . I assure you that his going a deputy will, in my opinion, cause great clamor against the town as being in favor of the Guinea Trade directly in the face of the law. Eighteen hundred and eight was a long way in the future, but the public conscience gradually awoke. An act of 1794 forbade Americans to carry slaves between foreign countries, or into or out of any state whose own statutes prohibited the trade. This was the law which Potter taught Captain Jim to evade, and it soon covered all the states, for even Georgia outlawed the business. The penalty was a hundred dollars per slave and forfeiture of the ship. Another law, in 1800, added two years in prison and fined the crew of a slaver a hundred dollars a head. This act did not pass without the opposition of the New England shipowners. During the debate the reformed John Brown, by then a Congressman, exclaimed on the floor of the House, "Why should we see Great Britain getting all the slave-trade to themselves? Why may not our own country be enriched by that lucrative traffic?" It was one thing to enact laws and another to enforce them. The infant government had no navy. The Bristol captains, who knew Narragansett Bay like the inside of their own pockets, could slip past Newport by any of three chann els under cover of darkness or fog, and then stand for Africa, where there were no consuls to prevent their loading slaves, and thence to the sugar islands, which were only too willing to receive their black cargoes. In July of 1799 the schooner Lucy, in ballast, tied up at the deWolf warehouse. She was a trim vessel of sixty-six tons with two masts and the figurehead of a woman. She had been built only two years before at Norwich, Connecticut. Charles Collins, a brother-in-law of James deWolf (his wife had been Lydia Bradford, a sister of Nancy's), was her master. Collins, a politician with impudent hazel eyes and full cheeks like a chipmunk's, was an old hand at evading the law. In 1791, at Halifax, before he was twenty, he had been fined for smuggling flour, and had written a letter home, which Ellery had seen, in which he said of the British judges who sentenced him, "May the great God curse the bunch of them." Charles deWolf was the Lucy's owner. William and James had posted her good-conduct bond for $1500 Most of the village, directly or indirectly, had some stake in her. She had not lain a week at the wharf before Collector Ellery, in Newport, libeled her as a suspected slaver. The United States District Court at Providence condemned her to be sold for the benefit of the government. Ellery ordered his local surveyor at Bristol, Samuel Bosworth, to attend the auction and bid on her for the Treasury. She was a brisk sailer, as slavers had to be, and would make a fine revenue cutter for Narragansett Bay. It was an unpalatable assignment for Bosworth, for he depended on the deWolfs for his fees, and even for his livelihood. So did many of his fellow townsmen-the seamen and coopers and chandlers who made their living from the outlaw trade. Collins and the deWolfs urged him to defy Ellery's order, so that they could bid the Lucy in themselves, without competition. John Brown himself rode down from Providence to dissuade him. But Bosworth, grandson of the deacon who had built the first house in town and led the first prayers, was not a man to shirk his duty. He asked Ellery to let him off, but when the order was repeated he prepared to attend the sale and bid for the Lucy against her owners. He reached the wharf a little before ten on the morning of July 25. A good crowd was waiting for the "vandoo" to begin, though no one except the government or the deWolfs themselves could afford to buy the vessel. As the unwilling surveyor passed the corner of Thames Street and Pump Lane, Collins, standing in a doorway, waved his hat. Instantly eight men dressed as Indians, with faces blacked, ran out from the crowd. They seized Bosworth and hustled him into a skiff that lay tied to the piling of the wharf. He called to Russell Warren, the housewright, who was in plain sight through the open door of his shop. Warren did not hear him. Captain Aaron Usher bustled to help him, but was too late. The agent of the United States government was rowed off from the wharf in silence, down the harbor and around Ferry Point, and dumped ashore at the base of Mount Hope, two miles afoot, and through the woods at that, from the Lucy. The federal marshal postponed the sale as long as he dared. Collins and the deWolfs had not forgotten that it takes two to make an auction. They let themselves be outbid by a Cuban captain in their own employ. The Lucy resumed her trade under the flag of Spain, and the Treasury was enriched by a paltry $738. To most New Englanders, Jefferson was a dangerous radical, if not the Devil incarnate. Potter and the two seafaring deWolf brothers, Charles and James, were almost the only men of substance in New England who supported his new Republican party against the Federalists. (William and John did not commit themselves.) They even organized a Tammany Society in the village, with free beer supplied by Captain Jim. Two years after the affair of the Lucy, when Jefferson succeeded John Adams, they took their revenge on Ellery. They persuaded Jefferson to set up an independent revenue district for Bristol and Warren, with a collector of its own. The man whom Jefferson appointed was Charles Collins, captain of the convicted slaver. Surveyor Bosworth wrote bravely to Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, that Collins was even then part owner of the slavers Armstadt and Minerva, and Ellery himself protested to Jefferson: if erecting the unnecessary collectorship at Bristol was an insult to him, handing it to Collins was a disgrace to the country. The protests did them no good, for Jefferson knew the value of rich friends in a hostile state, and his apparent innocence was the greatest part of his acumen. The deWolfs did not dare have Bosworth dismissed as surveyor, but he was never promoted. He stayed on as a subordinate for the rest of his life. Like many officeholders since, he had learned the penalties of independence, and complained no more. The Senate confirmed Collins. On the day he swore to uphold the Constitution, the Minerva landed a hundred and fifty slaves at Havana. Soon after his appointment, Ellery wrote resignedly to a friend: The slave traders, as if determined to set Congress at naught, are driving on their trade Jehu-like. Not less than eight or ten vessels have sailed or are about sailing from Bristol to Africa. But forsooth most of them, like deWolf's vessels, claim they go for elephants' teeth and gold-dust. 1 expect that the houses of some of the Great Folks will be adorned with ivory, and their horses shod with gold. Some suspect and hope that the slave act will be repealed at the next session of Congress. I can see that this open defiance of law will be as likely to effect it as the late exploit of the Indians was to procure a collector of customs for the district of Bristol. Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. Collins continued as collector for Bristol twenty years, issuing clearances to any vessels he chose, without control by Ellery. Ellery's only advantage was his command of the revenue cutter Vigilant, but he could not use her against the Bristol traders without clear proof they had violated the law, which was always hard to get. In 1802, with Potter's help and over Brown's protest, James deWolf was elected to the legislature, defeating the Federalist Sam Wardwell. Wardwell dealt in slaves too, but had not been accused of drowning them. Not long after the election, Captain Jim passed Wardwell's pigpen on Thames Street. Wardwell was leaning over the fence, admiring his stock. When Captain Jim was rash enough to taunt him with his defeat, Wardwell swung around, grasped him by the breeches, and threw him into the sty, shouting, "deWolf, you're the hog giest hog of them all." Everybody deplored the slave trade; Jefferson himself exclaimed, "I tremble for my country when I think of the Negro and reflect that God is just." But most people still tolerated it. Neither Bishop Grisweld at St. Michael's nor Parson Wight up street denounced it from his pulpit. Griswold, in fact, inherited a plantationful of slave's in Cuba. This saintly giant who strode from his house to his church bellowing a hymn and fully vested, who was so humble that he blacked the boots of his students and carried the slops downstairs to spare his own servants the chore, was offered a good price for his slaves by Charles deWolf's son George. He declined to sell them, or even liberate them-not because he condoned slavery, but because, as he sensibly put it, the plantation could not be run without them. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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