1642 to 1807 · Diasporaspan
Rhode Island fitted out half the slave ships in North America
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Merchants in three small Rhode Island towns, Newport, Bristol and Providence, outfitted roughly half of all slaving voyages sailing from the North American mainland. Their vessels were smaller than European ones and their trade good was rum, distilled in New England out of Caribbean molasses and carried to the Gold Coast forts at Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle. The destinations spread across the Atlantic world. About 11,000 captives went to Saint-Domingue and about 30,000 to Cuba, with the rest distributed through the British Americas. The business ran before the American Revolution and carried on after it. Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation law in 1784, and its merchants kept sending ships to Africa regardless, because the profit sat in the carrying trade rather than in owning the labour at home. An account that locates American slaving in the plantation South has to explain the ledgers kept at Newport, where a town of a few thousand people organised the deportation of tens of thousands.
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