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The Rhode Island Slave-Traders: Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick-Makers

On 12 July 1770, David Beekman, a factor in St Croix, wrote to Newport, Rhode Island merchant, Aaron Lopez, informing him of the state of the slave market on the Caribbean island. At the close of the letter, he told Lopez, ‘You may depend should you or any of your friends have any command this way be assured no one will serve them on better terms than I shall and take care of their interest...’ Beekman’s appeal was typical of the many such applications made to eighteenth-century Rhode Island merchants. Indeed, his language suggests that he faced competition from other factors on the island. In writing to Lopez, a well-known, wellconnected merchant, Beekman was clearly seeking to develop contacts among Rhode Island slave-traders, whom he apparently saw as a substantial source of potential clients. Contemporaries, then, were certainly aware of Rhode Island’s interest in the slave-trade, although historians have only recently begun to document and quantify the nature and scope of its involvement. From early in the eighteenth century until the end of 1807, when the American branch of the Atlantic slave-trade was officially closed, Rhode Island slavers were responsible for at least half of all slaving voyages from mainland North America. At times, Rhode Islanders controlled as much as 60 to 90 per cent of that traffic, leading one historian to suggest that the American slave-trade might be better termed the ‘Rhode Island slave trade’. Yet, while we now know a considerable amount about the economic side of the Rhode Island slave-trade and its role in the larger Atlantic slave-trade, relatively little is known about the slave-traders themselves – those contacts David Beekman had in mind when he wrote to Aaron Lopez. The purpose of this article is to study some of those traders in terms of their identities, prominence, wealth and occupations, with respect to the existing historiography and in the context of the structure and organization of the trade. In the main, two distinct but related points emerge: first, the