The Brown Family

Brown University Benefactors

To a busy, highly educated, social-media-savvy, staring-at-smartphone-while-skateboarding, thoroughly up-to-date individual of present-day now, Rhode Island may not seem a likely place to have been deeply involved in the slave trade. After all, it’s not in the South—it’s in New England, for gosh sakes!—it’s quaint, it seems kind of nice, it’s extremely small. But check out this bogus eighteenth-century tweet: ZOUNDS! RI AT HEART OF SLAVE-SHIPPING & -SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRY, W/BIG SLAVE MARKETS, LOTSA SLAVES ON FARMS, SWEATSHOPS, EVERYWHERE!#PROFIT

For Rhode Islanders, the slave trade^* was the hot new business opportunity, the virtual-reality goggles of the era. From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, Rhode Islanders invested^* in over 1,000 slave ships, wresting more than 106,000 human beings from their African homelands and… well, you don’t need us to fill in the gory details.

So successful was slaving that it took over—became—the economy of Rhode Island.^* There were boatbuilders and carpenters, sailmakers, blacksmiths, caulkers, rope makers and riggers, shackle-and-chain artisans, and all the other specialists required for the construction of seaworthy vessels with belowdeck dungeons. There were provisioners, supplying the ships with victuals. There were captains, sailors, cooks. And there was the rum industry,* an integral piece of the triangle-trade puzzle, which employed distillery workers and laborers, lumberjacks who felled trees, teamsters who transported the trees, and coopers who fashioned the wood into barrels. Don’t forget the hoteliers, housekeeping staff, and, presumably, prostitutes, all mandatory components of thriving seaports everywhere. It was a sprawling enterprise, and if you lived there you were involved, directly or indirectly.

The entrepreneurial Brown brothers, James and Obadiah, were already successful merchants when they decided to diversify their holdings and invest in the booming slavery sector. In 1736, their first ship put Providence on the slave-trade map and opened up a new income stream for the Browns. Over the next couple of decades the family kept its slave trading local, avoiding the risks of the high seas. But in the late 1750s James’s four sons, John, Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses, wishing to benefit from their age’s biggest cash cow, plunged back in. They made money, but there were still risks, not the least of which was that the slave business was rapidly becoming a craze, like the dot-com boom. If you were looking for a quick buck and had no moral qualms, you wanted in on the action. Eventually, an oversupply of rum and an undersupply of potential slaves motivated the invisible hand of the marketplace to start slapping the business pretty hard, and it became increasingly difficult to, shall we say, make a killing buying and selling people. Picture an enormous fleet of ships off the west coast of Africa—more than two dozen from wee Rhode Island alone—trying to avoid crashing into each other* as their agents onshore struggled to make deals.

Finally, three of the four Brown brothers reevaluated their investment priorities, assessed their risk tolerance, and reallocated their resources to other divisions of the family firm—their whale-oil candle works, for instance, and their iron foundry. The fourth brother, John, redoubled his commitment to the intercontinental slave import-export racket, becoming an outspoken advocate for the practice. After brother Noah had a come-to-Jesus moment/nervous breakdown and turned against the business of human bondage, the two clashed often and publicly.

Honoré de Balzac has been misquoted as saying that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. These hyperbolic, inaccurately ascribed^* words should be kept in mind as a preventive against future embarrassment by every high-minded institution ready to exchange naming rights for big, fat donations. Case in point: the College of Rhode Island. It was founded in 1764 and supported from the start by the Browns and others in the local moneyed set (including the governor of the colony and foundry partner of the Browns, Stephen Hopkins). The proximate cause of the name change from CRI to Brown U, in 1804, was a gift from Nicholas Brown, Jr. (class of 1786), although it was also surely a tip of the mortarboard to forty years of Brown family philanthropy—philanthropy funded in large measure by the family’s super-non-PC predilection for abducting and enslaving Africans. As this fake tweet so eloquently states: BROWNS’ SKEEVY BIZ DEALINGS ARE, OR SHOULD BE, A CONTINUING MORTIFICATION TO 21ST-CENTURY BROWN STUDENTS, PROFS, ADMINS, & GRADS!!!#SHAME.