Stephen Hopkins

Brown University Benefactor

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Stephen Hopkins was a boldface name—arguably Rhode Island’s number-one notable—in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. Born into a well-established Providence family* in 1707, his father and grandfather presented him with 160 acres of farmland in nearby Scituate, Massachusetts, when he was nineteen; by age twenty-three the ambitious young man was not only a farmer but a local justice of the peace. Looking to live a little larger, he sold the farm in 1742 and moved back to town, where he entered the mainstream of Providence life as a shipbuilder, ship outfitter, ship owner, and import-export merchant. Later on he went into the iron foundry business in partnership with the Brown Family. Within five years of his move to Providence he was a justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court; then chief justice; and in 1755 he became the governor of what was then called the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Always a studious sort, Hopkins was a stout supporter,* and the first chancellor, of the College of Rhode Island (later known as Brown University) from its founding in 1764. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act,* a nasty piece of work designed to control commerce and suck money, in the form of taxes and duties, out of the colonies. To counter this sort of financial oppression, Hopkins wrote a pamphlet entitled The Rights of Colonies Examined, published by the Rhode Island General Assembly. It was a rousing, widely distributed success, a foundational document in American-revolutionary thinking. A decade later, Hopkins was among those who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Thus far, we have portrayed him as an unalloyed hero of the revolution. But there’s one important detail we left out.

The Rights of Colonies Examined includes these thoughts: “Liberty is the greatest blessing that men enjoy, and slavery the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of.… Those who are governed at the will of another, and whose property may be taken from them… without their consent… are in the miserable condition of slaves.”

So Hopkins was well aware that slavery was a terrible thing. A curse. Which is ironic, to say the least, as Hopkins was involved in casting that very curse on other human beings. He owned at least five slaves.* And, like pretty much everyone* in Rhode Island in the 1700s, he profited, at least indirectly, from the slave trade: building ships, outfitting ships, owning ships… need we say more? And that iron foundry he co-owned with the Brown family: ship fittings, shackles, chains.… Speaking of the Browns, Stephen Hopkins’s brother, Esek,* was the captain of one of their slave ships. Not that we expect Stephen to have been Esek’s keeper, but it does show that there was only the tiniest degree of separation between those who trafficked directly in slaves and those who merely kept some slaves of their own while profiting from the sale of shackle-and-chain ensembles.

As the revolution approached, Hopkins came to the realization that the curse of slavery was incompatible—duh!, yes, but not everyone reached the same conclusion, obviously—with the quest to build a new country founded on freedom and equality. In 1774, he introduced an early antislavery bill and started setting his own slaves free.

Better late than never, Mr. Hopkins.