CHAPTER 12
Providence
On a hot summer day in July we picked up my father at his house on Cape Cod and headed to Providence, a drive of about an hour and a half. My father was born in Providence and lived in a house that is now part of the Brown University campus. Both Melissa and I had been undergraduates at Brown, and for years we'd talked about getting my dad to show us his boyhood haunts. Washington had spent considerable time at Brown (which was then known as Rhode Island College) during his 1790 visit to Providence, so I figured there was no time like the present to visit the campus with my father.
My dad was riding shotgun, and Melissa and Dora were sharing the back seat. My dad was born in 1929, just before the stock-market crash. He was the youngest of four. Both of his older brothers, Charlie and Dick, served in World War II (Charlie was a P-51 pilot stationed in England; Dick was nearly killed during the Battle of the Bulge), as did his sister's husband, Bernie, who was in the Pacific theater. A little kid during the Great Depression and a teenager during World War II, my dad claims he was raised by his dog, Brownie, a big springer spaniel. So it's no surprise that he and Dora have a special relationship. When we stay at my father's house, the two of them end the evening with a friendly tussle on my dad's bed.
We exited from the highway and were soon on South Main Street, with the steep two-hundred-foot-high hill of the East Side on our right and downtown Providence on our left. In the eighteenth century, what is now a wide plain of asphalt between Main Street and the beginnings of downtown was a natural inlet deep enough that vessels of considerable size could sail along the west side of Main Street. It was fun to think of Washington's packet, the Hancock, ghosting along the foot of the hill until it came to the brick Market House, which still stands at the foot of College Street. Washington's sail from Newport had taken more than seven hours, so it must have been fairly late in the day by the time the packet turned into the wharf as the cannons roared and the bells rang. Even before the packet had been secured to the dock, Rhode Island's governor, Arthur Fenner, had leaped aboard so he could be the first to pay his respects to the president. Rhode Island might have been the last of the original thirteen states to join the Union, but its governor was no John Hancock.
Washington and his entourage joined a procession that marched through the streets of the city to the musical accompaniment of three African American fiddlers. Providence in the eighteenth century was much like San Francisco in the nineteenth century: a city on the side of a steep hill facing the water. It made for a natural amphitheater as the citizens jammed the steeply pitched side streets and crowded around the windows and roofs of the houses for the best possible view of the president. Part of what made it so exciting was that the visit was so unexpected. Why would Washington take the trouble to visit a state that had not even participated in his election? But, seizing the opportunity to welcome the reluctant Rhode Islanders into the fold, here he was.
By the time Washington's procession had climbed the hill to Benefit Street, evening was coming on. Just across from the brick statehouse were the president's quarters at Abner Daggett's Golden Ball Inn. Washington stood at the door of the tavern to review the parade as it passed by, then retired for a quiet dinner and some tea before bed.
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With my dad calling the shots, we turned right up College Street, then left on Benefit, a street of impeccably maintained historic buildings, many of them owned by either Brown University on the uphill side or the Rhode Island School of Design on the downhill side. "How small everything looks!" my father said. The Golden Ball Inn is long gone, but not, we discovered, the two buildings that once constituted St. Dunstan's School on the corner of Church Street, where my father and his brothers went to elementary school. My father said that in the depths of the Depression most of the houses along Benefit Street were in terrible disrepair. He remembered walking home from school on the day of the 1938 hurricane, which no one knew was coming. The wind was so strong that huge slate roof shingles, big enough to cut a nine-year-old boy in half, were flying through the air. Meanwhile, at the foot of the hill, a massive storm surge had inundated downtown Providence, trapping his father in his second-story office. The next day his father told of looking out his office window and seeing bodies floating down the flooded street. Only later did he realize the bodies were mannequins from a nearby department store.
We turned up the hill in search of Prospect Terrace. A series of unhelpful one-way streets made it harder than it should have been, but eventually we pulled in beside the park and its panoramic view of the city. Underneath a granite arch stood a statue of Roger Williams in the chunky, heroic style of the Art Deco figures of Rockefeller Center in New York, looking out upon the city. Prior to the statue's dedication in 1939, Williams's remains were moved to a tomb underneath the statue. During the disinterment it was discovered that the roots of an apple tree had enveloped Williams's body and taken on a human shape. It's wonderful to contemplate: an apple tree nourished by the remains of Roger Williams! His bones were eventually deposited in the new tomb, and today his statue gazes upon yet another statue—that of the eleven-foot-high, gold-covered figure known as the Independent Man atop the rotunda of the Rhode Island State House—highly appropriate for a leader who was interested not in keeping religion out of government but in keeping government out of religion.
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Washington was preparing for bed at the Golden Ball Inn when there was a knock on the door. The students at Rhode Island College had a request. Back then the campus contained only a single massive four-story building, known, appropriately enough, as the College Edifice. The students had illuminated all 146 windows of the building with candles in the president's honor and wondered whether he might come take a look.
It was not a good night for a walk. A cold rain was coming down, and to get to the Edifice, they would have to walk up a steep, slippery hill in the dark. But Washington was all for it. Dragging his entourage along, the president set out up the hill toward the building that presided over eighteenth-century Providence much as the Parthenon does Athens.
The Edifice, now known as University Hall and to this day one of the largest buildings on Brown's central green, was built in 1770 after members of the Brown family succeeded in moving the college (founded by Baptists in the nearby seaport village of Warren) to Providence. There were four Brown brothers, and all of them were intimately connected with the college. Moses had been instrumental in moving the campus to Providence. Joseph had designed the Edifice, and Nicholas had built it, while John, the college's treasurer, had laid the cornerstone. The four brothers had once been very close, both personally and professionally. But in 1764, they put money into a slave-trading voyage to the west coast of Africa that went horribly wrong. By the time the slave ship Sally, captained by Esek Hopkins (future commander of the Continental navy), reached the Caribbean, 109 of 196 enslaved Africans had died. Three of the brothers, Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses, never again invested in the slave trade, but not John, who remained an unapologetic slave trader for years to come.
In 1773, Moses underwent a spiritual conversion, becoming both a Quaker and an abolitionist. It was only a matter of time before Moses and John had a very public falling-out. Under thinly veiled pseudonyms, the two began attacking each other in print. Moses condemned slavery as a sin, while John insisted that the slave trade "had been permitted by the Supreme Governor of all things from time immemorial, and whenever I am convinced as you are, that it's wrong in the sight of God, I will immediately desist." That had been back in 1786. By 1789, when Moses founded the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, John was an even more adamant defender of the slave trade, going so far as to claim, "There is no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses." John, a big man with a loud raspy voice, took great delight in exposing what he felt were the self-serving pieties of New England's Quakers. When Moses urged his fellow Rhode Islanders to invest in the textile industry as an alternative to the slave trade, his brother gleefully reminded him where the cotton for a textile mill came from: "the labor of the slaves."
As John would have no doubt enjoyed bringing to his brother's attention, even Rhode Island College was hopelessly enmeshed in slavery. Not only the Browns but slaveholding families throughout the country, including that of Henry Laurens from Charleston—a former president of the Continental Congress and one of the foremost slave traders in the United States—had donated money to the college. Enslaved workers had built the College Edifice with lumber donated by Lopez and Rivera, the largest slave-trading firm in Newport.
On that wet dark night in August 1790, when Washington crested the hill and saw the college ablaze with light, he witnessed a spectacle that has been repeated on special occasions many times since. Every commencement week, the lights go on in the windows of University Hall just as they did in Washington's honor. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brown's commencements were being overseen by the Ivy League's first African American president, Ruth Simmons. In 2003, Simmons commissioned a study to investigate the university's link to slavery. Its findings, published in a document titled Slavery and Justice, set a precedent that many colleges and universities have followed since.
Having come from a family with close ties to Brown (not only was my father virtually raised on the campus, but his grandfather had served as the college's librarian from 1893 to 1930), I was aware of the Brown family's connection to slavery. In the 1990s, I'd even co-written an unproduced screenplay set at a Brown-like college that includes a lachrymose confession by one of the characters about his family's slave-trading past. So when I first heard about Brown's highly controversial decision to explore the university's association with slavery, I must admit to thinking, what more is there to know? Well, let me tell you, I had no idea about how intimately involved not just Brown but all of Rhode Island was in southern slavery.
Yes, there were slave traders in Newport, Bristol, and Providence, but most of the state's slavery connections were more indirect. Rhode Island's farmers and merchants provided plantation owners in the Caribbean and the southern states with beef, butter, hay, horses, candles, salt cod, barrel hoops and staves, timber, and shoes. Other Rhode Islanders were in the rum distillery business, purchasing slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean and distilling it into the rum that was then used to trade for slaves in Africa. More than any other northern state, Rhode Island served as, in the words of the Slavery and Justice report, "the commissary of the Atlantic plantation complex."
It was a tragic irony that Moses Brown, the high-minded Quaker abolitionist and textile manufacturer, not John Brown, the unrepentant slave trader, created one of Rhode Island's most enduring and pervasive connections to the slaveholding South.