"The Notorious Triangle": Rhode Island Rum Runners

Image above courtesy of http://riroads.com/history/ri_rum_runners.htm

The “notorious triangle”, dubbed thus by Jay Coughtry (James’ review of his essay is cited below), forever changed the prospects and culture of tiny Rhode Island. When the port cities - Newport, Bristol, South Kingstown, and, slightly inland, even Roger William’s beloved Providence – partnered with the rum and slave trades, the people of the tiny and previously overlooked colony to experience an economical boom such as had not been seen in the colony yet. Soon Rhode Island became the leading colony in slave trade activity. In fact, Coughtry argues that Rhode Island merchants were almost completely responsible for the triangle trade (though James seems to believe this is an exaggeration.) A quote from a Rhode Island historian (slavenorth.com) explains the involvement of the Rhode Islanders in the gritty business:

"All together, 204 different Rhode Island citizens owned a share or more in a slave voyage at one time or another. It is evident that the involvement of R.I. citizens in the slave trade was widespread and abundant. For Rhode Islanders, slavery had provided a major new profit sector and an engine for trade in the West Indies."

While 204 investors may not seem a huge number, one must take into consideration the generally small population Rhode Island boasted in general, only several thousand people until the late 1700s. But it was not only slaves that made Rhode Island rich. Rum, distilled from Caribbean molasses, soon became the wampum (so to speak) of Rhode Island, used to trade for slaves in Africa, who were went to the West Indies, who worked the sugar plantations, from whence came the molasses in the first place. This New England-Africa-West Indies-New England ship and trade line formed a pattern dubbed the “Triangle Trade” and the “Rum Triangle.” This West Indian rum was soon the toast of Africa, some of whose citizens were willing to sell their own fellows for a bottle of the stuff. And more, besides being good for trade in Africa, rum became immensely popular among the colonists themselves.

It seems the Spanish had started this “rum-running” tradition, when Columbus found himself no Asian treasure-laden plains in his “India.” To appease the Spanish crown, who had fronted a large sum of money to pay for his multiple voyages, he began to take “Indian” slaves and also sugar back to Spain. The first attempt at distilling a liquor from this raw sugar was a failure, but within a few years, success resulted from the venture. And as usual, British adventurers soon followed suite. I apologize for the following lengthy quotation, but its conciseness makes it worth repeating:

“Between 1709 and 1807, Rhode Island merchants sponsored at least 934 slaving voyages to the coast of Africa and carried an estimated 106,544 slaves to the New World. From 1732-64, Rhode Islanders sent annually 18 ships, bearing 1,800 hogsheads of rum, to Africa to trade for slaves, earning £40,000 annually. Newport, the colony's leading slave port, took an estimated 59,070 slaves to America before the Revolution. Bristol and Providence also prospered from it. In the years after the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves.” (slavenorth.com)

And so, the “notorious triangle” gave eighteenth century Rhode Island’s economy a makeover it would never forget.

SOURCES

James, Sydney V. “Review: Of Slaves and Rum.” Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1982): 168-172. Online. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2702323.

http://64.251.194.106/archives/2004-july-aug/wine_rum_revival.htm

www.slavenorth.com

Population Growth and Immigrants in the Rhode Island Colony

In the late 17th through the early 18th century, Rhode Island colony experienced a slow influx of migration, stimulated only by the maritime and slave trades which boomed in the early 1700s.

12 friends, as Roger Williams dubbed them, founded Providence, Rhode Island in1636. These were religiously-independent Englishmen, soon followed by their wives and families and other religious refugees persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay colonies. They were overall a hard-working group, as they, unlike some southern and Caribbean colonists, for example, did not expect aid from the crown or native tribute. They knew they would forge their own way in that forested Rhode Island shoreline. This lifestyle and the general disdain that Massachusetts held for the colony – in fact, far from supporting this infant colony, Massachusetts sought to destroy it – kept its numbers small. The initial wave of settlers occurred between 1636 and1645, but over the next few decades population growth was very slow, mainly only the descendants of the original generation which had multiplied itself by then with children and grandchildren, etc. The English maintained a handful of towns consisting of several hundred families total, roughly two thousand people according to my estimate. Quakers established themselves particularly in Newport, and small populations of Jews, Catholics, and variant protestant remnants found sanctuary in this relatively tolerant society of misfits. Indians, though usually not included in population estimates, also thrived there, though they sold a large portion of their land to the settlers for profit.

The next wave of immigration occurred after King Philip’s War, which began in 1674 and after almost a two-year bloody conflict ended in 1675. Squashing native strongholds allowed the English to feel a new sense of ownership of their colony, originally purchased from the Narragansett and until 1675 dependent upon Indian trade and relations. Now the English formed a stronger government, spread out across the previously sparsely settled land, and began to receive immigrants directly from England. By 1689, the population doubled, perhaps 4000 people, again not counting the Indians.

Over the next twenty years, the rate of growth slowed somewhat, yet still the population nearly doubled again by 1708, when a census recorded 7,181 persons living in Rhode Island – a tiny number compared to the great plantation states of Virginia and Pennsylvania, surely, but a respectable growing community considering its unofficial beginnings in ratio of people to land area. Of this number, there were many descendants of the original first generations, people who tended to keep to themselves and would not have infiltrated the neighboring colonies too much. There were also newcomers, many of them lured by the prosperous fishing business, and by the ever-growing, highly profitable slave trade. And finally, the colony was now not as unpopular as it once was with the Massachusetts folk, now that Indian friendship had been minimized and official English government had been established.

Maritime industries brought some success to the small, formerly isolated colony; however, it was not until the lucrative slave trade was established in Newport and surrounding ports that Rhode Island became a really powerful, wealthy colony. The slave trade brought with it international affiliations, rum-running, and even more maritime fame. As will be revealed later in our study, this new-found status brought with it a sudden population boom, and by 1774 a census listed tiny Rhode Island’s population at 59,678 person – more than 8 times as many people as in the 1708 census taken only two generations years earlier.

SOURCES:

Fisch, Lila M. [untitled]. Review of Economic development and Population Growth in Rhode Island, by Kurt. B. Mayer. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1954): 240-242. Accessed online March 18, 2011. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3348354

Whitney, Herbert A. “Estimating Precensus Populations: A Method Suggested and Applied to the Towns of Rhode Island and Plymouth Colonies in 1689.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 55, No. 1 (1965):179-189. Accessed online March 18, 2011. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2561608.