Slaves, tea prized during Colonial revolution
Jamestown, 250 years ago, edged ever closer to an abyss.
1774 was the calm before the storm, one year before the War of Independence — and before John Eldred shot a cannon at the passing British navy, killing a boatswain, which prompted the Brits to burn most of the houses to the ground on Ferry Road (Narragansett Avenue).
They also fatally shot farmer John Martin in the stomach.
No one could predict the horrors approaching on the horizon. All Colonial ports were on edge after the assault in December 1773 on British imports. Mariner Peleg Clarke, who would later inherit all the land on Beavertail, sailed into Boston Harbor after returning from a slaving voyage from Africa and Jamaica. Landing just days before the Boston Tea Party, he witnessed the sacking of the British East India Company. He prophetically wrote that if British tea was allowed to land, “there will be bloodshed.”
In January 1774, the Newport Mercury featured declarations of defiance from the Sons of Liberty protesting the Tea Act and the British monopoly on the product. Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson vowed “to discover the offenders” of the “high-handed riot … committed by persons disguised and unknown on board three vessels from London.”
Hutchinson’s figure cast a long shadow over Jamestown as he owned the farm north of Weeden Lane. He kept a close eye on his property.
In response to the protest, the British enacted five Coercive Acts, the first of which blockaded the port until Boston provided restitution for the crown’s damage goods. Hardship and hunger ensued.
Before the war, Jamestown shared in Newport’s economic boom and the island grew to 563 residents, a peak not reached again for another 120 years. Much of Newport’s commerce, like Boston’s, comprised smuggled goods such as Dutch tea. Merchants were irate that British tea was now cheaper, which undercut their illicit goods.
Newport protested and Jamestown joined. The town council resolved to “prevent any tea subject to a duty sent out by the East India Company being Landed in this town… and will stand by and support our brethren in this and the sister colonies,” defending “our just rights and privileges as Englishmen … to curb the arbitrary mandates of an overbearing ministerial plan of government tending to slavery.”
Gentry in Jamestown, many of them slave owners, protested British “enslavement”, which may ring hollow to the modern ear, but they perceived no irony. The town council spoke more for the 23 white male landholders who could vote than the hundreds of propertyless disenfranchised residents who labored or slaved. Four-fifths of these voters were slave owners and challenged any infringement on their liberty to trade, whether in tea or humans.
Boston’s turmoil had not yet interrupted the Rhode Island slave trade. Twenty-seven Rhode Island voyages carried over 3,000 captives to the Americas that year. Six voyages were owned by current or future Jamestown landholders, including Audley and Peleg Clarke and Joseph Wanton. Providence Quakers sought a ban, authoring an “act prohibiting the importation of Negroes to Rhode Island.” But slave traders were unconcerned as almost all slaves already disembarked outside the colony. Further, it even allowed entry of slaves who “could not be disposed of in the West Indies.”
Slave traders, however, dreaded a potential war with England, the world’s greatest sea power. Clarke, in February 1774, received frantic instructions while in West Africa to “make the most of the time present as war will frustrate all our Guinea schemes.” His merchant sponsor advised, “if your negros are healthy,” they will fetch “42 pounds sterling at Jamaica where small slaves and even mangy ones sell better than in any other island.”
Highlighting the chasm between bondage for slaves and solidarity with the merchants’ cause, councilors in Jamestown resolved in September to “raise a sum of money or produce either in new milch cheese, fat sheep, or cash … for supporting the poor of the town of Boston in the great American cause for Liberty.”
Jamestown freeholders could not imagine that in only a year, the tables would turn. It would be more destitute than Boston, with 16 dwellings burnt and most livestock removed along with two-fifths of the residents. Soon, the economy would collapse for former slaveholders like Daniel Underwood and Christopher Fowler. They would be receiving alms from their Quaker brethren, and the former town clerk, Benjamin Underwood, would be in debtors’ prison while his six slaves were free.
