Nicholas Brown, Sr.
Providence, Rhode Island merchant, civic leader and co-signer of the charter of the College of Rhode Island in 1763
1729 CE to 1791 CE
Nicholas Brown Sr. (July 26, 1729 – May 29, 1791) is a Providence, Rhode Island merchant, civic leader and co-signer of the charter of the College of Rhode Island in 1763.
In 1771, Nicholas Brown Sr. is instrumental in convincing Baptist authorities to locate a permanent home for the College in his hometown of Providence.
'In 1804, the College is renamed Brown University following a gift made by Brown's son Nicholas Brown Jr.
World
The Atlantic Lands
View →Related Events
Showing 3 events out of 3 total
In 1764, Rhode Island has about thirty rum distilleries, twent-two in Newport alone.
The Common Burial Ground on Farewell Street is where most of the slaves are buried.
Sixty percent of slave-trading voyages launched from North America issue from tiny Rhode Island, in some years more than ninety percent, and many from Newport.
William and Samuel Vernon are Newport merchants who later play an important role in financing the creation of the United States Navy; they sponsor thirty African slaving ventures.
However, it is the DeWolfs of Bristol, Rhode Island, and most notably James De Wolf, who are the largest slave-trading family in all of North America, mounting more than eighty transatlantic voyages, most of them illegal.
The Rhode Island slave trade is broadly based.
Seven hundred Rhode Islanders own or captain slave ships, including most substantial merchants, and many ordinary shopkeepers and tradesmen who purchase shares in slaving voyages.
Spermaceti, oil produced by the sperm whale, is used in the eighteenth century to produce a superior candle.
The United Spermaceti Candle Making Company is founded in Newport and its founding partners include the Brown brothers of Providence, Aaron Lopez and Jacob Rodriguez Rivera of Newport.
The company controls the American market in the production and distribution of spermaceti candles.
The candle factories are located in both Providence and Newport and the labor force includes many slaves.
Ironically, the founding partners will later become most famous for being the early contributors to Brown University in Providence and Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest existing synagogue in North America.
Several Rhode Island merchant families (most notably the Browns, for whom Brown University is named) begin in the late eighteenth century to actively engage in the triangle slave trade on which the Rhode Island economy largely depends, and in which Rhode Islanders distill rum from molasses, send the rum to Africa to trade for slaves, and then trade the slaves in the West Indies for more molasses.
In the years after the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants will control between sixty and ninety percent of the American trade in enslaved Africans.
In February 1784, the Rhode Island Legislature passes a compromise measure for gradual emancipation of slaves within Rhode Island.
All children of slaves born after March 1 are to be "apprentices," the girls to become free at eighteen, the boys at twenty-one.