Newport, Rhode Island

What was Newport like around 1715?

Newport stands at the southern end of Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay. It was founded in 1639 by a group of religious exiles from Massachusetts led by William Coddington, and its sheltered harbour soon made it a trading town. By 1680 it had about 400 houses and ships sailing to other colonies, the West Indies and Europe.

In the game’s years Newport was still growing. A count in 1730 found about 4,600 people. The Quakers had built their large meeting house in 1699, and the Anglicans opened Trinity Church, designed by the local builder Richard Munday, in 1726. In 1727 James Franklin, older brother of Benjamin Franklin, set up the first printing press in Rhode Island here.

How did Rhode Island govern itself?

Rhode Island was a charter colony. In July 1663 King Charles II granted it a royal charter, obtained by John Clarke of Newport. Most colonies had a governor sent from England, but Rhode Island’s voters, men who owned property, elected their own governor and assembly. The charter also promised freedom of religion. Rhode Island kept it as its constitution until 1843.

Newport was one of several towns where the General Assembly met, and it was the colony’s leading town. The colony’s governor, Samuel Cranston, sat among the judges at the pirate trial held there in 1723.

Royal officials thought Rhode Island was easy on smugglers and pirates. In 1699 the Earl of Bellomont, governor of New York and Massachusetts, reported on pirates’ goods in Governor Cranston’s keeping and on the colony’s customs officer.

What did Newport trade around 1715?

Like Boston, Newport lived by the sea. Its ships carried fish, timber and farm food south to the sugar islands, where planters grew sugar instead of food, and brought back sugar and molasses, the dark syrup drained from sugar as it cured.

Much of it came from the French islands. France banned most rum imports to protect its own brandy makers, so French planters sold their molasses cheaply to New England traders. British sugar planters were angry that New England fed their French rivals. In 1733, a few years after the game’s era, Parliament taxed foreign molasses with the Molasses Act. Merchants mostly smuggled their molasses in anyway, often by bribing customs officers.

Newport’s distillers turned molasses into rum. The industry grew all century: by 1764 the town had 22 distilleries, some worked by enslaved people.

How did Newport become a slave-trading port?

The slave trade reached Newport early. In 1696 fourteen captives from the ship Seaflower were sold in the town. The first recorded slaving voyages from Rhode Island sailed in the early 1700s; historians date the first one to 1700 or 1709. From about 1725 Newport ships made the voyage regularly.

Often ships carried New England rum to West Africa and traded it for captives. The captives were carried to the Caribbean and sold to plantations, and the ships came home with molasses to make more rum.

Enslaved people resisted. In 1730 captives aboard the Newport ship Little George rose up against the crew. The trade grew much larger later in the century. Over its whole history Rhode Island ships made about 1,000 slaving voyages and carried more than 100,000 Africans, about half or more of all the slave voyages from mainland North America, and Newport led that trade until the American Revolution.

Who were Newport’s enslaved and free Black people?

Slavery was part of daily life in Rhode Island. In 1708 people of African descent made up about 6 in every 100 people in the colony, and by 1755 nearly 12 in 100, the highest share in New England. In Newport enslaved men and women worked on the docks, in the distilleries and in merchants’ households.

Their community left a lasting memorial. From 1705 the northern end of Newport’s Common Burying Ground was set aside for Africans. Now known as God’s Little Acre, it holds more than 600 grave markers for over 1,000 enslaved and free Black people, many from the later 1700s. The Newport historian Keith Stokes writes that it may be the oldest and biggest group of grave markers for enslaved and free Africans still standing anywhere in the United States. Africans there often organised their own funerals.

Why were 26 pirates hanged at Newport in 1723?

In June 1722 the pirate Edward Low had taken ships near Block Island, just off Rhode Island. By spring 1723 he was raiding with a second sloop, the Ranger, under Charles Harris, a Londoner of about 25. He had been a ship’s mate until the pirate George Lowther captured his ship in January 1722 and forced him to join; later he signed on as a pirate.

On 10 June 1723 the two pirate sloops attacked what they thought was a merchant ship. It was HMS Greyhound, a 20-gun Royal Navy warship under Captain Peter Solgard. After a fight the badly damaged Ranger was captured. Low sailed away and left Harris and his men behind, and the prisoners were brought into Newport the next day.

A Court of Admiralty, a special court for crimes at sea, tried 36 men at Newport on 10 to 12 July. The prisoners had no lawyers. The court found 28 guilty and freed the rest, including a 17-year-old Welsh boy and a Native American man from Martha’s Vineyard. Two of the guilty were recommended to the King for mercy.

What happened at Gravelly Point?

On 19 July 1723, 26 men were hanged on a gallows set up on the shore at Gravelly Point, between the high and low tide marks. Crowds came to watch, and the pirates’ own flag was hung on the gallows. Two ministers prayed and spoke with the condemned. The bodies were buried on Goat Island in the harbour.

Most were young men in their early twenties, from Britain, Ireland and the colonies. The 26 hangings were about half of all executions in Rhode Island between 1673 and 1845. In Boston the minister Cotton Mather praised the hangings, calling the dead men “twenty-six terrible preachers” whose fate warned others. Low himself was never caught, and nobody knows for certain how he died.