The New Yorker, September 12, 2005 P. 68
On May 14, 1770, John Brown laid the foundation stone for Rhode Island College, on a hill overlooking Providence and Narragansett Bay. According to the Providence Gazette, “a Number of Gentlemen, Friends to the Institution,” attended the ceremony, and, as tradition has it, Brown treated them to punch. He and his brothers—Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses—had reason to celebrate that day. All four had worked hard to establish the college, later known as Brown University.
The Browns themselves had no formal education. They were Baptists—their great-great-grandfather Chad Brown had been baptized by Roger Williams soon after Brown’s arrival in Providence, in 1638—and, until their generation, Baptists had regarded Biblical and classical learning as no more than obstacles to the direct experience of God. The brothers, like their forebears, and like most people in their largely Baptist town, had gone to work at around the age of fourteen. Their father, Captain James Brown, died in 1739, when Moses, the youngest, was less than a year old, and they learned their trade from their merchant uncle, Obadiah. Brought up on the wharves and amid the stench of Obadiah’s spermaceti-candle works, they succeeded where many failed in the risky world of maritime trade, whaling, privateering, and small manufacturing. Ambitious, farsighted, and hardworking, the brothers were not only building a mercantile empire but also turning Providence into a major seaport, and, in the process, challenging Newport’s commercial and political supremacy in the colony. Along with a number of other merchants and Stephen Hopkins, a governor of the colony and Providence’s political champion, they believed that education was the key to the future.
The Brown brothers raised the money for the college, and the family firm, Nicholas Brown & Company, took charge of constructing the College Edifice, which is today University Hall, the main administrative building. The Edifice was fashioned after Nassau Hall, at Princeton University, where the Reverend James Manning, a Baptist minister who was the founder and the first president of Rhode Island College, had studied. Both its design and its scale—four stories and fifty-six rooms—suggest the ambitions that Manning and the Browns had for the college. According to the records, the building committee hired a variety of laborers for different periods of time. A few were listed as “Negro.” At least three of them, and perhaps four, were slaves.
On November 9, 2000, Ruth J. Simmons was elected the eighteenth president of Brown University by its trustees. Announcing the decision at a press conference, Brown’s chancellor, Stephen Robert, pointed out that the election made her the first African-American to become president of an Ivy League institution. “This is a historic occasion,” he said. Robert praised Simmons’s accomplishments as the president of Smith College, where she had established an engineering program, increased the number of minority students, launched several new building projects, and doubled the college’s endowment. “She is truly beloved by faculty, students, and staff at Smith,” he said, “and we have every reason to believe she will be a star at Brown.” Simmons thanked the Chancellor and said, “It’s very hard for me to explain what’s going through my mind and through my heart right now. It would be impossible for you to understand, because you don’t know my personal circumstances yet. But, when I was told I had been elected this afternoon as president of Brown, I said my ancestors were smiling.”
Simmons often talks about her past. She was born in 1945, the twelfth child of sharecroppers on a farm near the town of Grapeland, in East Texas. During the press conference, she recalled that her first day of kindergarten was “magical,” because “here was a place that was bright and orderly, and something terrific happened there. I could have a pencil and paper; I could have books to read.” When she was a little older, the family moved to Houston, where her father found work in a factory and her mother cleaned houses for white families. They lived in the Fifth Ward, which she remembered as “a very impoverished area of Houston just in the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers” and “brutally segregated.” As a child, she knew no one who had been to college, but, with support from her family and her teachers, she went to Dillard, a historically black university in New Orleans.
Simmons usually speaks about her background in the context of how education can transform the lives of poor and minority children. After graduating summa cum laude from Dillard, she went to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature. She studied in France on a Fulbright scholarship, then taught French at the University of New Orleans, where she became an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts. There and at the University of Southern California, in the early eighties, she found her vocation as an academic administrator. In 1983, she was hired as director of studies for one of Princeton’s residential colleges. “Frankly, it was affirmative-action-driven,” a former university officer said. “There were hundreds of applicants and she got a second look. Then she clicked immediately.” Two years later, she was brought into central administration, in Nassau Hall. The move turned out to be an important one for Princeton, and a turning point in Simmons’s career. Charged with strengthening the African-American Studies program, she recruited Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and a number of other stars, making Princeton’s program the most dazzling in the Ivy League. She became associate dean of the faculty in 1987, spent two years as the provost of Spelman College, in Atlanta, then returned to Princeton as vice-provost in charge of the budget. By 1995, she had a thorough education in university governance and was regarded as a comer in her field.
Though not tall or svelte, Simmons holds herself regally. Her accent is mid-Atlantic, and she speaks with precision, in full paragraphs. She has two grown children from a marriage that ended sixteen years ago, and in photographs, smiling broadly with a hint of humor in her eyes, she looks ready to embrace the world and to mother everyone in it. Still, in her presence people tend to feel that they will have to pass a test or two to earn an embrace. She is so direct, so articulate, and so obviously in command that she inspires respect, even fear. Johnnetta Cole, a former president of Spelman, says that as a friend Simmons is warm and open and loves to laugh, but she concedes that this is not the way most people see her when she’s on the job. Those who have worked with Simmons describe the qualities that distinguish her with remarkable consistency. “Drive, ambition, and focussed energy,” a Princeton administrator said. Two Brown trustees—both men—used exactly the same words. “She’s always working,” one added. “I’ve learned a great deal about determination from her.” Simmons is notoriously hard on her subordinates—their feelings don’t really interest her. Yet she has certain well-honed political skills: she knows whom to consult; she chooses her battles; and she carefully builds support.
When Simmons took office at Brown, in July, 2001, the university had gone through almost four years of uncertainty and drift. In 1997, Vartan Gregorian, a man of sparkling intellect and a world-class charmer, had stepped down from the presidency after eight years. Taking, as trustees often do, the opposite tack, the Corporation—as Brown’s board is called—replaced him with Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University and a skilled manager. But, after two years, Gee, declaring that the “fit” was wrong, quit to become chancellor of Vanderbilt University. For the next two years, Brown had an acting president, and no major initiatives could be undertaken. Still, the trustees felt that Brown remained strong and competitive with the other Ivy League colleges and universities. As it turned out, this was not the case. On her arrival, Simmons conducted a thorough review of the state of the university and discovered that Brown was falling behind its peer institutions in a number of ways. It had, for example, the second-highest student-faculty ratio in the Ivy League; its faculty salaries were fifteen to twenty-five per cent lower than those of similar schools; too much of its money came from undergraduate tuition; and it had the smallest endowment in the Ivy League.
Some months later, Simmons went back to the trustees with the elements of a comprehensive renewal program. The plan eventually included the adoption of need-blind admissions, which all the other Ivy League schools had already instituted; the establishment of at least a hundred new faculty positions within eight years, and an increase in faculty salaries; the construction of major new research facilities in the biological sciences and a new building for the medical school; the creation of a series of multidisciplinary centers; the renovation of undergraduate living quarters; and a major investment in library and computing facilities. To fund this program, Simmons proposed a general campaign to raise approximately $1.3 billion—a sum equal to Brown’s entire endowment—in the next six to eight years. After that, she warned, the university would have to remain in permanent fund-raising mode.
Simmons told me that the trustees were initially shocked by her proposals. “I think what surprised them was that I was saying a lot of things they thought suggested they had not kept watch in the way that they should have,” she said. A couple of the trustees I talked with admitted that they were surprised. “We knew we were underinvested,” one said, “but we had no idea of the magnitude of what had to be done.” But the trustees were soon convinced that the program represented their own ambitions for the university, and that Simmons could get the job done. By the spring of 2003, Simmons’s program was well under way, and she had decided what to do about a question that she had felt it was important to address ever since she arrived: that of the historic ties of the university to slavery and the slave trade.
Boston has its Adamses, Cabots, and Lowells, but perhaps only in Providence has a single family held the preëminent position that the Browns held for more than two centuries. Few Browns live in Providence today, but the family remains a presence in the monuments on the hill overlooking the bay, among them the university; the Nightingale-Brown mansion, which the university now owns; the John Carter Brown Library; and the John Brown house, a Rhode Island Historical Society museum. In Providence, many people believe that the Browns made their fortune in the slave trade, and that John Brown, who laid the foundation stone for the college, was one of the biggest slave traders of his day. Many, including some university professors, believe that Market Square, by the Providence River, was a slave market where the Browns sold human cargo. And many more believe that the Brown mansions had tunnels through which slaves were herded in secret from the wharves below. This last belief is so powerful that when workmen cleared out the basement of the Nightingale-Brown house some years ago, a crew from a local TV station showed up to film the opening of its passageway. The university curator, Professor Robert Emlen, showed the crew that the eighteenth-century walls were solid and had no openings in them, but that evening the station’s newscaster remarked that it was amazing that after all those years people were still trying to hide the tunnels. These legends say a great deal about the historical imagination. The story of the underground passageways could stand as a metaphor for the burial of the history of slavery and the slave trade in Rhode Island. In these legends, the Browns have become a synecdoche for all that has been forgotten.
Slaves were a part of the fabric of life in pre-Revolutionary New England, and in the seventeen-seventies Rhode Island had more slaves per capita than any other New England colony. According to the 1774 census, 3,761 people—6.3 per cent of Rhode Island’s population—were “Negroes,” and it can be assumed that most of them were enslaved. As Emlen told the TV reporter, the Browns would have had no need for underground passageways, because slavery was no secret. Most well-to-do people in the town had one or more slaves working in their household. Wealthy farmers and merchants typically had a few slaves, as well as indentured servants, working on their farms, on their ships, or in their manufactories.
Slavery played a smaller role in the economy of New England than it did in that of New York and most other colonies, but New Englanders controlled the American slave trade. New England did much of the shipping for the country, and in the eighteenth century its merchants carried on most of their external trade with the slaveholding colonies of the West Indies, selling lumber and other local products for sugar and molasses, some of which would be distilled into rum. A number of successful merchants added a third leg to the trade: they sent ships filled with rum and other stores to the west coast of Africa, and sold their cargoes for enslaved Africans; the ships then recrossed the Atlantic and sold the Africans in the West Indies for sugar, molasses, and hard currency.
The New England Triangle Trade appears in most high-school history texts, but few people, even in Rhode Island, know that Rhode Island was the hub of the trade—its economy being the most heavily dependent on shipping and the sale of rum. According to Professor Jay Coughtry, a historian at the University of Nevada, who in the nineteen-seventies made a careful study of the shipping records, Rhode Island merchants controlled sixty to ninety per cent of the American slave trade throughout the eighteenth century. In a period of seventy-five years, more than nine hundred ships left Rhode Island for ports in Africa and brought back more than a hundred thousand slaves. Rhode Island was a small carrier compared with the European sea powers, but by the seventeen-thirties Rhode Island merchants were shipping more slaves than their Massachusetts counterparts, and by the end of the century they had almost no American competitors. In the half century before the American Revolution, Newport virtually monopolized the Rhode Island trade, sending out all but twenty-one of five hundred and thirteen slaving ships. Providence sent out nine slavers, and Nicholas Brown & Company one. However, the voyage of the Browns’ ship appears in many histories of the American slave trade, because, like most of the Browns’ business transactions, it was extremely well documented, and the records have survived.
In 1764, the Brown brothers outfitted an eleven-ton brigantine, the Sally, for a voyage to what was then known as the Guinea Coast of Africa. They were planning to build an iron furnace near the village of Hope, about twelve miles west of Providence, and they needed to raise the capital. Captain James Brown had sent out a slaver in 1736, and twenty-three years later Obadiah had sent out a ship that was lost off Africa, but the brothers had no experience in the trade. To captain the Sally, they chose Stephen Hopkins’s younger brother, Esek, who had sailed their privateers with success but had never been to the Guinea Coast. The ship left port in September, with a crew of eleven and a cargo of rum, tobacco, and other goods. She also carried seven swivel guns, an assortment of small arms, thirteen cutlasses, forty shackles, and three chains. Hopkins, faithfully writing down his day-to-day transactions in his trade book, left a record of one of the most horrifying of all slaving voyages.
The Sally arrived on the Guinea Coast in early November, 1764, and did not leave until the following August. The Seven Years’ War and British-French hostilities in the Atlantic had just ended, so numerous slavers, including twenty-six from Rhode Island, made their way to the Guinea Coast that year, and, because the Sally came late in the season, slaves were in short supply. The tribal chiefs with whom Hopkins dealt asked for goods that the Sally did not carry, so he had to sail up and down the coast looking for British ships that would take his rum and tobacco in return for the Manchester cloth and the pig iron that the chiefs wanted. Even then, he sometimes could not buy more than one or two slaves at a time. When he finally set sail for the West Indies, many of the slaves he had bought had already spent months on the ship, and twenty of them had died, among them a woman who hanged herself between decks.
Around August 20th, Hopkins set his course through the middle passage with a hundred and sixty-seven slaves aboard. In the first few days of the voyage, four slaves died. Then, days later, he released a few slaves to help out on deck. He wrote, “Slaves Rose on us, was obliged to fire on them and Destroyed 8 and Several more wounded badly 1 Thye & ones Ribs broke.” Throughout September, as the ship crossed the Atlantic, deaths were an almost daily occurrence. In a letter to the Browns, Hopkins wrote that after the failure of the uprising the surviving Negroes were “so disperited” that “some drowned themselves, some starved and others sickened and died.” By the time the Sally reached Barbados, in early October, eighty-eight slaves were dead, and the rest were, Hopkins wrote, in a “very sickly and disordered manner.” As the ship sailed from Barbados to Antigua, more people died, and by December, 1765, the death toll had reached a hundred and nine. Hopkins managed to sell twenty-four “verry Indifferent” slaves to a merchant in Antigua. His trade book does not record what became of the remaining Africans.
The Brown brothers, from the evidence of their letters, seem to have taken the news of the disaster calmly. In October, they wrote Hopkins, “We need not mention how Disagreeable the Nuse of your Luseing 88 Slaves is to us & all your Friends, but your Self Continuing in Helth is so Grate Satisfaction to us, that we Remain Cheirful under the Heavy Loss of our Ints.” All the same, the ill-fated voyage seems to have made a strong impression on three of the four brothers. Nicholas told his captains afterward to avoid the Guinea trade, and he, Joseph, and Moses never participated in a slaving voyage again. Only John continued to send out slavers, and after the Revolution he became Rhode Island’s most vocal defender of the trade. Moses became one of the leading abolitionists in New England, and his brother’s most persistent opponent. He helped found a society to combat the slave trade whose members included the Reverend James Manning, the president of Rhode Island College, and Nicholas’s son, Nicholas, after whom the college was renamed.
Ruth Simmons’s interest in the eighteenth-century Browns had its origin in current events. In the year of her appointment as president, a small but influential group of black intellectuals and lawyers began making a case that the federal government, as well as states and private institutions with historic ties to slavery, should pay reparations for the sins of the past. Among them were Randall Robinson, a leader in the campaign for divestment from apartheid South Africa; Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor; Alexander Pires, Jr., a Washington lawyer who had won a billion-dollar settlement from the Department of Agriculture for discriminating against black farmers in recent decades; and the defense attorney Johnnie Cochran. They claimed that the promises of Reconstruction had never been fulfilled and that affirmative-action and anti-poverty programs had failed to erase institutionalized discrimination and inner-city poverty. Reparations had been paid to Holocaust survivors, to Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War, and to Native Americans, so, they reasoned, those who still suffered the aftereffects of slavery should also be compensated. By 2001, their arguments had gained currency, and city councils in Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., passed resolutions calling for a federal commission to study the problems of the inner cities and to consider remedies. Conservative black intellectuals attacked the idea, and debates erupted on college campuses.
Meanwhile, reparations-movement lawyers discussed strategies for suing public and private institutions that had benefitted from slavery. In 2002, a class-action suit was filed against FleetBoston, Aetna, and other corporations, charging that their predecessor companies had conspired with slave traders to “illicitly profit from slave labor.” The petitioners asked for a full restitution of all moneys derived from slave labor, and the sum of a trillion dollars was mentioned. Brown was cited in the suit, along with Harvard and Yale, as a celebrated university that had its “origins in profits derived from the slave trade”—a reflection of the fact that some in the reparations movement thought that universities could also be sued.
Simmons had paid some attention to the debate when she was at Smith. After she was named president of Brown, alumni and others often asked whether the university was founded by slave traders, and she did not know the answer. She had heard reparations activists claim that it was, but the official short history of Brown, republished in 2000, said nothing about slavery except that James Manning had freed his only slave in 1770. Then, on March 13, 2001, a few months before she took office, the student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, printed a full-page ad listing “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea—and Racist, Too.” The ad, written by David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur, argued that slavery had occurred long ago, that it had been abolished by white Christians, and that black Americans should be grateful for the freedom and prosperity they had as a result of their removal to the United States. Angry students converged on the Herald office and demanded space for a rebuttal; a few days later, after their demands were not met, they made off with the entire press run of the next day’s paper. Horowitz, who was building a case about politically correct censorship on campus—and who had sent the ad to dozens of college newspapers—felt that his point was made. He accused the protesters of censoring conservative ideas, and a general shouting match ensued.
Simmons took office in July, and in September she gave her first speech to the students, on the importance of free expression in a university. But she felt that more had to be done. Three Yale graduate students had recently published a detailed account of Yale’s historic connections to slavery, showing that a slave owner had endowed the university’s first scholarships and that Yale had taken slave-trading money for its first endowed professorship and one of its first libraries. Simmons and others in the administration thought that Brown scholars should do likewise—get the facts out and clear the air. She also thought that Brown should take up the issue of reparations. “I was intrigued by the idea that we could replay the campus incident in a more fruitful way,” Simmons told me. “Universities are good at addressing even the most psychologically difficult issues, so I thought we could expose it to the timehonored academic methods.”
She first had to turn her attention to reviewing the state of the university and to developing a renewal program. But in April, 2003, she appointed a steering committee to look into the history of Brown’s connection to slavery and to explore the issue of reparations for slavery in comparative contexts, such as the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and apartheid in South Africa. The committee, made up of thirteen faculty members and three students, took until the late fall to plan its work, at which time exams and holidays intervened. In February, 2004, Simmons discussed the committee with the Brown trustees, and they decided to seek national press coverage for the endeavor. In an interview with the Times, published on March 13th, she announced the formation of the Committee on Slavery and Justice. “Dr. Simmons,” the Times reported, “has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.” The Brown family, the Times pointed out, had owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade, and Simmons was a great-granddaughter of slaves. “I sit here in my office,” Simmons said in the article, “beneath the portrait of people who lived at a different time and who saw the ownership of people in a different way. You can’t sit in an office and face that every day unless you really want to know, unless you really want to understand this dichotomy.”
The Times article, picked up by other news organizations, caused a commotion among Brown alumni. As some of them saw it, Simmons had started a process that could end with a commitment to pay out a huge sum of money. The alumni did not protest publicly, but their murmuring was audible enough to alarm the development office, which was just then beginning Simmons’s ambitious capital campaign. On April 28th, Simmons published an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe in which she wrote, “The committee’s work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past.”
She had not changed her mind about the committee’s purpose: she had set it up as a purely academic endeavor, and the committee members were quite clear about that. In her charge to the committee, delivered the year before, she wrote that its goal “will not be to achieve consensus, but to provide factual information and critical perspectives.” There was no suggestion that the committee should decide what Brown ought to do about its past. What’s more, the committee, whose members Simmons had picked, seemed unlikely to exceed her instructions: it included three university deans and two professors who declared that they opposed monetary reparations. When I asked Simmons about the Times piece, she blamed herself for not having been clear enough—and the reporter for having missed the nuances in an effort to distill the story. “It never occurred to me to say we’re not going to pay reparations, because I’m not a proponent of monetary reparations,” she said.
James Campbell, an energetic young professor of American civilization and Africana studies, who chairs the committee, told me that he was surprised and distressed by the Times piece. “The story they wanted to tell was ‘Descendant of slaves wants monetary reparations for slavery.’ They made it sound personal and reduced her to a person she’s not. I see a woman who is profoundly committed to the idea of a university, to examining difficult ideas and welcoming all points of view.” The Times may have wanted to focus the story on Simmons’s background, but, if so, Simmons had left herself open to it by twice referring to herself as a descendant of slaves and by describing her own reaction to sitting beneath a portrait of people (actually, James Manning) “who saw the ownership of people in a different way.” Further, an African-American taking over the presidency of a university that black intellectuals were charging had been founded by slave traders had at least something of a personal problem. But the real trouble was that, having set up an open-ended academic project, Simmons could not then close it by saying that she opposed monetary reparations. When the Times reporter asked whether her background would sway the inquiry, she replied, “I don’t think there can be a person with a better background for dealing with this issue than me.” To some white alumni, the remark seemed yet another cause for concern about Brown’s endowment—yet what she clearly meant was that she was in the best position to defend the university. “If you ask what my fondest wish is,” Simmons said of the committee, “it’s that something will come out of it to benefit our teaching and the way students understand our history.”
From its inception, the committee has faced two very large tasks: on the one hand, writing the history of Brown’s connections to slavery, and, on the other, examining reparations in comparative contexts. Of the two, the first would seem to be the simpler, but there are no Rhode Island historians on the committee (there are none at Brown), and, as Robert Emlen pointed out before the committee was formed, considerable pedantry would be required to track down all the people with ties to slavery who gave money to Brown in the antebellum years. (In addition to the Rhode Island merchants and manufacturers, some of the donors were Baptists from the South, any number of whom might have owned slaves.) When I spoke with Simmons last fall, she said that she expected the committee merely to open the way for future scholars. “We’re not going to write a definitive history,” Campbell said. “We’re going to create frames for thinking about it.” Still, if the committee is to fulfill the expectations for it, it must give some account of the Brown brothers, and particularly of John, who served as the treasurer of Rhode Island College for two decades and gave half the money for its library.
Campbell, like any good historian, believes that it’s important to understand John Brown and his brothers in the context of their day. “People are always looking for Simon Legrees,” he said to me last fall. “They tend to focus on one particular bad guy—and it helps if he’s rich. To me, what’s important is to look at the whole society.” Yet to focus on the Browns and slave trading is, of necessity, to come up with a morality play of fraternal struggle, between the good brother Moses and the bad brother John. Campbell doesn’t like this kind of approach to history, but he couldn’t help concluding, “John Brown was a bad man in the context of his day.”
To delve into the history of the Browns is, however, to find that neither John nor Moses is so easily categorized. For one thing—legends aside—John was not a major slave trader. According to J. Stanley Lemons, a Rhode Island historian, who has checked the family’s business records, John sent out just four slaving voyages in the course of as many decades, the first one in 1769. More important, though, is the matter of context. The conflict over slavery and abolition was inextricably bound up with the Revolution, the creation of the Union, and the development of the American economy after independence. The Brown brothers played important roles in all these events.
The Browns were a close-knit family, and until the early seventeen-seventies they worked together in business and in politics. Nicholas, the eldest, was cautious and conservative, and put the family firm on solid foundations as a manufacturing as well as a mercantile enterprise. Joseph, the second brother, had no head for business but great skills in mechanics and design. He managed the candle works, operated the Hope Furnace, and studied astronomy, electricity, and architecture. Before the Revolution, he designed the beautiful, high-spired First Baptist Church on College Hill, where Brown commencements are held, and afterward became a professor of natural philosophy at the college. John, born in 1736, and Moses, two years younger, had greater ambitions, yet the two were in many ways opposites. A tall, imposing figure, John gained such girth late in life that he was known as the “Providence Colossus.” Moses was small, slight, and often sickly. As an entrepreneur, John was, as one historian put it, an Elizabethan merchant-adventurer in a new setting. A warrior by nature and physically brave, he had a far greater tolerance for risks than Nicholas, and fewer scruples. By the time he was thirty, his independent shipping ventures had made him the richest man in Providence. After the Revolution, he built a Georgian brick house, designed by Joseph, which John Quincy Adams said was “the most magnificent and elegant private mansion” he’d seen on the continent. John ate well, entertained lavishly, and, with Nicholas, tried to establish a theatre in Providence, at a time when most of the Baptist brethren thought it the work of the Devil. Moses, by contrast, was an Enlightenment figure in the American vein. He was an innovative businessman, but neither the risks nor the money-making engaged him. He preferred to live simply on his farm, outside Providence, where he followed a regimen of temperance, strict diet, and exercise. He read widely, and in the course of his long life—he lived to be ninety-seven—he developed expertise in scientific farming, economics, medicine, and public health. (He introduced Rhode Island physicians to the smallpox vaccine, and, when there was an outbreak of yellow fever in Providence, he did the epidemiological research himself.) He was also a philanthropist, and helped found a boarding school, a deaf-and-dumb asylum, a school for children of color, the Providence Athenaeum, and the Rhode Island Historical Society. For all their differences, John and Moses were both deeply engaged in the politics of their day, and both were outsized characters, with the kind of energy, drive, and focus that Ruth Simmons would recognize better than most.
In 1771, John left Nicholas Brown & Company in order to invest more aggressively in shipping. Two years later, Moses also quit the firm. His wife, Anna, the daughter of his uncle Obadiah, had died, and he fell into a profound depression. Anna had become a Quaker, and Moses, in his distress, read Quaker literature, sought the company of her fellows, and, in 1774, became a member of the Society of Friends. His conversion was life-changing. The Quakers, unique among American sects, had long opposed slave trading, and had come to oppose slavery itself. Moses manumitted the six slaves he owned, and, for the rest of his life, acted as banker, lawyer, and counsellor to the freedmen and -women who sought his help. In the past, he had been active, along with his brothers, in the struggle for the rights of the American colonists. But the Quakers were pacifists, and on the eve of the Revolution he advocated a peaceful reconciliation with Britain. Then, in the interests of holding the New England Quaker community together, he accepted the official Quaker position that the Revolution was illegitimate and that the Friends should not pay taxes to the new government or accept Continental paper money.
John, for his part, helped start the Revolution. In 1772, a year of tranquillity in which many thought that a peaceful resolution to British-American differences could be found, the British schooner Gaspee ran aground while pursuing one of his sloops. The Gaspee, in search of contraband, had been stopping every vessel entering and leaving Narragansett Bay, and John had had enough of it. He rounded up a party of seamen and in the middle of the night rowed out to the ship with eight longboats, forced the crew off, and burned the schooner to the waterline. King George III’s government offered a thousand-pound reward and declared that the perpetrators of this “act of treason” would be tried in London and put to death. The British never found anyone to inform on John and his men, but their threat to try Americans in London alarmed American patriots. At the instigation of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, Committees of Correspondence were formed in the colonies, independence was freely discussed, and the first Continental Congress convened, in 1774.
The following year, just after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, John was captured in Narragansett Bay sailing two packet boats loaded with flour destined for the newly created American army in Massachusetts. The British captain could not prove that the supplies were for the rebels, but he charged John with burning the Gaspee and sent him to Boston in the brig of a warship. Moses rode posthaste to Boston, and got John released on the promise that his brother would use his influence to put an end to the military hostilities in Massachusetts. John made one speech to the Rhode Island legislature and then went back to his war work. That fall, while Moses was leading a Quaker relief mission to Massachusetts, John took the first kegs of gunpowder to George Washington’s army in Cambridge. For the rest of the war, he and Nicholas supplied the Continental Army with matériel, manufactured cannons at the Hope Furnace, and built privateers to capture transports provisioning the British troops. John’s gaff-rigged sloop, the Providence, became John Paul Jones’s favorite command.
After the war, Moses led a determined campaign to end the slave trade and slavery in Rhode Island—with some success. The Revolution had dealt a powerful blow to the ideological underpinnings of slavery and had shaken the Colonial social order. Clergy and laymen of other denominations joined the cause of abolition. In 1784, the Rhode Island legislature passed a bill emancipating all children born to slaves from March of that year on. Slaveholding slowly declined, and by 1790 two out of three blacks in the state had attained freedom. Slave trading, however, proved more difficult to stop. Lobbied by Moses and other Quakers, the General Assembly passed an anti-slaving law in 1787, and seven years later, as a result of their efforts, the United States Congress banned merchants from engaging in the slave trade between foreign ports. But the merchants, well practiced in evading British sanctions, easily found their way around customs regulations. In Providence, Moses and other Friends formed an Abolition Society and acted to enforce the laws, but in 1795 the Rhode Island slave trade reached prewar levels and afterward rose to new heights.
The issue brought the two brothers into conflict, but for reasons that most historians have missed. John sent out a slaving voyage in 1785 and another in 1786. Three years later, he published a diatribe against Moses’s Abolition Society, calling it a Quaker combination bent on ruining honest men. There followed an acrimonious debate in the Providence Gazette between John and officers of the society, Moses among them. John was angry, but not on his own account. As he wrote Moses after the second voyage, he was planning new ventures and had no intention of going back into the Guinea trade. He was defending friends of his whom the society planned to sue, and he was angry with the Quakers on another score. After November, 1789, Rhode Island was the only state that had not yet ratified the Constitution, then two years old. Most Rhode Island merchants had long seen the need for a federal government, and John, who hero-worshipped George Washington, had become a leader of the Federalist Party in Rhode Island. But there was considerable opposition to the Union in the state, and some of it came from the Friends, who objected to the slavery compromises in the Constitution. By 1789, what had been a local controversy had turned into a national crisis, and Congress was preparing to cut off all trade with Rhode Island. The following year, the state convention ratified the Constitution by two votes, but only after Congress took steps to turn Rhode Island into a foreign country and Providence threatened to secede from the state.
John and Moses battled over the slave trade until the end of the century. In 1795, a year after the passage of the federal law against slave trading between foreign ports, a record number of slavers set out from Rhode Island. John, despite his decade-old promise to Moses, sent out one of the ships. Moses and the other officers of the Abolition Society, believing that John was testing the law on behalf of the other traders, decided to sue him. Two years later, John became the first person prosecuted under the federal statute, and was forced to forfeit his ship. Undeterred, he ran for Congress in 1799, and, once elected, led an effort to repeal the law. He failed, but then the law didn’t affect the South: Rhode Island merchants were the only ones penalized by it.
During this period, John and Moses argued frequently and at length—John just couldn’t see anything wrong with the slave trade—yet the two never came near a complete falling out. Both were, after all, loyal family members, and both were involved in many matters other than the ones that divided them. In 1787, John sent his ship the George Washington to China. It was the first ship from Rhode Island and one of the first from the country to make the voyage. In the following years, his ships visited ports in South America, Australia, the Spice Islands, India, and China, opening up the Far Eastern trade for other New England merchants. Meanwhile, Moses, with the help of an English journeyman, Samuel Slater, built a water-powered cotton mill, the first manufacturing enterprise in the country. The Slater mill, as John Brown had anticipated in the Providence Gazette debate, bought cotton from Southern slaveholders and sold some of it back to them in the form of coarse cloth for slaves. It also helped spawn an industry that by the middle of the nineteenth century sustained the economy of much of New England and contributed to the country’s move toward self-sufficiency. In 1791, John and Moses founded a bank, the fifth private bank in the United States, to promote “the commercial, mechanical, and manufacturing interests” of Providence. They later built the roads, bridges, and wharves that the growth of the town required. During John’s years in Congress, they exchanged chatty letters about family matters, the bank, and John’s new acquaintances Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
John died in 1803, at the age of sixty-seven, leaving an estate of six hundred thousand dollars, all of which went to his family. A few months after his death, however, Nicholas Brown, Jr., gave Rhode Island College five thousand dollars to establish a chair in English oratory in his uncle’s memory. In recognition of Nicholas’s gift, the Corporation changed the name of the college to Brown in 1804. It was a wise decision, for in the course of his life Nicholas gave the college a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
At Brown, the Committee on Slavery and Justice has been holding lectures and panel discussions on topics ranging from the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to apartheid in historical memory. It has sponsored a high-school curriculum and a museum exhibit on slavery in New England, both of which feature the voyage of the Sally. It is now thinking about how best to institutionalize the discussion of slavery and justice at the university, and is considering new courses, fellowships, a study center, and a memorial dedicated to the slaves who helped build University Hall. The committee’s report is due by the end of this year, and while Campbell anticipates that some may see it as an exercise in political correctness and others as a completely inadequate response, he hopes that it will provide a model for universities with similar histories to use in conducting discussions about their past. Campbell worries about the media sound bites that will herald the report; however, slavery and justice is not the explosive topic that it was three years ago. The reparations movement has had no success with its lawsuits, and has taken another direction. (Activists have been urging city councils to pass ordinances requiring that city contractors disclose any historical link to slavery, with the idea that those whose predecessors profited from slave labor can be shamed into making reparations.) Most of the Brown alumni have been reassured about the purpose of the committee (though some donors have stipulated that their gifts not be used for reparations). As for the campus, it has turned to issues that seem more pressing.
According to James Campbell, the committee’s report will have as its centerpiece a short history of the Brown brothers’ involvement with slavery and the debate between Moses and John over the slave trade, to be supplemented by a Web site on the Browns and slavery. Campbell told me that he was happy to discover the debate, because it illustrated the moral choices within a historical context, and relieved the committee of having to provide its own account of the moral climate of the day. “Contextualization always gets read as extenuation,” he said. The report will apparently make no mention of the Browns’ other activities. The committee was not, of course, charged with writing their biographies, but its focus will reduce them, as Providence legend does, to slave traders and reformed slave traders.
Simmons, in the meantime, has raised about half a billion dollars for the capital campaign and made considerable progress with her renewal program. She has instituted need-blind admissions, filled forty-one new faculty positions, and increased faculty salaries. A building for molecular-medicine laboratories has been completed, and four other buildings for labs and study centers are under construction. In addition, Simmons has replaced the entire top administrative staff of the university and reorganized Brown’s fund-raising efforts and the way that the governing boards operate. In the past year, however, her relationship with the faculty has become less than harmonious. For one thing, Brown’s budget remains tight, and by hiring senior professors and giving them generous research funds to improve the graduate schools she has drained resources away from undergraduate teaching. For another, the money has gone to the departments and new initiatives, as opposed to the interdisciplinary programs that have attracted some of the best students to Brown. In the view of many faculty members, her approach has been both too conventional and too top-down, and she hasn’t provided the visionary educational leadership that they had hoped for. Asked about such criticisms, Simmons told a Providence Journal reporter, “I’m not afraid of the political machinations that abound on a campus. What I am here to do, I will do, irrespective of all that.” Whether she will achieve all of her goals remains to be seen, but thus far she has done what she promised the trustees, and she has, she says, become more comfortable with the portrait of James Manning in her office. ♦
