Moses Brown
New England abolitionist and industrialist and co-founder of Brown University
Years: 1738 - 1836
Moses Brown (September 23, 1738 – September 6, 1836) is a co-founder of Brown University and a New England abolitionist and industrialist, who funds the design and construction of some of the first factory houses for spinning machines during the American industrial revolution, including Slater Mill.
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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.
The Treasury in London has done little to correct known problems, and Britain itself has been at war during much of this period and is not in a strategic position to risk antagonizing its overseas colonies.
Several successive ministries have implemented reforms following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years' War in an attempt to achieve more effective administrative control and to raise more revenue in the colonies.
The Admiralty has purchased six Marblehead sloops and schooners and given them Anglicized French names based on their recent acquisitions in Canada.
St John, St Lawrence, Chaleur, Hope, Magdalen, and Gaspee had had their French accents removed, and subsequent nineteenth and twentieth-century authors will use the English spellings.
The revenue is necessary, Parliament believes, to bolster military and naval defensive positions along the borders of their far-flung empire, and to pay the crushing debt incurred in the war—which the British believe had been fought on behalf of those colonies.
Among these reforms was the deputizing of the Royal Navy's Sea Officers to help enforce customs laws in colonial ports.
In 1764, Rhode Islanders had attacked HMS St John, and in 1768 they had burned the customs ship HMS Liberty on Goat Island in Newport harbor.
In early 1772, Lieutenant William Dudingston sails HMS Gaspee into Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay to enforce customs collection and mandatory inspection of cargo.
Rhode Island had gained a reputation for smuggling and trading with the French during the previous war.
Dudingston arrives in Rhode Island in February and meets with Governor Joseph Wanton, but he does not find the governor to be overly helpful.
Soon after he begins patrolling Narragansett Bay, Gaspee stops and inspects the sloop Fortune on February 17 and seizes twelve hogsheads of undeclared rum.
Dudingston sends Fortune and the seized rum to Boston, believing that any seized items left in a Rhode Island port will be reclaimed by colonists.
The merchants are the most affected by Dudingston, and they seek to bring an end to Gaspee's control over Narragansett Bay.
On March 21, Rhode Island Deputy Governor Darius Sessions writes to Governor Wanton regarding Lieutenant Dudingston, and he requests that the basis of Dudingston's authority be examined.
In the letter, Sessions includes the opinion of Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins, who argues that "no commander of any vessel has any right to use any authority in the Body of the Colony without previously applying to the Governor and showing his warrant for so doing."
Wanton writes to Dudingston the next day, despite their encounter when Dudingston arrives in Rhode Island, demanding that he "produce me your commission and instructions, if any you have, which was your duty to have done when you first came within the jurisdiction of this Colony."
Dudingston maintains Gaspee's operations without returning to shore, despite the problems that he faces in the Rhode Island colony.
He continues making inspections without making formal seizures, infuriating Rhode Island's merchants further.
Additionally, he reaches out to Admiral Montagu, seeking clarification of the position taken by Governor Wanton.
During the exchange between officials, Dudingston's newly made enemies in the colony pursue methods of ending his inspections.
The Crown turns to a centuries-old institution of investigation, the Royal Commission of Inquiry.
This commission will be made up of the chiefs of the supreme courts of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, the judge of the vice-admiralty of Boston, and the Governor Joseph Wanton of Rhode Island.
The Dockyard Act, passed three months earlier in April, allows those suspected of burning His Majesty's vessels to be tried in England, but this is not the law that i used against the Gaspee raiders; they are charged with treason.
The task of the commission is to determine against which colonists there is sufficient evidence for their trial in England.
The Commission is unable to obtain sufficient evidence and declares their inability to deal with the case.
Her crew is unable to free her immediately, but the rising tide might have allowed the ship to free herself.
A band of Providence members of the Sons of Liberty rows out to confront the ship's crew before this can happen.
The group, led by John Brown, decides to act on the "opportunity offered of putting an end to the trouble and vexation she daily caused."
They board the ship at the break of dawn on June 10.
The crew puts up a feeble resistance; Lieutenant Dudingston is shot and wounded, and the vessel is burned to the waterline.
The man who fired the shot is Joseph Bucklin.
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.
Samuel Slater, a young Englishman who had worked in a cotton mill, learns that the United States is offering bounties for the introduction of spinning-machine patents.
Despite the laws forbidding emigration of textile workers, Slater secretly travels to the United States and, from memory, reconstructs Richard Arkwright’s spinning machine with help from Moses Brown’s Rhode Island firm.
Moses Brown had returned briefly to the business world in 1788 , embarking on a textile venture in partnership with his cousin Smith Brown and his future son-in-law William Almy.
Moses Brown had become interested in recent British attempts to use water power in their textile mills, and has hired English emigrant Samuel Slater to help build a similar mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Moses Brown soon withdraws from active involvement in the firm, but remains a partner.
He moves on to a variety of new activities, including playing a role in Rhode Island’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1790.
Samuel Slater, despite shortages of tools and skilled mechanics, has some machinery in operation by 1791, and the factory becomes the first water-powered spinning mill in America, a seminal event generally considered the birth of the American Industrial Revolution.
Moses’ son Obadiah Brown soon replaces Smith Brown as a partner, and Samuel Slater is taken in as well, to create the new firm of Almy, Brown & Slater.
