Newport is the center of the slave trade in New England during the Colonial period, active in the "triangle trade" in which slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean are carried to Rhode Island and distilled into rum, which is then carried to West Africa and exchanged for captives.

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.

Rhode Island’s success in the trade and ownership of slaves by the mid-eighteenth century gives direct rise to one of America’s first business cartels.

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.