HOMO HOMINI LUPUS
1646
Edward DeWolf was born to Balthasar DeWolf and Alice DeWolf. He is referred to in the records of Lyme, Connecticut as a carpenter. He was a member of a committee to arbitrate the differences between the people of New London and the builders of a church. JOHN WARNER BARBER LYME, CONNECTICUT
1656
March 5, Wednesday (1655, Old Style): Our first record of Balthaser DeWolf, the progenitor of the DeWolf family in America, has the name spelled “Baltazer De Woolfe,” as one of a group presented in Connecticut before “A Perticular Court in Hartford” charged with “smoking in the street.” Balthasar seems to have been living near what is now Branford, for the name is in a list of persons who settled in that town between 1645 and 1660. Balthazar DeWolf of Wethersfield 1664, removed to Lyme 1668, then had a daughter of age to live in a neighbor’s family; Edward DeWolf, Simon DeWolf, and Stephen DeWolf, who may have been all, as was Simon DeWolf, his sons (or not), joined with him in 1678, as members of the town train band, in a petition. Simon DeWolf of Lyme, son of Balthazar DeWolf, got married on November 12, 1682 with Sarah Lay, and they had Simon DeWolf, born during 1683; Sarah DeWolf, born during 1685; John DeWolf, born during 1687; Josiah DeWolf, born during 1689; Phebe DeWolf, born during 1692; Daniel DeWolf, born during 1693; and Jabez DeWolf; and died during 1696. Edward DeWolf of Lyme, had Simon DeWolf, born on November 28, 1671; Charles DeWolf, born on September 18, 1673; Benjamin HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
DeWolf, born on December 3, 1675; beside Edward DeWolf, whose birthdate is not on the record. Stephen DeWolf of Lyme 1676, had Edward DeWolf, born about 1686, and by a second wife Hannah DeWolf, who survived him, had others, and died on October 17, 1702. “The genealogist of the De Wolf family in America has satisfied himself that the immigrant ancestor of the family here under consideration came from the Livonian branch of the ancient De Wolfes of Europe. The crest of the Livonian De Wolffs is the same as that of the American family, and there is a widely held tradition in the family of Baron Ariste De Wolff, that early in the seventeenth century a younger son of the Baron of that day left Livonia, presumably for America, and was never heard from. Another tradition, accepted by some of the family, is that their ancestors emigrated from the Baltic Province of Livonia to Germany, thence to Normandy, and from there to England with William the Conqueror. This would seem to be borne out by the names of the children in this country, which are those of the English Bible, and in common use in England. In view of the prejudices of the time, the fact that Balthasar De Wolf’s children married into the best families of Lyme, Connecticut, would add further to the tradition.”
1664
Balthasar DeWolf was a resident of Wethersfield, Connecticut. JOHN WARNER BARBER WETHERSFIELD, CONN.
1668
Balthasar DeWolf and his three sons Edward DeWolf, Simon DeWolf, and Stephen DeWolf were members of the train band at Lyme, Connecticut. Presumably in this year he was at about 45 years of age. His wife’s name was Alice DeWolf (but we know little about her).
1670
By this point Edward DeWolf was the husband of Rebecca DeWolf.
2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1671
May: Balthasar DeWolf was made a freeman by the court at Hartford, Connecticut. JOHN WARNER BARBER HARTFORD, CONN.
1673
September 18, Thursday: Charles DeWolf was born to Edward DeWolf and Rebecca DeWolf. He would get married with Prudence White (perhaps Patience White). The couple would reside in Glastenbury and Middletown, Connecticut, where through dealing in general merchandise he would acquire a considerable property. JOHN WARNER BARBER GLASTENBURY, CONN. MIDDLETOWN, CONN.
1675
December 19, Sunday (Old Style): Forces of the United Colonies assaulted a sanctuary which the Narragansett tribespeople had set up in order to avoid turning over their wives and children to the whites as hostages, in the “Great Swamp,” a swamp in what is now South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In an attempt to assimilate this battle to the battle which ended the Pequot War, which had occurred in a swamp near Fairfield on July 13, 1637, both of these battles would come to be referred to as “The Great Swamp Fight.” This particular slaughter would excite a rather crude piece of doggerel: ’Tis fear’d a thousand Natives young and old, Went to a place in their opinion cold. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
The bloody-minded Reverend Cotton Mather would remember this Great Swamp Fight as the tailgate party at which the Narragansett tribe had been “Berbikew’d,” his spelling. (Get a clue: he was a Puritan and the land had been purified. –What could possibly be offensive about ethnic cleansing?)
It had been at 5 AM that the white soldiers had formed up after their night in the cold snow without blankets, and set out toward this Narragansett stronghold. They had arrived at the edge of the Great Swamp, an area around South Kingstown, at about 1 PM. The Massachusetts troops in the lead were fired upon by a small band of native Americans and pursued without waiting for orders. As the natives retreated they came along across the frozen swamp to the entrance of the fort, which was on an island of sorts standing above the swamp, and consisted of a triple palisade of logs twelve feet high. There were small blockhouses at intervals above this palisade. Inside, the main village sheltered about 3,000 men, women, and children. The Massachusetts troops had been enticed to arrive at precisely the strongest section of the palisade where, however, there was a gap for which no gate had yet been built. Across this gap the natives had placed a tree trunk breast height, as a barrier to check any charge, and just above the gap was a blockhouse. Without waiting for the Plymouth and Connecticut companies, the Massachusetts soldiers charged the opening and swarmed over the barrier. Five company commanders were killed in the charge but the troops managed to remain for a period inside the fort before falling back into the swamp. The Massachusetts men, now joined by Plymouth, gathered themselves for a 2d charge. Meanwhile, Major Treat led his Connecticut troops round to the back of the fort where the palisade had not been finished. Here and there the posts were spaced apart and protected only by a tangled mass of limbs and brush. The men charged up a bank under heavy fire and forced their way past the palisade. As they gained a foothold inside, the second charge at the gap also forced an entrance and the battle raged through the Indian village. It was a fight without quarter on either side, and was still raging at sunset when Winslow ordered the wooden lodges put to the torch. The flames, whipped by the winds of the driving
4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
snowstorm, spread quickly. Winslow decided that the army had to fall back to the shelter of Smith’s Trading Post in Coccumscossoc (Wickford), where some resupply ships might have arrived. The English gathered their wounded, the worst being placed on horseback, and fell back toward Wickford. It would not be until 2 AM that the leading units would stumble into the town. Some, losing their way, would not get shelter until 7 AM. This three-hour battle was the end of the Narragansett Campaign. The English suffering 20 killed and 200 wounded (80 of whom who later die from their wounds, there being 40 English corpses interred in one common trench in Wickford) and the Narragansett likewise suffered high casualties although about a thousand did escape.
At least one armed white man who was killed while attempting to kill others was a Quaker and an officer: “The usual interpretation of the actions and inactions of the Rhode Island government has been that its members were inhibited by the pacifist scruples of the Quakers among them. Historians have not cited, nor have I found, evidence upon which to base this belief.... Such reading back of later Quaker understandings of the peace testimony obscures not only other wartime motives but the nature of the peace testimony as it was understood in that particular time and place. Third, in many respects the government activities do not appear to have been constrained. ... There were Quakers who bore arms during the war. Captain Weston Clarke, who was sent to relieve Warwick, Lieutenant Robert Westcott, who was killed in the Great Swamp Fight, and Abraham Mann of Providence, who was wounded are three examples.” — Meredith Baldwin Weddle, WALKING IN THE WAY OF PEACE: QUAKER PACIFISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. England: Oxford UP, 2001, pages 172-173, page 204 THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
(Presumably Friend Robert Westcott, like the Reverend Roger Williams, had taken pains to consult with God and had been listening to the “mind and voice of the most high amongst us,” and had assured himself that Quakers who were “contrary” to war were simply mistaken as to God’s will! —You must lie in your blood, you “barbarous men of Bloud”!)
(Presumably, since Friend Abraham Mann of Providence who was wounded during the Great Swamp Fight was a white man, he was then tenderly cared for by the Quaker caretakers on Aquidneck Island, who tenderly cared for those who had been wounded in the fight, if they were white men!)
While the Narragansett were not completely crushed there can be no question that the Great Swamp Fight was the turning point in the war. If the tribe had been able to join the Wampanoag at full strength in the spring the war would have lasted much longer. The Narragansett would have a few more victories in 1676, would burn Rehoboth and Providence, and in March would ambush Captain Michael Pierce, but for all practical purposes they were out of the war.
In the course of this single race battle with the English, the Narragansett would lose almost 20% of its entire population, and massacre and starvation would soon be killing off most of the remainder. By 1682 fewer than 500 would remain of the original estimated 10,000 souls who had existed as of 1610. After 1682 this remnant would be allowed by the English to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown RI. The Narragansett tribal registry currently list over 2,400 members, most of whom reside in Rhode Island.1
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Most contemporary accounts of this second of the “great swamp fights” have been based upon a couple of letters by the white army’s chaplain, the Reverend Joseph Dudley, and one by Captain James Oliver, commander of the 3d Company of the Massachusetts regiment:
May it please your Honnr Mr Smiths 15, 10, 75
I am comanded by the Generall to give your Honnor account of our proceeding since our last frm Pautuxet in the Sabath evening we advanced the whole body from Mr Carpenters with Intent to surprise Ponham & his Party at about 10 or 12 Miles Distance having information by oue Warwick scouts of his seat but the darkness of ye Night Diffucutly of our Passage & unskillfulness of Pilots we passed the whole night & found ourselves at such Distance yet from ym yt we Diverted & Marched to Mr Smiths, found our sloops from Seaconck arrived since which by ye help of Indian Peter by whom your Honnor had the Information formerly of ye number & resolution of ye Naragansetts, we have burned two of their towns viz; Ahmus who is this summer come down amongst them & ye old Queens quarters consisting of about 150 Many of them large wigwams & seized or slayn 50 Persons in all our prisoners being about 40 Concerning whom the generall prayes your advice concerning their transportation and Disposall all which was performed without any loss save a slight wound by an Arrow in Lieut. Wayman’s face, the whole body of them we find removed into their great swamp at Canonicus his quarters where we hope with the addition of Connecticut, when arrived we hope to coop them up, this day we Intend the removall or spoyle of yr Corn & hope to Morrow a March toward them, our soldiers being very chearful are forward noywithstanding great Difficulty by weather & otherwise, abovsd Peter whom we have found very faithful will Make us believe yt yr are 3000 fighting Men many unarmed Many well fitted with lances we hope by cutting off their forage to force them to a fayre battle In ye Mean time I have only to present the Genralls humble service to your & to beg you Intense prayers for this so great Concern and remayn your
Honnors Humble Servant Jos: Dudley Goodale nor Moor arrived we fear want of shot My humble service to Madam Leveret Brother and Sister Hubbard & Dudley Amongst our Prisonrs & Slayn we find 10 or 12 Wampanoags
1. In Rhode Island especially, after the population disaster of “King Phillip’s War”, many native women would form new households with black men. Rhode Island would be boasting the largest black population in New England and a significant proportion of these blacks would be free, so in many cases this was their best available option. These unions would result in a new category of person, the “mustee,” who was considered to be a native American by himself or herself but not by the “white people” who were de facto making all such distinctions. You may therefore run into some hot arguments if you cite these population statistics, from whites who will attempt to insist to you that “it’s all just a bunch of n-----s making pretenses,” quote unquote. (You’ll have to live in Rhode Island for awhile, and argue cases of land title and cases of casino gambling, to get the full flavor of this.)
6 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Mr Smith’s, 21, 10, 1675
May it please your honour
The comming of the Connecticut force to Petaquamscott, and surprisal of six and slaughter of five on Friday night, Saturday we marched towards Petaquamscott, though in snow, and in conjunction about midnight or later, we advanced: Capt. Mosley led the van, after him Massachusetts, and Plimouth and Connecticut in the rear; a tedious march in the snow, without intermission, brought us about two of the clock afternoon, to the entrance of the swamp, by the help of Indian Peter, who dealt faithfully with us; our men, with great courage, entered the swamp about twenty rods; within the cedar swamp we found some hundreds of wigwams, forted in with a breastwork and flankered, and many small blockhouses up and down, round about; they entertained us with a fierce fight, and many thousand shot, for about an hour, when our men valiantly scaled the fort, beat them thence, and from the blockhouses. In which action we lost Capt. Johnson, Capt. Danforth, and Capt. Gardiner, and their lieutenants disabled, Capt. Marshall also slain; Capt Seely, Capt. Mason, disabled, and many other officers, insomuch that, by a fresh assault and recruit powder from their store, the Indians fell on again, recarried and beat us out of, the fort, but by the great resolution and courage of the General and Major, we reinforced, and very hardly entered the fort again, and fired the wigwams, with many living and dead persons in them, great piles of meat and heaps of corn, the ground not permitting burial of their store, were consumed; the number of their dead, we generally suppose the enemy lost at least two hundred men; Capt. Mosely counted in one corner of the fort sixty four men; Capt. Goram reckoned 150 at least; But, O! Sir, mine heart bleeds to give your honor an account of our lost men, but especially our resolute Captains, as by account inclosed, and yet not so many, but we admire there remained any to return, a captive women, well known to Mr. Smith, informing that there were three thousand five hundred men engaging us and about a mile distant a thousand in reserve, to whom if God had so pleased, we had but been a morsel, after so much disablement: she informeth, that one of their sagamores was slain and their powder spent, causing their retreat, and that they are in a distressed condition for food and houses, that one Joshua Tift, an Englishman, is their encourager and conducter. Philip was seen by one, credilbly informing us, under a strong guard.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
After our wounds were dressed, we drew up for a march, not able to abide the field in the storm, and weary, about two of the clock, obtained our quarters, with our dead and wounded, only the General, Ministers, and some other persons of the guard, going to head a small swamp, lost our way, and returned again to the evening quarters, a wonder we were not prey to them, and, after at least thirty miles marching up and down, in the morning, recovered our quarters, and had it not been for the arrival of Goodale next morning, the whole camp had perished; The whole army, especially Connecticut, is much disabled and unwilling to march, with tedious storms, and no lodgings, and frozen and swollen limbs, Major Treat importunate to return to at least Stonington; Our dead and wounded are about two hundred, disabled as many; the want of officers, the consideration whereof the Genreal commends to your honer, forbids any action at present, and we fear whether Connecticut will comply, at last, to any action. We are endeavoring, by good keeping and billetting oue men at several quarters, and, if possible removel of our wounded to Rhode Isalnd, to recover the spirit of our soldiers, and shall be diligent to find and understand the removals on other action of the enemy, if God please to give us advantage against them.
As we compleat the account of dead, now in doing, The Council is of the mind, without recruit of men we shall not be able to engage the main body.
I give your honor hearty thanks for your kind lines, of which I am not worthy I am Sir, your honors humble servant Joseph Dudley Since the writing of these lines, the General and Council have jointly concluded to abide on the place, notwithstanding the desire of Connecticut, only entreat that a supply of 200 may be sent us, with supply of commanders; and, whereas we are forced to garrison our quarters with at least one hundred, three hundred men, upon joint account of colonies, will serve, and no less, to effect the design. This is by order of the council. Blunderbusses, and hand grenadoes, and armour, if it may, and at least two armourers to mend arms.
8 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Narragansett 26th 11th month 1675
After a tedious march in a bitter cold that followed the Dec. 12th, we hoped our pilot would have led us to Ponham by break of day, but so it came to pass we were misled and so missed a good opportunity. Dec. 13th we came to Mr Smith’s, and that day took 35 prisoners. Dec 14th, our General went out with a horse and foot, I with my company was kept to garrison. I sent out 30 of my men to scout abroad, who killed two Indians and brought in 4 prisoners, one of which was beheaded. Our amy came home at night, killed 7 and brought in 9 more, young and old. Dec 15th, came in John, a rogue, with pretense of peace, and was dismissed with this errand, that we might speak with Sachems. That evening, ho not being gone a quarter of an hour, his company that lay hid behind a hill killed two Salem men within a mile from our quarters, and wounded a third that he is dead. And at a house three miles off where I had 10 men, they killed 2 of them. Instantly, Capt. Mosely, myself and Capt Gardner were sent to fetch in Major Appleton’s company that kept 3 miles and a half off, and coming, they lay behind a stone wall and fired on us in sight of the garrison. We killed the captain that killed one of the Salem men, and had his cap on. That night they burned Jerry Bull’s house, and killed 17. Dec. 16th came that news. Dec 17th came news that Connecticut forces were at Petasquamscot, and had killed 4 Indians and took 6 prisoners. That day we sold Capt. Davenport 47 Indians, young and old for 80l. in money. Dec 18th we marched to Petaquamscot with all our forces, only a garrison left; that night very stormy; we lay, one thousand, in the open field that long night. In the morning, Dec. 19th, Lord’s day, at 5 o’clock we marched. Between 12 and 1 we came up with the enemy, and had a sore fight three hours. We lost, that are now dead, about 68, and had 150 wounded, many of which recovered. That long snowy cold night we had about 18 miles to our quarters, with about 210 dead and wounded. We left 8 dead in the fort. We had but 12 dead when we came to the swamp, besides the 8 we left. Many died by the way, and as soon as they we brought in, so that Dec. 20th we buried in a grave 34, next day 4, next day 2, and none since. Eight died at Rhode Island, 1 at Petaquamscot, 2 lost in the woods and killed Dec. 20, as we heard since; some say two more died. By the best intelligence, we killed 300 fighting men; prisoners we took, say 350, and above 300 women and children. We burnt above 500 houses, left but 9, burnt all their corn, that was in baskets, great store. One signal mercy that night, not to be forgotten, viz. That when we drew off, with so many dead and wounded, they did not pursue us, which the young men would have done, but the sachems would not consent; they had but ten pounds of powder let.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Our General, with about 40, lost our way, and wandered till 7 o’clock in the morning, before we came to our quarters. We thought we were within 2 miles of the enemy again, but God kept us; to him be the glory. We have killed now and then 1 since, and burnt 200 wigwams more; we killed 9 last Tuesday. We fetch in their corn daily and that undoes them. This is, as nearly as I can, a true relation. I read the narrative to my officers in my tent, who all assent to the truth of it. Mohegans and Pequods proved very false, fired into the air, and sent word before they came they would so, but got much plunder, guns and kettles. A great part of what is written was attested by Joshua Teffe, who married an Indian woman, a Wampanoag. He shot 20 times at us in the swamp, was taken at Providence Jan’y 14, brought to us the 16th, executed the 18th. A sad wretch, he never heard a sermon but once these 14 years. His father, going to recall him lost his head and lies unburied.
A list of Major Saml Apleton souldjers yt were slayne & wounded the 19th Decemb. ’75, at the Indians fort at Naragansett
In the Company of killed wounded Major Appleton 4 18 Capt. Mosely 6 9 Capt. Oliver 5 8 Capt. Davenport 4 11 Capt. Johnson 4 8 Capt. Gardiner 7 10 Capt. Prentice 1 3
31 67
Of the officers, Capts. Davenport, Johnson, and Gardiner were killed, and Lieutenants Upham, Savage, Swain, and Ting were wounded.
Of the Connecticut troops 71 were killed. Capt. Gallup- 10 Capt. Marshall- 14 Capt. Seeley- 20 Capt. Mason- 9 Capt. Watts- 17
Edward DeWolf was one of the volunteers who surrounded the Swampy Fort, to whom the State of Connecticut granted the township of Narragansett, now Voluntown, as a reward for their services (however, presumably he continued to reside in Lyme).
10 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1677
Balthasar DeWolf was chosen a member of the committee of Hartford, Connecticut.
1687
March 5, Saturday (1686, Old Style): We know that Alice DeWolf was still alive at this point, because she was mentioned by her husband Balthasar DeWolf in a deed of land he was giving to his son Simon DeWolf.
1688
At about this point Edward DeWolf was one of four to whom permission was granted to build a sawmill at Eight-Mile River.
1695
Charles DeWolf (2) was born to Charles DeWolf (1) and Prudence White DeWolf at Lyme, Connecticut, the firstborn of a family that would extend to 10 children. Apparently he would learn the same trade as his grandfather for it is said he “went from Lyme, Conn., to the Island of Guadeloupe, as a millwright” (we presume he did not return from the French Indies).
At this point, we know, Balthasar DeWolf was yet alive.
1701
Edward DeWolf was granted liberty to set up a corn mill near the sawmill by his house. This is supposed to be the site owned by the late Oliver Lay, in Laysville, about two miles and a half from the center of the village of Lyme. It will thus be seen that he was also a millwright and miller.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1712
March 24, Monday (1711, Old Style): Edward DeWolf died. He was survived by his wife Rebecca DeWolf.
1717
March 31, Sunday (Old Style): On the island of Guadeloupe in the French Indies, Charles DeWolf (2) got married with the Englishwoman Margaret Potter, who would never come to the continent of North America.
1726
November 8, Tuesday (Old Style): Mark Anthony DeWolf, son of Charles DeWolf (2)and Margaret Potter DeWolf (circa 1700-?), was born on the Island of Guadeloupe in the French Indies. He would be educated in a French school there and, at about 17 years of age, conveyed in the employ of Captain Simeon Potter to Bristol, Rhode Island.
1731
December 5, Sunday (Old Style): Charles DeWolf died.
1744
August 26, Sunday (Old Style): Mark Anthony DeWolf got married with Abigail Potter, daughter of Hopestill Potter and Lydia Potter and sister of his boss Captain Simeon Potter, who had been born on February 2, 1726 in Bristol, Rhode Island.
December: A few months after marrying his boss Captain Simeon Potter’s sister, Mark Anthony DeWolf sailed from Bristol, Rhode Island as first officer of Captain Potter’s privateer Prince Charles of Lorraine.
December 22, Saturday (Old Style): The Bristol, Rhode Island privateer Prince Charles of Lorraine surprised and captured the French settlement of Oyapoc in French Guiana, making heavy reprisals on the inhabitants of the town.
12 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1745
February 25, Monday (1744, Old Style): Charles DeWolf was born in Bristol, Rhode Island to Mark Anthony DeWolf (1726-1793) and Abigail Potter DeWolf (1726-1809).
He would align himself with the Jeffersonian party, then known as the Republicans, his sympathies in political and national issues leaning toward the French against the English. He would become so averse to the “mingling of politics and religion” that he would be one of the signers of the protest against the pastor of Bristol’s Congregational church for “political sermons” — eventually he and other parishioners would migrate to St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, at which the reverend would understand that he needed to refrain from holding their feet to the flames.2
1757
May 19, Thursday: It became known in Warren, Rhode Island that one of the privateers of Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf of Bristol had captured a French snow north of Bermuda.
Here is Rhode Island privateering during the English war against the French, in comparison with the number of Rhode Island vessels taken by French privateers:
RHODE RI VESSELS ISLAND TAKEN BY PRIVATEERS FRENCH
1756 5 5
1757 10 5
1758 16 11
1759 2 5
2. There’s nothing in the Bible, for instance, to cause one to suspect that God sees anything objectionable about race slavery.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 13 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
RHODE RI VESSELS ISLAND TAKEN BY PRIVATEERS FRENCH
1760 8 0
1761 3 14
1762 22 11
1763 ? 1
“In the United States, every possible encouragement should be given to privateering in time of war with a commercial nation ... to distress and harass the enemy and compel him to peace.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1812
“If privateering had not been already well established in the British Empire when Rhode Island first took to the sea, Rhode Islanders would have had to invent it. It suited them well. — Hawes, Alexander Boyd, page 653
1762
December 19, Sunday: William DeWolf was born.
3. Hawes, Alexander Boyd. OFF SOUNDINGS: ASPECTS OF THE MARITIME HISTORY OF RHODE ISLAND. Chevy Chase MD: Posterity Press, 1999
14 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 15 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1764
March 18, Sunday: James DeWolf was born.
1771
April 28, Sunday: Captain Charles DeWolf (3) got married in Bristol with Mary Tyler, daughter of the Reverend Barnabas Tyler and Mistress Martha Tyler of Bristol (there would be children of this union; he would remarry on June 3, 1789 with Elizabeth Rogerson, and eventually would remarry with Abigail Greene).
1778
May 25, Sunday: A British force of 500 men, including Hessian troops, marched through Warren and down the main street of Bristol, Rhode Island (now known as Hope Street), setting fire to many buildings and taking several citizens as prisoners to Newport. The posh residence of the family of Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf at the south corner of Burton and Hope streets was one of the 19 torched (the DeWolfs had fled to a farm in Swansea). Most of the houses burnt were the barracks of American troops or homes of prominent “rebels.” (Bristol now boasts the oldest continuous 4th-of-July celebration in America. First staged in 1785, it was begun by Bristolians who had taken part in the revolution.) CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
After the failure of the American drive to recapture Newport, Rhode Island, Jemimah Wilkinson, who had become known as “The Universal Friend,” and some of her associates, obtained General John Sullivan’s permission and the British commander’s permission to pass through the military lines and pay a visit to
16 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 17 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
England. It has been suspected that her agenda was to pay an evangelical visit to King George III.
This agenda would fail of accomplishment, but she would succeed in winning over Judge William Potter of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. He would in 1780 create a sanctuary for her and her little group of admirers on his estate at Little Rest (now Kingston).
Universal Friend would be going on preaching trips escorted by her father. Eventually her father would be replaced at her side, first by Judge Potter and then by her cadre of women friends. Her caravan –usually 12, riding two by two behind her spirited horse with her seated on a stunning white leather and blue velvet saddle– would find its way to Philadelphia and Worchester in Pennsylvania. Meetinghouses would be established, initially in South Kingston at the home of Judge Potter and then also in New Milford, Connecticut.4 The town of Acton was keeping tabs on how much the revolution was costing them:
4 men Rhode Island 2¼ months May and June at £6=£24
4 men Northern Army 4 months Aug. to Dec. at £24=£96
4 men Northern Army 1½ months Oct. and Nov. at £9=£36
4 men Cambridge 5 months Nov. to April at £12=£48
6 men Cambridge 3 months April to July at £7¼=£43½
A full estimate of the services cannot be made. This town had the honor of furnishing several officers during the revolutionary war. Lieutenant Colonel Francis Faulkner and Captain Simon Hunt were in the battle at White Plains, and at other times were also engaged in actual service. The constitution was adopted by more than two thirds of the votes of the town.5
4. We are tempted to disrespect such a person as a mere self-deluded religious poseur — but in all fairness, if we do so there are any number of posturing males, cut from the same broadcloth, even today on the tube, whom we should also “diss.” 5. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.)
18 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
June 15, Monday: The General Court of Massachusetts had created a constitution and sent it around to the various towns of the Bay Colony for approval. On this day the citizens of the town of Concord, all 111 of them unanimously, voted to repudiate this document.
George DeWolf was born in Bristol, Rhode Island, son of Captain Charles DeWolf (3) and Mary Tyler DeWolf. Like his father he would be a prosperous ship owner and merchant, and in addition he would acquire a plantation in Cuba the working of which of course would require the labor of many black slaves. For a time his wealth would approach that of his uncle James DeWolf but then his failure in business would almost paralyze Bristol. Prominent in matters military, on horseback he would cut a splendid figure, and so for the years 1818-1821 he functioned as the brigadier-general in command of the 1st Rhode Island Brigade of troops from Newport and Bristol, and for the years 1822-1825 as the major-general in command of all Rhode Island troops (fortunately, nothing much would be going down during those years, except of course endless parades).
1783
The unrest of the American Revolution safely over, the family of Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf returned from its farm refuge in Swansea to Bristol, Rhode Island.
1784
June 1, Tuesday: William DeWolf got married with Charlotte Finney in Bristol, Rhode Island (the couple would produce Henry in 1785, William in 1789, Charlotte in 1793, Maria in 1795, and Abigail in 1798).
1786
June 19, Monday: Nathanael Greene died while he was still 43, less than three years after his nation had with his help achieved freedom, apparently due to the sunstroke he had suffered on June 12th while touring the slave plantation of a friend. Why, it’s almost enough to make one believe in a just God!
Mary Tyler DeWolf died. Her and Captain Charles DeWolf (3)’s children were George, born on June 15, 1778, Charles, who would die in Cuba in 1834, William, who would die unmarried, Martha, and Abby born in 1777.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 19 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1789
June 3, Tuesday: Alexander Mackenzie departed from Fort Chipewyan (Alberta) in an attempt to discover a water route to the Pacific Ocean. THE FROZEN NORTH
Captain Charles DeWolf (3) remarried with Elizabeth Rogerson (there would be children of this union; he eventually would remarry with a 3d wife, Abigail Greene).
20 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1790
July 14, Wednesday: In France this was, of course, the 1st anniversary of Bastille Day. Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Forster were in Paris for the celebration. Humboldt would return to his studies. Forster would join the revolution and, four years later, die in disgrace and misery.
At some point during this year a federal grand jury, in its first session, returned an indictment of murder against James DeWolf (1764-1837) of Bristol, son of Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf (1726-1792), for having thrown
The Family Crest
a woman overboard when she exhibited symptoms of the small pox. The indictment read “James DeWolf, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil ... did feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought, with his hands clinch and seize in and upon the body of said Negro woman ... and did push, cast and throw her from out of said vessel into the Sea and waters of the
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 21 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Ocean, whereupon she then and there instantly sank, drowned and died.” (The murderous James DeWolf, protected of course by his influential uncle Simeon Potter and other family members, would never be required to answer to this indictment.)
TRIANGULAR TRADER In Providence, Rhode Island, per Volume 22, page 290 of the town records, John T. Clark on behalf of the firm of Clark & Nightingale, distillers engaged in the Triangular Trade, manumitted “Quam a Negro Man late a Servant to us for life”:
^ÇÉã tÄÄ `xÇ àÉ ã{É à{xyx cÜxyxÇàá y{tÄÄ vÉÅx à{tà jx VÄtÜ~x 9a|z{à|ÇztÄx ÉycÜÉä|wxÇvx |Ç à{xVÉâÇàç ÉycÜÉä|wxÇvx`xÜv{tÇàá? yÉÜ9 |Ç VÉy|wxÜtà|ÉÇ Éy à{x fâÅ Éy Y|yàç fÑtÇ|y{ `|ÄÄxw WÉÄÄtÜá àÉ âá |Ç [tÇw Ñt|w uç dâtÅ t axzÜÉ `tÇ Ätàx t fxÜätÇà àÉ âá yÉÜ Ä|yx 9 yÉÜ w|äxÜá Éà{xÜ zÉÉw VÉÇy|wxÜtà|ÉÇá âá à{xÜxâÇàÉ ÅÉä|Çz? {täx ÅtÇâÅ|ààxw 9 áxà yÜxx? à{x át|w axzÜÉ `tÇ ÇtÅxw dâtÅ {xÜxuç yÉÜ âá 9 ÉâÜ [x|ÜáA exÄ|ÇÖâ|á{|Çz tÄÄ VÄt|Å ÉÜ g|àÄx àÉ à{x yt|w axzÜÉ `tÇ {|á áxÜä|vxá ÉÜ _tuÉâÜ yÉÜxäxÜ {xÜxtyàxÜ \Ç j|àÇxyá ã{xÜxÉy jx {täx {xÜxâÇàÉ áâuyáÜ|uxw ÉâÜ atÅxá tá à{x Y|ÜÅ Éy ÉâÜ [Éâyx à{|á yÉâÜàxxÇà{ Wtç Éy ]âÄç? |Ç à{x çxtÜ Éy ÉâÜ _ÉÜw bÇx à{ÉâytÇw fxäxÇ {âÇwÜxw 9 a|Çxà牉 VÄtÜ~9a|z{à|ÇztÄx j|àÇxyá ftÅTÜÇÉÄw
SLAVERY We wonder at the magnificent gentility of these white folks engaged in the Triangular Trade, in setting free this man of color who was their servant for life, and we also wonder — how old might Quam have been at the point at which he was thus made free?
22 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1791
During this year and the following one, the Sally, at this point owned by the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island, was making yet another slaving voyage to the coast of Africa.
TRIANGULAR TRADER W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Meantime, in spite of the prohibitory State laws, the African slave-trade to the United States continued to flourish. It was notorious that New England traders carried on a large traffic.6 Members stated on the floor of the House that “it was much to be regretted that the severe and pointed statute against the slave trade had been so little regarded. In defiance of its forbiddance and its penalties, it was well known that citizens and vessels of the United States were still engaged in that traffic.... In various parts of the nation, outfits were made for slave-voyages, without secrecy, shame, or apprehension.... Countenanced by their fellow- citizens at home, who were as ready to buy as they themselves were to collect and to bring to market, they approached our Southern harbors and inlets, and clandestinely disembarked the sooty offspring of the Eastern, upon the ill fated soil of the Western hemisphere. In this way, it had been computed that, during the last twelve months, twenty thousand enslaved negroes had been transported from Guinea, and, by smuggling, added to the plantation stock of Georgia and South Carolina. So little respect seems to have been paid to the existing prohibitory statute, that it may almost be considered as disregarded by common consent.”7 These voyages were generally made under the flag of a foreign nation, and often the vessel was sold in a foreign port to escape confiscation. South Carolina’s own Congressman confessed that although the State had prohibited the trade since 1788, she “was unable to enforce” her laws. “With navigable rivers running into the heart of it,” said he, “it was impossible, with our means, 6. Cf. Fowler, LOCAL LAW IN MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT, etc., page 126. 7. Speech of S.L. Mitchell of New York, Feb. 14, 1804: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 8th Congress, 1st Session, page 1000. Cf. also speech of Bedinger: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, pages 997-8.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
to prevent our Eastern brethren, who, in some parts of the Union, in defiance of the authority of the General Government, have been engaged in this trade, from introducing them into the country. The law was completely evaded, and, for the last year or two [1802-3], Africans were introduced into the country in numbers little short, I believe, of what they would have been had the trade been a legal one.”8 The same tale undoubtedly might have been told of Georgia.
1793
November 9, Saturday: Mark Anthony DeWolf died in Bristol, Rhode Island. He was survived by his wife.
1794
Friend Moses Brown and Friend Samuel Rodman presented to President George Washington and Vice- President John Adams a memorial in opposition to the international slave trade. The federal Congress passed an act prohibiting the trans-Atlantic trade. (When officials of the Newport customs district would begin to enforce this law in the subsidiary port of Bristol, this would interfere with the nefarious activities of Rhode Island slavetraders James DeWolf and Shearjashub Bourne. The slavetraders would lobby the government for the establishment of Bristol as a separate customs district and no longer subject to these out-of-control officials of the Newport customs district — who were actually daring to enforce this new law.) W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Of the twenty years from 1787 to 1807 it can only be said that they were, on the whole, a period of disappointment so far as the suppression of the slave-trade was concerned. Fear, interest, and philanthropy united for a time in an effort which bade fair to suppress the trade; then the real weakness of the constitutional compromise appeared, and the interests of the few overcame the fears and the humanity of the
8. Speech of Lowndes in the House, Feb. 14, 1804: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 8th Congress, 1st Session, page 992. Cf. Stanton’s speech later: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress, 2d Session, page 240.
24 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
many.
The DeWolf Crest
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 25 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1799
The Rhode Island brigantine Orange (or is this a typographic error in regard to a voyage in 1779?) brought a cargo of 120 new slaves from the coast of Africa.
William Ellery seized the DeWolf schooner Lucy (Captain Charles Collins) for engaging in the slave trade and put it up for auction in Bristol. Local surveyor Samuel Bosworth was appointed to bid on the vessel on behalf of the government. After John Brown of Providence and several other slavers had attempted unsuccessfully to intimidate Bosworth, the DeWolfs simply hired thugs who, costumed as native Americans, kidnapped him and took him several miles up the bay while with a trifling bid the DeWolfs recovered their vessel.
John Brown, as ever a strong defender of the absolute righteousness of the international slave trade, was elected to the US House of Representatives. He would sponsor legislation to create a separate Customs House in Bristol, in facilitation of the international slave trade that was still being conducted through that port by James DeWolf and Shearjashub Bourne.
The DeWolf Crest W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Meantime, in spite of the prohibitory State laws, the African slave-trade to the United States continued to flourish. It was notorious that New England traders carried on a large traffic.9 Members stated on the floor of the House that “it was much to be regretted that the severe and pointed statute against the slave trade had been so little regarded. In defiance of its forbiddance and its penalties, it was well known that citizens and vessels of the United States were still engaged in that traffic.... In various parts of the nation, outfits were made for slave-voyages, without secrecy, shame, or apprehension.... Countenanced by their fellow- citizens at home, who were as ready to buy as they themselves were to collect and to bring to market, they approached our Southern harbors and inlets, and clandestinely disembarked the sooty offspring of the Eastern, upon the ill fated soil of the Western hemisphere. In this way, it had been computed that, during the last twelve months, twenty thousand enslaved negroes
9. Cf. Fowler, LOCAL LAW IN MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT, etc., page 126.
26 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
had been transported from Guinea, and, by smuggling, added to the plantation stock of Georgia and South Carolina. So little respect seems to have been paid to the existing prohibitory statute, that it may almost be considered as disregarded by common consent.”10 These voyages were generally made under the flag of a foreign nation, and often the vessel was sold in a foreign port to escape confiscation. South Carolina’s own Congressman confessed that although the State had prohibited the trade since 1788, she “was unable to enforce” her laws. “With navigable rivers running into the heart of it,” said he, “it was impossible, with our means, to prevent our Eastern brethren, who, in some parts of the Union, in defiance of the authority of the General Government, have been engaged in this trade, from introducing them into the country. The law was completely evaded, and, for the last year or two [1802-3], Africans were introduced into the country in numbers little short, I believe, of what they would have been had the trade been a legal one.”11 The same tale undoubtedly might have been told of Georgia.
March: James DeWolf of Rhode Island made a record of a financial transaction involving 13 live slaves (and 5 who had died) in Havana, Cuba:
10. Speech of S.L. Mitchell of New York, Feb. 14, 1804: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 8th Congress, 1st Session, page 1000. Cf. also speech of Bedinger: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, pages 997-8. 11. Speech of Lowndes in the House, Feb. 14, 1804: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 8th Congress, 1st Session, page 992. Cf. Stanton’s speech later: ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 9th Congress, 2d Session, page 240.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 27 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1801
Josiah Quincy, Sr. visited Rhode Island. JOSIAH QUINCY, SR.
Mount Hope is not a high hill at all, rising only to some 200 plus feet above the level of Narragansett Bay. In this year the infamous Senator James DeWolf had an octagonal summer house erected near its top. BRISTOL
The DeWolf Crest
28 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
The DeWolf Carriage
1803
Christmas, Sunday,: William Thornton and Francis Fitzhugh Conway, cousins, found themselves in competition for the attentions of a niece of James Madison, Miss Nellie Madison, who was a guest at Chatham during this year’s Christmas season. The cousins arrived at the Chatham festivities on horseback and their horses were stabled. Francis had outfitted his horse with a handsome new bridle and told the young lady in the course of the evening that he was going to “surprise” her. When it came time for him to display his horse, he found that the groom had switched the bridles. It was his cousin’s horse that impressed Miss Nellie. He accused his cousin of having paid the groom to switch the bridles, which meant they needed to have a duel. They met on a narrow pathway between Alum Spring Rock and a mill pond and each shot the other in the region of the bladder. The cousins died at about the same hour.
James DeWolf of Bristol gave his wife a pair of slaves as her Christmas present. “I went shopping in this boutique in Africa and brought you home a little something, Darling. It’s a matched set.”12 INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Of the twenty years from 1787 to 1807 it can only be said that they were, on the whole, a period of disappointment so far as the suppression of the slave-trade was concerned. Fear, interest, and philanthropy united for a time in an effort which bade fair to suppress the trade; then the real weakness of the constitutional compromise appeared, and the interests of the few overcame the fears and the humanity of the many.
The DeWolf Carriage In Newport, Rhode Island, by this point Friend Stephen Wanton Gould, age 22, had reached a firm decision to “go to journey work” repairing timepieces, for his livelihood. Having just completed one apprenticeship which had been for seven years (we don’t know the nature of this), he apprenticed himself anew, to learn watch repair from Friend David Williams. While his brothers would be going into trade and traveling, he himself would be staying home and devoting himself to mundane activity — this in order to avoid any personal involvement at all in any slavery-related economic activity. He wrote in his journal of the religious anguish of his mind.
12. Clearly, there’s a terminology problem here. In an effort to resolve this terminology issue, at the Republican National Convention in New-York during August 2004 –at which the Republican Party would for four days make an effort to strip from its face its mask of hostility to the plight of the downtrodden and reveal its true countenance of benevolent conservatism and concern– these people would be sensitively referred to by a Hoosier Republican running for the US Senate as “involuntary immigrants.”
So, perhaps, this is a good point at which to insert a story about involuntary immigrants that has been passed on to us by Ram Varmha, a retired IBM engineer whose father had briefly served as Maharaja after the independence of Cochin. He relates the story as narrated to him by his paternal grandmother who lived in Thripoonithura, Cochin: “When my grandmother (born 1882) was a young girl she would go with the elder ladies of the family to the Pazhayannur Devi Temple in Fort Cochin, next to the Cochin Lantha Palace built by the Dutch (Landers = Lantha), which was an early establishment of the Cochin royal family before the administration moved to Thripoonithura. My grandmother often told us that in the basement of the Lantha Palace, in a confined area, a family of Africans had been kept locked up, as in a zoo! By my Grandmother’s time all the Africans had died. But, some of the elder ladies had narrated the story to her of ‘Kappiries’ (Africans) kept in captivity there. It seems visitors would give them fruits and bananas. They were well cared for but always kept in confinement. My grandmother did not know all the details but according to her, ‘many’ years earlier, a ship having broken its mast drifted into the old Cochin harbor. When the locals climbed aboard, they found a crewless ship, but in the hold there were some chained ‘Kappiries’ still alive; others having perished. The locals did not know what to do with them. Not understanding their language and finding the Africans in chains, the locals thought that these were dangerous to set free. So they herded the poor Africans into the basement of the Cochin Fort, and held them in captivity, for many, many years! I have no idea when the initial incident happened, but I presume it took place in the late 1700s or early 1800s. This points to the possibility that it was, in fact, a slave ship carrying human cargo from East Africa to either the USA or the West Indies. An amazing and rather bizarre story. Incidentally, this is not an ‘old woman's tale’! Its quite reliable. My grandmother would identify some of the older ladies who had actually seen the surviving Kappiries.”
30 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1804
February: The first customs collector for Bristol, Rhode Island, Jonathan Russell, had been constantly interfering with the international slave trade in strict application and implementation of official US federal law and policy. The DeWolfs and the other slave trading families of Bristol therefore arranged with President Thomas Jefferson to have Russell replaced with a brother-in-law of theirs, Charles Collins, who was captain of one of that family’s negrero vessels — a man who could be counted on to not enforce the federal law against the importation of generations of fresh slaves from Africa into the United States of America.
The DeWolf Crest
The DeWolf Carriage
President Jefferson must have been doing something that Republicans liked, for in this month a Republican congressional caucus nominated him for re-election as president. (New York governor George Clinton was nominated to run as the Republican candidate for vice-president.)
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 31 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
August 13, Monday: The state governments of New England were not themselves all that eager to cooperate in the freeing of slaves. For instance, on this day the owner of a Rhode Island slave named Patience applied to the state court for permission to set her free — and such permission would of course be forthcoming, but not until October 1808.13
Captain Charles DeWolf (3) and his son General George DeWolf were the principle owners of the full-rigged 250-ton vessel Juno that sailed from Bristol with a crew of 26 to trade along the northwestern coast of the United States. His home on Thames Street at the foot of Constitution Street was one of the most elegant of the period.
October 17, Wednesday: Milan prohibited imports from Tuscany due to the yellow fever epidemic.
General George DeWolf got married with Charlotte Patten Goodwin, daughter of Attorney-General Henry Goodwin of Newport, Rhode Island with Mary Bradford, daughter of Governor William Bradford and Mary LeBaron Bradford of Bristol.
13. By this point the brothers Moses Brown, Nicholas Brown, and Joseph Brown had ceased to participate in their family’s slave- trading enterprise, but only after a slave mutiny aboard one of their vessels had resulted in more than a hundred deaths. The only brother continuing in this international business had been the more-money-than-sense one, John Brown (Brown University is named after Nicholas Brown, Jr., rather than after either his father Nicholas or his uncle John).
32 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1809
In Bristol, Rhode Island, General George DeWolf purchased from his mother-in-law Mary Goodwin at a cost of $3,000 the property on which he would be erecting a magnificent $60,000 home for his family ($63,000 then would be more or less like $7,000,000 today).
On the low-rent side of things, in this year a Quaker meetinghouse was being erected in Cumberland that would be used by the Friends for over 117 years and now functions as a community center: The Friends Meeting House [of Cumberland, Rhode Island]. This house of worship was built in 1809, principally through the liberality of Samuel Hill. It is a two-story building, about thirty feet square. This is probably the largest society of Friends in the State. This house is used by the society of Friends regularly on their days of worship. The history of this society commences with the settlement of this place in early times, and the descendants of these early pioneers still [1878] hold to this grand old faith. This house is located on the west side of the Lanesville Road, about half a mile south of East Cumberland village, upon the brow of a sharp hill, south of which is a series of burial-grounds. An interesting feature in this repository of the dead, is the fact that there are monuments without an inscription, and are yet, even with the ground,
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
telling the simple story of loved ones at rest.
February 7, Tuesday: The widowed Abigail DeWolf, who had survived her husband Mark Anthony DeWolf by 15 years, died.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 7th of 2 M 1809 / This eveng I was called to Watch with our friend Edward Sisson I got to his house soon after Sunset & found him nearly about to close this scene of trouble & I firmly believe enter another & far better - he was past speaking but by signs & Motions appeard very Sensible — he departed about half past 9 OClock in the eveng — Assisted by our friends R Mitchell & Jon & Dennis we laid him out & I set up the remainder of the Night with John Chase — I was with him when he breathed his last which was very easy & quiet after a very distressing day, indeed his whole illness tho’ but ten days was very distressing — When I first entr’d the room I was much struck with the Awfulness of the Scene & was glad I was there believing some feelings I had were of a nature that would be lastingly beneficial RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
34 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1810
Here’s a story of one side of Narraganset Bay, versus the other side! On the east side of the bay in this year General George DeWolf was erecting “Linden Place” in Bristol as his homestead, using the profits of his large slave plantation in the Caribbean to make this a fine specimen of the finest architecture tastes of the period. His homestead, designed by Russell Warren, is distinguished by a fine portico with lofty Corinthian columns, and an old-fashioned ornamental balustrade of intricate pattern surrounds the roof. In the following year he would purchase adjacent land, to enlarge the grounds. Here in 1817 he would be able to entertain none less than President James Monroe in a manner befitting his position. Hoo-hah!
Meanwhile, on the west side of the Narraganset Bay, a couple of years after being caught as a runaway and flogged, Cato Pearce ran away again. He only had a year to go until under Rhode Island law he would no longer be required to serve his master without pay, but he ran away anyway — could he have been fearing that his master would sell him south into life slavery just before he attained his majority, or, could he have been fearing that despite technically becoming a free man, he would not be able to be actually free as a black man in the Rhode Island of that era? At that time there were only a few more than a hundred slaves left in South County, but the situation there for people of color did not seem markedly improved. This time he determined to try crossing the border into Massachusetts, because slavery had there in all its forms been outlawed, and hired himself out as a farmhand to a white family in Rehoboth. I went into Rehoboth, Mass., and hired out to a man by the name of Samuel Lyon. He was a dreadful wicked man, and while livin’ with him I became more wicked and hard than ever. He had rum as plenty almost as water, and I got to drinkin’ badly. I loved with him about three years. He died while I lived with him. His death was dreadful. I think he lay on his sick bed almost a fortnight. He cried bitterly for mercy — mercy, and told his folks that he was going to hell. He said he could n’t be saved. Oh, he said, my feet and legs are in hell. He die in that dreadful state; and the last words that came from his lips were,
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 35 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
“O Lord, gone!” I used to stand and look at him in this dreadful state, but I dare not go into the room. I then made up my mind that I would try to do better.
A few years later Cato would sign on as a crewmember aboard a schooner belonging to a Captain Rogers of New London, Connecticut, on a cruise to the Caribbean and then London. During a storm at sea he would try to pray, only to be told by the mate that “he would n’t have d----d niggers praying on board. He cuffed me, pinched my ears, and told me if he catched me praying again he would tie me over the windlass.” On his return in about 1815, after spending his wages, he would hire himself out to James Rhodes of Providence.
By that time there would be only seven persons still enslaved in South County.
36 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1812
At about this point Cato Pearce, who had been working on a farm in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, signed on as a crewmember aboard a schooner belonging to a Captain Rogers of New London, Connecticut, on a cruise to the Caribbean. On his return in about 1815, after spending his wages, he would hire himself out to James Rhodes of Providence, Rhode Island.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 37 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
In approximately this year Robert Voorhis was building his hut on Fox Point,
a peninsula of uninhabited land about a mile south of Providence Bridge in Rhode Island, and would reside there for a number of years, until obnoxious construction work began in that vicinity. What had made this escaped-mulatto-slave-become-seaman resolve to become a hermit? —he said that had sneaked back down south via Baltimore to Georgetown in a fruitless attempt to recover his first wife and their children: Feeling a strong inclination once more to visit the shores of the south, where I had not only been unjustly deprived of my liberty, but where I was inhumanly forced from my beloved wife and two darling children, I took passage (about fifteen years since) on board a sloop for Baltimore, and from thence proceeded direct to Georgetown. As twenty years had elapsed since I there left all that I held most dear in life — and so great a change had time effected in my personal appearance, I felt little or no apprehension that I should be recognized or molested by any, if living, who once professed a claim to me. In this I was not mistaken, for indeed as regarded the town, inhabitants, &c. so great a change had the twenty years produced, that I walked the streets at mid-day unnoticed and unknown. My old master (Voorhis and his wife had been some years dead, and the survivors of the family had removed to parts unknown— Bevins, the wretch by whom I was unjustly deprived of my liberty, and thereby forever seperated [sic] from my unfortunate family, had a few years previous emigrated to the west— but, the principle object of my visit was not answered— of my wife and children I could obtain no satisfactory information— all that I could learn, was, that
38 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
soon after my disappearance, their sufferings and deprivations became so great, that my poor wife in a fit of desparation [sic], as was supposed, put an end to her existence, and that her helpless children did not long survive her!— this was enough! yea more than enough, to fill to the brim the bitter cup of my afflictions!— afflictions which had more less attended me through life!—I then felt but little desire to live, as there was nothing then remaining to attach me to this world— it was at that moment that I formed the determination to retire from it— to become a recluse, and mingle thereafter as little as possible with human society.
1815
At about this point Cato Pearce, back from his voyage to the Caribbean, had abandoned religion and taken up drinking and carousing. After spending his seaman’s wages in Rhode Island, he began to attend the revival meetings held for people of color by a white man known to them as Elder Osborne (the Reverend V.R. Osborne was apparently being permitted by the white congregation of his Methodist church in Providence to preach to people of color, but only in all-colored assemblies and only at night). Elder Osborne was asking converts to rise and come forward, and some attenders did, but Cato always held back. He hired himself out to Captain James Rhodes of Providence. During a terrible storm while on another voyage to the Caribbean, he would feel an urge to pray out loud. The first mate would attempt to forbid such prayer, but later, below decks, he would again pray out loud. The first mate, hearing this, would call him on deck and shout “Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t have no more hollerin’ and prayin’ on board?” Then he hauled me forward and laid me over the windlass, and made one of the hands hold me over while he laid on three or four hard blows with a rope, and made me promise not to pray again. Then I didn’t know what to do.... I wept a good deal —
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 39 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
pretty much all night long.
RHODE ISLAND RELIGION
40 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
In about this year a portrait was made on canvas, by an unknown artist, of Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior (1764-1835), one of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’s wealthiest plantation masters, owning some seven or eight farms. He was an enormous man, six feet four inches tall and weighing about 300 pounds. Table of Altitudes
Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' John Keats 5 ' 0 '' Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Mother Teresa 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) Bette Midler 5 ' 1 ''
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 41 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Vol ta i re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2''
42 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11''
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 43 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard M. Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 ''
44 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1''
1817
After his bad experience of trying to pray aboard ship and being flogged with a rope end over the windlass, Cato Pearce had left the service of James Rhodes and hired out as a farm hand in Westerly, Rhode Island. At about this point he sought work aboard a sloop in nearby New London, Connecticut. The captain of the vessel, learning that most of Cato’s work experience was agricultural, got him into his small carriage and took him out to the plantation in Little Rest (now Kingston) of Representative Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior, one of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’s wealthiest plantation masters, who would soon be running for governor. He was hired by these Seventh Day Baptists and would have “a pretty good time with them,” except that they would be urging him to “keep the Seventh Day,” that is, to observe the Lord’s Day on a Saturday. Mistress Mary (Perkins? Mawney?) Potter, a lady from East Greenwich married to Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior, encouraged any religious observance even if it was not on the 7th day of the week, and so Cato requested of her that he be allowed to keep the Sabbath on a 1st Day, at a Sunday church service three miles away. She said that she would permit this, conditional on his having done his chores. At this worship service, with a congregation that apparently was made up mostly of white people, he was asked to speak, and did so, and was well received. He then asked if he could preach again, at their next worship service, and this offer was
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
accepted.
Overjoyed, back at his duties at the farm, Cato informed Mistress Potter that he “had got meetin’ ’pointed to preach,” and she expressed her approval of this religiosity. That week he would go “into the woods to study what I should say, and sound it out there; and swing my hands.” Then, at the next Sunday worship, his preaching engagement was a resounding success, and he was asked to preach again. He used some farm wages to purchase white gloves, white stockings, and a breast pin, to improve his appearance while preaching, and Mistress Potter volunteered to tack some ruffles onto his white shirt. Elisha Reynolds Potter, Sr. himself drove Cato in a wagon to the service in Groton, Connecticut. However, when they arrived, some white men outside the meetinghouse did not recognize him as the expected preacher, and told him to go away. Managing to make his way into the building, he made contact with his waiting host, and his preaching was again a success.
Perhaps at this point Cato was overwhelmed, for he did not preach again for awhile. Then, one day, Mistress Potter, being aware that there was a service planned at her father’s house in East Greenwich, sent him on an errand there. Arriving, he was invited by the worshipers to say a few words, and did so. However, he did not feel called to continue this preaching, so he went to pray by himself to the Lord.
At this point, as Cato describes in detail, he was visited by the Lord and suddenly found himself able to read the Bible even though he was illiterate. The Lord had forgiven his sins. I felt so happy I shouted; I couldn’t lay a-bed; and I got up and told Mrs. Potter, and she got up and called the folks; and we had a wonderful time. I felt so happy in the mornin’ I couldn’t work that day; and I went round and told the neighbors — and in the evening we had a meetin’, and had a wonderful time. Then we had meetin’s every night; and the Lord was with us and begun a good work, and many souls were converted to God.
46 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Cato determined that he needed to be baptized, but could not decide which church to join. At this point his work on the Potter plantation ended and he sought work in Windham County, Connecticut, near the Rhode Island border. One time, at Killingly, his employer and other whites took him to a Congregational meetinghouse for a Sunday service, so that he could try it out and see if it was congenial to him. His white employer ushered him to the separate box for black attendees, but this was so far away from the pulpit that he found he could hardly hear the preacher, who was in any event preaching not spontaneously from the spirit, but from written notes. He was offended at this segregated seating and referred to it as the “nigger pews.”
Above, “The Negro Pew, or ‘Free’ Seats for black Christians,” in the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY ALMANAC FOR 1840 (New-York, 1840). In the North in the 1st part of the 19th Century, in Protestant churches, African-Americans were often relegated to segregated, inferior seating (unlike Catholic churches, where they were not even permitted inside the building).
Finally, Cato got himself baptized by the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church in Killingly, Connecticut. He preached “both nights and Sundays” at various meetings in the area, including several at his white employer’s house. In the spring, however, he had to stop his preaching and obtain new employment.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 47 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
June 30, Monday: New President James Monroe, on a northern tour during the summer celebrating the “Era of Good-feeling,” went from Newport to Fall River. From there he would take a revenue cutter to Bristol, Rhode Island, to be entertained in a manner befitting his position at the magnificent homestead “Linden Place” of General George DeWolf.
The President would depart for Providence aboard the Narragansett Bay Firefly, an ugly little thing that needed a huge square sail to supplement its engine — but the initial steamboat to enter Bristol’s harbor. At Providence, His arrival had been anticipated, and the citizens had appointed a Committee to receive and welcome him, which Committee consisted of the Town Council and ten other gentlemen. He was received admist the ringing of bells, the discharge of cannon, and other demonstrations of joy, and was escorted from his place of landing from the steam-boat, by a civic and military procession, to the Golden Ball Inn (now Mansion House) where the Committee made him a very respectful address, to which he made a suitable response. On the following day he passed through the principal streets, on horseback, and at 11 o’clock left the town, under escort of the Light Dragoons. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 30 of 6M / This morning Went with Rowland Hazard to visit the President - We were introduced by OH Perry - He received us very civily. - my inducement for going was to shew a Simple testimony of respect & from a thought that it might be of use in some future day to be known to the president. we know not in what situation Our society may be placed, & a little knowledge of some of us may have some useful tendency in some way that we cannot now foresee. — While at the House I was also introduced to the Governor of the State (N R Knight) & to General Swift
48 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
On turning to come away I forcibly felt the expression to arise “Better O Lord is an hour in thy Presence than a thousand elsewhere.” — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1820
For some two decades the US customs collector at Bristol, Rhode Island had been a brother-in-law of James DeWolf who had a major investment in the illicit international slave trade, an official who could be counted on not to interfere with the importation of generations of fresh slaves from Africa into the United States of America. In this year, however, that convenient arrangement came to an end. –No more slaves were to be disembarked in broad daylight at this New England port!
The African Freedmen’s Society of Providence had become the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. At first the Bethel group had met in the homes of members and in the meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends at the corner of North Main Street and Meeting Street (when the white Quakers were not in the building, the black folks were of course allowed to sit anywhere they pleased, even downstairs rather than in the building’s dilapidated “pigeon loft”; the unused segregated seats would be torn out in a building renovation in 1822). Such churches were disapproved of by the white community, but as one meeting place
had been removed by the authorities, it had been replaced by another, and sometimes two or three. In the previous year members of the local black community had met at the 1st Baptist Church, the nation’s oldest Baptist church, to discuss their need for an African Meeting House. In this year the African Union Meeting
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 49 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
and School House Society’s new facility was erected at Meeting Street and Congdon Street (this currently houses the Congdon Street Baptist Church). At this point the congregation purchased a lot on top of College Hill on Meeting Street, and they would be constructing a building on this lot in 1866. (In 1961 the building would have become so shaky that the congregation would sell the plot to Brown University in order to purchase their current Bethel Church on Hope Street at the intersection of Rochambeau Avenue.)
Early in this decade Rhode Island’s black citizens would be being stripped of their hard-won voting rights, and segregated in the public schools. White rioters would be destroying property in Providence’s “Hard-Scrabble,” the 1st separate black neighborhood, off what is now North Main Street near University Heights.
At about this point, down in Little Rest (now Kingston), Rhode Island, Cato Pearce was being hired as a farm worker by Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior, at his farm homestead. (Potter was a state Representative who had recently run unsuccessfully for Governor, and his political attitudes might be said to be somewhat to the right of unreconstructed since he favored, for instance, that the bankrupt be thrown in debtors’ prison; the son Potter, Junior would attempt to follow in his father’s political footprints, with a more liberal bent, but would have his greatest success as a scholar.14)
The efforts of Cato to make a personal contribution were being supported by, among others, two white men, elders in the Quidnesset Baptist Church of North Kingstown, William Northrop and Thomas Cole.
(It seems clear that there was a reason why Cato could not affiliate with the Quakers of North Kingstown, in his desire to preach. Although Quaker practice would have allowed him to rise during silent worship and speak, in fact it seems there were only a couple of men attending the Quaker meeting in that town at that time, and they weren’t offering words to each other but simply sitting in silence.)
It was in about this year that the significant event occurred, which would cause us to retitle Cato Pearce’s 1842 autobiography, when it eventually came to be republished, as “JAILED FOR PREACHING.” The event is of
14. For instance, EARLY HISTORY OF NARRAGANSETT WITH AN APPENDIX OF ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS MANY OF WHICH ARE NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME PUBLISHED. Providence RI, 1935
50 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
significance to us not so that we can experience a sense of outrage, senses of outrage being easy enough to arrange, but so that we can get an approximation of what real human life amounted to in southern Rhode Island during the early years of the 19th Century. It is noteworthy, for instance, that despite the fact that Joshua Pearce, Cato’s former master, had beaten him as a child, and despite the fact that as a young man he had had the first mate of Captain Rogers’s schooner lay him over the capstan and go after him with the end of a rope, in these goings-on in about 1820 the plantation manager Elisha Potter did not actually put into play the horse- whip he held in his hand. It had been used as a prop, to threaten but not to inflict injury. Most likely, by this point in time the tenor of life on the former slave plantations of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations had changed somewhat. It had become socially unacceptable for a white man to thus administer lashes to a now- “free” person of color. The reason why Cato was put in jail was, Potter needed to resolve upon some alternative punishment. Thus it was that, rather than risk social disapprobation by whipping Cato, Potter “got the officer — the jailer — and put [Cato] in jail.” Cato had committed no crime and Potter held no official town or state government post such as sheriff or judge, that would legally permit him to commit a person to incarceration; nevertheless, Potter’s informal power in the community was so great that he could use it to have the local jailer take a free man into the jailhouse merely for having failed to abide by his wishes. And Potter felt no inhibitions about treating a free black man the way Cato’s slave parents would have been treated by their white masters. When Mr. Potter had done his breakfast he come out with his horse-whip in his hand. Says he, “Why wa’nt you here last night to do the chores.” I told him I hired some body. He said he wouldn’t have him on his place. He said he hired me. He said he didn’t understand why I went away to preach. Says he, “I won’t have no nigger preachers — I’ll horse-whip you;” and he swore. Says I, “Don’t strike me, Mr. Potter....” Well he said they had a good minister there, and they wouldn’t have no nigger preachers, and said he would put me where he could find me. So he went and got the officer — the jailer — and put me into jail. Cato was incarcerated in the jail for “two nights and parts of two days....” Fortunately, the county court was in session. Sheriff Allen and a number of the great men came in to visit them that was in prison, and asked me what I was put in for. I told ’em for preachin’ — but yet I couldn’t help weepin’. [One of the visitors] said, “You won’t stay here but a few minutes — he had done parfectly wrong — we will have you out in a few minutes.” Then they gave me some money and went out and told Elisha Potter they would give so long to take me out [or] they was goin’ to prosecute him if he didn’t. About half an hour after that, I could see Elisha Potter through the grate, comin’ up the back side and in the back way, and [he] got the jailer to talk with me while he stood down to the bottom of the stairs. And the jailer took me in another room and told me that Mr. Potter said I might go every Saturday night and stay till Monday mornin’ and have meetins where I was a mind to. I told the jailer I had nothin to do with Elisha Potter. “If he had put me in here, amen — if I have got to stay here and die, amen to it: I have nothin’ to do with him. I never have stole nor cheated nor done any thing wrong to him.... I said I hadn’t nothin’ ’gainst Elisha Potter: I loved him as well as ever. At that Elisha Potter come up stairs and said I had better go to work — he liked me well, and I might go to meetin’ when I was a mind to. I told him I didn’t calculate to work for him any more. Then he told me to go and git my things, and I come out.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
We notice that the situation in Rhode Island had even changed to such a degree by this point in time that once prominent whites visiting Little Rest learned of Potter jailing Cato, they became so upset that they threatened to prosecute Potter, the most important personage by far in that entire district. Then, it was an act of repentance and humility for Potter to invite Cato to continue to work for him and to offer that in the future he would have the weekend off to attend Sunday services. Then, it was an act of dignity as well as independence, that Cato rejected the offer, wanting “nothin’ to do” with Elisha Potter in the future.
A joke broadside was circulating in Boston on the anniversary of the abolition of the international slave trade. One of the jokes was in the form of a toast offered by a black man: De day, one of does great nashumnal hepox will call fort de sensumbility and de herhaw of good feelum of ebery son and daughter of Africa in dis world, and good many udder place beside....
ME HAPPY SO ME SING
52 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
October 12, Thursday: Theodora Goujand DeWolf was born in Bristol, Rhode Island to General George DeWolf and Charlotte Patten DeWolf (a volume of her poems, STRAY FANCIES, would privately circulate).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 12 of 10th M / Our meeting was Silent but a season of favor — The Select Meeting held at the close of the first was small, several of the members are sick & the family of several others. - in Addition to which the Wind was high which prevented the two who live on Connanicut from coming over. it however was a time in which the cementing love of Christ was renewedly extended in the hearts of the brethren The Queries answers with their usual clearness RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 20, Sunday: Charles DeWolf (3) died.
(What a pleasant smile he had on his face when he sat for this painting. He was perhaps whiling away the time by making a mental calculation of how much he might be able to get for your great-great-great-great- grandmother on the open market.)
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 20th of 8th M 1820 / In the Morng Meeting J Dennis was concerned in testimony — In the Afternoon silent. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 53 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1824
The drummer known as “King Charley” or “Carolus Africanus Rex” or “Charley of the Pinkster Hill,” who once presided over Pinkster Day in New York, died at a reputed age of 125 years.
Negro Election Day would, until 1841, be an annual event in Rhode Island. In the document below, we see that the Rhode Island politician Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior of Little Rest (now Kingston), who in 1818 had made an unsuccessful bid for state governor and was at this point serving in the state House of Representatives, involved himself to a degree in this celebration.
This reminisce by Jonathan P. Helme is from the Providence Journal for October 31, 1874 and is headlined “Recollections of Little Rest (Now Kingston) Hill, and its Surroundings Some Fifty Years Ago”: Among the servants of the late E.R. Potter, was one by the name of John Potter. In those days it was the custom of the colored population of the State to elect each year a governor, and on one occasion John was the elect. The governor was installed in June and the headquarters were at Fulling Mills, as it was then called, now Apponaug. On the occasion of his installation, Mr. Potter told his servant John to take the best horse in his stable, as he had a number, among them a fine span of large bays, for his journey to Apponaug, about twenty miles. He selected one of the span, a noble large horse, and with the assistance of Mr. John T. Nichols [sadler in Little Rest], his horse was beautifully caparisoned. Early on the morning of the day, the governor elect, mounted on his splendid steed, dressed in fine style, viz., blue coat, short waist, swallow tail, with a profusion of guilt [sic] buttons, red sash, black pants, put inside of a pair of boots, with white tops, and a handsome pair of silver-mounted spurs, together with a white hat, a large black plume with a red top, completed his regimentals. There were quite a number of our citizens assembled to see the governor elect start for the capital. He was met by a very large delegation of his colored fellow citizens about half way between Greenwich and Apponaug, with a band of music, consisting of three drums and two fifes (in those days the French horns, key bugles, etc..., were not known.) As soon as his appearance was noted, the band struck up “Hail to the Chief;” both sides of the road were lined with spectators, the ladies waving their ’kerchiefs, and the gentlemen their hats, while the governor with hat in hand bowed to the populace, his head nearly touching his horse’s head. On his entrance to the village, the band played “Washington’s March.” If any one had told the governor on this occasion, as a slave once told a heroic Roman general, that with all this pomp and show he “was nothing but a man,” he would have spurned him from his sight. ...About this time Mr. E.R. Potter was urgently solicited to accept the nomination for Governor of this State. He declined, stating as one of his reasons, that one Governor in a family was sufficient.
54 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
We remember this Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior of Little Rest, don’t we? He was the guy who, some four years earlier, back in about 1820, had made the serious error of having his employee Cato Pearce, a black Rhode Islander, thrown in the local jail merely for going off on a Sunday to preach — an error for which he needed to apologize, and for which he did in fact attempt to apologize. So, what do we have here, in about 1824, when we see this guy helping another of his black employees, John Potter, prepare for the important local Pinkster event?
Was this brass-balled, bull-necked politico still, in 1824, trying to make amends? Was he trying to make himself more racially sensitive? Was he learning to “go along and get along”? (It does warm one’s heart, to hear of this sort of thing.)
1825
The family of General George DeWolf and Charlotte Patten DeWolf fled by night to escape his creditors (they would be able to wait this out at their Cuban plantation “Noah’s Ark,” being tended hand and foot by black slaves). When the citizens of Bristol, Rhode Island would discover they had fled, their mansion Linden Place would be stormed and they would carry off its contents as partial recovery of the General’s debts.
In this year the brig Venus, owned by the firm of Brown & Ives of Providence, was making regular runs along Long Island Sound. We know of a Captain John T. Childs of Warren who was engaged in such business. Therefore it is a reasonable hypothesis, that this would be the “sloop” skippered by “Captain Childs” written about in late life by William J. Brown as on a voyage conveying cargo and passengers up Long Island Sound from New-York to Providence, aboard which he had enlisted at the age of approximately 11, which had gotten caught in a storm and apparently came close to sinking: I went coasting on board of the sloop Venus, commanded by Captain Childs, in whose family I had lived some years previous. He
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
offered me ten dollars a month to go before the mast. I accepted the position and went to work. We numbered six in all: the captain, mate, cook, steward, and two foremastmen. His sloop was the largest in the line but the dullest sailer, unless she was under a stiff breeze. We came out of New York one day heavily laden with cotton, and one hundred carboys of vitriol on deck, bound for Providence, intending to stop at Bristol to land freight; there were thirty-three passengers on board. We started with a light wind which increased during the night, and became so powerful by ten in the morning, that it carried away our topsail, which we afterwards secured. The sea ran so high, and we shipped such heavy seas, that we lost the blocking from two casks, catching uncle Tom, the cook, between them. I did not see the danger he was in until the captain coming out called all hands to rescue him from the danger he was in; we did so, John and myself blocking and securing the casks. I was securing the main boom when the ship came about; she shipped another sea and down went the forecastle and half a dozen casks of water. We were sent down to bail out the water; uncle Jack dipped it up, and I passed it over to John, and he threw it overboard. We had not been long at work when she shipped a second sea, and sent down more water; it seemed to be about a foot deep. Uncle Jack said “Hold on Bill, it is no use bailing, we must go up and shorten sail”; saying this he left me at the foot of the steps, went on deck, and said to the captain, “Hadn’t we better shorten sail?” He said, “No, we will drive her through;” to which uncle Jack replied, “Well drive her through if we go to the bottom.” I kept at my post at the foot of the steps, waiting for uncle Jack’s return, when she shipped another sea, filling the scuttle. I felt for the steps, for I thought she was sinking; soon I heard the captain’s voice. I jumped around trying to get up the steps, when the hatch came down over me. It was dark, and the water was nearly up to my arms. I was getting out of the water, but reaching the hatchway, could go no farther. I put the top of my head against the hatch, but could not move it; all was still on deck; not a step or a voice was heard. I was determined to come out, and stooping down, raised myself with all the power possible against the hatch; Captain Childs was sitting on the top of it to keep it down; a sea struck him in the back at the same time I was butting the hatch and knocked him completely off; he would have gone overboard, carried by the force of the wind, had he not fetched up the shrouds. When I came on deck a sad spectacle presented itself; her gunwales were even with the water, the men were trying to move around on deck and the water was up to their middle. Uncle Jack let go the jib and flying jib halyards, settled the peak, throttled the mainsails, lowered the sternsails, and she came up. It seemed by appearances that in one minute more she would have sunk, never to rise again. I took a hand-spike and knocked a board off the railing, letting the water off, and relieving the deck. I went aft to the pump, rigged it and went to pumping. The clattering of the pumps aroused the captain, and he said, “that’s right, Bill, pump away.” I kept watching the mate, thinking that if he got the boat which was hanging on the davits, I would grasp an oar and follow him. I asked a man who came on to work his passage to spell me at the pumps; he said he couldn’t pump. There was a minister in board
56 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
standing by, who said to him, “What kind of a man are you; here this boy is doing all he can to save the ship, which seems to be in danger of going to the bottom, and you refuse to help him.” When the minister said that, I was frightened, for I was not fit to die, and if the vessel sunk, I saw no possible way of escaping hell. I began to pray within myself, for I never intended to go to hell, but I knew I must go there unless I repented; still I had confidence to believe that I must read the bible, and go according to its directing to be saved. I never thought of being taken by surprise before. I now felt that something must be done, and I promised if the Lord would spare my life, I would seek him in earnest and not suffer myself to be caught in such a state again. We soon got through the race and came to anchor; as I came out of the forecastle a sea struck me, and knocked my hat off; my shoes were in the chain box, and my jacket lay in the berth. Uncle Jack asked me to take something to drink, as I was wet and cold; I told him I would; he handed it to me and I took a tumbler full of rum, and drank it, not knowing its power. I took two biscuits and got into my berth, and knew no more until ten o’clock the next morning. The sloop got under way, and they called for me, but I was nowhere to be found; they found my hat and shoes and came to the conclusion that I was washed overboard; no one could recollect when I was last seen; they knew I was pumping, and that was the last they knew about me. The sloop arrived in Newport at twelve o’clock that night. He entered his vessel in the morning and reported the rough time he had on the sound and the loss of one man; after breakfast they began discharging their freight, Uncle Jack had to work in the hold as they were one man short. I was awoke by hearing the words “back down your tackle, hoist away.” I could not imagine where I was. I lay some time thinking that we must be in Newport, for we had to stop there to leave freight. I got up, ate my breakfast, and went on deck; they had hoisted a barrel of flour up, and were just landing it, when I put my hand on John’s shoulder; turning around he saw me, and jumped from me with a shriek; the man below asked, “What’s the matter?” John said, “Here is Bill.” They came out of the hold, to see if it was me. The captain hearing the sound came quickly into the sloop. They were all anxious to know where I had been. I told them I had struck my head against the hatchway, trying to get out of the scuttle, then got into my berth and knew no more until morning. They were all very glad that I was safe; saying, they thought they had looked everywhere, but never once thought about my berth. When we arrived in Providence, and discharged our cargo, we found our sheet iron damaged. We had five hundred bundles in the bottom of the sloop. I felt as if I had been a sailor long enough, and now desired to turn my attention to business of a different kind; so I left the vessel and entered school again.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 57 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1826
Charles DeWolf (4?) purchased the mansion of General George DeWolf in downtown Bristol, Rhode Island, Linden Place, for a song (to wit, a promissory note in the amount of $15,000) — and then defaulted on the mortgage.
At this point the original building of the Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends in
58 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Providence was being expanded, by the addition of wings at each end.
Prudence Crandall, from a Baptist family that has no recorded connection with Quakerism, matriculated at this New England Boarding School of the Religious Society of Friends. Being a girl, she would of course have been in “Girls School,” in no classroom in which there were boys, going for no walks on which she might encounter a boy scholar, and making use of a gender-segregated grove and playground and dining area. There is nothing on record to indicate that she ever had anything to do with Quakerism, or ever once attended a meeting for worship, but it seems plausible that while at this boarding school, probably she knew Friend Abby Kelley.
In this year Friend Pliny Earle of the English Department prepared transcripts of Friend John Gummere’s PLANE TRIGONOMETRY and PROBLEMS IN SURVEYING. (These transcripts have been preserved at the school.)
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 59 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1827
October 12, Friday: Daniel Stedman of South Kingstown, a neighbor of “Nailer Tom” Hazard, recorded in his journal that “a black man by the [name] of Cato Pearce in Evening had a meeting at Wakefield to Mr. Ray Allen’s.” (Ray Allen was a white man, a Baptist, residing in Wakefield/South Kingstown/Peace Dale, Rhode Island.)15 It is known that Cato preached at evangelical meetings not only in Wakefield but also in Newport and Hopkinton, and on Block Island.
15. DANIEL STEDMAN’S JOURNAL, introduced and transcribed by Henry Clay Oatley, Jr., ed. by Cherry Fletcher Bamberg (Greenville RI: Rhode Island Genealogical Society, 2003.
60 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1828
Friend Sarah Helen Power of Providence, Rhode Island married with the wellborn poet and writer John Winslow Whitman, co-editor of the Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album, and moved to Boston. There she would be introduced to Mrs. Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and the Transcendentalists, and would write essays defending Romantic and Transcendentalist writers including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Waldo Emerson. She became involved in the “causes” of progressive education, woman’s rights, universal manhood suffrage, Fourierism, and Unitarianism. SARAH HELEN POWER WHITMAN
Captain James DeWolf, an uncle of General George DeWolf, purchased for $5,100, from Commercial Bank, the foreclosed “Linden Place” mansion in downtown Bristol, Rhode Island that had cost $60,000 to erect on
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 61 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
land costing more than $3,000.
62 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1829
April 19, Easter Sunday: William De Wolf died.
For the 1st time, and unexpectedly, Patriots’ Day fell on the day on which Christians were to celebrate the ascent of Christ the martyr Son to the throne of his Father in Heaven. New England’s political orators became aware that repeatedly there would arise this cultural coincidence, and that repeatedly they would need to be inventive in their oratory in order to rise to a considerable challenge, in the overcoming of a cognitive dissonance between two parts of a mentality, and two parts of a culture — parts which might function as
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 63 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
intended only when gripped within a discretely compartmentalized mindset.16
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 19th of 4 M / Morning Meeting Silent & hard to me — In the Afternoon Wm Almy attended & had good service, but it was not a time of much life to me - there seemed to be a heavy obstruction & whether it was Wholly in myself I do not certainly know. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
16. The discordant elements (just in case you don’t know) are “I’m willing to die for you” and “I’m willing to kill for you.”
64 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1830
Steamboats out of New-York began to bypass the port at New London, Connecticut and deliver their passengers to the docks of Providence, Rhode Island, where the passengers could take either the stage along the Lower Path to Boston, or the barge up the canal to Worcester. From this year until 1835 the Lady Carrington, an elegant and carefully designed barge, would be floating passengers along in comfort on a 12- hour cruise from Providence to Worcester (steamers plying the sound had by this point quite stripped the Connecticut coast of its timber).
The 1st steamboats on the Danube River in Europe.
A total of $1,066,922 in tolls was collected on New York’s canals.
Subsequent to this year, celebrations of Black Election Day in Rhode Island would fall off, no longer occurring during the planting season of each and every year.
Captain James DeWolf sold the “Linden Place” mansion in downtown Bristol, that he had acquired from the bank for $5,100 two years earlier, to his son William Henry DeWolf for $8,000.
It may have been at approximately this point that Providence citizen William J. Brown was giving over his dreams of self-improvement through travel in order to get married and raise a family: PAGES 152-155: I have previously remarked that the colored people have but very little chance to elevate themselves to a position of influence and wealth, and I determined to travel until I could find a brighter prospect for the future than Providence. I found, however, that there was a very formidable hindrance blocking up my pathway. I had made the acquaintance of a young lady schoolmate while attending school. This acquaintance was not formed for any special purpose, but simply
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 65 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
to have some one to spend my leisure hours with. I made it a practice to call twice a week, as I was remarkably fond of being in the society of ladies. The reason I did not want to make a wife of her then was, because I was not able to support her, having no permanent business that would warrant me a living, and thought it better for one to be miserable than two. I had been waiting upon her some two years, and thought I would break off the easiest way I could. I commenced by making short visits when I called, saying I could not stay long, as I had some engagement that called me away, at the same time watching to see the effect it would produce. I found it created a worriment of mind, making her very inquisitive. The next step was to omit a visit at the regular time. This brought forth questions I could not answer satisfactorily without telling a falsehood; finally I knew not what to do, for my visits had aroused a passion in my heart and mind I could not smother. I was also satisfied that if I wished to make a companion of her for life I could find no one with more attractions in personal appearances, qualifications or ability, than she possessed in my weak judgement. The question was, however, soon decided with me, for the time was fast approaching when I must settle on the subject of my departure. I was taken suddenly ill, suffering much from pain, which I could not account for. I had eaten nothing to cause it. It continued increasing until I was compelled to shut up my shop and go home. This was before my mother’s death, and she was an excellent nurse.... I had repeated attacks, each one becoming more severe, until I was compelled to give up the idea of going away.... I had said nothing to my intended or any one else about going away, but had merely said that if people could not prosper in one place they had better move to another.... Now the question to be settled was, would she accept me for a husband. I could not boast of any beauty and was near-sighted. Uniting in wedlock was no small thing to consider; its conditions extended through life. In making up her mind these defects might make her change her opinion of me. She might think it for her interest to marry a man blessed with good eyesight; if anything happened after marriage it would be something out of her power to obviate. I prized my good education highly, for it was in my favor; it excelled that of my associates at this time and if anything, present or future, could be accomplished by it, the means were in my possession. I also prized the good character I bore, for I was held in esteem by the elderly people for industry and politeness. The young people had a good opinion of me, because I was well spoken of by the aged; having knowledge of the estimate placed upon my character, I thought my defects would not be noticed. I now felt that the time had come for me to settle this question, for it had long been a source of trouble to me. I had made her frequent visits and enjoyed myself much in her society. Now I desired to know something of her personal appearance during the day, when engaged in her domestic affairs. To accomplish this I would drop something during the evening, which would cause me to call after during the next day. I would go at different hours for the things. It was common for ladies to be prepared for company during the evening; then one could find no fault with
66 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
their appearance; but to my satisfaction I always found her in trim, dressed according to her work. I considered her every way qualified, so far as domestic affairs were concerned, to make a suitable companion for any one, whether in high or low degree, and every one spoke well of her character. Her temper was mild, and there was but few who could equal her in looks, besides she enjoyed the best of health, having a carriage and appearance well calculated to sustain it. Thus having the matter settled in my own mind, I found no just cause to prevent us from getting married. I went and brought matters to a close respecting our union in just three months from that day. The varied incidents which had been thrown in my way had made its impression upon my mind, and my views in regard to the future were entirely changed. Instead of making preparations to go out and see the world, I decided to settle down at home; my business was good and increasing every day, everything seemed to warrant my success in supporting a family if I had one.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 67 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1833
June: President Andrew Jackson visited Newport, Rhode Island and then, at the “Linden Place” mansion in downtown Bristol, the President was entertained by William Henry DeWolf.17
While the President stayed overnight at Providence’s City Hotel, Friend Moses Brown managed to visit him despite his 95 years and despite his severe and debilitating vertigo, mentioning that he had come down to meet him simply because he’d “met all the others.” The aged man “thee’d” and “thou’d” Old Hickory after the Quaker manner, and invited him to visit the Yearly Meeting School, an invitation which the President was able to honor on the following day. The next morning, the Pawtucket artillery’s salute shattered a number of windows (repair costs would be reimbursed). As the President reached the bridge at the state line of Massachusetts, he was welcomed by Josiah Quincy, Jr.
Passing through Boston, the president was ill, and was unable to view the new figurehead of the USS Constitution, shaped in his image.
When President Jackson arrived at Salem, Massachusetts, a large parade had been organized, but he was ill and was taken directly to his hotel. The people who cheered the presidential carriage were not aware that in the dusk they were cheering merely the shadowy bowing figures of Josiah Quincy, Jr. and Martin Van Buren inside the carriage, rather than the President himself. Nathaniel Hawthorne was present and cheered with the deluded crowd, for he happened to believe that this genocidal racist, this precursor of Adolf Hitler, was
the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the cunninger the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.
17. Birds of a feather flock together.
68 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Pretty Boy Admires His Hero But then, Hawthorne never had much judgment in these matters, as witness the fact that later in life he was willing to write a campaign biography for a drunkard who couldn’t even stay on a horse, and lie about this man’s racist attitudes, and help him become President of the United States, not out of any belief that he was the best person for the job but because of a personal connection (Franklin Pierce had been a “college buddy”) and purely out of the expectation and hope that thereby he would receive a personal and magnificent reward.
President Jackson, in making his triumphal tour of the North, was escorted by Josiah Quincy, Jr., son of the Josiah Quincy who had been the president of Harvard College. Jackson’s appearance in Cambridge to pick up his obligatory, honorary Harvard degree became something of a spectacle when, as a man of the people, he mocked an address in Latin by spouting nonsense Latin.18
[NOTE: Compare and contrast this episode with Thoreau’s later remark about John Brown, with regard to the comparative unimportance of being able to set a Greek accent remark at the correct slant, versus being able to prop a fallen human being into an upright posture.]
18. Quincy, Josiah. Jr. “President Jackson Gives ’Em a Little Latin,” pages 364-7 in THE HARVARD BOOK: SELECTIONS FROM THREE CENTURIES. Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, revised edition 1982).
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 69 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1834
February 19, Wednesday: The main problem of the era, or at least the main perceived problem, in Rhode Island, was that the Charter of 1663 was being used to deny voting rights to thousands of men in the growing urban industrial areas of the state, thus retaining power for the old Yankee farmers.
Faced with continuing taxation without representation, the workingmen of Providence met to choose delegates to a proposed convention. Various middle-class reformers, including Thomas Dorr, took part in this popular
70 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
movement.
READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT There were of course, as always in politics, strange bedfellows. Representative James De Wolf of Bristol, he of the filthy-rich slavetrading family, would introduce a petition in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, to do away with the “freehold” qualification for voting under which an adult white male citizen could vote only if he was the holder of real estate worthing at least $134.00. Representative De Wolf’s petition would point at the fact that our Declaration of Independence had alleged that “all men are created equal,” and that therefore there ought to be “universal” suffrage, almost as if this De Wolf family believed in equality of all before the law. (By “universal” Representative De Wolf did not of course intend to include children, or women, or the descendants of the black slaves who had been brought over from the coast of Africa on slave ships by his family. That would have been preposterous.)
Thomas Dorr was himself personally in favor of black suffrage but, at the People’s Convention, he would be able to persuade only 17 persons to vote with him on this, while 46 would vote against black suffrage. The outcome of this vote would be that the Dorrites would lose the support both of the Rhode Island blacks, and of the white abolitionists.
1835
September 26, Saturday: Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior died in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. His grave is in the Potter family burial ground in Washington County.
(This datapoint helps us understand how Cato Pearce’s book A BRIEF MEMOIR OF THE LIFE AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF CATO PEARCE, A MAN OF COLOR: TAKEN VERBATIM FROM HIS LIPS AND PUBLISHED FOR HIS BENEFIT could be printed in Pawtucket. By the point at which this small book describing the misconduct was put into circulation, 1842, the important citizen had been out of circulation for at least six years.)
In the Teatro San Carlo of Naples, Lucia di Lammermoor, a dramma tragico by Gaetano Donizetti to words of Cammarano after Scott, was performed for the initial time. The composer reported that “It has pleased, and pleased very much.”
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 71 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1837
November 14, Tuesday: Theodora Goujand DeWolf got married with Christopher Coltin in Hartford, Connecticut.
December 21, Thursday: James DeWolf, unrepentant Rhode Island slavetrader and US senator, died on his thousand-acre estate paid for with blood money, near Bristol.
(The thousand acres are still there, he having been seemingly unable to take any of this with him. His grave in the DeWolf family cemetery off Woodlawn Avenue is now, as you can see above, receiving the sort of tending appropriate to our memory of such a man.)
72 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
The general financial crisis and panic of this year in the United States of America hit the Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island hard, its enrollment plunging from 134 to 79 as parents found themselves unable to continue to fund the education of their children. The loss of non-Quaker scholars hit the school especially hard, since it lost their tuition surcharges. For the following five years, enrollment would hover at around 80, with 10 of those having only one parent who was a Friend, or having some non-parental connection with the Society (perhaps by their having themselves become a “convinced” Friend). Only two of the 80 students had no connection whatever with the religion.
Friends Enoch Breed and Lydia Breed came back for another year as superintendents of the school. Superintendents.
1819-1824. Purinton, Matthew and Betsy. 1824-1835. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1829-1835. Gould, Stephen Wanton and Gould, Han- nah, Asst. Supts. 1835-1836. Davis, Seth and Mary. 1837. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1838-1839. Rathbun, Rowland and Alice. 1840-1844. Wing, Allen and Olive. 1845-1846. Thompson, Olney and Lydia. 1847. Congdon, Jarvia and Lydia. 1847-1852. Cornell, Silas and Sarah M.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 73 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1840
The 6th national census.19 Black Americans were becoming more numerous, in Mississippi at this point, than white Americans. In Massachusetts, the average free black able-bodied workingman was receiving one dollar per day for a laboring year of 260 working days, or a total of $260 annual income.
In the Rhode Island census, Cato Pearce was listed as an agricultural laborer living alone in Cranston, with Thomas Cole as a neighbor. Cato indicates in his 1842 narrative that for many years he lived in Cranston with Deacon Thomas Cole and Mrs. Cole. Deacon Cole was a white man, a Baptist, and had assisted Cato even before the 1820 incident with Potter Senior.
Edward Jarvis uncovered serious errors in the Massachusetts census of this year, and Lemuel Shattuck uncovered serious errors in the Boston census.
It having become abundantly clear that the new American Statistical Society had been poorly named, its initialism being ASS, the name was corrected to a less undignified American Statistical Association. (It’s obvious that these were high-minded gentlemen — or they would have seen this one coming.)
As of 1790 the center of the human population of the USA had been a little town just about a day’s travel inland
19.Theriseinmanumissions in the post-Revolutionary period had increased the proportion of free black Americans from about 8% to about 13.5%, where it had been holding steady. A decline in manumissions in the late antebellum period, combined with the lesser fecundity of free black Americans, would move the free-to-enslaved proportion back down to about 11% as we arrived at our Civil War: Census % in Population
1790 8%
1810 13.5%
1840 13.5%
1861 11%
74 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
from Baltimore. By this period the center of population had relocated.
(Nowadays, of course, we’ve all been coming from one or another center in Missouri.)
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 75 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1842
A minister in Pawtucket, Rhode Island put out a 36-page, illustrated publication entitled A BRIEF MEMOIR OF THE LIFE AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF CATO PEARCE, A MAN OF COLOR: TAKEN VERBATIM FROM HIS LIPS AND PUBLISHED FOR HIS BENEFIT.
1844
June 7, Friday: The first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor was published. In it former church leaders, now dissenters, condemned Smith’s secret polygamy, doctrine of plural gods, his political aspirations, and his ordination as king. 1844 June 10 As mayor of Nauvoo, Joseph Smith, Jr. condemned the Expositor as a public nuisance, printing libelous statements against him, and ordered its destruction. This caused a great uproar in the community.
General George DeWolf died.
76 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1857
June 5, Friday: Charlotte Patten DeWolf died.
1872
Emma Lazarus’s poem “Outside the Church” appeared in Index, an American magazine.
Theodora Goujand DeWolf Coltin privately circulated a volume of her poems, STRAY FANCIES:
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 77 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1875
In this timeframe about half the students at the Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island were not from Quaker families, with about one out of every five of the students who were Quakers coming to the school from outside New England. The board and tuition rate that was being charged of members of the New England Yearly Meeting was $100 (that’s roughly equivalent to $10,000 in the currency of the 21st Century), while Quakers from outside New England were being charged $190, scholars only one of whose parents was a Quaker were being charged $190, and non-Quakers were being charged $300.
Most of the Quaker schools in Philadelphia had by this point been consolidated into two, that we now know as the William Penn Charter School and the Friends Select School (they consider their date of origination, on the basis of the foundation date of schools that came together to create these entities, to have been 1689).
President Ulysses S. Grant was entertained at the “Linden Place” DeWolf mansion in downtown Bristol.
78 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1885
President Chester A. Arthur was entertained at the “Linden Place” DeWolf mansion in downtown Bristol.
That the Narragansett tribe had ceased to exist in white minds is evidenced in the records of the Rhode Island census, which listed 199 “Indians” in the state but not one of them in Charlestown. What had happened was that a local white official had accused the residents of the former reservation community of not being “real Indians,” they being merely a bunch of “monigs,”20 and had refused to record them as Native Americans. Of course, that guy was quite correct: these weren’t real Indians — they’d not so much as glimpsed the subcontinent of India. :-)
20. Note well that this local term “monig” is not a pleasant one. Whether employed by a red person or by a white person, it is not only racist but also derogatory and offensive (it is a truncation of the description “more nigger than Indian”). It is a term used here in Rhode Island by racist Native Americans to describe other Native Americans with whom they do not wish to be associated, and by racist whites to describe people whom they consider to be “putting on as Indians when they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of niggers with attitude.”
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 79 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
80 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1901
Theodora Goujand DeWolf Coltin died in Bristol in her 81st year.
Gypsy moth infestations were discovered in Rhode Island.
William Hannaway relocated his blacksmith operation from a lean-to at the west side of the mill at Saylesville into a nearby carriage house.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 81 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1939
Ernest Hamlin Baker’s mural about the slavery-intensive economic activities of the white “Narragansett Planters” of the southwestern region of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations:
(The mural reminds us that there were more black slaves in Rhode Island at one time, than in the remainder of the states of New England put together. — I mean, how dare this artist remind us of something like that!)
82 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
1973
The Cambridge buildings of The Riverside Press were demolished.
In Chicago, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Sears Tower, reached its topmost, 110th, story. The building was not yet, however, ready for use. (The building would lose its “world’s tallest” title in 1996, as more and more considerably taller towers have been erected on the Asian continent. It continues however to be tallest, for North America.)
The DeWolf family mansion “Linden Place” in beautiful downtown Bristol, Rhode Island found its highest and best use as backdrop for a filming of F. Scott FitzGerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY. In this movie you can watch Robert Redford and Mia Farrow dance on the High Street sidewalk in front of the mansion.
2006
JAILED FOR PREACHING / THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATO PEARCE, A FREED SLAVE FROM WASHINGTON COUNTY, RHODE ISLAND / WITH AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTIAN M. MCBURNEY. Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, Kingston, Rhode Island, 2006.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 83 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
2008
The slavetrading activities of Rhode Island senator James DeWolf were grist for a documentary film “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.” THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: October 30, 2013
84 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 85 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE DEWOLFS OF BRISTOL AND THEIR VICTIMS
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
86 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith