We are delighted that you are considering coming to Brown University to participate in our July 19-31, 2009 NEH Summer Institute, “The Role of Slavery in the Rise of New England Commerce, Industry, and Culture to 1860.” Our Institute is part of NEH’s “We the People” initiative, a program designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles.  For two weeks next summer, thirty K-12 teachers, in conjunction with a group of leading scholars and public historians, will explore a neglected but crucially important aspect of early American history—the two-and-a-half-century web of connections between the rise of New England as a commercial and industrial center and the enslavement of Africans.

            To a remarkable degree, slavery was essential to every phase of New England ’s development.  In the mid-1600s, New England colonists enslaved native captives following the Pequot and King Philip’s Wars, and the first African slaves to arrive on New England shores came in exchange for Indians. Rhode Island was the center of the American slave trade, responsible for more than a thousand slaving voyages that brought well over 100,000 enslaved Africans to the horrors of Caribbean sugar plantations, to the rice, indigo and tobacco plantations of the American South and to New England itself. At the same time, the rise of New England as a maritime power was heavily dependent on the business of provisioning those Caribbean plantations, and the provisions produced for export were grown on New England and Middle Colony farms and plantations by slaves. New England ’s banking and insurance industries, along with its iron-making, distilling, and shipbuilding industries, all developed to support the slave and provisioning trades.

            After the American Revolution, the New England states began the slow process of abolishing the institution of slavery and ending the participation of their citizens in the slave trade. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual emancipation statutes that made children born to slaves after March 1, 1784, free when they reached their majority; in the other New England states, new state constitutions and litigation by slaves seeking freedom under their provisions gradually made slavery unconstitutional. In 1794, the U.S. Congress made it illegal for American citizens to engage in the slave trade, and the importation of slaves into the United States became illegal in 1808. But by that time, New England businessmen—some of them the same people who had led the fight against the slave trade and local slavery—had embraced the manufacture of southern slave-grown cotton. By the mid-19th century, New England had become an industrial giant, importing cotton from the American South and sending cotton and woolen textiles back to clothe the slaves who grew it. The New England machine tool industry, too, reaped large profits on the picks, hoes, axes, and other implements manufactured in New England factories and shipped south to enable slaves to grow rice and tobacco, and to carve fields out of forests as the cotton revolution spread westward. At the same time, slavery as a moral issue inflamed New England politics.

            New England ’s extensive and complicated relationship with slavery is a crucial part of the American story that almost never is clearly and comprehensively discussed in American history textbooks. But this is an important story, and there is no better place to explore it, and learn how to teach about it, than in Rhode Island, not only the center of the American slave and provisioning trades, but also the birthplace of the American industrial revolution. The two-week Institute that we have planned will include lectures by experts, tours of historic sites associated with these key developments, and guided explorations of original 18^th- and 19^th-century print and graphic sources that document this fascinating, often painful history. Teachers will be able to bring back to their classrooms and departments new knowledge, new primary documents and images, and fresh ideas and strategies for teaching this sensitive material, including shared lesson plans.