For the past six years, first Brown University, and then the whole State of Rhode Island, has been engaged in a substantial investigation of the transatlantic slave trade. Just as today’s world is saturated with goods produced directly or indirectly through human exploitation, eighteenth-century Rhode Island was permeated with the products of the Triangle Trade. With few natural resources and almost no hinterland, the colony realized early that maritime commerce was its only prospect and embarked on trade with gusto—not only with the West Indies, Britain, and the colonies of the American coast, but also with privateers, smugglers, and slavers. Rhode Island merchants, principally those based in Newport and later in Bristol, undertook at least one thousand slave voyages. Yet just one family has been made the poster child for Rhode Island slavery: the Browns of Providence. Alas, all the ink and all the words have focused on the wrong men and the wrong century.

Until six years ago, the Browns were known mainly as one of America’s oldest philanthropic families. Today, many people (including a number of academics) believe that their fortune came from slave trading; that Market Square by the Providence River was a slave market where the Browns sold human cargo; that the John Brown House—which John Adams called the most magnificent mansion in America—is “the house that slavery built”; and that the Brown mansions on College Hill had tunnels through which slaves were herded in secret from the wharves below. There have been