Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,833

This is the grave of James DeWolf.

Born in 1764 in Bristol, Rhode Island, DeWolf grew up in the shipping world of that city, which was one of the biggest shipping hubs in the colonies, despite its small size today. This was a big port for slave trading ships and DeWolf was a big fan. Still in his teenage years, he joined a private ship launching raids on British ships in the American Revolution and he was captured twice by the British. But the real glory was in ripping Africans from their homes and selling them in the Americas. That’s where the family fortune had begun, at least as early as 1769 with DeWolf’s father and uncle.

Now, after the Revolution, the northern states turned against slavery at varying degrees of speed. Rhode Island was one of them. Slavery was bad enough but the international slave trade seemed particularly barbaric. The Constitution banned it by 1807 as part of the compromise between the regions. But Rhode Island banned it well before that, though its gradual emancipation plan did mean there were still slaves for quite awhile after its 1784 passage. DeWolf’s response was to completely ignore his state and run his own slave trading ships across the Caribbean, often bringing slaves he bought in Cuba and other islands back to the United States. Rhode Island didn’t really do anything to stop him.

But in 1791, DeWolf was indicted for murder in Newport, after he ordered a slave he had bought in the Caribbean who came down with smallpox thrown overboard. DeWolf fled to Africa on another slave trading mission when he discovered the indictment and the prosecutor eventually dropped the charges. After all, just an African, right. But then he visited Saint Thomas and the case followed him there and he was tried by the Danes, who presently owned the island. But he was found not guilty, despite testimony from two people involved. Part of the reason he did this was his insurance policy, which granted him 20% the price of any dead slaves. He’d get a little bit back on the dead slave and the smallpox wouldn’t spread and mean that he’d only get 20% back on all the other slaves. DeWolf was such a horrible human being that this was an obvious choice for him and he never showed even the slightest bit of remorse for ordering this killing.

A guy like DeWolf is the north summed up. Sure, he didn’t actually own slaves (actually he may have owned a few under the gradual emancipation law but I am not sure about this fact), but he more than happily made his fortune on them and this became one of the big Rhode Island fortunes. A lot of old money in the North developed this way, including the money behind Brown University, which at least it acknowledges today. DeWolf didn’t care about any of that, he just wanted to make money. He also ran a rum distillery in west Africa to provide some of the goods desired in exchange for the slaves.

Now, as the constitutionally mandated end of the slave trade started creeping up, American slavers were sad. After all, the Constitution was written at a moment when slavery was not as profitable as it had once been. People such as George Washington were moving away from big time cash crops and toward wheat as a more stable if less fantastic source of income and while you certainly could work wheat with slaves, it wasn’t a massive labor-intensive plantation crop. But in the meantime, Eli Whitney had “invented” or at least patented the cotton gin. Now slavery was super profitable again. But the Constitution was the Constitution and had to be followed (would be nice if the current presidential administration believed that!) and so that was that. But in those few years before the end of the slave trade, DeWolf doubled down and brought as many slaves over to the U.S. as he possibly could, funding at least 50 slave ships between 1805 and 1807. These weren’t all his ships–he had also gone into the insurance industry and he was insuring other people’s slavers. At a minimum, DeWolf and his family are responsible for at least 11,000 Africans entering the United States before the end of the legal international slave trade at the beginning of 1808.

Like any good capitalist, DeWolf used his money to diversify. Back in the day, there used to be this weird belief that existed across large parts of the political spectrum–we even dealt with it a bit in comments years ago from older leftists–that there was some sort of division between North and South over capitalism, i.e., the North was capitalist and the South was not capitalist and the Civil War was some sort of capitalist war against a non-capitalist region. This is absurd on the face of it, in part because slavery was the foundational economic activity of American capitalism. So someone like DeWolf would use his slave trade money and both buy plantations in Cuba where he could continue benefit from slavery and open textile factories in New England to benefit from the expansion of slavery in the South after the spread of the cotton gin. Southerners often did the same thing. Again, the idea of separating the capitalist factory system of the North with the slave system of the North makes no empirical sense.

DeWolf also went into politics. Not surprisingly, given his fanatical pro-southern sympathies, he was a Jeffersonian, but while Rhode Island was generally a Federalist state, a Democratic-Republican could win, especially given the suspicions of state power that led the state to be the last of the original 13 colonies to ratify the Constitution. I mean, a big part of the reason for the Constitution was that under the Articles of Confederation, Rhode Island could just veto what all the other states wanted and did so frequently. We are truly a ridiculous state, then and now. Mostly, DeWolf was just in state legislature, and off between the 1790s and 1820s. But he was also in the U.S. Senate from 1821-25, when he resigned, as senators so often did in these years. He hated it, thinking most other senators to be idiots and that politics were for the lazy. In fact, he had a very Trumpian/Muskian vision of politics that everything would be better done in about 3 days and that it all took away from business. While there, he was a big proponent of the Monroe Doctrine and any foreign policy that would lead to American expansionism in Latin America, although he had open contempt for James Monroe’s abilities, but of course he had contempt for almost all other human beings. But the Monroe Doctrine led him to be a supporter of John Quincy Adams, who was its real architect, instead of Andrew Jackson in the 1824 elections.

When DeWolf died in 1837 at the age of 73, he was probably the second richest man in the United States, thanks to his years of slave running.

James DeWolf is buried in this giant mound in Bristol, Rhode Island. Someone lives right next to it today, I wonder if they know or care about it or if it’s just some weird old thing next to their house. Not shockingly, most people are less interested in these sorts of things than I am.

If you would like this series to visit other slave traders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Pullum is in Lexington, Kentucky and William Boyd is in Nashville. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.