From the \u201cWelcome to Bristol\u201d\u009d sign at the town line, and along Hope Street\u2019s red-white-and-blue stripe to the postcard-perfect Federal-style homes at its center, Bristol wears its Colonial past proudly. But one September evening, about forty Bristolians gathered in St. Michael\u2019s Episcopal Church to talk about a past the town is not so eager to tell \u201d\u201d the great crime that built Bristol: slavery.<\/p>\n
Slavery was the economic lifeblood of the entire state for eighty years. Rhode Island passed its first law forbidding enslavement in 1652, but the law changed and the practice flourished apace with its profitability. From before the American Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, the slave trade powered Rhode Island\u2019s rum distilleries and the textile mills, spinning cotton picked by Southern slaves into cheap \u201cnegro cloth\u201d\u009d that was sold back to the South. Slavery employed the carpenters, the clerks, the bankers and the blacksmiths. Everyone made money from the slave trade, but few made more than the DeWolf family of Bristol.<\/p>\n
Family patriarch Mark Anthony DeWolf started slaving in 1769. And for half a century, various DeWolfs transported 12,000 enslaved Africans. But it was Mark Anthony\u2019s second youngest son, James DeWolf, who built the family business into an empire that included a bank, an insurance company and a distillery in Bristol, a sugar plantation in Cuba and a stake in Coventry\u2019s Arkwright Mills.<\/p>\n