Newport Historical Society

Monday April 11, 2011 at 5:30pm

Thomas Robinson, a Newport Quaker merchant, was a key advocate for abolition of slavery both within and outside of the Society of Friends from the 1770s. As a young man starting out in business in the 1750s, however, Robinson sent a number of ships to Africa to procure slaves for sale in the West Indies, stopping the practice just as the Quaker community came to prohibit the trade among its members. Robinson’s father, Deputy Governor William Robinson, owned a large slave-worked plantation in South County. Robinson’s father-in-law, colony Treasurer and Newport merchant Thomas Richardson, also held slaves, and served as Presiding Clerk of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends from 1729 to 1760.

Robinson’s shift from slave-trader to abolitionist provides a lens for looking at how and why the Quaker community, after tolerating slave-holding and even slave-trading among its members for 100 years, came to view slave-trading and slave-owning as contrary to their Christian testimony. The talk will draw on the extensive Robinson and Richardson family papers held by the Newport Historical Society, as well as Quaker meeting records, probate documents, and genealogical materials.

This program will be presented by Elizabeth Cazden, an independent scholar who studies Quaker history in its economic and social context. She has authored one book and numerous articles. This talk is part of her current major research project, “Slaves Among Friends: Quakers in the slave-based economy of colonial Rhode Island, 1660-1780,” which has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.

This program takes place at Salve Regina University’s Young Building in the Pell Center. Admission is free. Donations welcome. This is a joint program between the Newport Historical Society, the Newport Restoration Foundation and Salve Regina University; sponsored by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.