The Magazine Antiques

By Scott J. Tilden  |  

On a blustery March day in 1813, James DeWolf pored overthe ledgers in his counting house in Bristol, Rhode Island.Startled by the roar of a cannon, he sprang to his feet. His mindflashed back to 1775, when the British had shelled Bristol andsubsequently burned thirty buildings including his childhoodhome. Could the British have returned to wreak havoc on thevillage for its privateers that menaced British shipping? ThenCaptain DeWolf began slowly counting the blasts. At eighteen he smiled, for his ship the Yankee had eighteen guns, andhe knew she was giving the town a salute. He openedhis door and strode through the crowd of curious villagersworking their way to Pump Lane Wharf.

His fellow merchant Nicholas Peck (1762–1847)greeted him there. They looked down Narragansett Bayand saw the hermaphrodite-rigged, 160-ton brigantineYankee rounding Prudence Island. On its left sailed alarger brig, Shannon, and on its right a sleek and fastschooner, Thames. The sale of these two captured Britishprizes would swell DeWolf ’s coffers and those of thetown. Tonight the Yankees’s crew would raise theirglasses of rum at the Old Bay State to the sailors whohad died in action, and would celebrate their victories and share of the prizes. The ship’s officers and Bristolmerchants would toast DeWolf ’s pluck and prowess withchampagne at his mansion called the Mount.2

Of the 515 privateers commissioned by JamesMadison in the War of 1812, DeWolf ’s Yankee exactedthe greatest toll on British maritime trade. In threeyears of wartime service, it destroyed £1 million worthof British vessels and cargo and made a profit of $1million.3 While DeWolf certainly benefited financiallyfrom the war, he had built his fortune on trade to theWest Indies, Europe, and Africa. Before the conflict hisfamily had owned twenty-three ships, seventeen sloops,twenty schooners, twenty-nine brigs, three snows, onebark, and a packet.4 Their warehouses were chock-ablockwith boxes of sugar, hogsheadsof molasses, ingots of pig iron,bags of coffee, puncheons of rum, zeroons of indigo, ropes of onions,barrels of salt, pipes of Madeira, and stacks of ivory and dyewoods.

Members of the family participated as seamen or investors in more than ninety slave voyages between 1769 and 1807. The historian Jay Coughtry wrote, “Without a doubt…[they] had the largest interest in the African slave trade of any American family before or after the Revolution; theirs was one of the few fortunes that truly rested on rum and slaves.”5 Indeed, few merchants succeeded in this business fraught with high risk and the need for significant capital investment. As a group, the 426 Rhode Island slaver captains identified by Coughtry averaged only 2.2 African voyages—and their reluctance to continue was based primarily on fear of death and economic loss, not (or at best secondarily), on moral qualms.6

While the DeWolfs were the protagonists of the drama of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Bristol, their stage was the world where their ships roamed and their products were traded. The cast also boasted other well-developed characters of great appeal. Babbits, Bordens, Bosworths, Bradfords, Churchs, Colts, Dimonds, Pecks, Talbots, Ushers, and Wardwells all played opposite the DeWolfs as in-laws, business partners, and state legislators. Many of them were related to the Boston merchants who had purchased the land from the Plymouth Colony for £1,100 and founded Bristol in 1680: Nathaniel Byfield (1653– 1733), John Walley (1644–1712), Stephen Burton (d. 1693), and Nathaniel Oliver (1651/52–1704). Settlers cleared the forest for farms, roads, house lots, and a common for grazing cows, sheep, and horses. They built houses that rose a full two stories in the front, with roofs sloping to low woodsheds at the back.7 These rude dwellings, the town green, and the Congregational church (founded simultaneously with Bristol in 1680) defined the townscape, just as the farming of corn, barley, tobacco, and onions defined its economy.

Of the four first proprietors of Bristol, Byfield distinguished himself most in business and civic service. He commissioned a sloop named the Bristol Merchant from Deacon Woodbury, who had established Bristol’s first shipyard at the head of the harbor. The supplier of mahogany for Byfield’s sloop, Henry Mackintosh (d. 1725), came to Bristol from Dutch Guiana to collect on his bill, and in the course of settling his account married Byfield’s daughter Elizabeth and joined him in business. In 1686 Byfield shipped Narragansett pacers and red onions to the sugar plantations of Dutch Guiana.8 He also served five times as a delegate from Bristol to the Massachusetts General Court and received commissions as judge of the vice-admiralty under three different sovereigns.

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