Smith's Castle

Why A Slave Medallion at Smith’s Castle? An Address by Robert A. Geake at the dedication of the Rhode Island Slave History Medallion, Oct. 10, 2020

In June of 1637, a cargo of 40-50 captives from one of the last engagements in the Pequot War landed in Providence. The captive’s ship had left Pequot harbor bound for Boston, but the Captain had chosen for some reason to forgo the journey around Cape Cod, and let the captives be taken overland from Rhode Island.

 As the enslaved were herded in shackles to the carts and wagons that would take them from the port, Roger Williams was witness to the scene. He noticed an indigenous boy among the women and children being taken away and quickly wrote out a letter that he gave to one of those guarding the captives to give to Governor John Winthrop on their arrival.

 “I am bold (if I may not offend in it) Williams wrote “to request the keeping and bringing up one of the children. I have fixed mine eye on this little one with the red about his neck, but I will not be preemptory in my choice, but will rest in your loving pleasure for him, or any etc.[i]” 

 Williams received word in July from Winthrop that the Governor would comply with his wishes, and the minister returned word to him at the close of the month:

 “sir, I desire to be truly thankful for the boy intended. His father was of Sasquakit where the last fight was: and fought not with the English as his mother (who is with you and 2 children more)  certified me. I shall endeavor his good, and the common good, in him. I shall appoint some to fetch him: only I request that you would please give a name to him[ii]”.

 Modern Williams scholar Glenn LaFantasie tells us that this boy’s name was likely Will, a name later mention in Williams letters as “my native servant’. It is possible that he was the son of a Pequot sachem, citing an early 1660’s account of

 “that memorable storie of the young Indian prince or Sagamores sonne whome Mr. Williams educated…[iii]”

 It is entirely possible then, even probable, that this indigenous boy was the first slave to set foot on Cocumscussoc.

  There persists a question however, as to whether Williams had more than one Indigenous servant. In the coming months after acquiring this boy, he would continue in his role as a mediator between Winthrop and the Narragansett, as well as with Connecticut authorities over what to do with the remaining Pequot refugees. It would be likely then that he came often to Cocumscussoc or points further south to bring messages, or exchange points of negotiation.

 In letters written during this time, he does mention his servant “Will” who appears to have helped gather information for him. He is also sent to Winthrop and introduced as ”This native, Will, my Indian servant”, indicating that the Governor had no prior introduction to him, and had certainly not named him.[iv]Furthermore, it is clear this indigenous adult is not “the little one” he sought to raise and educate.

 This seems to indicate that Roger Williams had at least two indigenous servants in 1638[v].

      By 1651 when Richard Smith took possession of the lands of Cocumscussoc, he was traveling routinely between New Amsterdam, Taunton, and Cocumscussoc on his sloop Welcome. While Smith traded from Rhode Island, his son Richard Jr. learned the merchants trade from their trading house in New York. It was here that he would learn of the burgeoning profits garnered from trading in slaves, and the plantations in Barbados that Cocumscussoc would help to supply. When he inherited his father’s business, the fur trade was in decline, and Richard Smith Jr. transformed the trading post into a plantation. By 1671 he wrote to John Winthrop Jr.  of fitting out a ship for Barbados. At the time, he also held an interest in the sloop Primrose[vi].

 As Carl Bridenbaugh wrote of Smith Jr. and other early merchants, direct trade occurred with the West Indies before the triangle trade increased the slave traffic exponentially in the 18thcentury.

 “Before 1690 certainly,…It was almost totally a down and back traffic[vii]”

 Richard Smith Jr. held property of at least nine slaves during these years of expanding the plantation and producing large amounts of cheese along with other goods for export. The exact amount of slaves used in his operation is uncertain, but we know from later accounts of Narragansett Planters that it took a sizeable number to produce to meet the demands of merchants for this product. 

 It is likely that the slaves he acquired were brought back one or two at a time from his trade voyages to Barbados.

 It is undocumented whether Smith held indigenous slaves, though I feel that unlikely, as he was reliant upon indigenous couriers to convey messages to John Winthrop Jr., the governor of the neighboring colony of Connecticut, and an early physician of note. In William’s correspondence he mentions the indigenous man the English called “Stonewall John” as “Richard Smith’s man”, though he does not use the term servant as he did for his own slaves; significant because he also called Valentine Whitman “Smith’s man”. Whitman was an early interpreter for Smith at his trading post. These indigenous couriers brought Smith’s request for medicines to Winthrop, and returned with the powders and tinctures prescribed for the often ailing Esther Smith[viii].

   Despite this reliance upon indigenous couriers, and what seems to have been several attempts to mediate between Massachusetts Bay Colony authorities and the Narragansett, Smith Jr. would ultimately bring King Philip’s War to Cocumscussoc when he sent his own vessel to pick up Massachusetts soldiers and some forty Providence men from the Seekonk River and brought them back to these shores.

 Upon the merging of Massachusetts and Connecticut soldiers at Cocumscussoc,  as described by Douglas Leach 

 “the next few days were spent in vigorous scouting activity in the vicinity of Wickford. Before long the army had a sizeable collection of enemy prisoners, who were subsequently sold to Captain Davenport and transported to Aquidneck Island for safekeeping[ix]”.

 Days later, guided by the aid of an indigenous man under threat of execution, the combined forces would converge on the Great Swamp where they inflicted a massacre on the Narragansett warriors stationed there, as well as the elderly men, women, and children they were protecting.

 An undetermined number of captives were brought back to Smith’s Castle along with the wounded soldiers from the conflict. Some were tortured here, others summarily executed at the whim of officers. Deputy governor John Easton would recount some of those atrocities in A Relacion of the Indian Warre, and noted as other historians that “they solde those Indians they had taken for slaves but one old man who was taken off our Island upon his son’s back. He was so decrepid he could not go and when the army tooke them…sum would have had him devoured by dogs but the tenderness of sum of them prevailed to Cut off his head[x]”.

 The soldiers left Smith’s Castle after occupying the property for some three months. After their departure, the house Richard Smith had built was destroyed by fire in retaliation for his son’s involvement in the war.

 In the aftermath of the bloody conflict, when indigenous men came seeking asylum in Providence they were thrown into the garrison, and a committee was formed to determine their fate. When the Council met beneath a tree along the Providence River in August of 1677, a resolution was agreed upon and signed by Roger Williams, Thomas Harris Sr., Thomas Angell, Thomas Field, and John Whipple; which gave each settler whose property had been destroyed in Providence “A full share of the product”, or profits from selling them into slavery.

 The imprisoned Indians were placed on board a sloop owned by Robert Williams and brought to Cocumscussoc, where they were placed in pens and sold for such diverse currency as silver, corn, wool, and even “three fat sheep”[xi]. 

 On his death in 1692, Smith Jr’s inventory shows that he held 135 head of cattle. Of those nine slaves that were part of his property, he listed the adults: Ebed Melich, Caesar, and his wife Sarah, five unnamed children were also listed as was “an old Negro woman”. The adult males were valued at 40 pounds, the five children and the old woman combined were valued the same. 

 His will dated 16 March 1690, freed Caesar & Sarah, and gave them one hundred acres. Smith also promised to give their five children “all their freedom when thirty years old”. We have no indication whether his nephew Lodowick Updike who inherited the property fulfilled this promise. We do know however that Caesar and Sarah were free blacks, as was Ebed Melich by 1724, when attorney Daniel Updike represented him in a lawsuit.

  With the house coming into the ownership of Lodowick Updike, the slave population would grow exponentially on the plantation in the coming years. The young Updike had lived at the trading house since 1660 when he was fourteen years old, and was certainly familiar with the farm’s production and exports, as well as the management of slaves on the property.  At the time of his inheritance, he was newly married to Abigail Newton, a marriage that in and of itself, created important connections between the two wealthy families. That wealth would be visited upon their son Daniel, born in 1693, who would live his entire life as one of privilege and luxury. His descendant Wilkins Updike would write

 “His education was carefully carried on by tutors at home…The young Daniel it is asserted, was a great student and had a reputation as a penman. He was induced by a merchant of Barbados (perhaps John Chace-later his brother-in-law[xii]) to accompany him thither, tarrying there for some time and thus enlarging his information[xiii]”.

 The Chace family owned two adjoining plantations near Bridgetown. The young Updike was “admitted to the first circles of society on the island”, visiting the parlors of the plantation owners houses among this “circle” of wealthy land owners and slave holders. He would have keenly observed “how the planters organized the plantations and how they best employed their slave labor[xiv]”.

  These lessons were applied on a smaller scale at Cocumscussoc. When Daniel Updike inherited the property, he was living in Newport, and viewed Cocumscussoc as a summer residence. He hired an overseer named Isaac Phillips in 1730, with explicit instructions of the crops to be planted. Updike instructed Phillips to “plant 30 acres of maize, 30 acres of English corn, clear 10 acres of ground for meadow, and care for the orchards”. Phillips was also given the right to cultivate his own ¼ acre kitchen garden[xv].

 The probate inventory taken after his death in 1757 suggests, as Neil Dunay has observed, that Updike ”shifted the farm away from the Smith model of cattle for cheese production to sheep for wool and more particularly for meat (mutton) which was packed in butts (hence the need for cooper tools listed in the backroom) and shipped to Caribbean plantations[xvi]”. This while the other Narraganset Plantations were still producing great quantities of cheese based upon the Smith recipe.

     The plantation at Cocumscussoc would reach its peak about the mid-eighteenth century, encompassing some three thousand acres, exporting lumber, bricks, mutton and hay from the stone dock at Cocumscussoc that jutted out toward Rabbit Island.

 Daniel Updike would leave 19 enslaved people on the plantation in the charge of his heir Lodowick Updike II, who raised a large family at Cocumscussoc and oversaw the transformation of the Plantation during the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. The loss of slaves, both those who had fought for their freedom, and those later emancipated in 1784, as well as the loss of trade, was a death knell to the planter economy. The Updike’s attempted to diversify at the turn of the 19thcentury by expanding the family trade into Asia, before financial misfortune, the embargo of 1807-1809, and the War of 1812, forced the Updike’s to sell the plantation on December 31stof that year. 

 Why a Slave Medallion at Smith’s Castle?

 I would argue that Smith’s Castle is the last representation of a Northern Plantation in Rhode Island that the public may visit, and be educated on the history of the “Narragansett Planters”. In addition, the lands that were once part of Cocumscussoc are also the site of one of the oldest and largest indigenous and slave burial grounds in the state, holding some two hundred graves before it was leveled at the close of the 19thcentury. Those two hundred graves, of both indigenous and African men, women and children are an indication that the burial ground was also used by other slave holders in North Kingstown.

 This alone merits the medallion as a fitting tribute to the lives given for the benefit of those who owned these plantations and neighboring farms.

 We recover these unvarnished truths not to incite anger or resentment, or to place a mantle of guilt upon the descendants of those soldiers and planters, but we tell them because as we enter the third decade of the 21stcentury we can acknowledge those wrongs committed in the past, and further fulfill our obligation as the caretakers of this historic site to tell the history in its entirety. The slave medallion with its QR code will help us tell visitors the story of slavery at Cocumscussoc, just as we have and will continue to do in more expansive ways in our tours of the historic house known as Smith’s Castle.

[i]Lafantasie, Glenn Correspondence of RW Vol. 1 pp. 88-89

[ii]Ibid

[iii]Ibid. p.110

[iv]Correspondence of Roger Williams Vol. 1 p. 113

[v]Williams would later adopt a Dutch boy he found in the woods between Plymouth and Seekonk named Will Clauson. He raised the boy as “his servant” in Providence and gave him means to support himself as a young man.

[vi]Updike, Daniel Berkeley Richard Smith First English Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island Merrymount Press 1937 Smith Letters 4thof September 1671 p. 87

[vii]Bridenbaugh, Carl “Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience” Brown University Press 1974 p. 120

[viii]See Updike, Richard Smith, The Smith Letters pp. 77-118 for a full understanding of Mrs. Smith’s ailments and the medicine acquired through indigenous couriers.

[ix]Leach, Douglas Flintlock and Tomahawk MacMillan 1958 pp. 125-126  

[x]Easton, John A Relation of the Indian War pp. 14-17

[xi]Staples, William R. Annals of the Town of Providence Knowles and Vole 1842 pp.166-171

[xiii]Updike,  A History of the Narragansett Church  418

[xiv]Dunay, Neil, “Captive at Cocumscussoc: From Bondage to Freedom” from  Cranston/Dunay, “We Were Here Too: Selected Stories of Black History in North Kingstown” (CreateSpace 2016) p. 72

[xv]Fitts, Robert K. Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise p. 100

[xvi]Cranston/Dunay,  91-92