Day 5–Gradual Emancipation , Racism, and Abolitionism. 

In the morning, Dr. J. Stanley Lemons, Professor of History Emeritus at Rhode Island College and author of many articles on Rhode Island history, the RI slave trade, and antislavery, will lecture on the evolution of the Revolutionary antislavery movement in Rhode Island and throughout southern New England, focusing on the career of Moses Brown as a lens through which to examine the notion of gradualism as an antislavery strategy.  His lecture will be entitled, “A Hesitant Abolition: The Anti-Slavery Movement in Southern New England.”  Next, in her lecture, “Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England,” Dr. Joanne Pope Melish will describe the implementation of gradual emancipation and the struggles and achievements of the free population of color that slowly emerged out of slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in New England. In this talk she will address the paradox of the rise of white racism and mob violence against blacks that coincided with the rise of abolitionist sentiment directed toward Southern slavery.  In the afternoon, Dr. Melish and the institute staff will conduct two workshops on using primary documents including personal narratives, indentures, letters, Town Council and probate records, city directories, and broadsides to explore the first antislavery movement in New England, the lives of free people of color during the gradual abolition of slavery, and the rise of immediatism. Dr. Grefe will lead a pedagogical activity based on the debates between brothers John and Moses Brown over the abolition of the slave trade—a very public debate witnessed in letters published in the state’s many newspapers.

Day 6 –Antebellum New England and the “Slave Power”.

In the morning, Dr. James Oliver Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University, will introduce the second phase of New England’s involvement with slavery—its  rise as an industrial power in the nineteenth-century, based on processing Southern slave-grown cotton and producing manufactured goods for Southern slaveholders. Dr. Horton will focus on the powerful ways in which this history has shaped American society and culture, contrasting the American experience with European struggles over national memories of slavery.  Next, teachers will be bused to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to tour the birthplace of the American industrial revolution, Slater Mill, the first successful water-powered textile mill in the U.S. Paradoxically, Moses Brown, the Quaker who had fought so hard to end slavery in Rhode Island, was the major investor in Slater Mill, whose success would lead to the cotton revolution that would spread slavery across the American South.

In the afternoon, Dr. Seth Rockman, author of a forthcoming work on wage labor and the blurring of distinctions between slavery and freedom in the early republic, will lecture from his current research project on the rise of the (slave-grown) cotton textile industry in New England and the Northern manufacture of textiles, shoes, agricultural implements, and other products for the Southern market to be used by slaves. Drs. Rockman, Grefe, and Melish will then conduct a pedagogical exercise on the use of primary documents to trace the “genealogy” of products from the hands of enslaved producers through northern manufacturers and merchants to slave owners and enslaved “consumers.”