Let us begin with a clock. In 2003, Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate and issue a public report on the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Since that time, the committee, which includes faculty, students, and administrators, has met periodically in an office on the second floor of University Hall, the oldest building on the Brown campus. In the corner of the office stands an antique clock. A silver plaque on the cabinet identifies it as “The Family Clock of Admiral Esek Hopkins.” Built in the 1750s by a local craftsman, Samuel Rockwell, the clock was donated to Brown in the 1850s by Hopkins’s granddaughter. Such artifacts and heirlooms abound on the campus, and it took several months for committee members to notice the clock or to recognize its significance.
Though less celebrated than his older brother Stephen, a colonial governor and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Esek Hopkins is a well-known figure in Rhode Island history. A Providence ship captain, he served as the first commander-in-chief of the United States Navy during the American Revolution. After the war, he was elected to the state legislature. Like his brother, he was a strong supporter of Brown, then known as the College of Rhode Island, serving as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1782 to 1802. His memory is enshrined today in several public sites in Providence, including the Esek Hopkins Middle School, Esek Hopkins Park (which includes a statue of him in naval uniform), and Admiral Street, where his old house still stands.
There is another aspect of Esek Hopkins’s story, unmentioned on any of the existing memorials. In 1764, the year that the College of Rhode Island was founded, Hopkins sailed to West Africa in command of a slave ship, a one-hundred-ton brigantine called the Sally. The Sally was owned by
Nicholas Brown and Company, a partnership of four brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses Brown. Prominent Providence merchants, the Browns were also important benefactors of the college, playing a leading role in relocating the school from its original home in Warren, Rhode Island, to its current location in Providence. (In 1804, the College of Rhode Island changed its name to Brown University, in recognition of a gift from Nicholas’s son, Nicholas Jr.) There was nothing unusual about a slave ship departing from Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders dominated the North American share of the African slave trade, mounting over a thousand slaving voyages in the century before the abolition of the trade in 1807 (and scores more illegal voyages thereafter).
The Sally’s voyage was deadlier than most. At least 109 of the196 Africans that Hopkins purchased on behalf of the Browns perished, some in a failed insurrection, the balance through disease, suicide, and starvation. The records of the venture, from the fitting out of the ship in August 1764 to the sale of surviving captives on the West Indian island of Antigua fifteen months later, are housed in a library on the Brown campus, though few have troubled to look at them, at least until recently.
We shall return to the voyage of the Sally, an episode of considerable significance in the lives of the Brown brothers, three of whom seem never again to have invested directly in transatlantic slaving voyages. But let us return first to the clock. What should the University do with it, now that we know more about its origins? Is it appropriate to display it? Should we remove the plaque honoring Esek Hopkins? Attach another plaque? We are obviously speaking metaphorically here, but the underlying questions could not be more direct. How are we, as members of the Brown community, as Rhode Islanders, and as citizens and residents of the United States, to make sense of our complex history? How do we reconcile those elements of our past that are gracious and honorable with those that provoke grief and horror? What responsibilities, if any, rest upon us in the present as inheritors of this mixed legacy? The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice represents one institution’s confrontation with these questions.
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