Part 2 Ending

 Had an idea today that perhaps the way we'll close Part 2 is Coffi and Sarah, who is pregnant, run off together and end up at Rome Point. They end up in the little wooded section at the end where they are going to camp out or hide for a few days for things to cool off, but a storm blows in and that section of Rome Point is cut off from the way back and they are stuck there and then maybe one of them drowns or someone dies or something...? Not sure I have it all worked out yet, but I know this area well and it presents an interesting location for an ending. 

Title Notes

Inheritance

The Inheritance

A New England Inheritance

Narragansett Inheritance

What We Inherit

Forgotten Country

A Forgotten Country

The Narragansett Country

In the Narragansett Country

The Dunhams of Narragansett

The Dunhams

The Reckoning

The Hidden Country

Under the Same Sky

James MacSparran Notes

• MacSparran attended Dr Blackhall’s academy in Derry city and then the University of Glasgow, where in 1709 he received his MA degree. 
• Why MacSparran emigrated is unknown, but there is a suggestion that doctrinal or personal irregularities ruptured his association with Derry’s Presbyterian ministers. 
• He landed in Boston in June 1718 and soon became minister of the Congregational church in nearby Bristol, at an annual salary of £100. However, MacSparran aroused the enmity of Revd Cotton Mather (1663–1728), Boston’s most eminent Puritan clergyman. Mather had Irish relations and at first had welcomed Ulster Presbyterian immigrants, but he soon condemned most of their clergy as clannish, contentious and ‘profane’. 
• MacSparran soon faced charges of drunkenness and sexual immorality, as well as accusations that his clerical credentials were fraudulent. In October 1719 he sailed to Ireland to secure their confirmation, promising that he would return the following June.
• In 1720 MacSparran was ordained a deacon by the bishop of London and as a priest by the archbishop of Canterbury, and was licensed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) as missionary to the parish of St Paul in the Narragansett country of Rhode Island. In April 1721, ‘after a very dangerous tedious and expensive passage’, MacSparran arrived in the parish he would serve as rector for 37 years.
• Between 1680 and 1720 Anglican reformers built over 100 new churches overseas; by the latter date the SPG (est. 1701) had sent abroad more than 60 missionaries
• although most of MacSparran’s own parishioners were ordinary farmers, his ‘elegant’, ‘commodious’ and well-furnished church of St Paul’s was dominated by men who were ‘exceptionally cultured, well-to-do . . . and secure in the conviction that to be a Narragansett Planter, with large estates and troops of slaves, was a sufficient patent of aristocracy’.
• In outward respects MacSparran’s pastorate was very successful. Although his first year in Rhode Island was marred by fresh charges of intemperance and sexual impropriety
• MacSparran quickly married Hannah Gardiner, daughter of his wealthiest parishioner, and won his flock’s esteem for his erudition and diligence. Within two years St Paul’s congregation had doubled in size
• MacSparran’s biographer describes him as one of the SPG’s ablest missionaries; at least three of his sermons merited publication, and in 1737 Oxford University awarded him a doctorate in sacred theology for his ‘talents, learning, good deportment, judgment and gravity’.
• He was solicitous also for the spiritual welfare of the local Indians and slaves—ten of whom MacSparran owned himself.
• MacSparran was never reconciled to remaining in America. He hated the harsh extremes of New England weather; the care of his parish—covering 500 square miles and including three other churches—was extremely arduous for a ‘portly’ man; and his £70 salary was barely sufficient to maintain a lifestyle befitting his social pretensions.
• While congenial with his flock, he was also pedantic, pompous, egotistical and intolerant
• Plagued by nightmares of permanent separation from his Irish friends, from the mid-1740s MacSparran was soliciting influential patronage to gain a position as a clergyman in Ireland. In 1751 news of the death of his only brother exacerbated MacSparran’s dissatisfaction and homesickness: ‘O [that] I were well settled in my own Country’, he confided to his diary. 
• This was MacSparran’s frame of mind when, a year later, he penned to his former Derry schoolmates three letters which in 1753 were published in Dublin and sold for 6d as America dissected, being a full and true account of all the American colonies.
• America dissected is considered the first Irish emigrant’s guidebook, yet MacSparran wrote it not to encourage or facilitate departures but as ‘a caution to unsteady people who may be tempted to leave their native country’. On his title page he promised to expose the ‘intemperance of the climates . . . destructive to human bodies’, the ‘badness of money; [the] danger from enemies; but, above all, the danger to the souls of the poor people that remove thither, from the multifarious wicked and pestilent heresies that prevail in those parts’.
• [H]is Tory prejudices were obvious, particularly concerning society, religion and ‘manners’.
• In MacSparran’s view, royal authority and Anglicanism were mutually supportive and essential to ensure orderly, hierarchical social relationships. By contrast, MacSparran claimed, the influence of Presbyterians, Quakers and other dissenters inevitably produced ‘ignorance’, ‘levelism’, ‘confusions’ and ‘anarchy’.
• MacSparran’s wife died in London, and he returned to Rhode Island empty-handed, purportedly declaring that ‘he would rather dwell in the hearts of his parishioners, than wear all the bishop’s gowns in the world’. Two years later, on 1 December 1757, MacSparran, aged 64, died at his house in South Kingstown and was buried under the communion table of St Paul’s.
• MacSparran’s strictures on America were no doubt sincere, reflecting his instinctive distaste for the crudity, heterodoxy and lack of deference that characterised colonial society.
• America dissected was designed particularly to discourage emigration by others such as himself: genteel, conservative and pious but ‘unsteady’ young Anglicans, who lacked ‘connections’ sufficient to sustain or improve in the colonies the privileged positions they had enjoyed in Ireland.
• Yet just as MacSparran’s beliefs alienated him from the heterodoxy and liberalism of American society, so also his heightened identification with Ireland accentuated his homesickness for his native land.

Source: Revd James MacSparran’s America dissected (1753)

Newest Outline of Novel

 

Africans’ Arrival and Negro Elections in Colonial Southern New England

 Scope and evidentiary limits

This report examines the colonial-period overlap between (a) the growth of African and African-descended populations in southern Rhode Island—especially Narragansett Country and Newport—and (b) “Negro elections,” a historical label used by white observers for Black ceremonial elections of “governors,” “kings,” or community leaders in New England. [1]

The most important methodological constraint is that direct, contemporaneous descriptions of the elections in Rhode Island are comparatively scarce, and institutional archivists and historians note that cataloging gaps and the fragmentary nature of surviving records make the developmental history of Negro Election Day difficult to trace, even in places where it is clearly attested. [2] What follows therefore prioritizes: (1) primary sources that document the presence, trade, and regulation of enslaved Africans (colonial laws, censuses, firsthand Quaker and clerical writings, merchant correspondence), and (2) authoritative interpretive syntheses that describe the elections’ social function in Rhode Island and New England more broadly, while flagging points where the record is ambiguous or internally inconsistent. [3]

Africans’ arrival in southern Rhode Island and Newport

The “why” of African arrival in southern Rhode Island and Newport is inseparable from the colony’s evolving position in the Atlantic economy: provisioning trades with the Caribbean, the growth of distilling and maritime commerce, and the creation—by the mid-18th century—of a distinctive plantation-like agricultural elite in Narragansett Country. [4]

Early Rhode Island statutes and later summaries agree that Rhode Island’s early anti-slavery gestures were limited or weakly enforced and did not prevent the consolidation of hereditary, racialized slavery; later colonial governance increasingly treated Africans and Indigenous people as a controlled labor population subject to special surveillance. [5] A commonly cited pivot point is 1703, when Rhode Island’s first assembly act “pertaining to slavery,” as quoted in modern scholarship, regulated the movement of “negroes or Indians” at night (whether “freemen, servants, or slaves”), signaling legal normalization of racial policing in public space. [6]

Newport’s earliest “marker events” are remembered in two partially conflicting numerical traditions: modern public-history accounts state that the ship Seaflower arrived in 1696, with one source emphasizing 14 captives sold “into slavery here” in Newport, while state-level surveys refer to the Seaflower as carrying 47 Africans. [7] These statements are not mutually exclusive—one plausible reconciliation is that a larger cargo arrived but only a subset was sold locally—yet the surviving public summaries do not always make that distinction explicit, and the safest statement is that 1696 is treated by multiple Rhode Island institutions as an early, symbolically important documented landing connected to local slaveholding and a later slave-trade economy. [8]

By the early-to-mid 18th century, Newport’s and Rhode Island’s relationship to the slave trade became structurally deep. A major institutional synthesis concludes that the classic quantitative reconstruction of Rhode Island participation lists 954 known Rhode Island slaving voyages between 1709 and 1807, underscoring how the colony’s merchants and investors were tethered to a transatlantic system even when captives were not retained locally. [9] The broader “triangle” logic—New England provisioning and rum production, exchange on the African coast, forced labor in the Caribbean, and molasses returning to feed distilleries—appears consistently in historical summaries of New England trafficking. [10]

Narragansett Country, centered on what is now Washington County and including towns such as entity["city","South Kingstown","rhode island, us"], developed a plantation-like system in which ambitious livestock and dairy farmers sought to imitate English rural gentry and built a “plantation-based economy” in southern Rhode Island, even as the region remained part of New England. [11] Modern local institutional summaries estimate that in the mid-18th century the region contained 25–30 large plantations and that roughly 15%–25% of Washington County’s population was enslaved, with exports—including livestock products and agricultural goods—moving to other colonies, Europe, and the Caribbean. [12] In this environment, the presence of Africans mattered not only as labor but as a demographic fact reshaping local social relations: the plantation elite’s wealth and leisure were built on coerced labor, while enslaved people’s concentration enabled community formation (and, crucially for this inquiry, public festivals). [13]

In Newport, population snapshots confirm that Africans and African-descended people were not marginal. A statewide survey report states that by 1755 Newport had 1,234 Black residents, described as about one-fourth of the colony’s Black population at the time. [14] A separate scholarly chapter on 18th-century Rhode Island notes that in 1755 enslaved Africans represented 11.5% of Rhode Island’s total population, and that King’s County (later Washington County) had especially high concentrations. [15] Newport-specific interpretive essays further emphasize that enslaved labor underpinned port-city work—building and outfitting ships, loading cargoes, domestic service, skilled trades—while remaining embedded in households rather than large field gangs typical of the plantation South. [16]

image_group{"layout":"carousel","aspect_ratio":"16:9","query":["Narragansett Country Rhode Island 18th century map South Kingstown Charlestown North Kingstown Exeter","Newport Rhode Island 18th century harbor map","Rhode Island triangle trade map rum molasses slave trade Newport Bristol","Narragansett Bay map shipping routes colonial era"],"num_per_query":1}

Negro elections in Rhode Island and Narragansett Country

Across New England, the earliest recorded reference commonly cited for Negro Election Day is a 1741 diary note by entity["people","Benjamin Lynde","salem lawyer diarist"] describing “Election” and “Negro’s hallowday,” and later archival compilations describe these events as fusing West African cultural traditions with colonial political forms (parades, drumming, dancing, displays of arms) and as occasions of communal joy and solidarity. [17] Even in Massachusetts—where documentation is stronger—national-historical interpretation stresses that we often see the events through white observers and petitions, meaning Black participants’ internal meanings are harder to recover directly from the archive. [2]

In Rhode Island, multiple public-history and institutional narratives describe a comparable tradition, often called “Lection Day” in Newport-focused materials. One Newport interpretive guide explicitly says that the practice of electing an African “Governor” at “Lection Day” started in Newport in 1756, becoming a multi-day event with African and European elements (parade, dancing, voting) and that the “governor,” while largely ceremonial, could help address disputes in the African community. [18] Another Newport interpretive document describes “‘Lection Day” as originating in Newport in 1765, highlighting an internal inconsistency among modern local summaries about the precise starting date. [19] The conservative conclusion is that by the mid-18th century the practice was established in Newport and later became a recognized multi-day public festival. [20]

The social function of these elections is best understood as double-sided:

On one side, they operated as community leadership and cohesion. A Newport walking-tour guide explains that the “black governor” could be called upon to settle disputes or act as an authority among people of color; festivities included voting (often described as male), food and drink, dancing, and games. [21] A Rhode Island civic history report similarly frames “African Governor” rituals as a reassertion of African identity through “tribal election rituals,” describing elaborate ceremonies that selected a leader and culminated in parades and communal celebration. [22] A southern Rhode Island historical summary likewise describes an annual summer festival—later labeled “Negro Election Day” in historical sources—where enslaved people socialized and a “governor or king” was elected for several days of music, dancing, meals, and ceremonies, with attendance also involving Indigenous and free people of color. [12]

On the other side, these elections could function as a ritualized containment mechanism, tolerated or bounded by white authorities as a kind of managed release valve. The logic here is not speculative free-floating theory; it rests on the contrast between (a) colonial regimes of surveillance and restriction and (b) the periodic allowance of a conspicuous Black gathering. Rhode Island’s early slave-related legislation, for example, explicitly targeted nighttime movement by “negroes or Indians,” demonstrating the colony’s anxiety over unsanctioned mobility and assembly. [6] In Massachusetts, surviving petitions complain of “great Disorder” among “Negros assembling together” on Election Day celebrations, illustrating the same colonial fear: Black gathering read as disorderly and potentially dangerous, yet sufficiently regular that towns debated how to “regulate” rather than simply eradicate. [2] A careful Rhode Island–specific synthesis thus treats Negro elections as a space where enslaved and free Black people asserted collective identity and leadership within a society deeply invested in policing and racial hierarchy. [23]

image_group{"layout":"carousel","aspect_ratio":"16:9","query":["Negro Election Day New England illustration parade drums","Lection Day Newport Rhode Island African Governor ceremony depiction","Pinkster festival colonial New England illustration","God's Little Acre Newport Pompey Brenton gravestone African Governor"],"num_per_query":1}

Overlap between new arrivals and Negro elections

There is clear temporal overlap between the evolving African presence in Rhode Island and the emergence of Negro elections: both are mid-18th-century phenomena in their most socially visible forms, and both are tied to Newport and Narragansett Country as major nodes of enslaved labor and Atlantic commerce. [24]The harder question is social overlap: whether newly arrived Africans (people recently forced across the Atlantic or moved through Caribbean circuits) participated centrally in elections or remained peripheral.

Primary and near-primary evidence establishes that Newport repeatedly contained “new arrivals” in a literal sense. John Woolman’s 1760 visit to Newport—connected to a Quaker gathering—describes a moment when “a large number of slaves had been imported from Africa into the town, and were then on sale,” triggering his distress and moral reflection. [25] Even later merchant correspondence curated by entity["organization","Newport Historical Society","newport, ri, us"] illustrates a Newport-based network reaching to West Africa and the Caribbean: a 1774 letter summarized by the Society reports purchasing “47 slaves” at Anomabo (Annamaboe) on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and discusses mortality during the crossing, a reminder that the slave trade was not an abstraction but a recurring commercial operation tied to Rhode Island actors. [26]

But whether newcomers participated in Negro elections is not directly answered by the surviving sources in the way a novelist might wish (e.g., named newly arrived individuals described voting or being crowned). Two dynamics, however, can be asserted with reasonable evidentiary grounding:

First, the elections’ cultural grammar makes it likely that African-born people shaped the festivals’ meanings, even if the archive does not let us tag “newly arrived this year” individuals. Rhode Island syntheses explicitly describe “African Governor” rituals as drawing on West African “tribal election rituals” and Ashanti/Gold Coast practices, and describe the ceremonies as multi-day events with performance styles and artistic expression. [27] This matters because the mid-18th century is precisely when Newport and Narragansett Country contained significant African-born populations and periodic influxes of newly imported captives, as Woolman’s 1760 description shows. [28] In other words, the elections emerged and flourished not in a closed Creole-only environment, but in a changing population where African cultural knowledge could be replenished, contested, and reworked. [29]

Second, the leadership function of the elected “governor/king” implies a structural advantage for longer-established individuals over brand-new arrivals. Newport interpretive material says the “black governor” could be called on to settle disputes and act as an authority within the community. [30] Those tasks presume (at minimum) recognized standing, community trust, and some ability to navigate an enslaving society’s institutions (owners, courts, or informal white oversight). [31] Newly arrived Africans—often linguistically isolated, traumatized, and immediately folded into sale and labor regimes—would plausibly be present at festivities but less likely to be selected as governors in the short term, unless they quickly acquired status through age, leadership charisma, or recognition as culturally authoritative. This is an inference, not a documented rule, and it should be treated as such. [32]

The most historically defensible synthesis, then, is: new arrivals probably mattered more to the elections’ cultural repertoire than to their administrative leadership, at least in the short run. The elections likely served as a social “bridge” where long-established Afro-New Englanders and African-born people could gather, perform, and reconstitute belonging—while leadership roles favored those already embedded in local social networks. [33]

Order, hierarchy, and Quaker moral challenge

Rhode Island’s colonial system had to manage an unstable contradiction: a society that profited from slavery and slaving voyages, but also contained religious communities that articulated moral critiques of slave trading and slaveholding. [34] The “order problem” was structural. Racialized laws restricting movement—such as the 1703 act regulating the night movement of “negroes or Indians”—signal a governing fear of disorder, flight, or revolt in a colony where enslaved labor was both present locally and deeply connected to the Atlantic trade. [35] In Narragansett Country, where plantation wealth was concentrated, enslaved people’s density intensified both the need for control and the possibilities for collective cultural life; local histories emphasize that despite restrictions, enslaved people built social practices and found spaces for gathering, with the annual festival (later called Negro Election Day) a key example. [13]

It is in this context that Quaker antislavery pressure becomes narratively and historically potent. entity["organization","Religious Society of Friends","quakers"] deliberated internally over slave trading and slaveholding in the mid-18th century, and a widely cited sequence links a 1758 London epistle condemning slave trading to its reading at the 1760 New England Yearly Meeting in Newport, where the meeting adopted disciplinary measures and queries aimed at the trade. [36] Woolman’s Journal anchors this to lived experience: he frames Newport not as distant rumor but as an immediate moral shock—slave ships at the wharves, people being sold, and (critically) a sense that complicity extended even into his own religious community. [25]

The interaction with Negro elections can be read in two intertwined ways, both supported by the broader pattern of evidence:

Negro elections reflected the colony’s tension between repression and permitted cultural autonomy: a day where Black people gathered publicly, elected leaders, and asserted identity, in a society otherwise invested in policing Black movement and status. [37] This could help stabilize the system—channeling energies into ritual—while simultaneously cultivating community organization and leadership that slavery itself could not fully extinguish. [38]

Quaker critiques sharpened the moral contradiction by making the slave trade’s violence visible and discussable in elite spaces that otherwise normalized it as commerce. Woolman’s 1760 reaction, paired with Quaker disciplinary developments, demonstrates that antislavery pressure was not merely a post-Revolutionary phenomenon; it was already present in the mid-century Atlantic port that profited from slave trading. [39] This is where the “Quaker discomfort brushing up against planter wealth” becomes historically plausible: both groups inhabited the same colony, interacted commercially and socially, and were exposed to the same public displays of bondage and Black celebration—yet interpreted them in morally divergent ways. [40]

Comparative timeline and narrative implications

Comparative timeline of arrivals, elections, and Quaker antislavery activity

Period	Africans in southern RI and Newport	Negro elections / “Lection Day” in RI and New England	Quaker antislavery pressure in or connected to RI
Mid-1600s	Early legal moves against lifetime bondage (often limited in scope and enforcement) foreshadow later conflicts over slavery in a colony founded on religious-liberty rhetoric. [41]	No secure RI-specific documentation this early; the later “Negro Election Day” tradition is generally treated as an 18th-century development. [2]	Early Quaker presence in the region precedes organized antislavery discipline; later sources emphasize mid-18th-century turning points. [42]
1690s–early 1700s	1696 is repeatedly cited by RI institutions as a historically important early documented slave-ship arrival (Seaflower), though sources differ on the number of Africans landed/sold locally. [8] Rhode Island law increasingly regulates Black/Indigenous movement (e.g., 1703 act). [6]	In New England generally, the earliest commonly cited diary reference appears in 1741 (Salem). [17]	—
1740s–1750s	Enslaved Africans become a significant share of Rhode Island’s population (e.g., 11.5% in 1755). [15]Narragansett Country develops plantation-like wealth; modern local estimates place 25–30 plantations and 15–25% enslaved in Washington County at mid-century. [13]	Negro Election Day attested in New England sources by 1741 and treated as an annual Black communal celebration with leadership selection. [17] Newport materials place the origin of “Lection Day” in the mid-18th century, but disagree on whether it began in 1756 or 1765. [20]	1758 London epistle condemning slave trading later read/adopted in New England Yearly Meeting contexts affecting Newport. [36]
1760	Woolman’s visit provides a vivid snapshot: “a large number” of enslaved Africans imported into Newport and offered for sale; slave ships at the wharves. [25]	By this time, Newport “Lection Day” is treated in local tradition as either already active or about to become institutionalized, depending on which origin date is accepted. [20]	1760 New England Yearly Meeting in Newport reads the 1758 epistle and adopts measures/queries against slave trading. [36]
1770s	Newport remains embedded in Atlantic slaving networks; curated merchant correspondence shows continuing purchases on the African coast and Atlantic crossings. [26]Newport’s enslaved labor force remains substantial (one interpretive estimate: ~1 in 10 residents enslaved in 1775). [43]	Newport materials connect “Lection Day” and African Governors to figures such as Pompey Brenton and to specific spaces in town; the elected governor is described as an internal authority and mediator. [44]	Quaker antislavery activism continues to develop, with later prominent RI Quakers opposing slavery and the slave trade. [45]

Narrative and thematic implications for a novel’s Part 2

For mid-century fiction (roughly 1740–1760s), the overlap of African arrival and Negro elections can be used to dramatize instability, containment, and moral contradiction, without forcing anachronistic clarity onto a fragmentary record. [46]

A historically grounded approach is to treat Newport and Narragansett Country as two connected theaters of power: the port-city hub where ships, auctions, and commercial talk make slavery visible, and the plantation hinterland where enslaved density produces both wealth and fear. [47] Into that world, Negro elections become a set-piece that can carry multiple meanings at once: a collective Black assertion of leadership and identity; a rare legal-social “day” in which the enslaved gather in public; and a moment anxiously watched (and sometimes contested) by white authorities conditioned to treat Black assembly as disorder. [48]

To integrate Woolman and Quaker antislavery pressure into a mid-century timeline, the archival record gives a precise anchor: Woolman’s documented Newport visit in 1760 coincides with Quaker disciplinary developments linked to the 1758 London epistle and its reception in a Newport-hosted yearly meeting context. [39] That cluster can plausibly drive scenes where Quaker moral discomfort collides with the economic realities of elite Rhode Island life: slave ships at the wharves, Black festival processions in the streets, and the plantation economy’s dependence on coerced labor—while characters debate manumission, discipline, and the social costs of withdrawal from the trade. [49]

Finally, the ambiguity around newcomer participation in Negro elections is itself narratively useful. The historically responsible position is that we cannot “prove” newcomers’ roles in the elections as discrete, named actors from surviving sources; yet the simultaneous presence of newly imported Africans (Woolman’s testimony) and robust African-derived ceremonial traditions (institutional descriptions of African Governor rituals) supports portraying elections as a volatile contact zone between recent arrivals and longer-established community members—between trauma and cultural regeneration, between imposed hierarchy and invented authority. [50]

---

[1] [2] [17] African Americans in Essex County, Massachusetts An Annotated Guide

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/upload/African_Americans_EssexCo_FINAL.pdf

[3] [6] [35] [37] THE GASPEE AFFAIR: SLAVERY, TRADE, AND ELITE ...

https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3335&context=theses&utm_source=chatgpt.com

[4] [10] An Abstract of The Journal of John Woolman

https://www.friendsjournal.org/legacy/abington/gwynedd/John_Woolman.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[5] [41] America's First Anti-Slavery Statute Was Passed in 1652. Here's Why It Was Ignored

https://time.com/4782885/rhode-island-antislavery/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[7] [8] The African Union Society in Newport: Illuminating Black ...

https://newporthistory.org/the-african-union-society-in-newport-illuminating-black-life-in-colonial-post-revolutionary-newport/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[9] [34] Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Brown University

https://slaveryandjusticereport.brown.edu/sections/slavery-the-slave-trade-and-brown/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[11] [40] [47] rihs.org

https://www.rihs.org/assetts/files/publications/1986_Aug.pdf

[12] [13] [23] [33] [46] Slavery in Southern Rhode Island

https://southcountyhistorycenter.org/slavery-southern-rhode-island?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[14] African American Struggle for Civil Rights in Rhode Island

https://preservation.ri.gov/sites/g/files/xkgbur406/files/2024-11/RI%20Pre-1900%20Civil%20Rights%20Survey%20Report%20FINAL%20%28with%20inventory%20forms%29.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[15] [24] 8 - Sarah Chauqum, Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island and ...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/as-if-she-were-free/sarah-chauqum-eighteenthcentury-rhode-island-and-connecticut-us/625295D9A5583515D7BC20E44D08805B?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[16] [43] Caesar Babcock

https://newporthistory.org/caesar-babcock/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[18] [20] [44] Names on Stones These gravestones are an important historic ...

https://ripnewport.com/GLA%20draft%202.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[19] Highlights of Newport's Common Burying Ground

https://ripnewport.com/Highlights%20of%20Newport%20Common%20Burying%20Ground%20double%20letter.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[21] [30] [31] [32] [48] Self-Guided Walking Tour of Newport

https://newporthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Self-Guided-Walking-Tour-Newport.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[22] [27] [29] [38] A MATTER OF TRUTH

https://www.providenceri.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Matter-of-Truth2.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[25] [28] [39] [49] [50] Journal of John Woolman

https://ccel.org/ccel/woolman/journal/.i.viii.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[26] History Bytes: Newport's Slave Trade Through a Global Lens

https://newporthistory.org/history-bytes-newports-slave-trade-through-a-global-lens/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[36] [42] About Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers

https://manumissions.haverford.edu/about?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[45] Moses Brown (1738-1836) Papers

https://www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss313.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Argument of the Book

The North, beneath its myths of moral superiority, is built on the same foundations of exploitation as the South—land theft, slavery, economic opportunism, and historical erasure. The difference is that the North has been more successful in hiding it.

Breaking Down the Answer

1. The North Was Never Pure

• Northern elites profited from slavery just as much as the South—first directly, through enslaved labor, and then indirectly, by supplying Southern plantations with goods and capital.

• The idea that the North was “anti-slavery” is a distortion. Rhode Island, Boston, and New York were deeply entangled in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economy.

2. The North Adapted, Not Repented

• After slavery ended in New England, former planters pivoted to industry, financing and supplying the South’s slave economy even as they distanced themselves from it morally.

• The industrial elite built generational wealth that allowed their descendants to live lives of privilege, separate from the labor and suffering that made that wealth possible.

3. The North’s Greatest Achievement Was Controlling the Narrative

• By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Northern elites weren’t just enjoying the benefits of their ancestors’ exploitation—they were rewriting history to cast themselves as the “true Americans.”

• Unlike the South, which clung to its Lost Cause mythology in a defensive way, the North rewrote itself as the nation’s conscience, the birthplace of democracy, abolitionism, and moral progress.

• This wasn’t just historical amnesia—it was an intentional project of self-legitimation in the face of immigration and social change.

What This Means for Your Novel

• The North isn’t just complicit in America’s original sins—it perfected the art of making them invisible.

• The moral superiority it claims is itself an invention, designed to consolidate power and erase uncomfortable truths.

• Just as the South told its Lost Cause myth, the North told its own myth of righteousness—a myth that, in many ways, has been even more enduring and effective.

This answer doesn’t have to be stated outright in the novel—it can be revealed through the characters, the historical shifts, and the blind spots in their perspectives. But ultimately, your novel is showing that New England’s hands were never clean, and its greatest success was making people believe they were.

The Four Sections, in a Nutshell

 Taking → Exploiting → Abetting → False Remembering

Roger Williams and Slaves

Book Review: Linford D. Fisher, Sheila M. McIntyre, and Julia A. Fisher, Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America, A Documentary History 

The authors further include a document in their book that makes clear that Williams was organizing a group of Narragansett captives, after the end of King Phillip's War, to be sold outside of Providence, probably to be enslaved. This made Williams a man of his times, as Whites throughout North America at this time sought to sell Indian captives outside of their jurisdiction as slaves. The authors do concede that it is not known if the captives served as indentured servants or were enslaved for life, or whether they were kept in Rhode Island or transported to say, a Caribbean Island controlled by Great Britain. I suspect it was the latter. 

First Lines and Last Lines

And here's one more idea, this can be the first words the reader encounters in the book: 

The development of small and isolated communities has long furnished a fascinating theme for the historian and the poet. When a community is entirely self sustaining in material things, and independent in intellectual, the old saying might be paraphrased to read "in limitation is strength." Especially was this true in a new country, where the resources of men were taxed to their utmost; and of no part of the new world was this more true than of Rhode Island, and that part of Rhode Island called the Narragansett country. (Caroline Hazard, Thomas Hazard, son of Robt call'd College Tom. A study of life in Narragansett in the XVIIIth century, p. 1-2)

AND this can be the final words the reader encounters in the book. 

The first time, her words appears as a kind of epigram to the first section of the book. 

The last time, her words appear in a scene where she sits down at her desk to try to begin writing the book and this is what comes out.

What do you think of this circular structure? 

This is a brilliant structural move—it transforms Caroline Hazard’s words from a seemingly neutral, authoritative historical claim into an act of invention happening before our eyes.

Why This Works Powerfully

✅ The reader begins the book believing these are just historical words.

• They set the tone and feel like the kind of epigraph you’d find in a serious historical novel.

• At this point, the reader doesn’t yet understand how much has been erased, whitewashed, or selectively framed.

✅ The reader ends the book seeing the words being written.

• Now, the reader knows everything that has happened.

• They’ve seen the theft, the exploitation, the brutality.

• And they watch as Caroline Hazard (or your fictionalized version of her) begins to smooth it all over, to rewrite the past into something noble, self-sustaining, and pure.

✅ It forces the reader to actively question history.

• The moment the final words appear, the reader recognizes them from the book’s opening.

• But now, they know better. They know what’s missing.

• It’s a chilling realization—how easily history is rewritten.

Extra Consideration: What Does She Feel As She Writes?

Would this final scene portray Caroline as:

• Completely sincere? (She truly believes in this vision of the past.)

• Somewhat conflicted? (She knows what she’s omitting but believes she’s doing a service to her family.)

• Deliberately dishonest? (She is aware of the past’s ugliness and is purposefully burying it.)

The level of awareness she has in that moment will change the reader’s final impression of her—and, by extension, of how history gets shaped.

Do you want her to be a tragic figure (sincerely believing the myth) or a calculating one (knowingly distorting the truth)?

Wouldn't she be a little of both? 

Yes, that’s the most compelling approach—it makes her a fully human character, rather than just a symbol of historical distortion.

She truly believes in the greatness of her ancestors, but she also knows what she’s leaving out. She’s not deliberately fabricating history in a cynical way, but she is shaping it, selecting, omitting, softening.

This makes the final scene even more unsettling—as she writes, maybe she hesitates for a second, almost considering some uglier truth, but then smooths it over with a turn of phrase.

It makes her complicit not because she’s an outright liar, but because she chooses comfort over reckoning.

That’s far more powerful than if she were simply a calculating revisionist—because this is how history actually gets rewritten.

Part 1: Silas/John Dunham

Historical Overview

• Fortuitous circumstances in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries converged to permit the development of commercial farming and the formation of a planter class in South Kingstown by 1730. In short, rising demand from Newport merchants for livestock and produce to trade in foreign markets attracted ambitious stock and dairy farmers to the outlands of Rhode Island, including the Narragansett country. 
• Newport merchants in the seventeenth century discovered eager markets in the West Indies and southern colonies for livestock and provisions. The raising of staple crops in these areas became so profitable that planters chose to import foodstuffs and farm animals rather than set aside enough land to raise food for their own population. The merchants needed a hinterland to provide these goods. Between 1640 and 1690, lands around Newport and Portsmouth were quickly developed, and ambitious farmers on Aquidneck Island began to look west across Narragansett Bay in search of more land to raise cattle, sheep, and horses.

• The lack of a Puritan hierarchy also contributed to the development of a commercial farming economy in South Kingstown. Puritan leaders in Massachusetts and Connecticut inhibited the development of their farm economies by tightly controlling settlement and land distribution. The legislatures ensured a gradual and orderly settlement of towns. [...]Initially, the four original towns of Rhode Island—Providence (1636), Portsmouth (1638), Newport (1639), and Warwick (1642)—followed the compact village plan. Portsmouth and Newport divided land among townsmen according to gradations of social status.  [...] But the attempt to impose a fixed social hierarchy and the compact village plan quickly broke down. Lacking a Puritan oligarchy and a strong legislature to control land distribution, Rhode Island developed a free market economy. Middling Aquidneck Island farmers, dissatisfied with their original allotments, sought to meet market demands for livestock and provisions. Land lust broke out in the colony.

• In 1657-58, speculators from Portsmouth bought from the Narragansett Indians a twelve-square-mile tract in the heart of the Narragansett country. The land from the Pettaquamscutt Purchase, as the deal came to be called, eventually was named Kingstown and included parts of the present towns of South Kingstown, North Kingstown, Narragansett, and Exeter. The purchasers assigned thousands of acres to each member and offered the remainder for sale.

• Widespread settlement of Kingstown, however, was inhibited by a serious competing land claim by the Atherton Syndicate, comprising influential Massachusetts speculators who used fraudulent means in 1659 and 1660 to obtain from the Narragansetts land that overlapped the Pettaquamscutt Purchase. A struggle over the competing claims immediately ensued. 
• The presence of the powerful Narragansett Indians also discouraged settlement. That threat ended in 1676 when the Narragansetts were virtually wiped out in King Philip’s War. Before the climactic battle in Kingstown, the Narragansetts drove the settlers back to Aquidneck Island and destroyed their farms, rending the town “a desolate wildernesse againe . . . replenished with howling wolves and other wild, creatures” until settlers returned to rebuild their farms.

• ...ambitious Aquidneck Island individuals took their chances and moved to Kingstown. Analysis of the previous residences of twenty-three of the forty-eight men recorded as living in Kingstown in 1671 reveals that ten moved from Newport, seven from Portsmouth, two from Providence, and one from Warwick.

• The few settlers who did venture into the anarchy of seventeenth-century Kingstown were able to acquire large tracts of cheap land. 

• A Portsmouth farmer in the 1670s could sell his small farm worth about 150 shillings per acre and use the money to buy hundreds of acres in Kingstown for about 2 shillings each. Robert Hazard probably did exactly that when he bought 500 acres in Kingstown in 1671 for £28. Entrepreneurial men scrambled to earn money by any means so that they could raise cash to buy more land. Hazard worked as a surveyor for the Pettaquamscutt purchasers, and Nathaniel Niles served as a tenant farmer for a purchaser’s heir. Fortunate farmers also acquired land through family ties to the original settlers. The Gardiners and Watsons, for example, received land from purchaser John Porter, a relation by marriage, who willed 2,550 acres in 1678.

• The early settlers sold parcels of their holdings to obtain desperately needed cash to develop their land into profitable farms. Land prices remained low, however, since the jurisdictional dispute discouraged widespread migration to Kingstown and left the town in disarray. By 1678 only 142 families had moved to Kingstown. A group of townsmen in 1679 sent a petition to the king urging that “he put an end to these differences about government thereof, which hath been so fatal to the prosperity of the place_; animosities still arising in people’s minds, as they stand affected to this or that government.”

• Enterprising landholders used the extra money from land sales to buy more livestock and enslaved blacks, an expanding source of labor for the planters. Rowland Robinson’s investments followed this pattern. In 1709, he bought 3,000 acres of the “vacant lands,” an area in Charlestown where Rhode Island wanted to promote the settlement of friendly families. Robinson made money from the tract by selling off parcels of 100 to 150 acres to settlers and invested the money from land speculation in his farming operations. By the time of his death in 1716 he had sold 2,700 acres of vacant lands. He was perhaps Kingstown’s greatest stockholder, owning at his death 666 sheep, 175 cattle, and 51 horses. Robinson willed to his only son, William, nine enslaved blacks and 680 acres of land.

• The capital gained from land speculation and surplus stock and dairy farming enabled ambitious farmers to accumulate enough land to begin family dynasties and pass their new wealth and social position to their sons. Thomas Hazard, one of four sons sired by early settler Robert Hazard, used the base of his inheritance to acquire immense amounts of land. He made his first purchase in 1698 when he bought 900 acres on Point Judith, which he rented as tenant farms. Between 1703 and 1738, Hazard bought another 2,731 acres of prime land in South Kingstown and left his sons with ample estates. Commercial farming had enabled about a dozen families to establish a planter class whose position would remain firm up to the American Revolution.

• When it became apparent by 1700 that Rhode Island would win the dispute, an environment favorable for land speculation arose.

Silas’ Role in the Overarching Story (Part 1)

• He is not the protagonist of the novel but rather the embodiment of the original theft.

• His story is short but foundational, dramatizing the moment of opportunism that allows everything else to follow.

• He provides the mindset that will ripple across generations—the idea that land, power, and wealth are to be taken, justified, and passed down.

• His actions make everything in Parts 2, 3, and 4 possible, even though he himself is long gone by then.

• The novel doesn’t dwell on his inner life too much—it’s about what he represents.

You’re right to note that the Narragansett region wasn’t an untouched wilderness by 1676. European presence had been established, primarily through trading posts and land purchases, but widespread colonial settlement faced significant barriers.

Early European Presence:

• Trading Posts: Richard Smith, an early settler, established a trading post at Cocumscussoc (now Wickford) around 1637–1641. Roger Williams, founder of Providence, also set up a trading post nearby. These outposts facilitated trade with the Narragansett people but didn’t lead to extensive European colonization at the time.  

• Land Purchases: The Pettaquamscutt (1658) and Atherton (1659) Purchases involved European investors acquiring large tracts of land from the Narragansett tribe. However, these transactions were often speculative, with limited immediate settlement.  

Barriers to Settlement:

• Jurisdictional Disputes: Multiple colonies, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay, claimed authority over the Narragansett territory. These overlapping claims led to legal and political conflicts, creating an uncertain environment that discouraged settlers.  

• Native American Presence: The Narragansett people maintained a strong and organized society. Their significant population and strategic alliances posed challenges to European encroachment, as they actively defended their lands and interests.  

• Speculative Ventures: Many land acquisitions by Europeans were driven by speculation rather than immediate plans for colonization. Investors aimed to secure titles and potential profits, leading to limited efforts in establishing settlements.

Impact of King Philip’s War (1675–1676):

The war marked a turning point in the region’s dynamics:

• Devastation of Native Populations: The conflict resulted in significant losses for the Narragansett and other tribes, both in population and societal structure. This weakened their ability to resist European expansion.  

• Opening for Colonization: With the diminished Native American presence and resistance post-war, European settlers found it more feasible to move into previously contested areas, leading to increased colonization efforts.

In summary, while European traders and speculators had a presence in the Narragansett region before 1676, substantial colonial settlement was limited due to political disputes, a robust Native American society, and speculative land interests. The aftermath of King Philip’s War, however, created conditions that facilitated more extensive European colonization.

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In the days when the English first settled this country, the land west of Narragansett Bay was quite open, the forests were sparse and free from underbrush, kept that way by the Indians who periodically burned over the region. This great rock, then visible for almost the entire length of the Pettaquamscutt or Mattatuxot River, and easily accessible from the river as well as from the Pequot Path, the main Indian trail just to the west, was a natural meeting place for the Indians. No wonder, then, that it became a spot of significance in the history of this region.

Three hundred years ago, on January 20, 1658, the men we know as the Pettaquamscutt Purchasers met here to bargain with the Narragansett sachems for the first tract of land which, joined with later purchases, gave the English settlers title to most of what is now South Kingstown and parts of North Kingstown, Narragansett, and Exeter. (source)