[Cure-news] A Northern Family's Role in the Slave Trade

[Ida Hakim]

A Northern Family's Role in the Slave Trade
AlterNet: by Jessica Mosby, The Wip, Posted June 10, 1008

American slave trading is a human rights atrocity forever associated 
with the

Confederacy of the Southern United States. Northerners are 
stereotypically portrayed as benevolent abolitionists fighting the 
South's slave labor plantations. But history is rarely that cut and dried.

Katrina Browne is the producer, director, and writer of "Traces of the 
Trade: A Story from the Deep North," which premiers on PBS as part of 
the Point of View film series on June 24. She grew up very proud of 
ancestry: Her New England-based DeWolf family is filled with generations 
of prominent and successful people. The fact that they originally made 
their fortune as slave traders was only ever mentioned in family lore as 
a footnote. As Browne says, "I never thought to ask how we got so 
established."

While attending the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., 
Browne received a DeWolf family history booklet written by her 
grandmother that referenced her family's slave-trading past. Browne was 
appalled. Then she realized that this was not news to her; rather, she 
had known most of her life that the DeWolfs were slave traders, but she 
had never fully acknowledged the horrendous truth about her family's 
past. After deciding that she had to do something to come to terms with 
her ancestry, Browne contacted 200 DeWolf descendants asking them to 
join her on a journey around the Triangle Trade route that made three 
generations of DeWolfs the most prominent slave-trading family in the 
United States. One hundred forty people never responded to her letter; 
nine relatives signed up.

"Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North," which has screened 
at a number of film festivals, including Sundance, documents the 2001 
journey Browne and her relatives took to trace her ancestors' route from 
Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back again. The result is a powerful 
86-minute film that starts an important and often uncomfortable dialogue 
about race.

Browne asked her relatives to travel with her because she felt that it 
was "more than I could take on by myself." The group dynamic also 
stimulated very intense discussions about race and accountability; 
different family members felt very differently about guilt and 
responsibility. The DeWolfs brought more than 10,000 Africans to the 
United States and Cuba, and more than 500,000 descendants of those 
slaves are alive today.

Do the DeWolf descendants bear some responsibility for their ancestors' 
actions?

The journey begins in Bristol, R.I., the ancestral home of the DeWolfs. 
At the height of their enterprise, the DeWolfs' business supported the 
entire town of Bristol -- local shipyards built the ships used to 
transport slaves and goods; the distilleries made rum from sugar grown 
on the DeWolfs' Cuban plantations; Bristol warehouses stored their rum 
and sugar; and many New Englanders owned slaves that the DeWolfs bought 
and sold. Their former mansion, Linden Place, is now a museum, and St. 
Michael's Episcopal Church has enormous stained glass windows bearing 
the family's name. While trading thousands of slaves, the DeWolfs called 
themselves Christians.

The truth about their lineage didn't really seem to resonate with the 
DeWolf descendants while in Bristol; the Northeastern town is far too 
idyllic to really bring home the ghastly reality of slavery. But the 
real contrast of how slave traders lived in comparison to the slaves 
they bought and sold was too dramatic to ignore in Ghana. For 
generations, the DeWolfs traded rum and other goods for slaves on the 
African coast. While visiting the dark, cramped cells where slaves were 
held before being traded, Browne and her relatives were physically 
sickened by the inhumane conditions.

"It was an evil thing -- they knew it was an evil thing, and they did it 
anyway," declared Tom DeWolf, who has since written a book about his 
experience, "Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its 
Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History."

In Ghana, the DeWolf travelers were not well received by many of the 
Africans and African Americans they met. They were much too obvious to 
go unnoticed -- especially in their fanny packs and Boston Red Sox 
baseball hats. Dain Perry, who came with his brother and nephew, puts 
out his hand to shake hands with an African American woman who is 
visiting Ghana, but she refuses it, saying, "I was hoping to not see any 
white people." When the racial tension becomes too much, Browne and her 
relatives seek refuge in a nature preserve, which seems like an oddly 
self-indulgent activity considering the purpose of their visit.

Aside from the occasional moment of disconnect, the DeWolf descendants 
are very candid. During a town hall discussion in Ghana, Perry admits 
that while growing up in Charleston, S.C., in the 1940s and 1950s, the 
extremely racist environment shaped his views. Although he claims to 
have overcome his discriminatory beliefs, admitting that he was a racist 
in a room filled with Africans is surprisingly honest. Browne, who notes 
that she is from a different and more culturally accepting generation 
than Perry, tells the group that she still "feels separate from black 
Americans." The film is truly a microcosm for the larger debate that 
Americans need to have about race and responsibility.

Their final stop is Cuba, the former location of the DeWolfs' sugar and 
coffee plantations, which were active until 1875. Although the 
plantations no longer exist, their profits funded the building of Linden 
Place in Rhode Island. Today, little evidence of the DeWolfs' slave 
trade in Cuba remains, but even so, the group has a breakdown of sorts 
when descendant Keila DePoorter tells everyone, "we're being our nice 
Protestant selves and I'm tired of it." Finally a real discussion about 
their ancestors and current responsibility as descendants begins.

Even though none of the modern DeWolfs directly inherited any money made 
during the slave trade, there is a definite sense that their current 
affluence is a result of their ancestry. The DeWolfs' influence was so 
far-reaching that President Thomas Jefferson gave them a dispensation to 
continue trading slaves after it became illegal in 1808. It's hard to 
ignore that this kind of elite status typically sustains itself for 
generations; many members of Browne's group, including Browne herself, 
attended Ivy League schools and lead very affluent lives.

"Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North" is an incredibly well 
executed and powerful film. It tackles an important discussion about 
race that most people would rather ignore because it is both painful and 
too often considered taboo, especially in regard to slavery. But the 
reality is that many Americans, not just Southern plantation owners, 
benefited from the cheap labor and goods fueled by the slave trade. 
Though not everyone may be able to trace their own lineage back to a 
family like the DeWolfs, the film makes the point that everyone can 
participate in a discussion about race.