Chapter 18: The Ruling Elite: Brown Brothers, Slave Traders and Money Laundering

 

Chapter 18: The Ruling Elite: Brown Brothers, Slave Traders and Money Laundering

 

Brown Brothers, Slave Traders and Money Laundering

The slave-trading Brown family was one of the first to open the New England market to the very lucrative opium trade. First, they traded slaves, became bankers and then, through industrial piracy, ultimately went into the textile industry. Their nefarious success and profits motivated others to embark into the slave and opium trade including some of the following families: Whitney, Cabot, Lodge, Cushing, Perkins, Taft, Roosevelt, Bacon, Appleton and others, which formed the criminal foundation of New England wealth.[658]

Merchants exported pork, beef, cheese, board, shingles, barrel staves and other items to England in return

for coffee, salt, rice, flour, milled fabrics, pewter and stoneware, silk, guns and gunpowder and, especially from the Caribbean, sugar, molasses and rum. James Brown (1698-1739) was a seafaring entrepreneur residing in Providence, Rhode Island, originally founded on the principles of religious liberty and political democracy. Brown took his first of many trips to the sugar-producing island of Martinique in 1727, a French plantation colony, where he acquired molasses for his two stills. He converted the molasses into high-quality rum to sell in his retail store, along with other wares. Brown, a slave owner, also ran a slaughterhouse, very detestable facilities that generally fouled the air and polluted their surroundings. He also loaned money and charged usury. By 1750, Rhode Island, with the severest of slave laws, had become a slave-based economy very similar to the Southern plantation colonies.[659]

Rhode Island rum was a favorite on the African coast as early as 1725. In April and May of 1736, James Brown overhauled one of his ships, the Mary, in preparation for his brother’s first arduous transatlantic trip to Africa’s coast to buy slaves to re-sell to plantation owners in the Caribbean. Obadiah Brown left in May and arrived on the Guinea Coast sometime in August 1736. The slave trade created the massive fortunes of Newport, Rhode Island, home of twenty-two rum distilleries by 1769.[660] From 1709 to 1807, Rhode Island merchants subsidized hundreds of voyages to Africa’s coast and returned with an estimated 106,544slaves.[661] JamesandObadiahBrownweresomeofthefirstslaversinProvidence.[662]

Jews, always a part of the merchant class in every society, participated in the

development of the slave

trade. They were active in the slave trade in Newport, along with the Browns, before the Revolution, in

what the traders referred to as the triangle trade. Jewish residents in the South purchased Africans to use

in their homes and on their plantations. Some even made a substantial living from human trafficking. There

were other Jews, opposed to slavery, who freed their slaves. Mordecai M. Noah promoted slavery in his

New York newspapers while Moritz Pinner vehemently opposed slavery in his newspaper, the Kansas Post.

Judah P. Benjamin and David Yulee, two Jewish senators, championed the slave system. Other Jews,

Isidor Bush of St. Louis and Philip J. Joachimsen of New York, both active in politics, opposed slavery.

[663]

James and his wife Hope Power Brown had at least four sons, initially all Baptists – Nicholas (1729), Joseph (1733), John (1736) and Moses Brown (1738), all born in Providence, Rhode Island, co-founded, funded and organized the 1771 construction of the religious-based College of Rhode Island.[664] “His Most Sacred Majesty George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain” granted a charter to sixty individuals on the last Monday in February 1764. Many of those who received the charter held the British Title of Nobility, Esquire. According to the charter, in order to “govern a College or University within this Colony,” and for the “more effectual execution of this design,” the charter members were required to incorporate the college “into one body politic, to be known in the law, with the powers, privileges, and franchises necessary.”[665] John served as treasurer of Rhode Island College for twenty-one years. Administrators at the school changed the name to Brown University in 1804. John, Joseph, and Moses were allegedly all active members of the St. John’s Lodge Number 1, Providence Free and Accepted Masons.[666]

James Brown was injured and subsequently died in 1839. His sons John, Nicholas, Joseph and Moses joined their Uncle Obadiah (1712-1762) in the merchant-trading business, sending ships to Europe, the Baltic, the Orient and South America. John started his own Triangle Trade business in 1774 and invested heavily in privateers between the 1760s and 1780s. To avoid duty charges he convinced Alexander Hamilton, to relax the collection of duties by the ten revenue cutters that the U.S. had in service along the eastern seaboard. Hamilton agreed in order to acquire the good will of the merchant traders.[667]

John had interests in seventy-five ships, a veritable monopoly, and made a fortune during the Revolutionary War selling over-priced gunpowder to Washington who he compelled to pay his exorbitant

prices. In 1775, John sold the U.S. Navy its first ship, the USS Providence. With income from the Hope Furnace and his lucrative military contracts with Congress, he turned the war into a profitable enterprise. [668] In 1787, he sent the General Washington to Canton, China, one of the first U.S. vessels to arrive there. Thus, Brown broke into the lucrative China trade.[669]

John Brown, a member of the Rhode Island assembly (1782-1784), used his privateering profits and political connections to open a bank, chartered on October 3, 1791. With other Providence merchants, he established the Providence Bank, later known as the Fleet Financial Group of New England and became its first president. He lobbied to have the bank chosen as a federal depository and to have banknotes, rather than specie, as acceptable payment for customs bonds, which would make the customhouse a subsidiary of merchant interests.[670] Ship owners created and invested in marine insurance companies to compensate for the unavoidable losses incurred.[671] In 1795, Brown purchased 210,000 acres of land in the New York Adirondacks.[672] He anticipated westward expansion so he purchased thousands of acres in Ohio after he had netted $300,000 from his last cargo from Batavia on the George Washington, before selling the ship to the government.[673]

In August 1797, John Brown was the first American that the authorities tried for violations against the Slave Trade Act of 1794. His brother Moses, embraced Quakerism, gave up the slave business and had pressed the charges.[674] John escaped conviction and the people subsequently elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives (1799-1801). During one session, he asserted, “We want money, we want a navy, we ought therefore to use the means to obtain it...Why should we see Great Britain getting all the slave trade...why may not our country be enriched by that lucrative traffic?”[675] To halt enforcement of the Slave Trade Act, Brown and others threatened Samuel Bosworth, the Surveyor of the Port of Bristol. He disregarded their threats so they kidnapped him and deposited him two miles down the bay. This effectively halted the local enforcement of the Slave Trade Act (March 22, 1794).[676]

In 1800, both the House and the Senate, with their combined legislation, strengthened federal constraints on American involvement in the foreign slave trade. However, Representative John Brown of the prominent mercantile family, along with John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina, argued against such restrictions. They both maintained that slave trading would continue in Africa and that Americans should not have to relinquish the profits accrued from such commerce.

Brown criticized the Quaker abolitionists, including his brother, Moses. John Brown claimed that people enslaved in Africa and transported to America were “much bettered their condition.” The proposed law did not affect the importation of slaves, already suspended by the South Carolina legislature. However, the state could reinstate importation as the Constitution protected the institution of slavery from federal proscription. Brown viewed the legislation as repressive because it hindered the continuing commerce, which was so important to the economy of his state. Rhode Island, though it forbade its citizens activity in the foreign slave trade, still depended on the enterprise for its economic benefits to the state.[677]

Though Moses became a Quaker and an abolitionist, he still benefitted from his family’s slave trading. While he opposed slavery, and even instituted the Anti-Slavery Society in Rhode Island, he remained a benefactor of his family businesses, which depended on slavery in order to operate. Additionally, he owned a cotton mill that relied on the cotton that the slaves in the South provided. While he eschewed slavery, he exploited the wage slaves, including children, who worked in his mill, sometimes as long as fourteen hours a day. Moses Brown was one of the lobbyists who fought for a law to out slavery. Congress passed this law on March 2, 1807.[678]

Slave profits contributed to the wealth of the New England bluebloods and bound like-minded families together through intermarriage and Masonic affiliations, ties that were often essential in getting employment in the shipbuilding and mariner industry. Like banking families, shipbuilding families

intermarried. Despite the Revolution to rid America of tyrannical British masters, the country still had an elite oligarchy bound together by secret handshakes and Masonic loyalties.[679]

The early Massachusetts Puritan culture was discriminatory, repressive, intolerant and brutal in their punishments of supposed undesirables. It was the country’s Federalist foundation. The elite class had access to political power because of the enormous wealth that their trade engendered with which they enriched elite politicians. Under threat of embarrassing exposure, lawbreakers became lawmakers, that same sanctimonious assemblage that pioneered slave and opium trading, engaged in smuggling, tried to eliminate the Bill of Rights and introduced grueling factory labor for other people’s children.[680]

Another Brown family, Alexander Brown and his sons, William, George, John, and James, owned their first investment bank in Baltimore, Maryland. The sons founded businesses elsewhere. William established William Brown and Company in Liverpool, England. John and James started Brown Brothers and Company in Philadelphia. Brown Shipley was the London Branch of the Brown Brothers and Company, which funded and carried 75% of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners.[681] James opened a branch in New York City in 1825, a forerunner of Brown Brothers Harriman and Company.

The Factory Slavery System

In 1789, Samuel Slater, the “father of the American factory system” brought British textile technology to the infant textile industry America. He built a cotton-spinning mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island for Moses Brown, of the slave-trading Brown family, and another thirteen mills for himself from which he ultimately became very wealthy. Brown, a Quaker who later opposed his family’s participation in the trading of human flesh, had a mill with seventy-two spindles and became the first flourishing U.S. factory. By 1810, there were about fifty cotton-yarn mills, many of them started because of the Embargo of 1807 that halted imports from Britain. By the end of the War of 1812, hundreds of factories were operating with about 130,000 spindles. By 1840, the number of spindles had reached 2,000,000. Southern slaves picked the cotton that energized New England’s textile industry and ultimately the North’s factory economy.[682]

Although Slater, the pioneer industrialist, was innovative enough to use textile technology and steam power, he refused to mechanize the weaving process. William Gilmore built a Scotch-style crank loom, whichmanyotherRhodeIslandmillsadopted.[683] Millownersemployedchildrenasyoungasfour.

Rhode Island manufacturers were about a generation behind other New England industrialists in implementing the corporate system. Brown University introduced a utilitarian curriculum and even initiated courses for the calico printing and jewelry industries. However, Rhode Island lagged behind in public education because of legislative interests, closely tied to the industrialists, opposed education because the textile manufacturers employed so many children who had no opportunity or time for education. Further, the industrialists in Rhode Island did not even provide safety codes for their adult workers. The industrialists, in addition to the legislators, were among the first Americans to abolish capital punishment and allow married women to assume control of their own property. However progressive they were in other issues, they retained child labor practices for as long as the employers enjoyed the profitability. Manufacturers opposed reform because they did not want to sacrifice their earnings. The same industrialists who voted against education and poor law taxes organized schools for their employees, donated land and facilities for workhouses. They also bequeathed money to universities and hospitals and funded the temperance movement.[684]

The following advice appeared in the Textile World, an employers’ magazine, “It requires a great deal of diplomacy on the part of the spinning room overseer to bring all his help up to the same standards of efficiency due to the fact that most of them are children... . They have to be constantly watched or they

will go from bad to worse in order to make more time for play or rest. The overseer should never give up until he gets them to where they will give him a good day’s work with a minimum of trouble.”[685]

Senator Charles S. Thomas said, “The real problem in America is not child labor, but child idleness. You cannot convince me that it hurts a child either physically or morally to make him work. Where one child, in my experience, has been injured from work, ten thousand have gone to the devil because of lack of occupation.”[686]

Moses Brown, despite being an avid opponent of slavery, proclaimed the virtues of child employment in the textile factories, with the new water-powered spinning technology. This recently perfected machinery created “opportunities” in numerous Providence textile workshops. Child laborers from the age of eight to fourteen worked twelve to sixteen hour shifts in gloomy workshops, which supposedly represented the labor savings of the entire nation. This egregious, but apparently tolerable practice was prevalent throughout the northeast for almost 100 years.[687]

The industrial revolution had its drawbacks, particularly because the legislation associated with this era permitted manufacturers to enjoy complete freedom to indiscriminately dispose of toxic, noxious wastes. The waste products from tanneries and slaughterhouses often became stagnant, stinking pools. Factory workers often resided in cramped, unsanitary tenements after working long hours in hazardous conditions. Worker’s tenements were located in congested areas that lacked adequate drainage facilities and access to pure water. Consequently, there were recurrent outbreaks of diseases that affected infant mortality and overall general health. Local and state governments did not regulate industrial nuisances until 1843. Even when they did step in, the legislation favored the industrialists rather than the employees. By 1850, authorities finally instituted zoning for slaughterhouses and other such industries. The legislatures apparently saw no problem with the high incidence of child labor or by the unhealthy factory conditions that they toiled in and therefore took no action until after 1850. However, legislation was notoriously ineffective.[688]

By 1860, New England had 472 cotton mills, adjacent to the rivers and streams throughout the New England region. The town of Thompson, Connecticut had seven mills within a nine-square-mile area.[689] The Lowell Mills, in Lowell, Massachusetts, founded by Francis Cabot Lowell, a member of the Boston Lowell family, hired factory girls, some of whom were as young as ten years old. The mill owner promoted the Lowell System, which combined massive scale mechanization with a majority female workforce. Mill officials persuaded girls from the rural farm areas to come work in the mill for a “better life.” The female laborers, received lower wages than men would have demanded, slaved from five in the morning until seven in the evening, about seventy-three hours a week. About eighty females worked in each workroom with two male overseers. The rooms were hot, unhealthy and noisy. The mill provided year-round housing in barracks adjacent to the mills. Each accommodated about twenty-five people with six females sharing one small bedroom. Curfew was 10 P.M. The quarters were half-ventilated, overcrowded and without privacy and comfort. The factory girls worked and ate together, rarely leaving their barracks or workrooms.

Immigrants and others who slaved in the central Massachusetts and Connecticut mills used the phrase “factory slavery” and referred to their superintendent as a “slave driver.” Monopoly manufacturing generated an aristocracy that exploited the poor. Workers and their children labored for as many as sixteen to eighteen hours every day, like slaves, just for a bare subsistence wage. The confinement and oppression existing in Yankee factories was often worse than southern slavery. When an exhausted, longtime northern worker became incapable, his/her employer relegated him/her to the streets to starve. “Owners” in the South traditionally gave slaves lighter tasks or no tasks at all. Chattel slavery, under the guise of employment, existed in the New England woolen mills and elsewhere.[690]

The Hollingworth family, English immigrants, worked in the woolen mills of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Joseph Hollingworth wrote, “Manufactoring (sic) breeds lords and Aristocrats, Poor men and slaves.” He was rather hopeless when envisioning his future and the future of his children. He thought, “I cannot bear the idea, that I, or my children (if I should ever have any) should be shut up 16 or 18 hours every day all our life time like Slaves and that too for a bare subsistence.” He referred to another immigrant family, the Haighs, who fled from one job because of “the Confinement, Slavery, and oppression of the Yankee Factorys (sic).” Many families had emigrated from England for a better life only to find the same kinds of conditions in America that they had escaped in England. Their letters certainly are revealing in that they compared their situation in the mills with chattel slavery.[691]

Children worked the same long hours that adults labored which often totaled sixteen hours a day including the one hour for meals, which workers ate in the factory. This was the situation during the 1830s and 1840s. Many people lost their farms, possibly because of the economic crash in 1837, and they were compelled to work in the urban areas. Some children working in the textile mills worked as many as thirteen hours a day. Frequently, the bosses manipulated the clocks and bells in order to keep the children working even longer. Even children born into slavery did not work half as many hours as the factory slaves. Nor did they do as much work as the white children enslaved in the factories in “free New England.” Ultimately, people became so outraged over the child labor policies that the Massachusetts legislature enacted a law in 1842 to prohibit children under the age of twelve from working more than ten hours a day. In Connecticut, the authorities passed a law limiting the workday to ten hours for children under fourteen.[692]

In England, in some factories, approximately one-fourth to one-fifth of the child laborers were crippled, deformed, or permanently injured because of the dangerous toil and even from the brutal abuse suffered at the hands of the overseers.[693] Their families had abandoned some of the factory children. Often, professing Christians readily exploited the factory children, the most persecuted yet some of the most industrious in English society.[694] Other Christians spoke out against the monsters and their abuse of innocent factory children.

Mill workers recognized that, while they toiled under gruesome conditions, their employers enjoyed life’s luxuries purchased by the sweat of others. Under the factory slave system, moralistic owners acquired significant economic benefits to which they felt entitled without the social stigma of slave ownership. Many of them regularly attended local abolitionist meetings where they talked about the inhumanities of slavery. Their corporate policies were frequently more oppressive than the South’s “black codes.” Southern slave owners had a financial investment to protect. However, thousands of vulnerable white females labored away their youth and health in the New England mills. They were expendable, replaceable, and were constantly at the mercy of their demanding overseers.[695]

The misery of black chattel slavery and white factory slavery is disturbing and still exists in various parts of the world, like China and other Asian countries where multinational corporations, many based in the U.S., extract labor from the impoverished residents. Under the factory slave system, the opportunity to improve one’s condition does not exist. Employers compel oppressed workers, then and now, to relinquish the results of their labor. Women commonly compare sexual discrimination with slavery. There was no hope for advancement or independence. Factory overseers controlled their charges through threats of impoverishment. Quite simply, the employer technically owned each worker. Refusal to obey is grounds for dismissal. For most, there are no other options – work or starve.[696]

Out of the Congo