by Paul Martin
The accumulation of James DeWolf’s fabulous wealth is a paradoxical tale of ambition and business acumen coupled with moral blindness. Born in Bristol in 1764, DeWolf was the son of Mark Anthony DeWolf, a seagoing man who struggled to earn a living through the slave trade and privateering. The senior DeWolf sired fifteen children, eight sons and seven daughters. Five of Mark Anthony DeWolf’s sons—Charles, John, William, James, and Levi—along with Charles’s son George, would become partners in a hugely successful business empire, one that used profits from the slave trade to expand into agriculture, manufacturing, and finance (to his credit, son Levi soon soured on slave trading and quit to pursue a religious life). Among the DeWolfs, James was always the leading man.
If not for the manner in which he made his fortune, James DeWolf might be remembered as a swashbuckling American hero. He went to sea as a boy, serving aboard a privately owned combat vessel during the Revolutionary War. Captured twice by the British, he endured harsh conditions as a prisoner in Bermuda, which apparently turned him into a hard case. After the war, he followed his father into the slave trade. In 1786, at the age of twenty-two, he led a voyage to Africa aboard a ship owned by Providence slaver John Brown, a member of the wealthy family whose generosity to Rhode Island College prompted the school to change its name to Brown University. (The first Rhode Islander tried under the 1794 federal Slave Trade Act, John Brown footed half the bill for the college’s original library, and his family provided slave labor to build the school’s University Hall).9
In 1788, James DeWolf purchased his first slave ship, the Polly. It didn’t take long for him to show his attitude toward his living cargo. On the return leg of a 1790 trip to Africa, one of the females among the 122 slaves DeWolf was transporting to Cuba fell ill.10 Fearing that the woman had smallpox, DeWolf had her hoisted high onto the Polly’s main mast in an attempt to prevent her from infecting others. When the slave’s condition failed to improve, DeWolf ordered his crew to lash the woman to a chair. He then personally lowered her over the side and dropped her into the ocean. According to witnesses, DeWolf’s only regret was the loss of the chair.11 The following year, a Rhode Island grand jury indicted DeWolf for murder, but he was never arrested and the charge was eventually dropped.
DeWolf quickly accumulated a sizeable fortune through slave trading, and he augmented his wealth in other ways. In 1790, he married the daughter of former Rhode Island deputy governor William Bradford, adding Nancy Bradford’s dowry to his coffers. When the War of 1812 came along, DeWolf entered his own warships into the fight. His eighteen-gun brig Yankee became one of the conflict’s most successful privateers, capturing forty British vessels and netting at least a million dollars in prize money—equivalent to $12.6 million today.12 (DeWolf later tried to save face by claiming that he made more money from privateering than from the slave trade.)
Along with their fleet of slave ships, the DeWolfs owned a Bristol bank, an insurance company, and at least three distilleries, all extensions of the slave trade. James DeWolf started a Rhode Island cotton mill, and family members bought five sugar and coffee plantations in Cuba—again, all intimately linked to slavery. As the money poured in, the DeWolfs built themselves showplace mansions in their hometown. (One of their palatial estates still stands, George DeWolf’s Linden Place; located near the Bristol waterfront, it’s now open as a museum and is a popular stop on walking tours. James DeWolf’s home, The Mount, burned in 1904.)
Paralleling his financial accomplishments, James DeWolf’s political career hit one high point after another. Beginning in 1797, he served several terms in the Rhode Island legislature, including periods as speaker of the house. In 1820, he won a seat in the US Senate, where he served until 1825, resigning because of his aversion to life in Washington and business pressures at home. One biographer claimed that he quit because he was bored.13 That’s easy to believe. For a man of action such as DeWolf, the endless debates in Congress must have been grating. There’s little doubt he would have felt certain that his own convictions were correct. Honoring opposing views must have struck him as a waste of time.
At least that’s the impression he gave in his business affairs. When Rhode Island outlawed slave trading in 1787 following a long campaign by Quaker abolitionists, DeWolf simply ignored the law.14 After the US Congress tightened restrictions on slaving voyages in 1794, DeWolf helped orchestrate the appointment of his brother-in-law, Charles Collins, as customs inspector for Bristol. A slave trader himself, Collins looked the other way while one ship after another departed Bristol on the way to Africa.
After 1807, when the federal government banned all importation of slaves, the DeWolfs shifted the center of their slaving activities to Cuba. They did, it seems, begin to slow their involvement in the trade, although apparently they didn’t abandon it completely until 1820, after Congress passed a law that redefined slave trading as an act of piracy punishable by death. Even then, the DeWolfs continued to import cotton, molasses, and other slave-produced commodities for use in their Rhode Island factories.
The unbroken record of financial success enjoyed by the DeWolf family ended in 1825 when George DeWolf’s Cuban sugar crop failed, causing him to default on several loans. In addition to pushing a number of banks to the brink of collapse, George DeWolf’s difficulties rippled throughout Bristol, affecting everyone from farmers to tradesmen, along with members of his own family. The situation became so bad that George DeWolf stole away from his mansion in the dead of night, taking his wife and six children to his Cuban estate. When his creditors discovered that he’d left town, they broke into Linden Place and made off with everything they could find, right down to the chandeliers.
Although James DeWolf suffered a setback because of his nephew’s bankruptcy (probably a major factor in his decision to leave Washington and return to Bristol), he wasn’t wiped out. When he died in December 1837 at the age of seventy-three, he was still a millionaire, having long ago diversified his fortune into real estate and manufacturing.15 On the whole, however, the DeWolfs struggled financially for decades, although they retained their elite social status. Members of the family continued to hold positions of respect—as legislators, Episcopal ministers, writers, scholars, artists, and architects. They clung proudly to their heritage, sometimes glossing over the clan’s deep involvement in the slave trade.16
One contemporary DeWolf ancestor who chose not to continue looking the other way is Katrina Browne. A former social worker and seminarian, Browne has produced a moving documentary that closely examines her family’s past (called Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, the film aired on PBS in 2008). In the film, Browne and nine other DeWolf descendants make a spiritual pilgrimage that re-creates the route of the notorious Triangle Trade. The group journeys from Bristol to a former slave dungeon in Ghana to the ruins of a DeWolf sugar plantation in Cuba. Browne and her relatives find themselves wrestling with a combination of guilt and uncertainty about what they and other white Americans could, or should, do to help heal the emotional scars left behind by America’s involvement in slavery.
A member of the group, Thomas Norman DeWolf, published a book in 2008 that attempts to address that quandary. In Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, DeWolf admits that “there are no simple answers.” But by confronting the issue, “we will finally break through the scars to clean the living wound properly and begin the healing.” DeWolf offers this advice: “People really need to examine their own lives and see the ways in which we perpetuate inequality.”17
That’s a thoughtful recommendation. It’s too easy to overlook our own biases, to think of ourselves as open-minded even as we slight others, though the offense may only take place in the privacy of our own minds. Still, a baffling question remains: How could thousands of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have supported the existence of slavery—something so evil, so obviously wrong—in the first place? Many people in
James DeWolf’s day regarded attempts to end the trade as government oppression, an infringement of their rights. Slavery was essential to the American economy, they proclaimed—the same argument raised by every powerful interest group that puts profit above principle.
Just as puzzling is the suggestion that people of subsequent generations shouldn’t judge slave traders and slave owners too harshly, since those activities were widely accepted at the time they occurred. “Let us not hold our ancestors responsible for deeds which in their day were not regarded as sinful,” wrote Bristol historian Wilfred H. Munro in 1880.18 Sorry, but that’s impossible to do: there truly are unforgivable crimes, and growing obscenely rich as a merchant of misery is among them. Besides, if slavers didn’t believe that what they were doing was sinful, which seems preposterous, that’s an even greater reason to condemn them.
Some people have clearly never absolved James DeWolf—a man who reputedly wallowed in a pile of gold on the floor of his mansion in a sordid display of his worship of wealth.19 DeWolf’s body now lies in an unmarked plot in the family’s private cemetery in Bristol. His grave was vandalized so often that his relatives were forced to remove his tombstone to conceal his whereabouts.20
Samuel Mason
Pirate Samuel Mason’s Illinois hideout Cave-In-Rock
A few miles upstream from its confluence with the Mississippi, the powerful Ohio River wriggled like a broad brown serpent between the shores of southern Illinois and western Kentucky. In the early 1800s, dense virgin woodlands still lined the banks of the Ohio, a busy watercourse that carried a picturesque assortment of river craft, from chuffing paddle wheelers and graceful sailboats to utilitarian keelboats, flatboats, barges, canoes, and even crude log rafts. Among the thousands of travelers on the Ohio, many were bound for St. Louis, Missouri, the gateway to the West during America’s great nineteenth-century expansion.
On this bright summer afternoon, bearded, boisterous Zebulon Prescott and his wife and children drifted down the Ohio aboard the raft they’d launched somewhere below the river’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headwaters. Like countless other families, the Prescotts had sold their farm back east and were headed to “the promised land” to forge a new life.
A short distance ahead, on the Illinois bank of the Ohio, a hand-painted banner heralded a makeshift store set up near a large cave. Zebulon Prescott steered his raft toward the trading post. After several days on the river, the family needed fresh supplies. The Prescotts eased their craft up to the riverbank and scrambled ashore. The trading post’s jovial proprietor, Col. Jeb Hawkins, gave them a cheerful welcome—perhaps a little too cheerful.
As the Prescotts examined the store’s offerings, a gang of ruffians suddenly appeared from the nearby woods, guns in hand. The unsuspecting travelers were shocked to realize that they’d been lured into a trap by river pirates. Fortunately for the Prescotts, a wiry, drawling mountain man named Linus Rawlings would come to their rescue. That’s the way things played out in the 1962 movie How the West Was Won, an epic account of the settling of the American West. In real life, the outcome of such a riverside encounter might not have been so favorable.
During the frontier era depicted in this early scene in How the West Was Won, pirates did in fact rob and murder pioneer families, at times burning or scuttling their boats and tossing their bodies in the river.1 The movie cutthroats who waylaid the Prescotts were based on an actual outlaw gang, one that operated from an Ohio River hideout known as Cave-In-Rock, a limestone cavern situated at the base of a high bluff some seventy miles northeast of present-day Cairo, Illinois. A perfect criminal sanctum, the cave presented sweeping views of the river and all the vessels that passed up and down it. (Located in Hardin County near the tiny town of Cave-In-Rock, the site is now a state park.)
From about 1790 to the early 1830s, Cave-In-Rock harbored a parade of counterfeiters, gamblers, prostitutes, and other riffraff. The fictional thief Col. Jeb Hawkins, played with oily malevolence by actor Walter Brennan, was patterned on one of Cave-in-Rock’s most notorious denizens—Capt. Samuel Mason, a cunning brigand who conducted a reign of terror along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Natchez Trace at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time of general lawlessness throughout this sparsely populated region. From 1797 to 1799, Mason and his gang preyed on passing river traffic from Cave-In-Rock. Among the pirates and highwaymen of his day, Mason has been called “the worst of the worst,” a relentless predator whose widespread marauding made the dangers of frontier travel even greater.2
Historians believe that Mason was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1739 and grew up near present-day Charles Town, West Virginia (an area that was then part of the huge Virginia Colony). Mason’s family was evidently respectable. He had a brother who became a prominent Pennsylvania tradesman and a sister who married a Methodist minister. Despite a decent upbringing and rudimentary education, Samuel Mason had little use for honest work or religious niceties. He certainly didn’t adhere to the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” As a young man, he helped himself to someone else’s horses in Frederick County, Virginia, the first record of his criminal tendencies.3
The Revolutionary War temporarily diverted Mason’s attention. During the war, Mason served as a captain in a Virginia militia. Assigned to Fort Henry, in present-day Wheeling, West Virginia, he fought against Native American allies of the British, surviving an ambush in which he was wounded and most of his men were killed. (To keep his pilfering skills sharp, he found time to steal supplies from Fort Henry.)4 After his service, Mason settled in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Somehow, he fooled enough people to win an appointment as an associate judge. Not surprisingly, his flirtation with upholding the law didn’t last long. By the mid-1780s, he’d run up a thumping debt in Pennsylvania and decamped to Tennessee, where he quickly earned a reputation for thievery.5
By the early 1790s, Mason had migrated to the Ohio River settlement of Red Banks, in western Kentucky (site of the present-day city of Henderson). From Red Banks, Mason launched his career as a river pirate, assisted by his sons and a gang of “worthless louts,” as his cronies were described by a contemporary observer.6 Mason himself didn’t look anything like a storybook pirate. There was no eye patch, no parrot on his shoulder, no Jolly Roger fluttering overhead. Tall and heavyset, dressed in a frock coat, vest, and string tie, he looked more like a shopkeeper or gentleman farmer. But Mason had the instincts of a buccaneer: at Red Banks, he graduated from theft to murder, which became his hallmark ever after. (When Mason was finally captured, he had twenty human scalps in his possession.)7
In 1797, Mason fled Red Banks after a series of killings, moving his gang downriver to Cave-In-Rock. At their new hideout, the pirates used a variety of tricks to lure travelers within striking distance. Mason sometimes had a lone man or woman call out to passing boats from the riverbank, pretending that they were stranded. When a boat pulled ashore to offer assistance, the pirates attacked. Mason reportedly gave able-bodied male travelers the chance to join his gang. Refusing his offer wasn’t a wise choice.
Mason capitalized on the dangerous water conditions along the lower Ohio by having some of his men pose as local river pilots. The pirates intercepted vessels traveling downriver and offered to guide them through the tricky channel below Cave-In-Rock, which was filled with snags, sandbars, and other obstructions. When a boat hired one of the fake pilots, the pirate would intentionally ground the vessel at Cave-In-Rock or some other rendezvous point so Mason’s gang could swarm aboard.
Another ruse the pirates used was the one shown in How the West Was Won—enticing travelers ashore with a large banner. Mason put up a sign advertising Cave-In-Rock as “Wilson’s Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment.”8 Much of the river traffic at the time consisted of flatboats carrying trade goods to New Orleans. The rowdy crews aboard these boats were highly susceptible to the offer of a good time. While a crew was busy gambling and swilling rotgut inside the cave, Mason’s men leisurely inspecte
d their cargo. If the goods were worth stealing, the pirates pounced on the drunken boatmen. Mason then replaced the crew with his own men, who sailed the vessel to New Orleans and sold the cargo themselves.
Among the collection of thugs who passed through Cave-In-Rock, the two most vicious by far were Micajah and Wiley Harpe, better known, respectively, as Big Harpe and Little Harpe. Thought to be brothers from North Carolina, the Harpes were even more bloodthirsty than Mason, having murdered perhaps dozens of people just for the hell of it.9 The two psychopaths were known to disembowel their victims, fill their bodies with stones, and sink them in the nearest waterway. They killed women, children, and infants without remorse, sneaking up on lonely cabins, slaughtering everyone inside, and setting the dwellings ablaze. They ambushed travelers gathered around a campfire at night, mutilating their bodies with tomahawks and knives. Their victims probably fainted away when these buckskin-clad ogres emerged from the woods, firelight flickering on their swarthy faces as they announced themselves with the chilling proclamation, “We are the Harpes!”10
The outrages perpetrated by the Cave-In-Rock pirates naturally alarmed decent people living in the region. In 1799, a group of regulators launched a series of attacks on outlaws in western Kentucky and southern Illinois. On the frontier, volunteer militias and vigilante groups were often the only semblance of law and order. The raids prompted Mason to move his base of operations to Wolf Island in the Mississippi River, a few miles below the mouth of the Ohio. A short time later, he moved downriver to New Madrid, then part of the Spanish-occupied Louisiana Territory and the largest river settlement between St. Louis and Natchez, in the American-held Mississippi Territory. (Now a quiet Missouri town, New Madrid is famous for a series of powerful earthquakes that occurred there in late 1811 and early 1812. The tremors affected an area ten times larger than the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake, shaking buildings as far away as New York City and Washington, DC.)11