A Northern Family's Role in the Slave Trade

By Jessica Mosby, The Wip. Posted June 10, 2008.

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 The fact that they originally made their fortune as slave traders was only ever mentioned in family lore as a footnote.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.

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Jessica Mosby is a writer and critic living in San Francisco, Calif.

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