Schooling for Enslaved Youth in Newport Before the Revolution

A recent publication in Williamsburg, Virginia, about a colonial school for enslaved and free children of color spurred this research. Williamsburg historians used their database of student names, as well as enslavers’ residences and occupations to develop biographical information, leading to locating descendants of children who attended the school.[1] Newport opened a similar school in the decade before the American Revolution, which historians John Van Horne (1986) and John Hattendorf (2001) discuss in their works.[2] Considering the Williamsburg study, this author hoped to dig through the surviving reports of ministers and teachers to find the names of the students, how they fared and the effect of schooling on their lives as they became adults residing in Newport. Was the literacy and active involvement of Black leaders in post-Revolution Newport connected to this school?

By way of background, unlike some colonies Rhode Island had no law against teaching a Native Indian or a Black person to read. In fact, the Congregationalists in Newport took the lead in educating the enslaved. In the evening at his Clarke Street home, Ezra Stiles, minister at the Second Congregational Church, taught religion to free and enslaved people from the beginning of his tenure in 1755. Sarah Osborn, a devout Congregationalist and teacher, welcomed Black children and adults to her home on Osborn Court for Sunday night scripture reading and discussion from 1765‒1770. Reverend Samuel Hopkins of the First Congregational Church on Mill Street arrived as pastor in 1770 and passionately spoke about abolishing slavery. He taught enslaved and free Blacks. In particular, he persuaded Ezra Stiles to collaborate with him in educating African-born Newport men, John Quamine (Church) and Bristol Yamma (Coggeshall), for missionary work in Africa. The two pastors ensured that the men were funded in a program of study at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. Another individual, Newport Gardner (by his Akan name, Nkrumah Mireku) was baptized in the First Congregational Church, attended sessions at Osborn’s house and with Reverend Hopkins. The minister loaned books to Gardner, who became a highly respected deacon at the church and a teacher of Black youth. Although born in Africa, all three men became literate in English in the 1760s. To quote Ezra Stiles, they were “pious men of intelligence, who sought to learn with zeal.”[3]

The idea for the Anglican school designed for “ye Blacks and Native Indians” was the brainchild of English cleric Thomas Bray (1658‒1730), who in 1701 also began the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Compared to Baptists, Congregationalists, and Quakers, there were few Anglicans in the North American colonies. The SPG organization sent ordained ministers as missionaries, such as Scotsman Reverend James Honeyman, who arrived in Rhode Island. As Rector of Trinity Church from 1701-1750, he baptized fifteen Black adults and children among the enslaved who participated in Anglican Sunday service.[4]

In the meantime, colleagues of Reverend Bray organized the Bray Associates of London. From 1753 the Associates sent multiple copies of books to mission Anglican parishes in the colonies for the instruction of Black children both enslaved and free. Their hopes for the young people included “self-edification” and “amelioration of their condition.” Persuading several wealthy British citizens to donate funds, Bray’s Associates put £900 toward the endeavor. These men believed that conversion to Christianity, in this case to the Anglican faith, would give young Black children the best chance for life in America.[5]

An American who joined the Bray Associates in 1758, Benjamin Franklin, proposed schools in Williamsburg, New York, and Newport, in addition to the one already started in Philadelphia. In his view the locations had effective communication networks, active churches, and a population of students. At the time he was working in London as a colonial agent for Pennsylvania. He believed that education would overcome “a Prejudice that Reading and Knowledge in a Slave is useless and dangerous.” The schools would make “sincere, good Christians of the Scholars. . . .” Franklin, who served as President of the Board of Bray Associates in London in 1760, detailed how such a school would run under a male or female instructor with thirty students, both girls and boys. He wrote that wealthy colonials would monetarily support a school that had formal instruction and discipline.[6]

An Idea Comes to Fruition in Newport

Anglican ministers at Trinity Church, in Newport, in conversation with the philanthropists in England, the Bray Associates, opened a school for youth of African heritage. In Newport, Reverend Marmaduke Browne, educated in Ireland, and Reverend George Bisset, a Scotsman, believed it was the moral duty of Christians to give the enslaved a chance to know God. Anglican clergymen in their sermons called for teaching children to direct their minds to serious thought at an early age. Commenting that ancient Greece and Rome enslaved bodies but not minds, they hoped that education could mean a life of freedom.

Even before his approval by the congregation as the new rector of Trinity Church, Reverend Browne set out to engage a teacher for fifteen enslaved children. He selected a female “schoolmistress,” Mary Brett, “as sober, well-disposed, and qualified.” She was a respected widow of a much-esteemed physician in town. The Bray Associates paid her salary at £20 per year. (The church rector received £100 per year). She instructed the students at her house, which was located “nearly opposite the house of Judge Johnston.” Newport historians suggest a location of 47 Division Street. At the very least the minister hoped for “good effects on the manners and behavior of the children.”

By the next year, the school had a full complement of thirty students, fifteen boys and fifteen girls. Browne took on the day-to-day supervision of the church school, along with the minister’s duties for the church. The minister encouraged students to show their knowledge at Sunday church service, in hopes of encouraging other Anglican owners to send the people they enslaved to school.[7]

Benjamin Franklin came to Newport in June 1763, visiting with Reverend Browne and the students as well as members of the Franklin family. His family in Newport consisted of a brother John, who was a candle maker and chandler in town, and his widowed sister-in-law Ann Franklin, printer of the Newport Mercury and Rhode Island General Assembly Acts. Ann had died two months earlier and his young nephew James, also a printer, and his two nieces predeceased her.[8]

By 1766, even though enrollment numbered twenty-six scholars, in his report to the Bray Associates Reverend Browne indicated numerous slaveowners showed “negligence & contempt” because they did not see the enslaved as anything but “property.” They were interested in riches gained from their labor, with “no regard to their spiritual welfare.” Nevertheless, Browne’s reports are remarkable for the progress he saw in students’ ability to read, say prayers, and respond orally to questions from the catechism. In fact, he celebrated students each year for their recitations at church and commented that “several are proficient at reading.” The minister’s death in March 1771, meant that the school would need support of a new rector.[9]

The new rector of Trinity Church was the assistant minister, Reverend George Bisset, who served from 1767 as schoolmaster at the school funded by Nathaniel Kay. His first report to the Associates on November 23, 1771, followed by another on October 17, 1772, reported thirty students in attendance. The minister advertised the school in the April 3, 1772, edition of the Newport Mercury. There is correspondence from Reverend Bisset to the Bray Associates for April 8, 1773, and November 13, 1773. The letters indicate that in May 1774 there are 38 students and similar numbers on the 12th of April 1775, the eve of the Revolutionary War. From 1762 through 1775, Mrs. Mary Brett, a widow in her fifties, served as teacher.[10]

What is missing from the minister’s letters is an objective evaluation of students in terms of who or how many excelled in reading, spelling, or recitation, over the school year. Every teacher monitors students using some format. The absence of Newport records is odd since other Bray Schools maintained a detailed inventory.

After the American Revolutionary War commenced in April 1775, the Bray Associates decided to withdraw funds for American schools “until the unhappy Disputes between Great Britain and her Colonies” were at an end. The Reverend Bisset, a supporter of King George III, would leave Newport with his wife Penelope (Honeyman) Bisset for New Brunswick in 1779.[11]

Composition of the Students in Attendance at the Bray School

Since the ages within the classrooms in Philadelphia and Williamsburg were no younger than four-years-old and up to ten or older, we might expect the same to be the case in Newport. The Trinity Church vestry decided that the entrance age would be six or seven years old. Children attending were to be sent by members of Trinity Church, with each church member contributing wood for the winter months to heat Brett’s house used for the school.[12]

Unlike the reports over some years from Philadelphia and Williamsburg schools, neither the first nor last names of the children in Newport were listed. Instead, the only two extant reports of Newport class lists reveal the enslavers by name, both men and women, and the number of children they enrolled at the school. Omission of the names and gender of the students is a hurdle to following the adult lives of those young people in the Newport community. However, some conclusions can be made. Children entering the Newport Bray School from 1762 to 1766 would have been born in the 1750s (age six at entrance). Those attending from 1767 to 1775 would have been born in the 1760s. The children would have been known by the surname of the enslaver. Historian John Hattendorf determined the names of eight men who likely sent children as they were active on the vestry of Trinity Church from 1762 to 1775 and owned pews in the church: Stephen Ayrault, merchant, Captain John Duncan, Samuel Freebody, distiller, Attorney James Honeyman, Dr. William Hunter, Attorney General of Rhode Island Augustus Johnston, Deputy Governor of Rhode Island Joseph Wanton, Jr., and Captain Philip Wilkinson.[13]

To determine the other Trinity Church members who sent children to the Bray School, a search ensued for those men who indicated slave ownership on the “List of Rateable Estates or Newport Taxation of 1767” and then a comparison of those men who continued to hold enslaved people as noted in the Rhode Island Colony Census of 1774. The 1774 data included the number of enslaved boys under age sixteen and the number of girls under sixteen. A cross check of active Trinity Church members and their dates of birth and death on Ancestry.com, those buried in the church cemetery, and interrelated family marriages at the church, resulted in tentative conclusions. The identification of individuals is made with caution, as families with the surname Freebody, Mumford, Thurston, Wanton, and Wickham, each had at least three adults actively involved in church leadership.

Attending school in the years of 1771 and 1772 were fourteen enslaved youth among the families of men who at one time were ship captains: George Buckmaster, Silas Cooke, John Duncan, John Dupuy, Robert Shearman, Job Snell, Thomas Wickham, and Philip Wilkinson.[14] Several women sent one child to the school. When evaluating dates of birth (DOB) and dates of death (DOD), the owners of enslaved children under sixteen in 1774 include Phoebe Wilcox, the second wife of James Cahoone; Ann Almy, the wife of Walter Chaloner; Elizabeth Goulding, the wife of James Honeyman; and Mary Carr, the wife of Governor Josias Lyndon. Miss Elizabeth Scott, the daughter of George and Mary Ayrault (Neargrass) Scott, sent three pupils. In the Rhode Island Colony Census of 1774, a Black boy and a Black girl under sixteen lived in Scott’s household. There were also three “Free Negroes.” One free Black man attending Trinity Church, Pompey Scott, may have been the “Jack” Scott, head of household in the Rhode Island Coloney Census of 1774 with three girls under sixteen.[15]

Of the members of Trinity Church who sent children to Bray School several changes occurred between the 1771 and 1772 reports by Reverend Bissett. In 1771, the Ayrault, Chaloner, Cooke, Dickenson, Scott, and Whitehorne families accounted for six students who did not attend the following year. (Those same families in the 1774 colony census had among them nine enslaved children under sixteen still living in their households.) In 1772, the families of Captains George Buckmaster, John Dupuy, Job Snell, Joseph Wanton, and Thomas Wickham, as well as the Lyndon and Mumford families sent seven of their enslaved children for schooling. From the report, twenty-four children attended both years. Sent by the families of Cahoone, Hunter, Honeyman, Johnston, and Thurston, as well as ship captains Duncan, Freebody, and Shearman, the children received two consecutive years of education.

In 1774, the number of Black boys in Newport under sixteen was 204, and the number of Black girls under sixteen was 185, for a total of 389 children.[16] If as many as thirty children attended the Newport Bray School each year over the thirteen years of its existence, it is possible that some children attending school became literate. In addition, it was possible for children in attendance to borrow books from the Trinity Church public lending library to continue their learning. There were books on religious themes and a “layman’s library” of books some sent by the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and others by the Bray Associates.[17] Writing was not a subject of the curriculum.

Curriculum Materials and Methods

The Bray School teaching methods commenced with what J. Carter Woodson called “memory training” or “verbal education without letters.” Lessons consisted of recitation of prayers, the Ten Commandments, and the catechism. Teachers expanded their teaching to the alphabet, spelling, and reading of the Bible, depending on the aptitude and age of the young person. A goal was to guide the youth by using the Bible passages, especially the New Testament to introduce an understanding of religious practice. Boys learned to read and girls to read and sew, knit, and cross stitch. Those skills increased the economic possibilities for a girl while at the same time teaching her arithmetic and spelling.

Typically, the Bray Associates in England shipped to each of the three schools in Colonial America the following books for classroom use:

50 children’s First Book

40 copies of the English Instructor

25 Catechisms with Questions and Answers

10 Easy Methods of Instruction

2 Preliminary Essays on the Catechism

3 Indian Instructions

5 Bacon’s Sermons to the Planter

2 Bacon’s Sermons to the Negroes

10 Christian Guides

Allen’s Discourses

Bray’s Lectures

Kettlewell’s Practical Believer[18]

The English Instructor by Thomas Dixon was a methods book on how to teach spelling and how to pronounce words once a child understands vowels; the 23rd edition of the publication was printed in 1760. Maryland clergyman Thomas Bacon’s Sermons advised enslaved people on behaviors toward each other and toward owners, emphasizing obedience and cooperation. He encouraged teaching the youngest of the enslaved because adults had more difficulty changing from their languages to English. Reverend Bray’s Lectures spoke for example about sinfulness and ways to redemption. Reverend John Kettlewell’s Practical Believer answered basic questions about salvation, repentance, and prayer. The teacher used religious texts to teach reading, spelling, the alphabet, and behavior. The First Book includes the alphabet and a series of words using each letter along with a vowel. For example, children memorized “oa” words such as oar, board, boat, oat, road; “oi” words as boil, coil, toil, coin; “oo” words as tool, wool, book, blood; “ou” words out, your, hour, count. They learned to pronounce them, their meaning, and then composed sentences. Prayers and religious passages are also in the book.[19]

Some rules at Bray Schools were: “begin at seven O’Clock in the Winter half year & at six in the Summer half year in the Morning & keep Scholars diligently to their Business during the Hours of Schooling… On Days of Service the teacher is to first have the children assemble orderly before going to church.” In advance she should instruct them when “to kneel or stand as the rubric directs, [and to] say their prayers with humility.” The school mistress shall teach “her Scholars to pronounce correctly…learn the true spelling of words…and to read.” She shall take care to teach proper “Manners and Behaviour.” Owners were expected to send “Children regularly & constantly at the Hours of Schooling “(on time). Owners of the children were to send them “properly cloathed and kept in a cleanly Manner.” Scholars were to become faithful and diligent in their studies.[20]

The Obstacles to Youth Getting an Education

From the onset, objections to the schools came from the attitudes of enslavers who believed that the enslaved were not capable of learning. Reverend Samuel Auchmuty, Reverend Jonathan Boucher, and Reverend George Whitefield in their writings pointed out that all that was needed to dispel that myth were some exemplary Black students.[21] Another problem was that owners were willing to send their youngest enslaved to school, but as soon as the child was useful in the household, they were often pulled from the classroom and set to work. Although the Bray School Associates considered the minimum time for learning to read was three consecutive years, the education process was too frequently truncated at six months. Many enslavers were hostile to the idea of teaching Christianity, as it might cause discontent rather than obedience as it helped the enslaved see another perspective of his/her social and economic place. A dissatisfied enslaved person could undermine the authority of the enslaver.[22]

What did enslaved people think about the opportunity to learn about Christianity? Those who attended church services and followed through with baptism as a Christian believed they would be accepted by other church members. A long-held belief in the European world was that Christians could legally enslave infidels and heathens, to excuse their involvement in the slave trade, but not fellow Christians.[23] However, some enslavers opposed receiving communion in the mixed company of those they enslaved when they received the sacrament. Over time churches assigned enslaved people and free Blacks to a separate space for worship and to a separate time in the Sunday service for taking Communion.

In April 1772, due to alterations in Trinity Church, Newport, the vestry voted to “remove negroes to the west end of the Church, pews behind the organ…” The owners of those pews were to have a choice of other pews “on the south side of the gallery where the negroes are now.”[24] Alas, colonial legislators passed laws to quelch any link between baptism as a Christian and freedom from enslavement. Six colonies (two from the North and four in the South, but not Rhode Island) passed laws stating baptism did not give an enslaved person freedom.

In addition to religious acceptance, conversion to a Christian way of life led enslaved couples who were married in a church by a minister to expect social acceptance. The couples questioned why they had to continue to live in two different households. In many towns Christian burials for those of African heritage were separate from others.[25]

A last point is that there was difficulty in securing qualified instructors for teaching enslaved children. While spinsters and widows sought the job with the Bray Associates paying the yearly salary, there was a “dearth of qualified individuals willing to teach black children.”[26]

Conclusions about the Newport Bray School

One of the goals of the Bray School was to encourage conversion to Christianity. That meant removing African religious ideas and culture. The day off from work, which was Sunday, was a time of gathering for dance, merriment, and celebration. Conversion meant replacing these activities with prayer and church services. Did the experience at the Bray School affect student commitment to become Christians? Without the names of those students attending, there is no definitive answer. However, Trinity Anglican Church manuscript records show baptisms in the 1770s among both enslaved and free Black adults. As an adult Pomp Scott was baptized in 1772. Flora and Sarah Johnston were also baptized in 1772. Philip, Joseph, and Israel Cahoone became Anglicans in 1773. Charles Chaloner had his two children baptized in 1772 and 1773. As adults Jane, Lucy, Nancy, and Samuel Honeyman, as well as Sarah, Robert and Samuel Hunter became Anglicans by 1774. Adam, Abigail, Elizabeth, Margaret, Moses, and Obbah Ayrault were baptized between 1773 and 1776. Fortune Cahoone married Amy Dupuy, a communicant at the church and they had their children baptized in 1788. Ceazar Wanton, baptized in 1787, married Jane at Trinity Church and lived in a house on Golden Hill Street with two daughters baptized in 1780 and 1785. Cato Wickham became an Anglican in 1777.[27] To determine the possibility of attendance at school in the 1760s or 1770s, we need a date of birth or their age at baptism.

Adults aged eighteen who joined Trinity Church in the mid-1780s could have been the appropriate age to attend the school. Church members included free Black men, namely Cuff Drew, George Fayerweather, Thomas Ferguson, John Greene, Lymas Keith, Quash Mowatt, Tony Overing, Paul Overing, and Curbay (Kirby) Rodman.[28] However, these Anglicans do not have the surnames of those enslavers who sent children to Bray School in the 1760s to 1770s.

Although schooling brought spiritual understanding and book knowledge, being a Christian did not result in freedom from slavery. Unlike Congregational pastor Samuel Hopkins and the Quakers who forbade slave ownership among members, Trinity Church leaders did not take this stand, nor did they push for manumission.[29] What is recorded among the twenty Anglican families who sent enslaved children to Bray School is that fourteen families still held enslaved people in 1782 according to the state census of that year.

In conclusion, since the yearly classes remained limited at thirty students, fewer than two hundred young people of African descent had a chance to go to the Bray School over the years 1762 to 1775.[30] Those who learned to read and/or understand written text demonstrated to the community how eager young minds could be engaged. One should not underestimate the importance of education for these children, many of whom were born in this country and represented a new generation of Americans. Whether at the Bray School or by individual ministers or families, education prepared the way. As free adults they supported the Free African Union Society, the first self-help organization of freemen in the United States (1780). They became owners of businesses and homes (from 1783), as well as supported the founding of a school (1808) and a church (1824) for families of African heritage.

Notes:

[1] Nicole Brown, “Preliminary Williamsburg Bray School Historical Report, Block 14, Building 41,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Publications, 2025. Accessed at digitalcollections.colonialWilliamsburg.org/Package/2RERYDT5G8M2.This online publication includes a map showing the locations of the school over time and the houses of owners who sent students. See also https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/events/williamsburg-bray-school/ and Antonio T. Bly, “Literacy and Religious Instruction,” Virginia Humanities (Dec. 2020), based on articles published from 2008 to 2013, at https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-literacy-and-education-in-virginia/#heading4. Once an enslaved person had some instruction from a minister, she or he continued to read, finding ways to access books, and often teaching others. Some enslaved in Virginia taught themselves to write, forging passes to avoid travel restrictions. Of fugitive slave notices in Virginia newspapers by the 1760s, 5.4 percent of 648 ads list the runaways as literate.

[2] John B. Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church in Newport 1698-2000, (Newport: Trinity Church, 2001); John C. Van Horne, ed., Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, 1985).

[3] Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles 1727-1775, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner and Sons,1903), vol. 1, 363‒364. Ministers Stiles and Hopkins were fellow Yale graduates. The Revolutionary War quickly put an end to their time at Princeton. Yamma died in 1794 and Quamine in 1779. See Cherry Fletcher Bamberg, “Bristol Yamma and John Quamine,” vol. 73, Rhode Island History (Winter/Spring 2015), 4‒35; Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Although Osborn read the Bible to them and prayed with them, she never said in her diaries that she taught enslaved or free people to read the Bible. See also William Patten, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, Rhode Island (1843), 86-87. In 1763, widow Abigail Hazard (Bours) married Reverend Samuel Fayerweather and the couple moved to Narragansett, near St. Paul’s Anglican Church. They rented out her Newport home at 47 Division Street. There Newport Gardner taught music to residents and composed music on themes of deliverance and faith. Edward E. Andrews, Newport Gardner’s Anthem: A Story of Savery, Struggle and Survival in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025); Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1915), 13. Southern states passed laws to suppress owners from teaching enslaved people.

[4] Hattendorf, Semper Eadem, 30‒38, 60.

[5] John C. Van Horne, “Impediments to the Christianization and Education of Blacks in Colonial America: The Case of the Associates of Dr. Bray,” vol. 50, no. 3, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church (Sept 1981), 243-269, accessed at http://www.jstor.org/stable/42973847. D’Allone, private secretary to King William, left an enormous sum with the Bray Associates to achieve missionary conversion in the colonies, including Canada and the Bahamas. Although the Society of Friends in the colonies prominently called for manumission of the enslaved, Newport’s Quaker merchants and artisans founded no schools for them.

[6] Benjamin Franklin to Anglican clergyman John Waring, Jan. 3, 1758, and Feb. 17, 1758. Minutes of the Associates of the Late Dr. Bray, Jan. 13, 1760. Franklin was in London as a representative of colonial interests, especially for Pennsylvania and Maryland from 1757 to 1762 and again for the decade before the Revolutionary War, assisting Georgia and New Jersey. Letters accessed at Founders Online, Benjamin Franklin Papers, https://founders.archives.gov/about/Franklin. See also Marcus W. Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies,” vol. 21, no. 3, American Historical Review (1916), 510, accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/i304886. Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 23, 119, 151.

[7] Woodson, The Education of the Negro, 19-23, 59; George Champlin Mason, The Annals of Trinity Church, Newport: 1698-1821 (Newport: G.C. Mason, 1890), 68, 92, 168, 194n, 225, and 318-319; Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 194 and 220; Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church, 98-100.

[8] Phoebe Bean, “Ann Franklin,” https://www.rihs.org/a-womans-touch-ann-franklin-printing-pioneer/. Franklin also visited the Trinity Church-run Kay School, a Latin grammar school, taught by a male teacher for forty to fifty students. See Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church, 38, 50, 100. Nathaniel Kay in 1741 left a fund to pay for educating “ten poor boys to be taught their grammar and mathematics gratis” at the school. See “Trinity School House,” the National Register of Historic Places Inventory Sheet (July 1969), accessed at https://preservation.ri.gov. Located in Newport at 25 School Street, the southwest corner with Mary Street “on town school lands,” the Kay School adjoined a residence for the school master. “The Trinity Church Schoolhouse was abandoned in 1799.” Charles A. Battle, The Negro on the Island of Rhode Island (privately printed, 1932), 19. Rebuilt, Newport Gardner and Patience D’Lymas taught there at the school run by the African Benevolent Society from 1808, and continued as a school for 175 years, being sold to Shiloh Church in 1867.

[9] Edgar L. Pennington, “Thomas Bray’s Associates and Their Work Among the Negroes,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings (Oct.1938), 347, 398-400, accessed at https://www.americanantiquarian.org/node/11160. See also Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 193, 220, 233, 239, 247, 258, and 271. Reverend Browne’s extant letters to the Associates about his progress in Newport are from Jan. 9 and Aug. 29, 1763, Nov. 20, 1765, Nov. 6, 1764, July 1, 1766, Jun. 4, 1767. They include no detailed record of student achievement.

[10] Hattendorf, Semper Eadem, 92, 101; Mason, The Annals of Trinity Church, 225. Brett instructed children in Newport until her death in 1800 at the age of 85. See John C. Van Horne and Grant Stanton, “Philadelphia’s Bray Schools: A Story of Black Education in Early America 1758-1845,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol 147. no. 3 (October 2023), 75-104, accessed at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378586230. Because there was a sizable free Black population there was less hostility to education and more monetary support from the population. The school sent the names of students to London in their reports of 1761 and 1762, indicating the number of children who could spell and read the New Testament and Primer. While the teacher at Williamsburg’s school was also a woman, in Philadelphia, two of the early teachers were males of African descent associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From the end of the American Revolutionary War until 1845, the Associates funded the Philadelphia Bray School.

[11] Pennington, “Bray Associates,” 400-403.

[12] “Rev. Thomas Pollen, Trinity Church to Rev. John Waring of the Bray Associates, Aug. 12, 1760,” in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 151. The Newport Anglican minister in his letter agreed to start a school with Mary Brett, a church member as the teacher. He left to take charge of a parish in Jamaica in 1761.

[13] Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, 92-147,125-155. Hattendorf, Semper Eadem, 120, 487-493. For a list of Newport enslavers, see https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/dataset/efb02932-9f3e-4777-b4af-d1254b9ebe4d. Why Mr. Dickinson and Capt. Buckmaster are on the list is a mystery. John Dickinson owned a pew in the church gallery in the 1720 and 1730s, but no descendants were active in the Newport church in the 1770s. Relatives were active in St. Paul’s, Narragansett. George Buckmaster was active in First Congregational Church and his children were baptized Congregationalists. His first wife was Abbiah the niece of Benjamin Franklin. None of his three wives were Anglican. However, he did live across the street from the Bray School and in his household was an enslaved girl under age sixteen. Van Horne and Stanton, “Philadelphia’s Bray Schools,” 84. Owners of enslaved who were not Anglicans sent children to the Philadelphia Bray School.

[14] Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade 1700-1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), Appendix. He lists captains and owners of ships sailing to Africa. John Duncan captained six trips from 1766 to 1773; James Duncan of Trinity did not. While Thomas Wickham captained four trips from 1760-1769, his brother Charles Wickham did not. (They served on the Trinity vestry multiple years between the 1740s and 1770s) Walter Chaloner, George Scott, and Philip Wilkinson each owned a slave vessel in the 1750s.

[15] Without more data, the author cannot confirm if Ann, wife of William Mumford Jr., Mary, wife of Edward Thurston Jr., and Mary, wife of Capt. Samuel Thuston, may have sent children to school. Also, in the colony census of 1774, there were at least fifteen boys and twelve girls under sixteen years of age among the families of free householders Valentine Brown, Abraham Casey, Cudjo Chaloner, Amos Cotton, James Dyre, Sarah Jack, Tony Johnson, Thomas Peirce, Hannah Perry, and Jack Scott. Perhaps the three free Black children attending school without Trinity sponsors were from this group.

[16] Rhode Island Colony Census of 1774, Newport section, 33, Rhode Island State Archives, accessed at https://catalog.sos.ri.gov/repositories/2/archival_objects/2013. There is a summary of numbers in each category.

[17] Hattendorf, Semper Eadem, 30.

[18] Transcription of letters of Rev. John Waring of Bray Associates Feb. 29, 1760, 144-145 in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, Books sent to colonial America on p.120, 147,152,194, 240, 259. Thad W. Tate, “The Negro in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series—0121, Williamsburg, Virginia (April 1957). Accessed at https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/DigitalLibrary/.

[19] The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA located a copy of the 32-page book in the Library of the Francke Foundation in Germany, which the Foundation reproduced on their website. Accessed at https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/events/williamsburg-bray-school/finding-the-childs-first-book/.

[20] Transcription of Regulations to Bray Associates, Williamsburg, Sept. 30, 1762, in Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 189-192.

[21] Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 34. Pennington, “Bray’s Associates,” 333-338, and390-393, successes in NYC and Charleston.

[22] Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion,” 517. Pennington, “Bray’s Associates,” 320 and 350-351 Georgia and South Carolina colonial records note how streets were patrolled to prevent “slave gatherings” on days when they were not working. Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 30-32. Without evidence of educated Blacks leading insurrections, newspaper editors suggested teaching slaves to read was a cause of the problems in New York City (1712) and Virginia (1730).

[23] Van Horne, “Obstacles,” 247. Jernagan, “Slavery and Conversion,” 504.

[24] Mason, Annals of Trinity Church, 155. Jernagan, “Slavery and Conversion,” 506.

[25] Pennington, “Bray’s Associates,” 352, 386.

[26] Once young free Black men received an education, they were often hired to teach in Philadelphia.

[27] James N. Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850. “Newport Marriages,” vol. 4, part II, 3-79 and “Newport Births and Deaths,” 80-124, as well as “Births, Marriages, Burials,” vol. 10: 433-544, and “Church Records” vol. 11, 297-322. Trinity Church Records 1731-1805 indexed by Joseph W. Blaine, 15, 56, 87, 100; Trinity Church Baptisms, vol. 2097. Both are at Newport Historical Society. Richard J. Boles, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730-1850, PhD Dissertation (George Washington University, 2013), 223. Historian Boles, in an email to me of June 20, 2023, included the names of individuals baptized at Trinity Church from 1764 to 1776. There were 51 Anglican baptisms of people of color.

[28] Boles email to me of June 20, 2023. When Trinity Church reopened from 1786 to1788, there were twenty-nine baptisms; fourteen of them were for children of African descent. These Anglican men were members of the Free African Union Society and later the African Benevolent Society. As free men, they became homeowners and/or ran local businesses from the 1780s.

[29] Charles A. Battle, The Negroes on the Island of Rhode Island (Newport, 1930), 8. Contemporary anti-slavery sentiments include Quaker John Woolman’s pamphlet (1762), writings by Pennsylvania schoolteacher Anthony Benezet of the same decade, and op ed pieces in the Newport Mercury from 1768. See also John D. Sassi, “‘This whole country have their hands full of Blood this day’”: Transcription and Introduction of an Anti-slavery Sermon Manuscript Attributed to Rev. Samuel Hopkins, American Antiquarian Society (2004), 29-65, Accessed at www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44539532.pdf. In his sermons Hopkins called the enslavers “tyrants,” as there was no such thing as “humane” treatment without liberty. In the state’s gradual emancipation law of February1784, towns were to pay for education and maintenance of the freed population. In October. 1784, the state repealed that provision, putting the onus back on the owners. John Russell Bartlett, ed., The Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 10 (Providence: Providence Press Company, 1865), 7-8 and 132-133.

[30] Van Horne, Religious Philanthropy, 38; Stanton and Van Horne, “Philadelphia Bray Schools,” 88. With a half million enslaved people and free Black people in colonial America, only about four thousand youth had a chance in the pre-Revolutionary era to learn from books and schoolmasters.