Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:34, 17 January 2025

Cyprian Sterry (c. 1753 – September 1, 1825) was an 18th-century American slave trader. Based in Rhode Island, he has been described as "the main slave trader of Providence" and an "affluent and highly successful merchant-shipowner." Following the end of the American Revolutionary War and the resumption of the transatlantic slave trade by three states, Sterry was a leading trafficker of slaves to the port of Savannah, Georgia.

Career

Sterry was a native of Rhode Island, a sea-faring colony, "more dependent upon maritime enterprise than any other." It had the highest concentration of slave traders in British North America, as well as a population of abolitionist Quakers.

He served in the American Revolutionary War as a quartermaster and brigade major for the Rhode Island brigade organized in 1776. He was apparently captured by the British because he escaped from a British prison in October 1778. In 1779, while living in London, Sterry swore an oath of allegiance to the United States and was issued a passport by Benjamin Franklin so that he could ship Dutch cloth to America, a general business enterprise that was presented to Franklin as serving the patriotic purpose of being a source of blankets for the Continental Army. In 1785 he sold an interest in the slave ship Industry, a brigantine, to American Revolutionary War veteran Silas Talbot. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Cyprian Sterry was one of the most active slave traders based in Providence, Rhode Island. He financed at least 18 slave-trading trips and trafficked more than 1500 people from Africa to the United States before 1797. His competition included the D'Wolfs of Bristol, Caleb Gardner of Newport, William Vernon of Newport, Peleg Clarke of Newport, Aaron Lopez of Newport, and Samuel Brown. According to historian Peter J. Coleman, "His extensive trading connections had taken his ships to Europe, the Orient, the Guinea coast, and the Caribbean."

The slave trade was banned by the Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War but resumed afterward in North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina. Sterry was the leading vendor of African slave cargoes to Georgia in the 1790s, delivering 13 cargoes "between 1793 and 1796: one each in 1793, 1794, and 1797, five in 1795, and five in 1796. He trafficked a total of 1,238 slaves to Georgia. Presuming his prime was in 1795, his net worth was once estimated at US$235,000 (equivalent to $4,218,941 in 2023).

Georgetown University holds a logbook of a slave ship, the Mary, funded by Sterry and captained by one Nathan Sterry, that visited "Senegambia, Windward Coast, and Gold Coast" and sold the approximately 100 slaves that survived the trip to the port of Savannah in 1796 to a "Mr. Robertson of Charleston and a Spanish merchant." In 1795, Sterry and Welcome Arnold had a joint interest in whiskey distillery. Rhode Island prohibited the African slave trade in 1797. Sterry was bullied out of the business by a combination of the law and "the Providence Abolition Society, which threatened to sue him unless he signed a document promising to never engage in the African slave trade again." Sterry declared bankruptcy in 1807.

His son Robert Sterry killed Micajah Green Lewis in a duel in New Orleans in 1805, and was the American consul at La Rochelle, France prior to his death in a shipwreck off Southhampton, Long Island in 1820.

See also

• List of Rhode Island slave traders

References

1. ^ Coleman, Peter J. (1963). "The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Rhode Island History". The Business History Review. 37 (4): 319–344. doi:10.2307/3112713. ISSN 0007-6805.
2. ^ Marques, Leonardo (2012). "Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition". Journal of the Early Republic. 32 (2): 233–260. ISSN 0275-1275.
3. "Founders Online: To George Washington from Brigadier General James Mitchell Var …". founders.archives.gov. Retrieved January 17, 2025.
4. ^ "Founders Online: To Benjamin Franklin from Thomas Digges, 6 September 1779". founders.archives.gov. Retrieved 2025-01-17.
5. Clark, William Bell (1953). "In Defense of Thomas Digges". The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 77 (4): 381–438. ISSN 0031-4587.
6. Verhoeven, Wil (2006). "Gilbert Imlay and the Triangular Trade". The William and Mary Quarterly. 63 (4): 827–842. ISSN 0043-5597.
7. ^ "Journal of the Slave Ship Mary". repository.library.georgetown.edu. Retrieved January 17, 2025.
8. ^ Coleman, Peter J. (1965). "The Insolvent Debtor in Rhode Island 1745–1828". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (3): 413–434. doi:10.2307/1920454. ISSN 0043-5597.
9. ^ Wax, Darold D. (1984). ""New Negroes Are Always in Demand": The Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century Georgia". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 68 (2): 193–220. ISSN 0016-8297.
10. Tritt, Samantha (September 14, 2020). "Slave ship logbook in library provides new insight into the slave trade in North America". The Georgetown Voice. Retrieved January 17, 2025.
11. "Journals / Edited by Howard Greene and Alice E. Smith v.2". HathiTrust. p. 52. Retrieved 2025-01-17.
12. "Duelling in old New Orleans". HathiTrust. pp. 9–12. Retrieved January 17, 2025.
13. "Robert Sterry (1782–1820), Rhode Island". Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Express. February 9, 1820. p. 3. Retrieved January 17, 2025.

• v
• t
• e

• 18th-century American slave traders
• 1825 deaths
• 1750s births
• Continental Army staff officers
• People from Rhode Island
• History of slavery in Georgia (U.S. state)
• History of slavery in Rhode Island