Abraham Redwood

Abraham Redwood Jr. was born on Antigua on February 15, 1709, at his father's plantation, Cassada Garden. Abraham Redwood Sr. was born in Bristol, England in 1665. In 1687, Redwood Sr. went to the island of Antigua, where he married Mehitable Langford, only daughter of Jonas Langford.{{Cite book |last=Oliver |first=Vere Langford |title=The History of the Island of Antigua, One of the Leeward Caribbees in the West Indies, From the First Settlement in 1635 to the Present Time |publisher=Mitchell and Hughes |year=1896 |volume=2 |location=140 Wardour Street W., London |pages=140}} Through this marriage, Redwood Sr. took possession of the sugar plantation known as Cassada Garden which had "a great number of slaves."{{Cite book|last1=Turner|first1=Henry Edward|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZZg6AQAAMAAJ|title=The Rhode Island Historical Magazine|last2=Tilley|first2=Risbrough Hammett|date=1881|publisher=Newport Historical Publishing Company|language=en}} Abraham Redwood Jr. was the third son of fifteen children. Redwood Sr. remained in Antigua until 1712, when he moved with his family to Salem, Massachusetts. His first wife, Mehitable, died in 1715. Until his death in 1729, Redwood Sr. traveled between homes in Antigua, Salem and Newport, Rhode Island.

Abraham Redwood Jr. was likely educated by the Society of Friends in Philadelphia. On October 27th, 1724, his older brother Jonas was thrown from his horse and killed in Newport.{{Cite book |last=Pryce-Jones |first=Alan |title=Redwood Papers |publisher=Redwood Library and Athenaeum |year=1976 |editor-last=Dexter |editor-first=Lorraine |pages=1}} Upon the death of his elder brother, Abraham came into the possession of the family sugar plantation in Antigua, Cassada Garden. In 1727, Redwood Jr. purchased land on Aquidneck Island{{Clarify|date=July 2025}}, and on November 2nd, 1743 he purchased a country estate five miles north of Newport in Portsmouth.{{Cite book |last=Mason |first=George Champlin |title=Annals of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum |publisher=Redwood Library and Athenaeum |year=1891 |pages=68}} Prior to 1728, he married Martha Coggeshall, of Newport, a descendant of John Coggeshall, one of the founders of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Together Martha and Abraham had six children.{{Cite book|last=Moore|first=Sean D.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LhuJDwAAQBAJ&dq=abraham+redwood&pg=PA87|title=Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814|date=February 14, 2019|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-257340-7|language=en}}

Redwood's botanical garden on his Portsmouth estate was known for its various curious foreign and indigenous plants.{{Cite book|last1=Johnson|first1=Rossiter|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_e0UAAAAYAAJ&q=abraham+redwood|title=The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans ...|last2=Brown|first2=John Howard|date=1904|publisher=Biographical Society|language=en}} He ordered orange and fig trees, and adolescent guava and pineapple plants from the West Indies to fill his garden.{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}} Solomon Drowne wrote in 1767 that the garden was rumored to cost over forty thousand pounds, and that the gardener, Charles Dunham, received over one hundred dollars annual salary. Dunham was probably Newport's first professional gardener.

During a voyage from Bristol to Antigua in 1687, Abraham Redwood Sr. married Mehitable Langford, the daughter of a wealthy planter named Jonas Langford. Soon after his marriage, Redwood Sr. inherited the sugar cane plantation named Cassada Garden.{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}} Redwood Sr.'s oldest son, William, died in 1712 at the age of sixteen, and his second son, Jonas, was thrown from his horse in 1724, at the age of eighteen. Thus the third son, Abraham Redwood Jr., became the oldest living heir, and sometime after 1724, he inherited the estate of Cassada Garden. The plantation brought Redwood an income between two and three thousand pounds a year.{{Cite journal|last=Deutsch|first=Sarah|date=1982|title=The Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers, 1735–1774|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/365360|journal=The New England Quarterly|volume=55|issue=2|pages=229–253|doi=10.2307/365360|jstor=365360|issn=0028-4866|url-access=subscription}}

The name Cassada appears to be a derivative from a cassava, a plant that produces large green leaves and a tuber that has long been a source of food for Indigenous peoples of the Americas.{{Cite web|title=Cassada Gardens – Antigua Sugar Mills|url=https://sugarmills.blogs.bucknell.edu/cassada-gardens/|access-date=2022-01-17|language=en-US}}

Both Abraham Redwood Sr. and Abraham Redwood Jr. were devout Quakers, but that did not prevent either of them from engaging in the Atlantic slave trade.{{Cite journal|last=Deutsch|first=Sarah|date=1982|title=The Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers, 1735–1774|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/365360|journal=The New England Quarterly|volume=55|issue=2|pages=229–253|doi=10.2307/365360|jstor=365360|issn=0028-4866|url-access=subscription}} In 1720{{citation needed|date=July 2025}}, Abraham joined his father's business, working to not only maintain their sugar plantation in Antigua, but also the bilateral trade often referred to as the West Indies trade. As a part of this trade, Redwood sent timber and fish from Rhode Island to the Caribbean in exchange for molasses and hard currency.

In 1736, a sudden drop in the price of sugar in London threatened Redwood with bankruptcy.{{Cite journal|last=Deutsch|first=Sarah|date=1982|title=The Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers, 1735–1774|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/365360|journal=The New England Quarterly|volume=55|issue=2|pages=229–253|doi=10.2307/365360|jstor=365360|issn=0028-4866|url-access=subscription}} In response to his personal financial crisis, Redwood expanded his enterprise to include slave trading, becoming among the first of Newport's leading merchants to enter the slave trade. In 1737, he financed a voyage to West Africa on his snauw Martha and Jane. Though that voyage failed, Redwood financed two more voyages on the Martha and Jane, one in 1738 and another in 1740. Each of these voyages traveled from Newport, Rhode Island to the Gold Coast and ended in St. John's, Antigua—the site of Redwood's sugar plantation, Cassada Garden.{{Cite book|last1=Donnan|first1=Elizabeth|url=https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012284163|title=Documents illustrative of the history of the slave trade to America|last2=Carnegie Institution of Washington|date=1930–1935|publisher=Carnegie Institution of Washington|series=Carnegie Institution of Washington publication no. 409|location=Washington, D.C.}}{{Failed verification|date=July 2025}} In all, Redwood may have personally financed the enslavement of over three hundred people from the region of West Africa.{{Cite book|last=Coughtry|first=Jay Alan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=T7BrAAAAMAAJ|title=The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807|date=1978|publisher=University of Wisconsin—Madison|language=en}}{{Failed verification|date=July 2025}}

Redwood's 1740 slave voyage was his last one on record. However, his younger half-brother, William (1726–1815), and his son, Jonas (1730–1779), financed four more voyages with William Vernon between 1756 and 1759. The ship used for their 1757 voyage was named Cassada Garden, after the family sugar plantation. These voyages enslaved an additional five hundred people into the Atlantic slave trade.{{Cite web|title=Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database|url=https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database|access-date=2022-01-17|website=www.slavevoyages.org}}

Abraham Redwood was one of Newport, Rhode Island's largest slave owners.{{citation needed|date=July 2025}} Diana Redwood (1739–1822) and Newport Redwood (1716–1766) are recorded as two enslaved people Redwood kept in Newport.{{citation needed|date=July 2025}} The 1774 Census of Newport, Rhode Island records two presumably free African householders with the surname Redwood, Cuff Redwood and Phillies Redwood.{{Cite journal|last=Benard|first=Akeia A.F|date=January 1, 2008|title=The Free African American Cultural Landscape: Newport, RI, 1774—1826|url=https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3308227|journal=Doctoral Dissertations|pages=1–251}}{{Failed verification|date=July 2025}} Scipio and Oliver, two enslaved Africans Redwood kept on his plantation in Antigua, were burned at the stake for suspected involvement in a conspiracy to start a slave revolt in 1736.

In 1775, the Society of Friends of Rhode Island, believing slavery and the Atlantic slave trade to be unchristian, formally asked Redwood to free the people he had enslaved. Redwood refused, and the Quakers disowned him. Redwood's biographer, Gladys Bolhouse, writes that Redwood, now sixty years old, believed his "whole livelihood as well as the inheritance of his sons depended on the plantation and the plantation could not be run without slaves."{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}}{{Cite book|last=Crane|first=Elaine Forman|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_vAMAAAAYAAJ|title=A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era|date=1985|publisher=Fordham University Press|isbn=978-0-8232-1111-1|language=en}}

Upon his death in 1788, Redwood transferred the ownership of slaves in Newport and Antigua to his children and grandchildren. On the 1774 Census of Newport, Redwood has three enslaved people living in his home. An inventory of his Cassada Garden in Antigua showed that he owned two hundred and thirty-eight slaves.{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}} In total, Redwood owned well over two hundred enslaved people, making him, at the time of his death, the largest slave owner living in the city of Newport.{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}}{{Failed verification|date=July 2025}}

File:Redwood Library (Newport, RI).jpg, Newport, Rhode Island]]

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, "Without a doubt the slave trade provided Redwood with the enormous profits that allowed him to become, as he was described at his death, 'the greatest public and private benefactor on Rhode Island.'" Following his donation of five hundred pounds sterling to fund the library's original book collection, on August 22, 1747, an act of the Rhode Island General Assembly incorporated the Redwood Library. Redwood's donation purchased over one thousand three hundred volumes for the new library.{{Cite web|last=Davis|first=Paul|title=Abraham Redwood: Antigua and the West Indies Trade|url=https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/slaveryinrhodeisland/abraham-redwood-antigua-and-the-west-indies-trade/|access-date=2022-01-17|website=Slavery in Rhode Island|language=en-US}} Several other prominent slave traders appear on the original list of forty-six proprietors, including William Vernon and Simon Pease.

In 1764, Abraham Redwood was also one of the early benefactors of the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, later known as Brown University.

In 1788, Abraham Redwood died at the age of seventy-nine. Redwood is buried in the Coggeshall Burial Ground in Newport, Rhode Island.{{Cite book|last=Manuel|first=Elton Merritt|url=https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102361036|title=Merchants and mansions of bygone days; an authentic account of the early settlers of Newport, Rhode Island.|date=1939|publisher=R. Ward|location=Newport, R.I.}}

• Aaron Lopez
• William Vernon

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Category:1709 births

Category:1788 deaths

Category:People from Newport, Rhode Island

Category:Merchants from colonial Rhode Island

Category:18th-century American merchants

Category:18th-century Quakers

Category:American slave owners

Category:Philanthropists from Rhode Island

Category:18th-century American planters

Category:Antigua and Barbuda emigrants to the United States

Category:People from colonial Rhode Island