Rhode Island slavers made nearly a thousand voyages and procured 106,544 Africans

Evidence

American slavers were the last to enter the trade. But from the ports of Rhode Island, beginning in 1709 and lasting officially to 1807, Rhode Islanders managed to make nearly a thousand voyages to Africa, procuring 106,544 enslaved people. Illegal trafficking continued for decades. Alongside the triangular trade, American colonists opened direct lines of trade that didn’t resemble a triangle at all. They traded directly with England, delivering mainland commodities produced by enslaved labor, such as rice, tobacco, and cotton, as well as flour and lumber, and returned home with manufactured goods and luxury items. On separate voyages, American colonists also exported North Atlantic dried cod, flour, and pine wood to plantations in the British West Indies, in exchange for sugar and molasses. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 286

Categorization

• QUESTION: The 106,544 figure is specific and central to the claim that Northern colonies — not just the South — were foundational to the slave trade; worth cross-checking.
• XREF: Directly supports the foundational-not-peripheral reframing: New England complicity complicates the ‘Southern slavery’ framing in the reader’s case study.