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| Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Norman Dewolf
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (9 reviews)
Sales Rank: 123705
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0807072818
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.3620974
EAN: 9780807072813
ASIN: 0807072818
Publication Date: January 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In 2001, at forty-seven, Thomas DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, curried favor with President Thomas Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed. When James DeWolf died in 1837, he was the second-richest man in America.
When Katrina Browne, Thomas DeWolf's cousin, learned about their family's history, she resolved to confront it head-on, producing and directing a documentary feature film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
Inheriting the Trade is Tom DeWolf's powerful and disarmingly honest memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced the steps of their ancestors and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states.
Their journey through the notorious Triangle Trade?from New England to West Africa to Cuba?proved life-altering, forcing DeWolf to face the horrors of slavery directly for the first time. It also inspired him to contend with the complicated legacy that continues to affect black and white Americans, Africans, and Cubans today.
Inheriting the Trade reveals that the North's involvement in slavery was as common as the South's. Not only were black people enslaved in the North for over two hundred years, but the vast majority of all slave trading in America was done by northerners. Remarkably, half of all North American voyages involved in the slave trade originated in Rhode Island, and all the northern states benefited.
With searing candor, DeWolf tackles both the internal and external challenges of his journey?writing frankly about feelings of shame, white male privilege, the complicity of churches, America's historic amnesia regarding slavery?and our nation's desperate need for healing. An urgent call for meaningful and honest dialogue, Inheriting the Trade illuminates a path toward a more hopeful future and provides a persuasive argument that the legacy of slavery isn't merely a southern issue but an enduring American one.
"Exploring the links between a grand Rhode Island mansion and dungeons in Ghana, Tom DeWolf traces the infernal trade that gave his family, and this country, great wealth and power. His journey into the past forces painful questions to the surface, and illuminates our present."
?Henry Wiencek, Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
"Thomas DeWolf's personal journey into his family's long hidden slave trading past is a compelling invitation to explore how our country and many institutions, including churches, benefited from this dark chapter. Such exploration is essential if we are to move forward to a place of repair and racial reconciliation."
?Frank T. Griswold, 25th Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church
"Tom DeWolf's deeply personal story, of his own journey as well as his family's, is required reading for anyone interested in reconciliation. Healing from our historic wounds, that continue to separate us, requires us to walk this road together."
?Myrlie Evers-Williams, civil rights leader, chairman emeritus of the NAACP (1995-98), and author of The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, Watch Me Fly, and For Us the Living
"Inheriting the Trade is like a slow-motion mash-up, a first-person view from within one of the country's founding families as it splinters, then puts itself back together again."
?Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family
"Inheriting the Trade is a candid, powerful and insightful book about how one family dealt with the infamous slave trade. This book is jarring in its candor, and revealing in its honest assessment of slavery and the Dewolf family. We must read important books like this one, if we dare to appreciate every aspect of our history, and as the Dewolf family does, dare to change our judgments about the wretched history of slavery."
?Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Executive Director, The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Invitation to go on a Guilt Trip with Thomas DeWolf August 22, 2008
I looked forward to reading "Inheriting the Trade" by Thomas Norman DeWolf when I first heard it mentioned on National Public Radio. I ordered it with high expectations, (maybe unrealistically high), hoping it would match up favorably to Edward Ball's revelatory "Slaves in the Family."
Sadly, this book under-performs. By his own admission, Thomas Norman DeWolf is no historian. While one need not be a historian to write about this compelling subject, DeWolf frequently presents a cluttered and annoying mix of historical fact with personal opinion. While it is no a crime to interpret history in one's own way, the mush of blended facts and opinion DeWolf presents becomes increasingly frustrating to the careful reader. A trained historian would support his opinions with a critical analysis of facts, building conclusions one brick at a time.
The DeWolf Family of Bristol, Rhode Island is a family of prominence and privilege, with a national reputation.
While most of the "Family of Ten," who travel the historical journey with the author come from the more privileged side of the family, with backgrounds of wealth, status and Ivy-League education, Thomas Norman DeWolf himself comes from the less privileged side of the family. He lives in a county in Oregon with a mimimal percentage of black people, a state with one of the lowest percentages of black people. His presentation of himself is as a man laden with personal guilt for not mixing with black people, for not having had a black person as a business colleague, for not having a black person as a friend, for not understanding black people.
From this perspective, he opines that all whites have "complicity" for what has gone on between the races through decades and centuries of American history. He rails against the founding fathers and he condemns the first five presidents who hail from Virginia (since they were slaveholders for parts of their lives). DeWolf does not present the controversy and struggle to end "the peculiar institution." He does not seem to know much American history. He claims that he and whites generally have "amnesia" about slavery, about the slave trade and about race issues. Where has he been hiding? His high school and university education must have been sorely lacking. Does he not know how many people, black and white, north and south, for decades and centuries worked to end the maritime slave trade, for the abolition of slavery, for equal rights in society? Did he "forget" how many Americans strove to end the practice long before it finally did end?
DeWolf is on much more solid ground when he delves into the history of the 18th and 19th century maritime slave trade and the specific role played by certain DeWolf Family ancestors. These relatives are presented in a well-done genealogical chart at the front of the book which the wise reader will frequently refer back to. These were the ones who were involved in the maritime slave trade when it was still legal and who continued in it after 1808, when it became illegal. The best parts of "Inheriting the Trade" are in this portion of the book and these parts compare with the best historical documentation in "Slaves in the Family." Unfortunately, there is much less here than I would have liked to learn about the DeWolf family members as they continued in the illegal slave trade--such as how they got away with it, who assisted them, identifying complicit political figures who looked the other way or may have been paid-off.
On the Cuban leg of his trip with the "Family of Ten," the family visits a sugar mill museum. Perhaps the most insidious of all the DeWolf ancestors who engaged in the illegal maritime slave trade was the one who established several plantations (coffee and later sugar) after fleeing Rhode Island for Cuba. Again the guilt emotion in the author is paramount: Thomas DeWolf feels "white man's guilt" when he notes the mark of a Buffalo, New York manufacturer on a 19th Century sugar mill press.
DeWolf does understand that slavery was above all, an economic institution. He makes it quite clear that the maritime slave trade was extremely lucrative and that is why the more notorious members of his family continued to engage in it, even after it was made illegal.
A few other points are important to remember: It was Africans who sold other Africans into slavery. Lots of people, not just whites "share the blame" for the slave trade. It is estimated that from 5 to 10 percent of slaves in 18th and 19th century America were owned by black people who could afford them; some of these "black" owners were the mixed-race offspring of black and white people, who understood the peculiar insitution quite well. After all, slavery was above all else, an economic institution.
Many historians believe that that was why it took so long and was so difficult to end. Let's also not forget that it took a four-year long Civil War, an Emancipation Proclamation and three constitutional amendments. Let's also not forget that something pretty close to slavery continues today in the Sudan and that there is effectively, chattel ownership of people from certain tribes in some of the former Portugese colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Inheriting the Trade," is admirable for it its message of compassion. Unfortunately, DeWolf's guilt trip that he wants to lay on the whole of the white race gets in the way of finding effective solutions to problems. America needs to focus on class issues more than race issues. Poverty is much more a function of class and education than it is of race. America is an increasingly diverse country, home to people with origins from all over. Issues like reparations (to whom? from whom?) only serve to drive wedges between people. The past cannot be undone--only the future changed.
 The stink of privilege..... July 15, 2008
Like Traces of the Trade, the authors lack the courage to jump in, and like the stink of Zen, grasping their pride and privilege, it all looks like new age capitalists creating a new ego of "nice people" with wayward ancestors, standing firmly on the high-ground on a very un-level playing field.
Resting in wealth and capitalistic venture, what is so sad is the lack of courage to jump in the freezing water and suffer the death of their egos.
Without taking a vow of poverty, these fat cats will always look like Zen priests in there pretty robes, in a world of immense suffering and pain as children are incested, burned, and beaten by their parents, also children of parents generations later. Where is the commitment?
And they sell books...
Amateur narcissism June 2, 2008
19 out of 30 found this review helpful
Learning about your family's slave trading empire must be hard to stomach, and the members of the family who undertook to study the facts deserve credit for facing up to it. Too bad they didn't hire a qualified historian to write their story. Inheriting the Trade reminds me of those self-indulgent, melodramatic "encounter groups" that were so popular in the 1970's. Let's beat up on each other for things we never did, just for being who we are. And along the way, let's read endless descriptions about the participants' clothing, jobs, hair color, and denial. And let's ignore the fact that people of all races have been enslaved at one time or another, by one culture or another.
Slavery is deplorable, but an avalanche of angst is useless and a waste of energy that could better be expended on finding solutions to the problems that separate the races in 2008. What did the deWolfs gain from the evils perpetrated by their ancestors? Well, among their apparently endless "privileges" is the right to write a book and make a TV program.
 Stopped me in my tracks March 28, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
It is my pleasure to invite you to read this book. Inheriting the Trade is about Tom's journey with his relatives as they documented the story of their ancestors being the largest group of slave traders in America. Their experience is told in the recently released movie: Traces of the Trade.
This book stopped me in my tracks and invited me to ask questions and see new truths about myself.
It is not just the story of one family, but of an entire world and all of us in it.
Be ready to take your time when you read this and listen to the questions that surface in your heart. Answer them honestly and you will learn about more than slavery in the past, you will discover your own position and how it is influenced by privilege, your own and others still today.
I highly recommend this book.
Life-changing for the author, eye-opening for me March 16, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I thought this book was fascinating. Here's this white guy from Oregon who grew up in a middle-class family in California without much knowledge of his family history. He moves to Oregon, to an affluent, largely white town, where he encounters a distant cousin. Suddenly, he's thrust into a huge extended family with long ties to New England. Slave traders! His forebears were slave traders? Does he want to be in a documentary about the slave trade? Does he want to go to Rhode Island, Ghana, and Cuba to retrace the route of the triangle trade?* He does, and in the process his eyes are opened to places and ways of living he knew nothing about - and this includes not only the African and Cuban cultures but also that of privileged New Englanders. What an amazing set of events!
The author weaves together his own deep changes with description and reflection on the history of the slave trade and its continuing impact on our still racist society. The big idea is that white people in America are largely unaware of our own unearned privilege, and that becoming aware is one step in beginning the change to erasing racism. This book shows that it's a one-person-at-a-time effort, difficult but not impossible.
*Traces of the Trade, by Katrina Browne, Thomas DeWolf's 7th cousin once removed, if I read the genealogical chart correctly.
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