Between 70 – 90% of the slaves that were brought over to the plantations of the colonies came via Rhode Island. The state’s affluent Brown family, with John Brown as the patriarch was one of the largest in slave importation, and government law was particularly strict on protecting the human property. Ironically, it was also one of the first colonies to pass anti-slavery laws.

On this day, June 13, in 1774, Stephen Hopkins, Chief Justice of Rhode Island and one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers and signers of the Declaration of Independence, helped enact a law banning slave importation.

The act was done more to hurt the British slave trade than as a moral statement of the rights of slaves, but the stirrings of the latter were already present. A decade later, after the Revolutionary War, Quaker communities and other abolitionists pushed through a compromise granting freedom to all children of slaves once they reach adulthood.