made
the town celebrated in colonial annals for its prosperity and
importance. The Jewish merchants were men of good origin, fine presence
and character. They were many of them of high birth in Spain and
Portugal, and they have bequeathed to posterity a record of stately
hospitality and unblemished integrity. The names of Lopez, Riviera,
Seixas and Touro are honored and respected still in their former home,
and the fine arch that towers over the gay promenade of to-day gives
entrance to their last resting-place, so solemn and so majestic a home
of the dead that it drew from the Nestor of American poets a stirring
apostrophe to the manes of the dead sons of Israel. The fine harbor and
bay of Newport soon attracted commerce from all nations, which heaped
its wharves with riches and made princes and magnates of its
merchants--a position they seemed born to sustain. The Overings,
Bannisters, Malbones and Redwoods kept open house and exercised lavish
hospitality--witness, as told by the Newport _Herald_ of June 7, 1766,
the story of Colonel Godfrey Malbone's feast on the lawn of his burning
mansion, so fine an edifice that its cost had been a hundred thousand
dollars in 1744; but the house taking fire at the time he had invited
guests to dinner, he thus feasted rather than disappoint them, and all
through the long summer night they held high revel and pledged each
other in jovial toasts while the flames of the burning building
illumined these Sardanapalian orgies. Year after year added to the
importance of this city by the sea: year after year the Indies poured
into its warehouses the riches with which Newport, out of its
abundance, dowered New York, Boston and Hartford and ornamented and
enriched the stately homes of its merchants. There is, however, one
blot on its scutcheon--one which darkens the picture of this prosperity
and the means that helped make it--and that is the slave-trade. Yes,
the town which was to give birth to William Ellery Channing was one of
the first to become interested in this baleful traffic. It is true it
was denounced by the Legislature, which as early as 1652 made it penal
to hold slaves, yet statistics show that between 1730 and 1752 the
return cargoes of all ships from the West Indies consisted of them. The
slave-trade of Newport bore fruit in other evils. At this time there
were no less than forty distilleries at work, and this rum, exported to
Africa, bought and brought home the human freight