The Brown Family Business Records, the Sally, and the John Carter Brown Library

The BFBR contains 1300+ boxes of material. Apart from the notorious logbook, it includes correspondence, bills, invoices, ledgers, legal documents, ships papers from the mid 18th to early 20th centuries. These items arrived at the JCB in early 1900s with additional accruals through 1920s. Indeed, ours may be the largest collection of records relating to a continuously operating set of family companies in North America.

The JCB has been undertaking an extensive review and revision of its approach to how the logbook and the related archival material is accessed and preserved. Our efforts to catalog and make them accessible include selective digitization and collaboration with local community groups and artists around these objects that archive slavery. There have been various efforts over the past several decades -some of them grant-funded- to better catalog and describe the collection. We have accelerated our efforts toward even greater discoverability, converting a finding aid to digital, searchable access over the past few years through the Rhode Island Archival and Manuscripts Collection online (RIAMCO). Through the work of our archival assistant, MJ Cunniff, we also have unpacked and begun to sort through some of the related collections. Our next steps involve connecting those collections on RIAMCO and then ultimately digital access through the JCB’s platform Americana.

But first, we needed to upgrade and update the digital files for the materials in the Report in an effort to progressively offer the public opportunities to engage with and learn from the materials. Our efforts will highlight the location of the logbook and related materials within the greater ecosystem that was the Brown family businesses.

The surviving evidence of the ship Sally’s 1764 slaving voyage is buried within the thousands of documents that make up the Brown family business records at the JCB. The planning correspondence, the fitting out papers, and the account book filled with the horrific details of this tragic enterprise arrived at the library in the early 20th century in an avalanche of paper: bills and receipts bundled up with twine or stuck on spikes by 18th and 19th century file clerks, piles of account books and ships logs. After nearly a century of unpacking, foldering, labeling, and indexing, the entire collection rests quietly in carefully numbered grey archival boxes, occupying nearly half of a floor of the JCB’s rare book storage area–the records of the Sally scattered among them.

You would be hard-pressed to find the 85 items related to the Sally cited in Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report without some kind of a guide–a way into that archival grey wall of order. Fortunately for the Report’s researchers, a great deal of information had been generated about the contents of the collection by the time they began their work in the early 2000s. For decades beginning in the early 1940s, James B. Hedges, the professor of American History tasked with arranging and describing the records, approached the mountain of material with the passion of a scholar determined to understand every scrap of paper in it. The complex alpha-numeric code he developed to organize the documents as they were unpacked required nine pages of instructions for the small fleet of assistants (including his wife, Nina Leonard Hedges), who assigned the designations which were typed onto cards for the project’s voluminous item-level card catalog.

These exacting methods came at the cost of speed. After nearly two decades of work, much of the later records remained only partially unpacked. More poignantly, James Hedges passed away before fully processing the collection or completing the second volume of his detailed history of the Brown family’s enterprises, The Browns of Providence Plantations (volume 2 was published posthumously by his wife with the assistance of Edmund Morgan).

Researchers have been granted access to the collection since Hedges began his work in 1941. The card catalog and Hedges’s own meticulously documented footnotes provide clues to the contents of the records; the Slavery and Justice Report researchers had the benefit of chapter four of Hedges’s first volume, That Unrighteous Traffick, which details the voyage of the Sally and includes numerous citations to the account book, or “Trade Book” and other documents.

But the cards and citations provide no information about the physical location of specific items within the mountain of material. This was supplied in 1991 by a dedicated team of archivists, including Catherine Osborne DeCesare and Carole Foster, funded by an NEH project to create standardized finding aids for Brown family-related collections held by the JCB, the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the (then) John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization. Under the considerable time constraints of a three year grant, the NEH archivists reorganized and augmented the information collected by Hedges, created coherent series and subseries descriptions, and developed box and folder lists to guide researchers to specific material within the collection. The project had a goal of creating a unified database for searching the collections across institutions, but in the aftermath of the grant deadline, this too was left incomplete: all that remains of the collaborative plan is a large, poorly printed spreadsheet from a now defunct database program (“Minaret”).

We are fortunate to have this wealth of information to draw on as we contemplate new ways to access and encounter this collection and the other archival material in our care. Hedges’s calendaring process produced copious information about the contents of the collection, but also imposed an interpretive lens and artificial arrangement that eliminated traces of how the records were created and relate to each other. His card catalog includes a card for the Sally voyage with several items listed; but a subject search for “slavery” and related topics yields only one card– for “Slave Trader,” with the cryptic description, “Undated” (see image below). The NEH archivists strove to reinstate the original order of the records, but the resulting eight finding aids (one for each iteration of the family business) introduced an unwieldy amount of duplication. Subject access in these guides is enhanced from Hedges’ card catalog, but many of the 1990s terms used when the finding aids were developed are dated and less useful to current researchers.

The new digital tools we are working with present opportunities to address many of these issues of organization, description, and discovery. The prodigious efforts of rare materials librarian Mark Armstrong and archival assistant MJ Cunniff to transmute the paper-based legacy data about the BFBR into a digital finding aid was just the beginning; this work has created a workflow to develop digital guides for other related collections in our care. With the help of our metadata librarian Judy Dowling and our associate director of digital initiatives Meaghan Brown, we will be able to bring all of this information into discussions about how this material is featured in our technological tools, from Americana to the new website “Enslaved on the Sally.” In uniting the metadata structure of the finding aid with the ability to feature digital versions of these documents, we have the exciting possibility of providing researchers and other audiences with a better sense of the rich ecosystem of the Brown family business records and all of our related materials.

Text by Kimberly Nusco, Associate Librarian for Research and Reference