Hosted by Bristol Historical & Preservation Society in collaboration with Linden Place Museum
Monday, June 28, 2021 from 7:00 to 8:00 pm
Register here
The evening of June 28, join us for a Zoom conversation at 7 pm with historian Stephen Chambers as he discusses the American-owned plantations in Cuba, their connection to George DeWolf and Bristol, and the economic turmoil of the early 1800s. The event is free, but registration is required here.
In 1825, George D’Wolf famously fled his mansion at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, deeply in debt. That year, financial hedging in New York City combined with catastrophic weather in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Matanzas, Cuba, to disrupt D’Wolf’s New England empire. The story of how this happened and what followed — chaos, death, and a slave insurrection on American-owned plantations in Cuba — demonstrates Bristol’s central role in this maelstrom. When George D’Wolf left, he didn’t go to Boston or New York. Instead, he sailed for Cuba, where he already felt at home among other Americans from the U.S. North on the brutal sugar and coffee plantations of a deeper south.
Stephen Chambers is a managing director at The Winthrop Group, a top history and archival consultancy. He has published numerous works of business and peer-reviewed scholarship, including in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States (Verso Books, 2015). He received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University.
