Slaves and slave dealers helped turn Brown University into a major New England college, says a new Brown University report.

More than two centuries ago, a handful of slaves helped erect the first college building in Providence, and Rhode Island slave dealers donated some of the labor, money and materials to build it, says a report issued yesterday by the university’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.

Plantation owners in the South also gave money to the college, the report says.

The committee in 2003 was charged by university President Ruth Simmons to investigate Brown’s ties to slavery and the slave trade, and to “help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised by this controversy.”

For years, the college has ignored much of its slave past, said James Campbell, the committee chairman and an associate professor of American civilization and Africana studies. A recent history of the college barely mentions slavery, he said.

But slavery endured in Rhode Island for nearly 200 years, according to the committee’s report. The first enslaved Africans entered Rhode Island sometime after 1638, and the last slaves disappeared – through death, freedom or out-of-state sales – in the early 1830s. Rhode Islanders financed about 1,000 voyages to Africa and transported more than 100,000 Africans into New World slavery.

“This was the world into which Brown University was born,” the report says.

Brown, the nation’s seventh-oldest university, was formally chartered in 1764 as the College of Rhode Island. Its founder, the Rev. James Manning, freed his only slave in 1770, shortly before the college moved to Providence.

That’s the official story, said Campbell.

But Manning also accepted donations from slave owners and traders, including the Brown family of Providence. In fact, about 30 members of the college’s governing corporation “owned or captained slave ships,” the report says.

The presence of slavery is most palpable in University Hall, the oldest building on campus, the report says. The 56-room hall was built in part by slaves loaned to the college by local merchants. Lopez and Rivera, one of the largest slave trading firms in Newport, provided wood for the building.

A facsimile of the construction records – including references to enslaved workers – hung for years on the first floor of University Hall, “more or less unnoticed. It is an apt metaphor for a history that has long hidden in plain sight,” the report says.

The fledgling college prospered, in part, from donations from slave traders and owners. One donor, Lt. Gov. William Bull from South Carolina, owned a 3,000-acre rice and indigo plantation on St. Helena Island. Another merchant and planter, Gabriel Manigault, donated more than 100 pounds to the college. He owned more than 40,000 acres – and nearly 500 slaves.

The report pays particular attention to the Browns of Providence.

“By the standards of Rhode Island’s mercantile elite, the Browns were not major slave traders, but they were not strangers to the business either,” it says.

James Brown, a captain and a businessman, purchased slaves as early as 1728 and owned four slaves at his death in 1739.

By the early 1770s, his sons – Nicholas, Joseph, John and Moses – owned at least 14 slaves, several of them in common. John, a sometime slave trader and vocal defender of the trade, laid the cornerstone of the early University Hall and served as treasurer.

In 1764, the brothers outfitted the slave ship Sally with candles, tobacco and more than 17,000 gallons of New England rum. The ship also included an assortment of chains, shackles, swivel guns and small arms. The brothers ordered Capt. Esek Hopkins, a family friend, to sail to West Africa to buy slaves.

The trip was a disaster. Hopkins, who had never helmed a slave ship, stayed too long on the malarial coast. Eventually he sailed to South Carolina, a major North American slave port, but 108 slaves died on the voyage.

Shortly after, three of the brothers – Nicholas, Joseph and Moses – quit the slave trade.

Moses went even further. He became a Quaker, freed his slaves, helped start the Providence Abolition Society, and battled slave traders in court, including his brother John.

In the newspapers, John emphasized the sanctity of property rights, and argued that Africans were better off in America. Buying and selling slaves, he said, was “right, just and lawful.” There is no more crime “in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses,” he said.

The dispute split the state, the report says. But for the Browns, it was personal.

Moses and the Abolition Society mounted a court case against John for a 1795 slave venture. John had sent a ship, the Hope, to the Gold Coast to buy 229 Africans, many of them later sold in Cuba.

Forced to appear before a judge, John lost his ship, and became the first Rhode Islander – possibly the first American – prosecuted in federal court for illegal slave trading, the report says.

Northerners did not easily quit their connection to slavery.

Between 1790 and 1860, nearly 300 textile firms opened in Rhode Island. Many carved out a niche by producing so-called “Negro cloth” – a coarse cotton-wool cloth sold to southern planters to clothe their slaves.

Why isn’t Rhode Island’s slave history better known?

“New Englanders, in particular, have contrived to erase the institution’s presence from their collective memory,” the report says.

But that history is becoming better known, in thanks to the committee’s work, The Journal’s series on Rhode Island and the slave trade and Charles Rappleye’s recent book about the Brown brothers, Sons of Providence, Campbell said.

“Most Rhode Islanders today think a little differently about their state than they did three years ago,” he said.