“Where the great serpent of Slavery … basks himself all summer long”¹: Antebellum Newport and the South

Conventional wisdom states that New England was unsympathetic toward the South in the decades before the Civil War. The region's attitudes, however, were not homogeneous. In Newport, Rhode Island, a town dependent upon tourism and real estate investment, residents empathized with Southerners and the sectional issues that concerned them.